"A Lear of the Steppes" is a supreme example of Turgenev?s imaginative interpretation of life, and of his habit of representing the universal in a single episode. It is the tragedy of a powerful nature, Harlov the Lear of the tragedy; and the novelist?s art is directed by showing how the tragic event affects the household and relatives of the sufferer, and how the whole life of the community in which he lived is more or less influenced by his death.