The influence of the French romanticists on the Russian writers of the '40's consisted in the fact that the latter, imbued with the ideas of the former, engaged in the analysis of Russian life, which constitutes the strength and the merit of the Russian literature of that epoch.
Of all the Russian writers of that period, Turgeneff was indisputably the greatest.

No one could have been more advantageously situated for the study of the mutual relations between landed proprietors and serfs.
The Turgeneff family offered a very sharp type of old-fashioned landed-proprietor manners.

Not one gentle or heartfelt trait softened the harshness of those manners, which were based wholly upon merciless despotism, and weighed oppressively not only upon the peasants, but upon the younger members of the family.

Every one in the household was kept in a perennial tremor of alarm, and lived in hourly, momentary expectation of some savage punishment.

Moreover, the author's father (who is depicted in the novel "First Love"), was much younger than his wife, whom he did not love, having married her for her money.