Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Considered to be Turgenev's greatest love story, The Torrents of Spring is a bittersweet story of young love steered astray by passion. While traveling through Germany, nobleman Dmitri Sanin meets Gemma Roselli, a beautiful Italian girl who works in her family's shop. They fall in love as Sanin saves Gemma's brother life and defends her honor in a duel. Romance turns...

With the publication of "A Sportsman's Sketches" in 1852 Ivan Turgenev established himself one of the leaders in the movement of Russian literary realism. Abandoning the idealized vision of Romantic literature, Realism seeks to present the true struggles of the human existence. In "Virgin Soil", his final novel, we see a continuation of the themes present throughout his other works. At the heart of the novel is the story of a young man and woman who...

In this volume of "First Love and Other Stories" six of Turgenev's shorter works are collected together. Firstly in "The Diary of a Superfluous Man" we find the story of a dying man who recounts the incidents of his life. Secondly this collection contains the short story "Mumu", which relates what follows when Gerasim, a deaf and mute man, rescues a drowning dog. Thirdly, in "Acia", there is the story of an unnamed narrator who recounts, in a remorseful...

"Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Children is a masterpiece not only of the nineteenth century but of the whole of Russian literature, a book full to bursting with life. It is a novel about the relations between the young and the old, about love, families, politics, religion, about strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death. It is about the clash between liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. At the time of its publication...