Ivan Turgenev's 19th-century fiction follows Lavretsky, a Russian nobleman who returns to his estate after his marriage collapses, seeking meaning amid the social changes transforming aristocratic life. The novel explores love, duty, and generational conflict as Lavretsky encounters his idealistic young cousin Liza in this translation by Constance Garnett.
A bright spring day was fading into evening. High overhead in the clear heavens small rosy clouds seemed hardly to move across the sky but to be sinking into its depths of blue. In a handsome house in one of the outlying streets of the government town of O---- (it was in the year 1842) two women were sitting at an open window; one was about fifty, the other an old lady of seventy. The name of the former was Marya Dmitrievna Kalitin. Her husband, a shrewd determined man of obstinate bilious temperament, had been dead for ten years. He had been a provincial public prosecutor, noted in his own day as a successful man of business. He had received a fair education and had been to the university; but having been born in narrow circumstances he realised early in life the necessity of pushing his own way in the world and making money. It had been a love-match on Marya Dmitrievna’s side. He was n…Continue reading →
This is the Constance Garnett translation, a public-domain English text. Marginalia presents it unabridged, with chapter navigation, your reading position saved, and optional AI commentary on any passage.
A towering figure of 19th-century Russian literature, this nobleman-turned-writer (1818-1883) masterfully captured the social tensions of his era through psychological realism. His novels, particularly Fathers and Sons, introduced the world to the concept of nihilism while exploring generational conflict with unprecedented nuance and empathy. All works by Ivan Turgenev →
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