Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons & other works (12 books)

IVAN SERGEYEVICH TURGENEV (1818-1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright, and the first Russian writer to enjoy an international reputation. He was arguably the most liberal-spirited and unqualifiedly humane of all the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists.

His first major publication of short stories, SKETCHES FROM A HUNTER'S ALBUM (1852), was based on his observations of peasant life and nature and remains a milestone of Russian realism. Turgenev himself considered the book to be his most important contribution to Russian literature.

HOME OF THE GENTRY (1858) is a novel full of nostalgia for the irretrievable past and of love for the Russian countryside. It contains one of his most memorable female characters, Liza, whom Dostoyevsky paid tribute to in his Pushkin speech of 1880, alongside Tatiana and Tolstoy's Natasha Rostova.

One of his finest novellas, FIRST LOVE (1860), is based on bitter-sweet childhood memories and the delivery of a speech on "Hamlet and Don Quixote", presenting a man torn between the self-centered skepticism of Hamlet and the idealistic generosity of Don Quixote.

FATHERS AND SONS (1862) -- here presented in 4 translations -- is Turgenev's most famous and enduring novel and regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction. Set during a six-year period of social ferment, from Russia's defeat in the Crimean War to the emancipation of the serfs, its leading character, Eugene Bazarov, is considered the "first Bolshevik" in Russian literature, and was in turn heralded and reviled as either a glorification or a parody of the "new men" of the 1860s. The novel examines the conflict between the older generation, reluctant to accept reforms, and the nihilistic youth.

Turgenev's artistic purity made him a favorite of like-minded novelists of the next generation, such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad, both of whom greatly preferred Turgenev to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. James, who wrote no fewer than five critical essays on Turgenev's work, claimed that "his merit of form is of the first order" and praised his "exquisite delicacy", which "makes too many of his rivals appear to hold us, in comparison, by violent means, and introduce us, in comparison, to vulgar things."


The following books are in ePUB or PDF format as indicated:


Novels & Stories

* DREAM TALES AND PROSE POEMS (Macmillan, 1916). Translated by Constance Garnett. -- PDF

* FATHERS AND SONS (Penguin Classics, 2009). Translated by Peter Carson with an Introduction by Rosamund Bartlett and an Afterword by Tatyana Tolstaya. -- ePUB

* FATHERS AND SONS (Penguin Classics, 1975). Translated by Rosemary Edmonds, with the Romanes Lecture "Fathers and Children" by Isaiah Berlin. -- PDF

* FATHERS AND SONS (Oxford World's Classics, 1991). Translated and edited by Richard Freeborn. -- PDF

* FATHERS AND SONS (Norton Critical Edition, 1995). Translated and edited by Michael R. Katz. -- PDF

* FIRST LOVE (Melville House, 2004). Translated by Constance Garnett. -- ePUB

* HOME OF THE GENTRY (Penguin, 1970). Translated by Richard Freeborn. -- ePUB

* A LEAR OF THE STEPPES & OTHER STORIES (AMS, 1970). Translated by Constance Garnett. -- PDF

* SKETCHES FROM A HUNTER'S ALBUM (Penguin Classics, 1990). Translated with Introduction and Notes by Richard Freeborn. -- ePUB

* THE TORRENTS OF SPRING (AMS, 1970). Translated by Constance Garnett. -- PDF


Correspondence

* LETTERS TO AN ACTRESS: The Story of Ivan Turgenev and Marya Gavrilovna Savina (Ohio UP, 1973). Translated and edited by Nora Gottlieb and Raymond Chapman. -- PDF

* TURGENEV'S LETTERS: A Selection (Knopf, 1961). Edited and translated by Edgar H. Lehrman. -- PDF