His mother's portrait is to be found in "Punin and Baburin." Extremely unhappy in her childhood and youth, when she got the chance at last she became a pitiless despot, greedy of power, and indulged the caprices and fantastic freaks suggested by her shattered nerves upon her family, the house-servants, and the serfs.

It is but natural that from such an experience as this Turgeneff should have cherished, from the time of his miserable childhood (his disagreements with his mother later in life are matters of record also), impressions which made of him the irreconcilable foe of serfdom.

In depicting, in his "Notes of a Sportsman," the tyranny of the landed gentry over their serfs, he could have drawn upon his personal experience and the touching tale "Mumu;" actually is the reproduction of an episode which occurred in his home.
His "Notes of a Sportsman" constitutes a noteworthy historical monument of the period, not only as a work of the highest art, but also as a protest against serfdom.

In a way these stories form a worthy continuation of Gogol's "Dead Souls." In them, as in all his other stories, at every step the reader encounters not only clear-cut portraits of persons, but those enchanting pictures of nature for which he is famous.
The publication of his short sketches from peasant life in book form--"Notes of a Sportsman"-- aroused great displeasure in official circles; officialdom looked askance upon Turgeneff because also of his long residence abroad.

Consequently, when, in 1852, he published in a Moscow newspaper a eulogistic article on Gogol (when the latter died), which had been prohibited by the censor in St.Petersburg, the authorities seized the opportunity to punish him.