First Love by Ivan Turgenev (1860, translated by Constance Garnett)

First Love is Ivan Turgenev's most read novella.  A group of people are looking for ways to pass the time (now they would all be on devices) and agree to tell each other stories about their first loves. A man of advanced years agrees to go first and tells us of his love, at age 16, for the daughter of a neighbor. First Love is just an amazing work, the remembered experiences are marvelously rendered.  I would put it and his Faust and King Lear of the Steepes with the best of the works I have ever read, especially First Love.  Seemingly simple, it is a story of great emotional depth and complexity.  There is a scene in the story, readers will know it, that is overwhelming powerful.

Please share your experinces with Turgenev with us.  

Mel u

King Lear of the Steppes by Ivan Turgenev (1870, translated by Constance Garnett, 1899)

King Lear of the Steppes  by Ivan Turgenev has been on my To Be Read list for a long time.  Last month I read King Lear so I decided no time better than now  for it to be at last read.  The novella way exceeded my expectations.  I have previously read and posted on his by far most famous work, Fathers and Sons as well as The Diary of a Superflous Man, and a few, too few, of his short stories.  He is considered the first writer to depict the lives of ordinary Russians, serfs and peasants in a realistic fashion as full human figures.

People say this is among the most personal of Turgenev's works.  It is narrated by a wealthy young country gentleman living on his mother's estate and under her control.  She is very much the queen of her estate, her serfs are her property.  One of the central figures in the story, he is the King Lear figure, is a well of peasant with an estate of his own.  The mother is his benefactor and he is totally subservient to her, seeking her advice on major decisions.  I am not quite clear what is legal bond to is but she is his master in fact.

He is getting old so he decides to deed all of his property over to his two daughters, under the assumption he will  live out his days on the estate and be given living money.  Everyone,including the mother, try to dissuade him from this, saying he will lose everything and be turned out.  

The conclusion is very powerful, almost overwhelming.  I knew something bad was going to happen but I was left deeply saddened by the despair and darkness of the close.

There is much wonderful material on daily life, we see a bit about how serfs feel about their masters and I guess one who read the work for clues concerning the psyche of Turgenev would find grist in relationship of the mother and the narrator.

This is a very deep beautiful work of art, worthy to carry the name "King Lear" in title.

I think my next Turgenev will be another novella, First Love.

Mel u

Father and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

Fathers and Son by Ivan Turgenev (1862, 204 pages, translated by Richard Hare)

Prior to today I have posted on two short stories by Ivan Turgenev (1818 to 1883, Russia) and his novella, Diary of a Superfluous Man.   (There is some additional background information on Turgenev in my prior posts on him.)\

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two, March 12 to March 22.   All you need do is post on one short story by an Irish author and send me a comment or and e mail and I will include it in the master post at the end of the challenge.  

Fathers and Sons is a very important European novel, listed on most best 100 novels of all time lists.  It is included by Clifton Fadiman in his The Life Time Reading Plan.   Turgenev was a close friend of Gustave  Flaubert.

Fathers and Sons was the first Russian work to be widely read out side of the country.   As the novel opens two young men fresh from the university go for a visit to the modest country estate of the father of  Arkady.   His father feels a bit uncomfortable as he has recently had a child with one of the servant women and has kept this from his son.    The son's friend is an advocate of nihilism, a new philosophy that repudiates all ideas that cannot be scientifically proved.    The friend, Bazarov, strongly condemns everything about life in Russia from the Czar to the peasants.

I do not see a need or wish to give a plot summery (there is one here if you are doing your homework).

The power in this book is in several things.   One of them, as the title suggests, is its its brilliant portrayal of the relationship between the two young men and their fathers.   Another is in its portrayal of the coming changes in Russia, the Russian Revolution was still over fifty years in the future.   We can see the radical Bazarov is not really ready to turn everything over to the peasants.  There are also beautiful descriptions of the natural wonders of rural Russia.   Bazarov gets in a duel over a petty point of honor, he is still enough of a traditionalist to hold to old codes of honor.    One of the most moving parts of the book is when Bazarov goes to visit his own parents, very traditional people who love their son with all their heart but have no comprehension of what is behind his strange and radical to them views.

I really enjoyed reading Fathers and Sons.   It is not hard to read or follow at all.

I plan to begin to read the stories in his Sportsman's Sketches soon.   Please share your experience with  Turgenev with us.

Mel u

Notes on the passing of Mr C, blog co-editor of The Reading Life

"The Jew" by Ivan Turgenev (1846, 35 pages, translated by Constant Garnett)

Mr C , A Truer Friend there Never Was
1992 to 2012

Yesterday was a very sad one for my family.   On Valentine's Day our beloved cat, Mr C (also known as Charles or Charlie) passed away at 19.5 years, nearly 100 for us.    He was strong up until the last few months of his life and he did have a great life.   We took him yesterday to the ancestral home of my wife where we buried him next to his beloved brother Yoda who passed away three years ago at 16.5.   Charles has been by my side for so long it is hard to imagine him not sitting next to me as I type.   He was older than my oldest daughter and strongly helped me get through the worse part of my own life when my mother passed away.     He will always be missed by us all.   Not many cats live to 19.5 and he fought off several illnesses in the last couple of years.    He had a very powerful personality and demanded constant affection and attention and he did have us trained to cater to his every need and  whim.

The ancestral property is about 250 Kilometers from Manila and about 50 years back in time.   It is a lovely place on a lake and right across the street from the Sea of China.   There are huge mango trees, wild and cultivated orchids and it is located on the main north-south highway.   The air there is so clean and fresh it is a pleasure just to breath.   My wife and her sister had some business to do so I stayed behind and sat on the front porch enjoying the wonderful view and peace.   I took my Ipad along, no wifi up there, and decided to help me get into a better frame of mind I would read short stories by writers of the highest quality.    I ended up over seven hours or so reading two stories by Ivan Turgenev, one by Henry James, one by Anton Chekhov, a very weird story by  Dostoevsky,  a marvelous story by Tolstoy and an Irish fairy tale by James Stephens that anybody who reads will love (Stephens will be a featured writer during Irish Short Story Week Year Two March 12 to March 22).   I will post on all of these stories as a tribute to Charlie.  

In the very opening pages of his magisterially study, The March of Literature, Ford Madox Ford lists the short stories of Ivan Turgenev (1818 to 1883-Russia) as among the supreme artistic achievements of all time.   Frank O'Connor in the only book worth reading on the short story, The Lonely Voice, names two of Turgenev's short stories as the absolute best in the world.  (There is some background information on him in my prior posts on two of his works).

"The Jew"  (not the most politically correct title for a short story) is a story told by a colonel in the Russia army in which he is reminiscing for his men about his younger days in the army.    He does talk about the Jewish character in the story, a man of forty or so who hangs on the margins of the army camp looking to find ways to make money off of the soldiers and officers of the Russian army, in a grossly antisemitic fashion.    This does not, of course, mean that Turgenev is antisemitic.   (There is also nothing in the story to clear him from this claim.)  

The colonel tells his men of how bored he was during a long siege of a town.    He says he was so bored that when the Jew offered to provide him with a woman (in exchange for a fee to himself and  the woman)  he agreed.   Of course the Colonel wants to tells his men a story that will make him "one of the boys" and a story about an encounter with a prostitute will do the trick.

The woman shows up, young with dark hair and beautiful white skin and so lovely.   She either does not know why she is there or is a great actress but she does nothing with the Colonel and leaves with a Gold coin.   The Colonel is outraged when the Jew comes the next day to ask him if he was satisfied with the woman.   The Colonel demands his money back but instead the Jew says he will bring the woman tonight and he will explain to her what she is supposed to do so there is no possibility of misunderstanding.

I do not want to spoil the plot of this pure gem of a story so I will tell no more of what happens.   It does give us a good look at life in the Russian army between wars and at attitudes toward Jews in the 1840s.  This is just a great short story.    Of the stories I read, it is a toss up if this or "Crocodile" by Dostoevsky is the most interesting story.

You can download it from Manybooks along with a lot of other works by Turgenev.   My quick research indicates he wrote 57 works that are considered short stories (many are longer stories).  I for sure have it in my plans to read all of them.    I will be read his masterwork Fathers and Sons, very soon.

I will post on all the stories I mentioned over the course of the next few days.  

I do not mean to make anyone sad in my account of the passing of Mr C but the book blog world has a lot of cat lovers among its members who I feel will understand.

Mel u

"Vermolai and the Miller's Wife" by Ivan Turgenev

"Vermolai and the Miller's Wife"  by Ivan Turgenev (1865, 10 pages, translated by Constance Garnett)

Last June I read and posted on Ivan Turgenev's Diary of a Superfluous Man, a work I greatly enjoyed.   Lately I have been getting very into short stories.    Frank O'Connor is his classic work on the short story, The Lonely Voice speaks in the most rhapsodic terms of the short stories of Turgenev (1818 to 1883).    Ford Madox Ford in his magisterial survey The March Literature mentions as early as page five the short stories of Turgenev as among the most beautiful literature of all time.


"Vermolai and the Miller's Wife" is a wonderful straight forward story about a Russian noble on a hunting trip with one of his men.    It is a celebration of nature, of hunting, of friendship,  of the pleasures of friendship, of the enjoyment of being outside in the Russian winter and in bonding with other men in conversations about women.

This is a great story and I cannot imagine anyone disliking it.

It was a bit shocking at first when the narrator of the story casually mentioned the serfs he owned as if to own another person was perfectly ordinary, and I guess it was at the time.  

Turgenev came from an incredibly wealthy Russian Family that owned over 5000 serfs over whom they had the power of life and death.

The story can be read online here.

I will be reading through the stories of Turgenev this year and posting on some of them-If you have a favorite please let me know.


Mel u

Diary of a Superfluous Man by Ivan Turgenev

(Diary of a Superfluous Man by Ivan Turgenev (1850-70 pages-read via Dailylit.com)

When I saw that there was going to be a Classics Circuit Tour on the Literature of Imperial Russia I knew I wanted to participate.   (The full schedule for the tour can be found at the link here.)    Last year I read a great book, Flaubert: A Biography by Frederick Brown.     Ivan Turgenev and Gustave Flaubert were very close friends for many years.    Brown sketched out some fascinating background information on Turgenev.   Turgenev  (1818 to 1883) was born in Oryal, Russian, about 360 kilometers southwest of Moscow.    He was born into a family of wealthy landed aristocrats that  owned over 5000 serfs.    Ivan's mother brought great additional wealth to the family.    According to Brown, and verified in other sources, Ivan's mother was abused by her parents and suffered at the hands of Ivan's father through his extreme philandering.    The serfs at this time were little more than slaves and it was common for aristocratic men to take serf mistresses and use any serf woman they desired and Ivan's father enjoyed his prerequisites.   His mother found this deeply humiliating and became an extremely cruel mistress to the serfs under the family control, having them whipped for the most minor offenses.   She also had numerous serfs hung.   I am going to assume here that serf women who were discovered to have been with her husband were subject to very harsh punishments and were considered to be to blame for what happened.    His mother was also abusive to Ivan and his brother, especially after their father died when they were sixteen.     In his early twenties he began to live largely in Western Europe, mostly in Paris.   Turgenev fell madly in love with a beautiful famous opera singer, Pauline Viardot and choose to live in Paris most of the rest of his life to be near her.   It is in Parisian literary salons that Turgenev and Flaubert met.    Turgenev never married, largely because of his love for the married Opera Singer.   He had one child by a serf mistress.   (This was a common more or less accepted practice.)

"Diary of a Superfluous Man" is a series of journal entries by an affluent middle aged Russian man seemingly of the very minor nobility.     The idea of a superfluous man was a common concept in 19th century literature. Here is how it is depicted in Turgenev's "Diary of a Superfluous Man".   A superfluous man is one with no place in society and no need to find a place or pursue a living due to the possession of some family money.   Perhaps he  might be the 4th son of a wealthy man or the illegitimate but still acknowledged child of an aristocrat.    Having no need to work he might often become highly cultivated in the literary arts, well traveled and in part because of this hypersensitive to his own emotional reactions to events and people in his life.   Often he would wander about near aimlessly and indulge in romantic liaisons with women in the preforming arts.    Much of his time might be spent brooding over his love affairs and the abusive ways the women he loved treated him.   Not to put too autobiographical slant on this but the opera singer that Turgenev was in love with all his life exploited him to support herself and her husband who was fully aware of an supported the affair for his own gain.    Because of the romantic sensibility of a superfluous man brought about in part by his leisure for self cultivation he is able to give a very self aware account of his life:

There passed in a flash before me my childhood, noisy and peaceful, quarrelsome and good-hearted, with hurried joys and swift sorrows; then my youth rose up, vague, queer, self-conscious, with all its mistakes and beginnings, with disconnected work, and agitated indolence.... There came back, too, to my memory the comrades who shared those early aspirations ... then like lightning in the night there came the gleam of a few bright memories ... then the shadows began to grow and bear down on me, it was darker and darker about me, more dully and quietly the monotonous years ran by--and like a stone, dejection sank upon my heart. I sat without stirring and gazed, gazed with effort and perplexity, as though I saw all my life before me, as though scales had fallen from my eyes. Oh, what have I done! my lips involuntarily murmured in a bitter whisper.

The superfluous man falls in romantic love with an inappropriate woman not worthy of the attentions of a man of his finely cultivated sensibility.   He comes near to a duel in it but some how avoids it.   Much of his time is spent brooding over this woman and the man she prefers to him.    Nothing really important happens in this diary, in fact how could it?    To me this short work is very much worth reading just so one may  ponder at leisure  reflections of its  self-absorbed narrator and to enjoy the beautiful descriptions of nature found in the work.    It is also a good look at life in Imperial Russia in the mid 19th century.

Turgenev is most famous for his Fathers and Sons (1862) which is on most lists of 100 greatest novels of all time.   I am currently being both edified and entertained by Ford Madox Ford's great over view of the world's literature The March of Literature (1938, 872 pages).   In the very opening pages Ford pays homage  to  Turgenev by placing him  in the company of Shakespeare,  Dante, Stendhal, and the best of the classic Greek poets.      There is another side benefit to Turgenev.   You can read a great Russian classic novel that is under 200 pages!

Mel u