Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) was a Russian novelist and playwright who spent much of his life in France and Germany, and was the first Russian writer to be widely read in the West. A Sportsman's Sketches, drawn from his mother's serf-worked estate, was credited with influencing the emancipation of 1861. Fathers and Sons (1862) gave the word nihilist its currency and was attacked from both the radical and conservative sides.