 The film was based in part on a story by Ivan Turgenev , a 19th @-@ century Russian scholar and novelist , but was adapted to incorporate the folk story of Pavlik Morozov , a supposed Young Pioneer glorified by Soviet Union propaganda as a martyr . Turgenev 's original short fiction titled " Bezhin Meadow " or " Bezhin Lea " was a story about peasant boys in the 1850s , in the Oryol region , discussing supernatural signs of death , while they spend the night in the Bezhin Meadow with a lost hunter . Eisenstein would later remove any direct references to Turgenev 's fiction , aside from the title , from the film . It is a part of A Sportsman 's Sketches , a collection of short stories . 
