I feel like I must give Turgenev four stars—if not five—though in places his stories feel overwrought and the characters seem boring to me; still, he was the greatest writer of fiction of his time and did a lot to inform the future Russian collective psyche of what the life of a nobleman with peasents was like and what rural life in general was about for Russians of his period. Read him, if possible, in the original Russian because there are aspects of language that no translation I've yet seen really can capture. Turgenev informed minds, made enemies, got banished from St. Petersburg, and established the motifs we—and especially Russians today—associate with "old Russia". He deserves to be read, but won't be everyone's favorite—though probably for quite different reasons he wasn't everyone's favorite during his own time.