I haven't read many Russian novels, and still haven't found any I truly like, but I thought I'd share this anyway. "Fathers and Sons" left me cold, but now I'm interested to try "Sportman."
Liberals, Radicals, and the Making of a Literary Masterpiece
Ivan Turgenev achieved greatness with a novel detested by almost everyone he cared about.
By Keith Gessen
Tall, handsome, rich, and easygoing—“Nature has refused him nothing,” was how Dostoyevsky put it—Turgenev was also indecisive, inconstant, maybe even a bit unreliable. More than any other figure in Russian literary history, he embodied the tragedy of the middle, the failure of the golden mean ever to take root on Russian soil.
Both conservatives (including Dostoyevsky) and radicals despised him for his watery European ideals. He quarrelled constantly with Tolstoy, despite many ties of family and friendship. Because of his willingness to coöperate with a government investigation of émigré radicals, he was estranged for years from his old friend Alexander Herzen. His ability to see the many facets of every person and every issue—“He felt and understood the opposite sides of life,” in the words of Henry James, who got to know him in Paris—served him well as a novelist. But this ability was less desirable in a political ally, or even in a pal.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/05/liberals-radicals-and-the-making-of-a-literary-masterpiece-ivan-turgenevs-fathers-and-children-slater-translation