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  • Published: 6 December 2007
  • ISBN: 9780141935836
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208

Home of the Gentry



On one level the novel is about the homecoming of Lavretsky, who, broken and disillusioned by a failed marriage, returns to his estate and finds love again - only to lose it. The sense of loss and of unfulfilled promise, beautifully captured by Turgenev, reflects his underlying theme that humanity is not destined to experience happiness except as something ephemeral and inevitably doomed. On another level Turgenev is presenting the homecoming of a whole generation of young Russians who have fallen under the spell of European ideas that have uprooted them from Russia, their 'home', but have proved ultimately superfluous. In tragic bewilderment, they attempt to find reconciliation with their land.

  • Published: 6 December 2007
  • ISBN: 9780141935836
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208

Other books in the series

Maldoror and Poems
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the authors

Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in 1818 in the province of Oryol. After the family had moved to Moscow in 1827 he entered St Petersburg University where he studied philosophy. When he was nineteen he published his first poems and went to the University of Berlin. After two years he returned to Russia and took his degree at the University of Moscow. After 1856 he lived mostly abroad, and he became the first Russian writer to gain a wide reputation in Europe. He wrote many novels, plays, short stories and novellas, of which First Love (1860) is the most famous. He died in Paris in 1883.