Torrents of Spring, also known as Spring Torrents ( Veshniye vody), is an 1872 novella by Ivan Turgenev. It is highly autobiographical in nature, and centers on a young Russian landowner, Dimitry Sanin, who falls deliriously in love for the first time while visiting the German city of Frankfurt. Written during 1870 and 1871, when Turgenev was in his fifties, the novel is widely held as one of his greatest. Inception Despite its fictional overlay, Torrents of Spring is inspired by the events of Turgenev's life during his 1838-1841 tour of the German States. Although Fathers and Sons remains Turgenev's most famous novel, Torrents of Spring is significant in its revealing of the author's life, thoughts, and most intimate emotions. Gemma According to Turgenev's biographer Leonard Schapiro, the character of Gemma Roselli was inspired by an incident which took place while the future novelist was visiting Frankfurt in 1840. A young woman "of extraordinary beauty suddenly emerged from a tea-room to plead for help in reviving her brother, who had fainted." But, unlike Gemma, the young woman was Jewish rather than Italian and, unlike Sanin, Turgenev left Frankfurt that same night without getting to know her further. Maria Nikolaevna The character of Maria Nikolaevna Polozova is believed to have had two models. The first was Turgenev's mother, Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva. According to Schapiro, Varvara Petrovna subjected her husband, her son, her servants, and her husband's serfs to systematic physical, emotional, and verbal abuse. All of this left permanent emotional scars upon her son and caused him to always gravitate towards abusive relationships. The second model is believed to have been Eleonora Petersen, the first wife of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev, with whom Turgenev "conceived some kind of romantic attachment" during his 1838 voyage from St. Petersburg to Lübeck. At the time, Eleonora was "returning to Munich with her children" and "died the following year". According to Schapiro, Turgenev's "correspondence with his mother suggests that he was in love with" Eleonora, "or fancied himself to be so, but that is as much as we know." According to Schapiro, there are many indications that Torrents of Spring had "some deep personal meaning" for Turgenev. In a letter to his French publisher Hetzel, the author wrote of Maria Nikolaevna, "This she-devil seduced me as she seduced that nit-witted Sanin." In response to a letter, criticizing the novel, from the niece of Gustave Flaubert,