Amazon.com description: Product Description: OF Russia's great novelists, Turgenev is the one who comes nearest to the apprehension of the western reader. His world of men and women presents no striking abnormalities, his portraiture hardly ever invades the province of pathology, his view of life reasonably satisfies our standards of sanity, and his art has the chastity and restraint of the best European tradition. To impute this result to the influence upon him of western culture might be misleading. His literary powers attained their maturity on Russian soil and his art followed the path that had been blazed by his great countrymen, Pushkin and Gogol. But it is also true that he became conscious at an early age of the great need in Russia of the fertilizing elements from a richer cultivation and dedicated himself with missionary enthusiasm to the importation of those elements from abroad. Hence the self-imposed exile which lasted through nearly his whole creative career. What one is likely to overlook, however, is how perfectly Turgenev embodied in himself certain of the fundamental Slavic traits with which his own teachings were at war. The seeds of the ailment which was devastating the life of his people were planted in him also, but he at least saw it as an ailment, and instead of sinking under it inertly, gave himself up to discovering and applying the remedy. Western ideals of conduct and positive western culture offered him the escape from the stagnant morasses of Slavic indifferentism and supplied the motive power for his principal stories.

In the heart of Turgenev there lurks a cosmic sadness, born, it may be, of the spirit that broods over the vast desolate steppes of his native land and shedding its melancholy light over his whole universe. Nature appears to him insensible and the fate of man in the world evil. A thin partition separates him from despair or even pessimism. In moments of spiritual crisis this despair wells up from the depths with lyric intensity. He gives it body in some of his fantastic tales, where it is joined with those vague mystic longings for the unreachable which accentuate the earthly weakness and confinement of man.