In a series of nine letters, the narrator tells his friend how he introduced Vera Nikolayevna, a married woman who had been forbidden as a child to read fiction and poetry, to the intellectual pleasures of Goethe’s masterpiece. Opening up in front of Vera’s eyes is not only the realm of imagination, but also a world of unbridled feelings and tempestuous passions, which can only shatter the comfort and safety of her existence and force her to set off on a journey of spiritual awakening.
This lesser-known novella by one of the great masters of Russian literature, now available to English readers in Hugh Aplin’s lucid translation, is presented here with ‘Yakov Pasynkov’, another poignant story exploring the nature of love and human relations.
Turgenev’s final novel, Virgin Soil traces the destinies of several middle-class revolutionaries who seek to “go to the people” by working on the land and instilling democratic ideas in the countryside’s locals. They include the daydreaming impoverished young tutor Nezhdanov – employed by the liberal councillor Sipyagin and his vain and beautiful wife Valentina – the naive young radical Maryanna and the progressive factory manager Solomin.
Their liaisons, intrigues and conspiracies, set against the backdrop of Tsarist Russia, form the matter of Turgenev’s most ambitious and elaborate work, which cemented the author’s place in the West as Russia’s foremost novelist while at the same time proving controversial at home – culminating in the arrest of fifty-two real-life revolutionaries barely a month after it was published.
Driven to his deathbed by an incurable disease, the thirty-year-old impoverished gentleman Chulkaturin decides to write a diary looking back on his short life. After describing his youthful disillusionment and his family’s fall from grace and loss of status, the narrative focuses on his love for Liza, the daughter of a senior civil servant, his rivalry with the dashing Prince N. and his ensuing humiliation. These pages helped establish the archetype of the “superfluous man”, a recurring figure in nineteenth-century Russian literature.
First published in 1850, ‘The Diary of a Superfluous Man’ was initially censored by the authorities, as some of its passages were deemed too critical of Russian society. This volume also includes two other masterly novellas, also touching on the theme of disappointed love: ‘Asya’ and ‘First Love’.
On his way back to Russia after some years spent in the West, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov, the son of a retired official of merchant stock, stops over in Baden-Baden to meet his fiancée Tatyana. However, a chance encounter with his old flame, the manipulative Irina – now married to a general and a prominent figure in aristocratic expatriate circles – unearths feelings buried deep inside the young man’s heart, derailing his plans for the future and throwing his life into turmoil.
Around this love story Turgenev constructs a sharply satirical exposé of his countrymen, which famously embroiled its author in a heated quarrel with Dostoevsky. A melancholy evocation of impossible romance, Smoke represents the apogee of Turgenev’s later fiction.
Dmitry Rudin, a high-minded gentleman of reduced means, arrives at the estate of Darya Mikhailovna, where his intelligence, eloquence and conviction immediately make a powerful impression. As he stays on longer than intended, Rudin exerts a strong influence on the younger generation, and Darya’s daughter, Natalya, falls in love with him. But circumstances soon will show whether Rudin has the courage to act on his beliefs, and whether he can live up to the image he has created for himself.
Rudin, Turgenev’s first novel, is a subtle examination of human weakness which foreshadows many of the themes in the author’s later work, with its lead character personifying the type of the “superfluous man” which came to dominate much of the literature of nineteenth-century Russia.
Coming back to the “nest” of his family home in Russia after years of fruitless endeavours away from his roots, Lavretsky decides to turn his back on the vacuous salons of Paris and his frivolous and unfaithful wife Varvara Pavlovna. On his return he meets Liza, the daughter of one of his cousins, whom he had known when they were children and who rekindles in him long-smothered feelings of love. News of Varvara’s death arrive from France, offering Lavretsky the prospect of a new life, but a cruel twist threatens to shatter his dreams and forces him to re-evaluate his plans.
Hailed as a masterpiece of Russian literature, A Nest of the Gentry, Turgenev’s most successful and widely read novel – here presented in a new translation by Michael Pursglove – deals with the personal struggles of the individual in a period of turbulent social change.
Fathers and Children, arguably the first modern novel in the history of Russian literature, shocked readers when it was first published in 1862 – the controversial character of Bazarov, a self-proclaimed nihilist intent on rejecting all existing traditional values and institutions, providing a trenchant critique of the established order.
Turgenev’s masterpiece investigates the growing nihilist movement of mid-nineteenth-century Russia – a theme which was to influence Dostoevsky and many other European writers – in a universal and often hilarious story of generational conflict and the clash between the old and the new.
This humane, moving masterpiece of families, love, duels, heartache, failure and the clash between generations caused a scandal in nineteenth-century Russia with its portrayal of youthful nihilism.
A new series of twenty distinctive, unforgettable Penguin Classics in a beautiful new design and pocket-sized format, with coloured jackets echoing Penguin's original covers.
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