show that when one of his characters appears his whole life and all his relatives seem to be hanging out of his talking mouth. When Russians soliloquize they are never alone." This need to reveal the self, its passions, its aspirations, its fears, its anger, is so pervasive in Russian fiction that its dramatic quality accounts in part for the compelling nature of conversation and debate in so many Russian works.
             Ivan Sergeyevitch Turgenev was born on the 28th of November, in the year 1818. Making residence three hundred miles southwest of Moscow in the provincial capital of Orel. His father was an impoverished nobleman, a cavalry officer. His mother was Varvara Petrovna Lutovina, she was six years his father senior. His mother was the owner of a huge estate at Spasskoye where she ruled like a feudal despot.
             V. S. Pritchett suggests, "It is tempting to trace Turgenev's life-long hypochondria to seeing the agonies of his father's death but other influences pervade." Pritchett attempts to shed doubt on the common assumption most other writers have jumped to, because of the many other causes that may have been associated with the development of his hypochondria. Later Pritchett revisits the issue by stating, "Cholera moved from district to district among the peasants and the news of it besieged the minds of the landowners who shut themselves up in their houses when it was about. His mother feared it so much that she is said to have been borne round her grounds in a glass-enclosed chair when the plague came near. Spasskoye was a hothouse of imaginary symptoms. Much more important was the effect of the father's death on the mother's attitude to her favorite son. She now turned greedily, almost amorously to him for the love she had not received from her husband. Her possessiveness increased and in the storms she created in the household he fell into the part of the soother, the peacemaker, the slave of her moods."
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