Turgenev, Virgin Soil

I read the last of Turgenev's novels, Virgin Soil, last night. The experience consolidated for me the idea that Turgenev's great theme is the lack of political freedoms in Russia. I thought the protagonist, Nedhezov, might actually be based on Alexander Herzen, whose memoirs I read lately. The novel itself, spare and smoothly written, didn't interest me all that much. The introduction to this 1920 edition was written by Edward Garnett, the reader in London who established Somerset Maugham.