advantageous marriage, and "have a career"; but the boy was determined
never to marry, and he had not the slightest ambition for government
favours. The two utterly failed to understand each other, and, weary
of his mother's capricious violence of temper, he became completely
estranged. Years later, in her last illness, Turgenev made repeated
attempts to see her, all of which she angrily repulsed. He endeavoured
to see her at the very last, but she died before his arrival. He was
then informed that on the evening of her death she had given orders to
have an orchestra play dance-music in an adjoining chamber, to
distract her mind during the final agony. And her last thought was an
attempt to ruin Ivan and his brother by leaving orders to have
everything sold at a wretched price, and to set fire to other parts of
the property. His comment on his dead mother was "Enfin, il faut
oublier."

It is significant that Turgenev has nowhere in all his novels
portrayed a mother who combined intelligence with goodness.

French, German, and English Turgenev learned as a child, first from
governesses, and then from regular foreign tutors. The language of his
own country, of which he was to become the greatest master that has
ever lived, he was forced to learn from the house-servants. His father
and mother conversed only in French; his mother even prayed in French.
Later, he studied at the Universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and
Berlin. At Berlin he breathed for the first time the free air of
intellectual Europe, and he was never able long to live out of that
element again. One of his closest comrades at the University was
Bakunin, a hot-headed young Radical, who subsequently became a
Nihilist agitator. There is no doubt that his fiery harangues gave
Turgenev much material for his later novels. It is characteristic,