While reading Islands in the Stream, the last book that Hemingway wrote before he died, I am struck by the sadness that runs throughout the novel. Hemingway controversially considered Turgenev the greatest writer there ever was. While I love Turgenev's writing—from the sentimental First Love across the melancholy Diary of a Superfluous Man to the masterpiece that is Sketches from a Hunter's Album—it takes a certain kind of passionate partiality to call him the greatest writer there was.