Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev

Literature & Fiction

When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith." Turgenev's masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when it was published in 1862 and continues today to seem as fresh and outspoken as it did to those who first encountered its nihilistic hero.
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Sketches From a Hunter's Album

Sketches From a Hunter's Album

Ivan Turgenev

Literature & Fiction

Turgenev's first major prose work is a series of twenty-five Sketches: the observations and anecdotes of the author during his travels through Russia satisfying his passion for hunting. His album is filled with moving insights into the lives of those he acquaints with, peasants and landowners, doctors and bailiffs, neglected wives and bereft mothers each providing a glimpse of love, tragedy, courage and loss, and anticipating Turgenev's great later works such as First Love and Fathers and Sons. His depiction of the cruelty and arrogance of the ruling classes was considered subversive and led to his arrest and confinement to his estate, but these sketches opened the minds of contemporary readers to the plight of the peasantry and were even said to have led Tsar Alexander II to abolish serfdom.
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First Love

First Love

Ivan Turgenev

Literature & Fiction

"The great thing is to lead a normal life, and not be the slave of your passions. What do you get if not?" One of Russian literature's most renowned love stories—a vivid and sensitive account of adolescent love, wherein the sixteen year old protagonist falls in love with a beautiful but older woman living next door, thereby plunging into a whirlwind of changing emotions that are heightened by her capriciousness, and leading to a truly heart-rending revelation. The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.
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A Sportsman's Sketches: Works of Ivan Turgenev 1

A Sportsman's Sketches: Works of Ivan Turgenev 1

Ivan Turgenev

Literature & Fiction

Turgenev was a major 19th century Russian novelist. His novel Fathers and Sons is his best-known work. Published in 1852 this collection of stories is also known as Hunting Sketches and Sketches from a Hunter's Album. The stories are based on Turgenev's experiences hunting on this mother's estate. While on these tripe he learned about the abuse suffered by the Russian peasants and the injustice of the Russian system. These stories along with his epitaph to Gogol led to his house arrest. Stories in this work include: Khor and Kalinych:, Yermolay and the Miller's Wife:, Raspberry Water, District Doctor:, My Neighbor Radilov, Famer Ovsyanikov:, Lgov:, Bezhin Lea:, Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands:, Bailiff:, The Office, Loner:, Two Landowners, Lebedyan, Tatyana Borisovna and her Nephew:, Death, Singers, Pyotr Petrovich Karataev, Meeting. Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District: . Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin: The End of Chertopkhanov: Living Relic: The Clatter of Wheels: Forest and Steppe: T he Russian German, and The Reformer and the Russian Ge
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Fathers and Children

Fathers and Children

Ivan Turgenev

Literature & Fiction

A 19th-century Russian masterpiece about love, politics, family, and the tension between the new generation and the old world. Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children is a book full to bursting with life, both comic and tragic. At the heart of this novel about love, politics, and society, strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death, is the generational divide between the young and the old. When the young university graduate Arkady and his mentor, the nihilist Bazarov, leave St. Petersburg to visit their aging parents in the provinces, the conflict that ensues from the generations’ clashing views of the world—the youths’ radicalism and the parents’ liberalism—is both representative of nineteenth-century Russia and recognizably contemporary. At the time of its publication in 1862, the book aroused indignation in critics who felt betrayed...
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Home of the Gentry

Home of the Gentry

Ivan Turgenev

Literature & Fiction

"Home of the Gentry" is a novel by Ivan Turgenev published in the January 1859 issue of "Sovremennik". It was enthusiastically received by the Russian society and remained his least controversial and most widely-read novel until the end of the 19th century. It was turned into a movie by Andrey Konchalovsky in 1969. The novel's protagonist is Fyodor Ivanych Lavretsky, a nobleman who shares many traits with Turgenev. The child of a distant, Anglophile father and a serf mother who dies when he is very young, Lavretsky is brought up at his family's country estate home by a severe maiden aunt, often thought to be based on Turgenev's own mother who was known for her cruelty.
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A Sportsman's Notebook

A Sportsman's Notebook

Ivan Turgenev

Literature & Fiction

Twenty-five beautifully written stories, penned in exile, evocatively depicting life on a manor in feudal Russia and examining the conflicts between serfs and landlordsA Sportsman's Notebook, Ivan Turgenev's first literary masterpiece, is a sweeping portrayal of the magnificent nineteenth–century Russian countryside and the harsh lives of those who inhabited it. In a powerful and gripping series of sketches, a hunter wanders through the vast landscape of steppe and forest in search of game, encountering a varied cast of peasants, landlords, bailiffs, overseers, horse traders, and merchants. He witnesses both feudal tyranny and the submission of the tyrannized, against a backdrop of the sublime and pitiless terrain of rural Russia.These exquisitely rendered stories, now with a stirring introduction from Daniyal Mueenuddin, were not only universally popular with the reading public but, through the influence they exerted on important members of...
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Memoirs of a Hunter

Memoirs of a Hunter

Ivan Turgenev

Literature & Fiction

Turgenev's first major publication, Memoirs of a Hunter is a series of tales based largely on the author's own experiences while hunting on his mother's estate of Spasskoye, where he became aware of the iniquities of the system of serfdom and the privations and indignities suffered by the Russian peasantry. Told from the perspective of a dispassionate, observing narrator, the stories in this volume are concerned with the relationship between landowner and labourer, presenting a vivid and moving portrait of life in the era before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861—a watershed whose advent some believe was hastened by Turgenev's sympathetic depiction of the ordinary folk of rural Russia.Originally published individually in the St Petersburg journal Sovremennik before appearing as a single volume in 1852, and presented here in a masterful new translation by Michael Pursglove, this landmark collection of stories established the literary reputation of the...
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Love and Youth

Love and Youth

Ivan Turgenev

Literature & Fiction

From the most romantic of the Russian greats, an enthralling selection of short stories and novellas Ivan Turgenev was able to contain the narrative sweep of a novel in a single short story. His tales evoke the joy and painful tubulence of first love, the grandiose flights of youthful imagination, and the wistful reflections of maturity. Tugenev brought his characters vividly to life, rendering their complex interior lives, whether nobleman or serf, in writing charged with a profound social conscience.This collection, in a lyrical new translation by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater, places Turgenev's great novella First Love alongside a selection of his classic stories. From the evocative rural scenes of 'Bezhin Meadown' and 'The Rattling!' to the pathos and profundity of 'The District Doctor' and 'Biryuk', these are miniature epics brimming with humanity.Ivan Turgenev was born to an aristocratic family in 1818. He wrote plays,...
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