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Rh order to settle his business affairs. And if at first the love of his native land seized upon the exile and brought him back for a time to Spasskoi, the tyrannical reign of Nicholas did its best to kill these regrets. In 1852, the day after the publication of "A Sportsman's Sketches," he received in prison, as did every âme bien née in the Russia of those days, his baptism of liberty. His crime was the discreet praise he had given to Gogol and his "Dead Souls," just as Lermontov had been punished for praising Pushkin. It was a warning. From henceforth Turgenev was cured of his nostalgia. He became more and more "Westernized." For years he wandered across Europe in the pursuit of his artistic ideal, and in the train of Madame Viardot, the famous prima donna and sister of Malibran, to whom he was united by a friendship which death alone was to end. He resided alternately in Germany and France, and built himself a villa at Baden-Baden. He, the Scythian and the Tartar, became a type of the uprooted absentee landlord. Far from Russia, he understood her no more, and was no more understood by her, and he lived to be depreciated and disowned by the coming generation of his compatriots.