Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Translator’s Note
Further Reading
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in 1818 in the province of Oryol, and suffered during his childhood with a tyrannical mother. After the family had moved to Moscow in 1827 he entered St Petersburg University where he studied philosophy. When he was nineteen he published his first poems and, convinced that Europe contained the source of real knowledge, went to the University of Berlin. After two years he returned to Russia and took his degree at the University of Moscow. In 1843 he fell in love with Pauline Garcia-Viardot, a young Spanish singer, who influenced the rest of his life. He followed her on her singing tours in Europe and spent long periods in the French house of herself and her husband, both of whom accepted him as a family friend. After 1856 he lived mostly abroad, and he became the first Russian writer to gain a wide reputation in Europe; he was a well-known figure in Parisian literary circles, where his friends included Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, and an honorary degree was conferred on him at Oxford. His series of six novels, which reflects a period of Russian life from the 1830s to the 1870s, are Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), Fathers and Sons (1862), Smoke (1867) and Virgin Soil(1877). He also wrote plays, which include the comedy A Month in the Country, short stories and novellas, of which First Love (1860, written at the height of his powers) is the most famous, and the influential Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (1852), as well as literary essays and memoirs. He died in Paris in 1883 after being ill for a year, and was buried in Russia.
Isaiah Berlin Om was President of the British Academy; at Oxford University he was a Fellow of All Souls College, Professor of Social and Political Theory, the first President of Wolfson College, and an Honorary Fellow of four other Colleges. He received many other honours and awards including the Jerusalem Prize in 1977, the Erasmus Prize in 1983 and the Agnelli Prize in 1987. His superb translations of Turgenev’s First Love and A Month in the Country are both published in the Penguin Classics, and his 1970 Romanes Lecture on Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons appears in the Penguin Classics edition of that novel. Among his many other publications are Karl Marx (1939), Russian Thinkers (1978), Against the Current (1979), Personal Impressions (1980), Three Critics of the Enlightenment (2000) and Liberty (2002). Sir Isaiah Berlin died 6 November 1997. On the occasion of his death he was described by The Times as ‘one of the most influential figures in the intellectual life of the country’.
Sir Victor Pritchett was Visiting Professor at several American universities and President of the Society of Authors. He received an Honorary Litt.D. from Leeds University in 1972 and from Columbia University, New York, in 1978. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1993. Apart from his critical writings, he wrote a large number of short stories and novels, notably Mr Beluncle and Dead Man Leading, as well as The Gentle Barbarian, a life of Turgenev. The first part of his autobiography, A Cab at the Door (1968), received a Royal Society of Literature Award and was followed by Midnight Oil (1971). A volume of The Complete Short Stories was published in 1990 and The Complete Essays in 1991. V. S. Pritchett died in March 1997 and in its obituary the Guardian eulogized him as ‘one of the towering English literary figures of the century’.