Library of Russian Classics S.

4 total works

Month in the Country

by Ivan Turgenev

Published July 1976

"In my opinion ...every love, happy as well as unhappy, is real disaster when you give yourself over to it entirely." This heart-felt sentiment expressed by Turgenev's unfortunate character, Rakitin, sums up the central predicament of this, Turgenev's most celebrated play, completed in 1850 during the period of his...Read more

"In my opinion ...every love, happy as well as unhappy, is real disaster when you give yourself over to it entirely." This heart-felt sentiment expressed by Turgenev's unfortunate character, Rakitin, sums up the central predicament of this, Turgenev's most celebrated play, completed in 1850 during the period of his extensive travels abroad. Probably drawn from his experiences of frustration and unhappiness at the hands of the famous Pauline Viardot, "A Month in the Country" explores the complexities of that most universal of themes, the eternal love triangle, and transforms what could be termed an almost hackneyed subject into a brilliant tragi-comedy. With his fresh and subtle play of paradox and a new psychological penetration into character that anticipates the theatre of Chekhov, Turgenev creates a dramatic "month" which surely realizes Henry James' evaluation of the writer as "beautiful genius".

Mumu

by Ivan Turgenev

Published 1 July 1984

This book contains the Russian text of Turgenev's Mumu, edited with an English language introduction, notes and extensive vocabulary.

Rudin

by Ivan Turgenev

Published 1 March 1955

Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public. As regards his method of dealing with his material and shaping it he surpasses all the prose writers of his country, and has...

Read more

Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public. As regards his method of dealing with his material and shaping it he surpasses all the prose writers of his country, and has but few equals among the great novelists of other lands. To one familiar with all Turgenev's works it is evident that he possessed the keys of all human emotions, all human feelings, the highest and the lowest, the novel as well as the base. He make himself almost exclusively the poet of the gentler side of human nature. We may say that the description of love is Turgenev's specialty. Rudin is the first of Turgenev's social novels, and is a sort of artistic introduction to those that follow, because it refers to the epoch anterior to that when the present social and political movements began. This epoch is being fast forgotten, and without his novel it would be difficult for us to fully realise it, but it is well worth studying, because we find in it the germ of future growths. Introduced in English, the text is in Russian and the notes are in English

First Love

by Ivan Turgenev

Published 30 November 1978

The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The "boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her" story is universal but not, I think, banal - despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise. First Love is given its originality and poignancy by Turgenev's mastery...Read more

The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The "boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her" story is universal but not, I think, banal - despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise. First Love is given its originality and poignancy by Turgenev's mastery of the piercing turning-point (akin to Joyce's "epiphanies") that transforms the character's whole being, making a tragic outcome inevitable. Even the nature symbolism is rescued from triteness by lovely poetic similes - e.g. "but at that point my attention was arrested by the appearance of a speckled woodpecker who busily climbed up the slender stem of a birch-tree and peeped out uneasily from behind it, first to the right, then to the left, like a musician behind the bass-viol."