PENGUIN Home of the Gentry

Beware of the back cover blurb, which gives away the whole plot. Many will say that the tone makes the ending inevitable anyway, but I'd still rather encounter it at the pace Turgenev intended than summarized in thirty-seven words by an uncaring publisher. The story is a low-key drama where small lives experience huge tragedy. Richard Freeborn draws attention to the similarity with English-language novels of the 19th century, but compares the quiet, closely domestic, and introspective flavour of Turgenev with the busier and more expansive feel this story would have in the hands of George Eliot, Dickens, etc. Turgenev can evoke a scene or a person perfectly with just a few lines, and even his digressions into characters' backstories (sometimes going back several generations) are entertaining and add to our appreciation of what's happening. One of the things I particularly liked was the quality of Freeborn's translation. Many Russian classics can be hard to read in English because the translation is over-literal, leaving mystifying elliptical phrases in character's mouths -- "So... that is, I... yes..." or whatever. Freeborn recognizes that we don't have the cultural familiarity to interpret those, so he keeps his version clear of such stumbling blocks. A possible error on the author's part -- at least, it confused me -- was when Lenochka says at the end that there are five of them in the garden, just right to play a game. By my count there's Lenochka herself, her fiancé the hussar, her brother, her brother's wife, her brother's wife's sixteen-year-old sister, and Shurochka. Does Shurochka's status exclude her from their games? She's larking about with the other young people when Lavretsky arrives at the door, and their household doesn't seem to stand on ceremony. (In fact that scene is startlingly modern. However manners change, early twentysomethings are the same throughout history.)

Brilliante Novelle und "first class English" translation aus dem Russischen.

Already in his thirties, Lavretsky returns to his hometown of O... in Russia. He descends form a strange family of landed gentry. At some point in the book his biography is revealed, a life of reclusion, loneliness, and disappointment. Very Russian. Lavretsky returns a defeated man, for his wife has cheated on him in every corner, has taken lots of money from him, and disgraced him through half Europe. And everybody knows. After dismissing her, he travels to Italy, in order to get himself together, and he decides that his mission is Voltaire-like, to go back to Russia and "tender his own garden". He decides not to go back to the old estate where he had suffered so much, but to a smaller house where a wicked old aunt had died. Trying to recover some social links, he visits a distant relative, Maria Dimitrevna Kalitin, a widow with two young daughters. I won't spoil the rest, but what follows is a tale of mishap, love, suffering, unwelcome surprises. The epilogue is masterful, an ode to memory, to the passage of time, and to bodily-felt homesickness. Traditional, serene, and making no concessions, this novel is part of the work that makes Turgenev deserve his place up above with Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, in his own style. Russian to the bone, but without paranoid delirium or epic ambitions, it is a perfect novel. I would like to read it again when I am old, sitting on a bench of a park, in autumn.

Love those Russians.

An elegaic meditation on ageing, love and happiness, this has been called the most 'Turgenevian' of Turgenev's novels. It is set in the externally placid countryside, with the metropolises of Moscow and St Petersburg (and Paris) mentioned only as distant lands of troubles and bureaucracy. The novel is mainly concerned with Lavretsky, who has returned to the countryside following his wife's unfaithfulness. She has gone to Paris, and he has now fled back to the country, as if he has been scalded by life and has now scarpered from it like a whimpering dog - or perhaps it is more like a bird returning after migration, as the Russian title 'The Nobility's Nest' suggests. While he fully expects to pass the remainder of his days in seclusion, he falls in love with Liza and the torments of love and unattainable happiness assail him once again, as it conspires that the two of them are unable to be together for the wheel of fate has spun them away from one another. A Russian novel that if not epic in size, is certainly epic in its strength and beauty. It's concern with Russia's relationship with Europe is one that we can also find in War and Peace, and it's certainly no slander against Turgenev to say that this novel could easily find its place slipped within the pages of that epic masterpiece.