PublishedNew York Review Books, September 2022 |
ISBN9781681376356 |
FormatSoftcover, 256 pages |
Dimensions20.3cm × 12.7cm |
A 19th-century Russian masterpiece about love, politics, family, and the tension between the new generation and the old world.
Ivan Turgenev'sFathers and Childrenis a book full tobursting with life, both comic and tragic. At the heart ofthis novel about love, politics, and society, strong beliefsand heated disagreements, illness and death, is the generationaldivide between the young and the old. Whenthe young university graduate Arkady and his mentor, thenihilist Bazarov, leave St. Petersburg to visit their agingparents in the provinces, the conflict that ensues fromthe generations' clashing views of the world-the youths'radicalism and the parents' liberalism-is both representativeof nineteenth-century Russia and recognizably contemporary. At the time of its publication in 1862, thebook aroused indignation in critics who felt betrayed byTurgenev's refusal to let his novel serve a single ideology; it also received a spirited defense by those who sawin his diffuse sympathies a greater service to art and tohumanity. In this fresh new translation Nicolas PasternakSlater and Maya Slater have captured Turgenev's subtlehumor, his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, his compassion, and, above all, his skill as astoryteller
