Recommendations from our site
“You can read it in a long afternoon. It’s sublime in its literary style, even in translation. There’s a clarity and vivacity of characterization which makes the characters very memorable. It’s also a very contemporary book. The culture wars we’re having today were described by Turgenev in Fathers and Sons…The other thing about Turgenev and this book is that it was the first novel to put Russian literature on the map. There had been translations of Gogol and Pushkin and, for me, Turgenev’s masterpiece is Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, which came out 10 years before and was badly translated into French. But Fathers and Sons really hit the big time. In Germany Turgenev suddenly became the most-read author. It established what a Russian novel was and held that position for 20 years until suddenly, in the mid-1880s, people discovered Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and the big sprawling novel became what Russian novels were meant to be like.” Read more...
Orlando Figes, Historian
