Book description
On one level the novel is about the homecoming of Lavretsky, who,
broken and disillusioned by a failed marriage, returns to his estate and
finds love again - only to lose it. The sense of loss and of unfulfilled
promise, beautifully captured by Turgenev, reflects his underlying theme
that humanity is not destined to experience happiness except as
something ephemeral and inevitably doomed. On another level Turgenev is
presenting the homecoming of a whole generation of young Russians who
have fallen under the spell of European ideas that have uprooted them
from Russia, their 'home', but have proved ultimately superfluous. In
tragic bewilderment, they attempt to find reconciliation with their
land.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in 1818 in the Province of
Orel, Russia. His series of six novels reflect a period of Russian
life from 1830s to the 1870s: they are Rudin (1855), A House
of Gentlefolk (1858), On the Eve (1859; a Penguin
Classic), Fathers and Sons (1861), Smoke (1867) and
Virgin Soil (1876). He also wrote plays, which include the
comedy A Month in the Country; short stories and Sketches
from a Hunter s Album (a Penguin Classic); and literary essays
and memoirs. He died in Paris in 1883 after being ill for a year, and
was buried in Russia.
Richard Freeborn was an Oxford don for ten years. He was a Professor
at UCLA and at Manchester, and then Professor of Russian Literature at
the School of Slavonic & East European Studies in the Federal
University of London from 1964 until his retirement in 1988. Author of
books on Turgenev, the rise of the Russian novel and the Russian
revolutionary novel as well as a history of Russia, translations of
works by Turgenev and Dostoevsky, and four novels.
