Ivan Turgenev's Rudin

I picked up seven volumes of Turgenev's novels, translated by Constance Garnett, this morning, and I expect I can read most of them over the week-end, a Turgenev weekend! I am filling out reading the Russian canon, having read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Tolstoy, I remember, exploded on my consciousness like a bomb when I first read him, back in high school. Naturalism has been my object and my passion in writing ever since. I still look for the universal truth and the telling detail in all novels, as I found so richly in his.

I have already read the first Turgenev, Rudin. I must be predisposed to like Russian literature of the 19th century, as I liked it immediately, the stateliness, the characters, the pace. Perhaps it's because I so loved the Russian author who wrote children's classics in French, the Comtesse de Segur. Anyway, Turgenev is much shorter and has many fewer characters than the other Russian authors, and is a quick good read. There is a whiff of fin de siecle here, with the coming revolution hinted at...Turgenev draws characters much more easily and quickly that either other Russian writer. A pleasure. I may have time to read something else before bed.