Turgenev himself maintained the character was a "fairly faithful" portrait of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, whom the author knew well. Many critics suggest that the image of Rudin was at least partly autobiographical.
The main character of the novel, Rudin, is easily identified with Hamlet. This interpretation of the superfluous man as someone who possesses great intellectual ability and potential, but is unable to realize them stems from Turgenev's own view of human nature, expressed in his 1860 speech ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’, where he contrasts egotistical Hamlet, too deep in reflection to act, and enthusiastic and un-thinking, but active Don Quixote. Rudin depicts a typical man of this generation (known as 'the men of forties'), intellectual but ineffective. The main debate of Turgenev's own generation was that of Slavophiles versus Westernizers. Rudin was written by Turgenev in the immediate aftermath of the Crimean War, when it became obvious to many educated Russians that reform was needed. Similarly to other Turgenev's novels, the main conflict in Rudin was centred on a love story of the main character and a young, but intellectual and self-conscious woman who is contrasted with the main hero (this type of female character became known in literary criticism as «тургеневская девушка», “Turgenev girl”).
Rudin was the first of Turgenev's novels, but already in this work the topic of the superfluous man and his inability to act (which became a major theme of Turgenev's literary work) was explored. Turgenev started to work on it in 1855, and it was first published in the literary magazine " Sovremennik" in 1856 several changes were made by Turgenev in subsequent editions. Rudin ( Russian: «Рудин», pronounced ) is the first novel by Russian realist writer Ivan Turgenev.
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