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. The main debate of Turgenev's own generation was that of East versus West. Rudin depicts a typical man of this generation, aka the men of forties, intellectual but ineffective. Rudin is often compared to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and Lermontov's Pechorin.