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“... six in the morning​  on 19 January 1870, at the Roquette Prison in the eleventh arrondissement, Ivan Turgenev watched as a man was prepared for the guillotine. Four months earlier, Jean-Baptiste Troppmann had murdered, for money, the entire Kinck family – the owner of an engineering works, his heavily pregnant wife and their six children – and ...”

“... of his namesake: Gogol’s life, in a nutshell, was a steady decline into madness. The writer Ivan Turgenev described him as an intelligent, queer and sickly creature. He was reputed to be a hypochondriac and a deeply paranoid, frustrated man. He was, in addition, by all accounts morbidly melancholic, given to fits of severe depression. He had ...”

“... the writer’s niece, it seems), thus effectively disenfranchising her. The correspondence with Turgenev, largely complete, is probably the third most important exchange after those with Louise Colet and George Sand; and it comes from the mellower end of Flaubert’s tonal spectrum. The letters to Louise are almost wholly combative: he fights against being ...”

“... conversations about ultimate questions typically take place in the most sordid settings, as when Ivan Karamazov has to talk more loudly with Smerdyakov because in the corner ‘cockroaches were swarming in such amazing numbers that there was a continual rustling from them.’ Similarly, Dostoevsky composed his major novels while suffering from a legion of ...”

“... artists, actors, composers and patrons, most of whom will be familiar – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov. It also takes in significant but less well-known figures, such as the formidable critic Vladimir Stasov, whose efforts did a great deal to shape the cultural scene. The portraits are drawn from the ...”

“... with Chadayev’s ideas long before he got to Russia, thanks to Chateaubriand’s friendship with Turgenev. Custine adopts Chadayev’s belief that Russian enthusiasm for suffering is motivated by thoughts of future reward, but La Russie en 1839 also includes the more sinister notion of Russia’s ‘immense’ ambition: ‘to cleanse itself of the shameful ...”

“... commentary in art seems to be indirect and spontaneous, born of some local controversy, like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, or even War and Peace, which was a kind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in reverse, Tolstoy’s paean for the good old aristocracy and good old serfdom. No Russian writer was so sensitive to current feeling and opinion as Dostoevsky – as ...”

“... had given him no distinctive, notable features whatsoever, either for ill or good. Many called him Ivan Ivanich; others, Ivan Vasilievich; still others, Ivan Mikhailich. His last name was also cited variously. Some said he was Ivanov; others called him Vasiliev or Andreyev; still others ...”

“... life. Instead, they have reverted to the 19th century, to the society described by Gogol or Turgenev. All is boorish posturing. Young officers loaf through dreams of becoming heroes of their own times. Fine feelings are aped, then put aside when the vodka comes round. Grand evenings begin with tinkling ‘English’ Lieder on out-of-tune pianos, and end ...”

“... but eventually ranging across the entire canon. In Roman, written in the late 1980s, 300 pages of Turgenev pastiche are followed by a bloodbath in which the eponymous protagonist – whose name also means ‘novel’ – ends up killing and eating all the other characters. Subsequent works contain parodic imitations of Dostoevsky, Platonov, Tolstoy and ...”

“... conduct a bit of his private life at the same time and said across the footlights: ‘By the way, Ivan Vasilich, I’m afraid I shall be unable to have luncheon with you tomorrow.’ It didn’t occur to Nabokov’s grandfather that his luncheon date was really being cancelled. The phenomenon recalls the letters painted on a van at the beginning of The ...”

“... hoping to inspire them to improve their lot. Russian literature had paved the way in 1852 with Turgenev’s sympathetic images of peasant types in Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (the proudest moment in his life, he said, had been when two peasants bowed to the ground Russian-style and thanked him for the book), and Nekrasov’s epic poem Who Is Happy in ...”

“... high. But his Mexican film never got made. Bezhin Meadow, his next commission, from a story by Turgenev, had very nearly reached completion before someone found a reason to ban it. By the mid-1930s, Socialist Realism, hostile to montage, was in the ascendancy. Rather amazingly, Eisenstein survived the Purges with little damage done apart from the ...”

“... estate of Ismailovo. This may indeed have been English, perhaps even a gift from Elizabeth I to Ivan IV, but Peter first sought tuition in the shipyards of Amsterdam. It was only when the Dutch failed to instruct him ‘in the Mathematical Way’ he required that he repaired to England, ‘and there, in four Months Time, finish’d his Learning, and at his ...”

“... Stalinist proscription of Bezhin Meadow (1937) and prescriptions of Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1940-1945), the last unfinished, its second part suppressed for an unorthodox emphasis – after all this, Eisenstein had a heart attack in February 1946, and Immoral Memories is the work of his convalescence. In 1934 he had lamented the ...”