The injustice and humiliations he and his brothers, along with a large household of dependents, suffered at Madame Turgenev's hands,[4] early aroused in him a detestation of the system of serfdom. The touching story of _Mumu_, in which the deaf and dumb house-porter's sweetheart is forced to marry another man, while he himself is ordered to drown his pet dog by his mistress's caprice, is a true domestic chronicle. Though Madame Turgenev dearly loved her son Ivan Sergeyevitch, whose sweet and tender nature influenced her for good, her insatiable desire to domineer over others, and her violent outbursts of rage kept the household trembling before her whims. "Nobody had a right to sustain in her presence any ideas which contradicted her own," while her jealousy of her handsome husband's _affaires de cœur_ embittered her days.[5] She herself had been the victim of her own upbringing, and remembered with loathing her step-father's lust and cruelty. Turgenev therefore was early inoculated with an aversion for tyrannizing in any shape or form, as well as for the prevalent forms of oppression, official or social, under Nicholas I., and as his biographers tell us, the Turgenevs were a stock noted for "a hatred of slavery and for noble and humane temperaments."[6] [4] See "La mère d'Ivan Turguenieff," in _Tourguénieff Inconnu_, par Michel Delines. [5] See the story _First Love_, where Turgenev describes his parents' relations. [6] Brückner's _A Literary History of Russia_, p. 338. A second potent influence that turned the youthful Turgenev's face definitely towards the West was his lengthy tour in Europe, 1838-41. His early education at Moscow University had been completed at the University of St. Petersburg, where his family had removed after his father's death in 1835, and where as a shy youth he saw the two great authors, Gogol and Pushkin, whose literary example was to have a profound influence on his own work. German philosophy, especially Hegel's, was at this epoch fashionable in Russia, and Turgenev, after setting out on his tour with his mother's blessing, attended by a valet, arrived in Berlin, where he drank deep of Goethe's, Schiller's and Heine's works, and where his ardent discussions with his circle of students on life, art, politics and metaphysics crystallized his aspirations for European culture. A tour on the Rhine, in Switzerland and in Italy effectually widened his outlook, and he returned to Spasskoe in 1841, bringing with him his narrative poem "Parasha."