The novel about a typical Russian intelligent of the 1840s was written in the midst of the Crimean campaign in one fell swoop – within seven weeks. Genial Nature was the name Turgenev planned for the novel; it was copied from a friend of his youth, Mikhail Bakunin, a theorist and classic of anarchist world. Turgenev made his way to the classics of Russian literature and to the school curriculum with this and other novels, and it ruined his reputation considerably. This is the reason why Rudin is only known to applicants of philology schools, who look for him among the long line of superfluous people, somewhere in between Onegin and Oblomov. And the wits who explain the difference between men's and women's logic with a quote from Rudin: “A man can say that two times two is five or three and a half, and a woman will say that two times two is a stearin candle.”