Turgenev’s remarkable quality of insight, gives an uncanny position in Russian literature and life. In this fresh new translation Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater have captured Turgenev’s subtle humor, his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, his compassion, and, above all, his skill as a storyteller. At the time of its publication in 1862, the book aroused indignation in critics who felt betrayed by Turgenev’s refusal to let his novel serve a single ideology it also received a spirited defense by those who saw in his diffuse sympathies a greater service to art and to humanity. 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. When the young university graduate Arkady and his mentor, the nihilist Bazarov, leave St. 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. Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children is a book full to bursting with life, both comic and tragic. The September selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |