Love and Youth: Essential Stories

Description

An icon of Russian literature, Turgenev was able to contain the narrative sweep of a novel in a single short story. His protagonists experience the joy and painful turbulence of first love, the thrilling adventures of youth, and the layered reflections of maturity. His great skill is to make his readers feel alongside these characters, rendering their complex interiorities, whether nobility or serf, in these stories charged with a profound social conscience.

Ivan Turgenev was born to an aristocratic family in 1818. In 1852, he wrote an obituary for Gogol for the Saint Petersburg Gazette. Banned by the censor in Saint Petersburg, it was nevertheless published in Moscow, leading to Turgenev being briefly imprisoned then exiled for two years on his country estate. Turgenev lived for much of his life in Western Europe, where he became friends with writers such as Gustave Flaubert. His most famous novel Fathers and Sons was poorly received by many Russian critics. It is now regarded as one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century.

* 'Turgenev's Russia is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great light and the free air of the world' - Joseph Conrad * 'He was the stuff of which glories are made' - Henry James * 'Turgenev's achievement lies in how he succeeded, in spite of himself, his country and his time, in exempting his work from public duty. This has given it that unnameable quality that makes every sentence true, every silence trustworthy' - Guardian * 'There are two masters of seeing in Russian literature: Tolstoy and Turgenev' - V. S. Pritchett