 Turgenev himself maintained the character was a "fairly faithful" portrait of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, whom the author knew well.Alexander Herzen, who knew both men, said in his memoirs that the vacillating Rudin had more in common with the liberal Turgenev than the insurrectionist Bakunin.Rudin is often compared to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin.