This book contains three short works that provide a wonderful example of the Russian approach to romantic literature. The form is wonderful, the characters perfectly created and the plot shores up the authors ideas with an most resonant clarity.

First love shows the blend of comedy and tragedy that is so prevalent in Russian works of the period. The events portrayed are those that could occur in daily life even to today. The emotions that are evoked are real and timeless. It surely adds proof to the argument that Russian works of this period age so much better than do those authors from other countries whose works have survived.

Spring Torrents is the longest of the works and still provides a feel that the length is exactly perfect for the tale. If the prologue does not pull you into the story you have an absences of a great concern that plagues many of us. How many of us fear reaching that point (or have reached that point)in life where we recognize all of the great loss of opportunity which has occurred in our life. From this prologue the story races along explaining how one of us has reached the position when the concern has become a reality. Wonderful feelings are evoked on the path.

This book is highly recommended for all and is a must read for the Tolstoy, Chekov, Gogol and Dostoevsky fans.

First love is a wonderful evocation of youth, love and life in 19th century Russian life. I challenge anyone not to be moved by this book, which is both humorous and touchingly melencholic.

If reading in translation has proved difficult for you in the past, Freeborn's translation of Turgenev's short stories will suprise you in a wonderful way. There were times when I forgot that I was in the process of reading, but rather felt that these very scenes were being lived out before me, a bodiless and voiceless viewer.

Turgenev's understanding of and ability to capture the complete emotional processes of people in love in this collection touched me in its sincerity and genuine clarity. All the insane, skipping-over-themselves thoughts and quick jealousies that people experience are completely captured in stories like "First Love" and "Diary of a Superfluous Man."

Turgenev is a great introduction to Russian fiction. I'm sorry that I didn't discover him earlier.

I am one of the many family members of Jasper R. Nall.

The most exciting moment for me was when I completed the reading of this wondeful book that my great-great-grandfather left to me.

It bought tears to my eyes to think that he loved me so much, to the point that he was moved to leave a part of himself for all of us in the family to share.

I was only 2 years old when he passed away, but it feels as if I knew him through his words.

I recommend everyone to read the book, if you haven't already.

Sincerely,

Ms. Gonnie Goins (decedent of RJN)

This small book has a surprising message of slave loyalty and affection for the white master. It was a pleasure to read, took about 2 hours, and I couldn't put it down. Brought back a lot of memories of stories my Grandma told about our ancestors in Alabama. I am descended from Nall slave owners and, although I've always been ashamed of that, this humble story creates more of an understanding of that day and time for me. I highly recommend it for anyone.

This was a short easy to read book. Don't be fooled by the length! This book was full of power. Jasper was a incredible man. He gives an insight on what it is to be born a free man, but still be oppressed. But rather than walking with his head down, he leads a prosperous life. Thank you Jasper for documenting your life before you passed. It enables me to share our history with my children.

This book is one of the best! I couldn' t put it down. What happened to Peter Freeborn? His previous book, "The Stark Truth" was a pageturner as well. It's too bad these books are out of print. They were published ten years ago, but they filled with fresh or current ideas and the writing doesn't get any better.

This is a book you cannot put down and adding to the mystery, the author, Peter Freeborn is a pseudonym. An author is contacted to ghostwrite the memoirs of a beautiful, mysterious Hollywood star, Nina Hardy. The story leads to the uncovering of Hollywood secrets that keep you wondering who the people really are. Nina and the author fall in love but they are starcrossed lovers manipulated by a powerful team of brothers, one who is a publisher involved with the author's beautiful wife and one a movie mogul, in love for over 30 years with Nina. Although this book is out of print, I can obtain copies. Please write me at the following email address.

All congenitally melancholy souls will love this novel, where intense romantic and spiritual conflicts unfold in the dreamlike setting of a nineteenth century Russian estate. This is a beautifully written, extremely lyrical work...it will especially appeal to devotees of Romantic piano music. The final few paragraphs are unforgettable and heartbreaking. I consider Home of the Gentry to be the most quintessentially "Turgenevian" of all the author's works. I have read the novel many times, and I never tire of it. If you are new to nineteenth century Russian literature, this is a good work with which to start. The novel is not long, and most chapters are quite short. Each one stands like a perfect little jewel, and many passages will remain in your memory for a long time. Like most Russian novels of the period, Home of the Gentry is a novel of ideas. Your reading will be enhanced if you have some background in the cultural dynamics of the period and understand the intellectual caste to which the protagonist belongs - he is a "superfluous man," and his conflicted ideological stance relates directly to issues that were intensely debated in the 1840s. Although knowing something about this situation is helpful, I imagine that even those readers who have no prior knowledge of the period will enjoy the work immensely. If nothing else, Turgenev's elegiac portrayal of the Russian countryside is unrivaled....even Tolstoy cannot match Turgenev's affecting depictions of the land itself. Freeborn's translation reads smoothly, and there is a helpful introductory essay in this edition.

Unlike his famous contemporaries Turgenev's writing is not heroic and it's not full of pathos.Home Of The Gentry is a sensitive 'quiet' novel, the characters are portreyed delicately with an impossible combination of cynicism and true love for humen nature. The touching love story is a reward for those who like smart observations and have a real passion for the truely romantic.

I didn't know Chekov was considered a master of the short story until I read Janet Malcolm's pieces about him in The New Yorker. So I started with this book, which contains some of his earliest stories. Each story is amazing and in them you can see him progressing into his own unique style. This is a great book to start with if you're reading Chekov for the first time.

With so much emphasis on self-help books, "The Upward Call" targets the true purpose for our lives. Spiritual development is not a matter of self-achievement, self-help, or self-discipline, according to this book, but strictly a matter of a relationship with God. This book clearly points out a path, with strong Weslyan foundations, to a meaningful, fulfilling relationship with God. It directs us to become "the whole person in relationship with God, with-in the community of belivevers, growing in Christlikeness, reflected in a Spirit-directed, disciplined lifestyle, and demonstrated in actions that lead others to redemption."

A life-changing read.

In giving this book only three stars, I'm not rating Turgenev but rather the translation. I'm not a translator myself, I'm sure it's very difficult rendering dialogue from another time and place, etc., etc. but I finally couldn't abide the translator's choice in this case to render the voices of nineteenth century Russian peasants in Cockney (or other English) slang.

Examples: "He was a right pain to his peasant girls." "They felt right idiots." "He's not a gent, is he?" "Help us, mate." "Judge for yourself, mate." "He's the soul of kindness, he is." "Gavrila comprehended-like how to get out of the wood." The use of "'cos" for "because." The use of "gotta"--"And I've gotta tell you this."

And what was for me the last straw, in the story Bezhin Lea, "Cor!" and "Cor, stone me!"

If you like this kind of thing, you'll love the book. For Russian lit in translation, give me Constance Garnett (and her Edwardian diction--which works so well, perhaps because it seems natural in contrast to the forced quality on display in "Sketches") or else the current team of Pevear and Volokhonsky.

It's taken me until now to get to Sketches From A Hunter's Album. Now I have finished it and now I am grieving. It will stay in my nonlending collection so I can savor it even after the surprise has gone. It's like losing a friend.

Turgenev calls these 'sketches' rather than stories. It's a good distinction. More story writers should concentrate on their sketch pads. The sketches are of places and people in the rural south of Russia in the 1840s. Each is strung thematically on Turgenev's wandrings through the countryside while hunting for game birds. Each begins with a mention that he was hunting in a certain place. He goes into lovely thoughtful and surprising descriptions of the woods or marsh, the sky, the smells, the sounds, the light. Even in translation, these are exquisite. He speaks of shifting light shining through the leaves onto the forest floor, or unbreatheable noonday heat, or changing skies at the advent of a storm, a dawn, or a sunset; he calls up moments from your own life that you thought could not be shared with anyone who wasn't there and he makes you relive those moments as if he had been there with you.

For anyone who has spent time out of doors, these little Aldo Leopold nature essays standing alone would be reason enough to read the 'Sketches', but these are just hors d'œuvre to his descriptions of the persons he meets while hunting. When sketching people, Turgenev does gracefully what Dickens tried to do and did clumsily; that is, he describes the physical characteristics of a person and gives you a fully formed description of their character as well, and he does this without sounding forced and without showing himself. (And you will burst out laughing at the sudden recognition that, indeed, someone does look 'like a root vegetable'.)

"Sketches" was published twice in Turgenev's lifetime and in the second edition he added to it. In the earlier sketches, Turgenev brings a character to life in a description; the character may speak a few words, and disappear from the scene, as people do in real life, leaving the reader to speculate what became of him. Yet, Turgenev has given us enough insight into the character that we think we know what probably happened next, and so the story is complete. These are elegant Aristotelian constructs with the action taking place offstage, and, oh elegance! with the final action taking place in the reader's imagination after the story has ended. If my description leaves you wondering, read them! (Would that I could spur you to act as Turgenev spurs his readers to think. Ah, but it's too much... .) This is what Turgenev does. He starts you thinking, but requires you to complete the story. In the later sketches Turgenev is just as deft in his descriptions, but perhaps to satisfy the market or his editors he adopts a more plot driven model. These later contributions can more truly be called stories rather than sketches. They are equally well-crafted, but they demand less of the reader. Curiously, they give us less as well.

The hunter's travels theme gives the collection an interrelatedness, almost like a picaresque novel. As in Huckleberry Finn or Don Quixote, neither the author nor the protagonist directly express opinions, but as stories accumulate the reader acquires the author's strong politicized view. We meet the aristocrats and peasants of rural Russia. The serf-holding system had been 'liberalized' in the early 19th century, but it is revealed as the unnamed slavery it was. Landlords control peasants' rights to marry; they name the persons to fill regional conscription quotas; they assign agricultural and residential alotments; and thoughtless and uncaring aristocrats use these powers carelessly or maliciously to destroy lives. Liberal aristocrats fare no better than traditional feudalists, as Turgenev details social reformers' well-meaning disasters which beggar both for the peasants and the bumbling aristocrats who direct them.

America often forgets that its civil war was part of a European pandemic of peasant revolts driven by the extended logic of the Enlightenment. As masters and slaves in the United States were struggling with the immorality of a divine order handed down from a prior age, the masters and servants in Europe did the same. The 1840s, 50s, and 60s were tumultuous times in central and eastern Europe. Turgenev, arrested and exiled in 1852 because of the 'Sketches', has an historical place akin to the American abolitionists of the same day, however, unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe, Turgenev draws his characters in three dimensions with humanity, with love and understanding even when he does not forgive them their moral failings. The 'Sketches' would be an interesting book to teach alongside Huckleberry Finn.

I don't like short stories, never have and I don't know why. I had to read this collection for a course and found it pretty good. The professor told us that this was Hemingway's favorite book which Hemingway had read over and over. In fact, Hemingway modeled some of his own stories on those here, particularly the Hemingway stories where nothing happens except someone might make a pot of coffee. But let's face it, these are not so much stories (narrations of events in time) as sketches of characters. Any plot would be too much plot and would interfer with the general effect, which is to show us the life and times of Russians before the liberation of the serfs. I liked "The Singers", as other reviewer have, but the true masterpiece, worth the entire price of the book, is "Living Relic." Nothing happens in that story except we learn again the beauty and strength of the human spirit and in the process the redemptive nature of true literature.

A reviewer before me said Turgenev came in the footsteps of the other great Russians. He might have been after Gogol, whom was the first master of fiction to turn to realism, but he was basically a frontrunner of both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (and Chekhov). At Gogol's death in 1852 Turgenev wrote an eulogy on Gogol and published the short-story cycle "A Sportsman's Sketches", and was banished to his estate. After this he went abroad and spent most of his time in Paris, where he more than anybody made Russian literature known to the outside world. His greatest novels were "A Nest of Gentlefolk", "On the Eve" and of course "Fathers and Sons". "A Month in the Country" is a pleasant and amusing play of the day, and his very best. One that later also highly inspired Chekhov. Further reading recommended: "The Essential Turgenev".

In the footsteps of other such amazing Russian authors comes Turgenev, and his wonderfully written play 'A Month in the Country.' If you love Russian literature of this time period, and you like Love triangles, and plays, then this story can not go wrong.

This is the first fiction book I've read in a long time, and I have to say I'm not too disappointed. Fathers and Sons relates not only the generation gap in 19th century Russia, but also shows how fragile and fake the entire Russian system was in that time period. Every character symbolizes an important facet of Russian society. Paul Petrovich is the old slavophile nobility, convinced that Russians and their ways are the best in the world while they wear English clothing and speak and read in French. His brother Nicholas is the bridge between the old world and the new world, trying to fit in with the new ways while he only understands the old customs. Arcady, who represents those in society who outwardly follow the latest trendy beliefs but can't shake their emotions or their humanity. And Barazov, who represents youth, with its eternal promise of new ideas and ways, but who are blind to their own naive hypocrisy. Certainly there are other characters, but these major figures shape the plot of the book.

Turgenev manages to leave no stone unturned, casting withering attacks on peasants, psuedo-intellectualism, government officials, corruption, and conventions. The book mentions that Turgenev alienated and angered many in Russia with this book, and the reader will quickly see why.

Turgenev recognized the backwardness of Russia, and that it must change if it were to survive in a new world. The big question was how, and Turgenev shows that while idealists like Bazarov may have new ideas (Bazarov's idea was nihilism, a belief in nothing), those ideas mean nothing if not backed up with solutions to the problems.

An excellent book, and very readable. The price is low enough that most people really don't have an excuse to give this one a shot.

This was required reading for my Russian literature class because it is considered a classic. My favorite part of this book is the fact that it gives the reader a glimpse of what life was like for the average nobleman of the day...(in the 1850's) It has some interesting descriptions of Russian family life, the life of the peasantry and how the younger generation interacted with the older generation (hence the title, "Fathers and Sons" although the original Russian is called "Fathers and Children"). One of the main characters, Bazarov, is a self proclaimed nihilist who rejects all forms of authority, causing problems for the older generations (his parents & his friend's parents), but attracting the attention of the people of his (the younger) generation. This book has no real plot...it is merely the story of how one man brings his nihilist ideas into other peoples' lives & it gives accounts of everybody else's reactions to these nihilist ideas. It is an interesting book & a pretty quick read, but it can drag in places...especially if the reader is waiting for something interesting to happen. All in all, I believe this book is worth reading, if just to get a taste of "Old Russia", but if you are looking for an exciting "can't-put-it-down-sitting-on-the-edge-of-your-seat-page-turner", you won't find it in this book.

In Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, as in most of Chekhov, nothing much really happens. People talk a lot and that's about it. Should be dull, right? But it isn't. The talk, and the characters revealed, reflect the profound changes that were being felt in Russian society at the end of the 19th Century; changes that would set the stage for much of what was to happen in the 20th Century. But more important to a modern reader, the ideas and the real life implication of those ideas are as current and relevant as when Turgenev wrote. Bazarov, the young 'nihilist', sounds just like the typical student rebel of the 60's (or of the Seattle WTO protests just recently). He has the arrogance and the innocence of idealistic youth. He is as believeable, and as moving in his ultimate hurt, as any young person today might be confronted with the limitations of idealism and the fickle tyranny of personal passion.

I loved this book when I first read it as a teenager and I enjoyed it even more on subsequent rereadings. It makes the world of 19th century Russia seem strangely familiar and it gives many a current political thread a grounding in meaningful history.

_Rudin_ is a good novel by Ivan Turgenev, but altogether non-essential, unless you want to read all of his works.

The character Rudin is a fortunate young man in 1860s Russia, a man around thirty years of age, in the prime of his life. He is very much a superfluous man, like the man Turgenev wrote of in his shorter story "A Superfluous Man." He is all talk and no action. He has high-minded ideals but can not transfer them into deeds.

I suppose Turgenev saw many young Russian men of his generation who served as the basis for Rudin, the character. Natalya, Rudin's love interest, at least has the fortitude to translate her ideals into actions, but she is offered fewer possibilities by Russian society. She comes off more sympathetically than the title character, but she is female, and therefore a minor character in a Turgenev work. I found her more interesting, and similar to the female main character in _Oblomov_ by Goncharov.

The political edge on this novel is not nearly so sharp as that on _Fathers and Sons_. Mostly this seems a personal and emotional novel, rather than a political novel. A student wanting a general grounding in the major novels of Russian Literature can probably skip _Rudin_. On the other hand, if you read _Fathers and Sons_ and found that book very rewarding, you may want to take a peek at _Rudin_, to see what another (earlier) novel by Turgenev is like.

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Rudin is the lead character in this short novel, which reads like a play set in mid nineteenth century Russia. He enters into a provincial society peopled by the usual array of grand dames, eccentrics, local radicals, and beautiful / eligible debutant-daughter, with whom he (believes he) falls in love.

Whilst the characters and setting is characteristic of many European novels of the time, the story takes an unexpected turn. Rudin is a fateful character, and one whose shallowness and egotism is exposed by the young daughter who he seduces. Turgenev manages to present Rudin as a sympathetic character albeit imbued with the resignation that he is a 'superfluous man' (cf. 'A Hero of Our Times' by Lermontov)

The book is well written and deserves a place in the canon of nineteenth century Russian novels . Particularly recommended for anyone who has read Fathers and Sons.

This is a simple parable, told within a beautiful story. We meet Rudin through several people's eyes and learn much more about him from the differences others see in him than we learn directly. It is facsinating to see the interplay between the man's fantasies and his facade. You are left with very profound and troubling unanswered questions about your own life and our tenuous connections to "reality." This is a powerful volume for anyone who is seriously and sincerely examining their own motives, especially if you are dissatisfied with your current conclusions.