When Fathers and Sons was first published in Russia, in 1862, it was met with a blaze of controversy about where Turgenev stood in relation to his account of generational misunderstanding. Was he criticizing the worldview of the conservative aesthete, Pavel Kirsanov, and the older generation, or that of the radical, cerebral medical student, Evgenii Bazarov, representing the younger one? The critic Dmitrii Pisarev wrote at the time that the novel "stirs the mind . . . because everything is permeated with the most complete and most touching sincerity." N. N. Strakhov, a close...

When Marshal of the Nobility Pozdnyshev suspects his wife of having an affair with her music partner, his jealousy consumes him and drives him to murder. Controversial upon publication in 1890, The Kreutzer Sonata illuminates Tolstoy's then-feverish Christian ideals, his conflicts with lust and the hypocrisies of nineteenth-century marriage, and his thinking on the role of art and music in society.
In her Introduction, Doris Lessing shows how relevant The Kreutzer Sonata is to our understanding of Tolstoy the artist, as well as to feminism and literature. This Modern Library...

This introduction to Waugh's complete fiction devotes a chapter to each of his novels in chronological order, providing a lucid outline of his creative and spiritual trajectory from carefree unbeliever to committed Catholic, from modernist to traditionalist, from comic satirist to ironic realist. The critical analysis of each novel is preceded by a biographical introduction with an unprecedented focus on apparently trivial experiences in Waugh's life which had a significant impact on the themes, images, and structures peculiar to that novel. Waugh always rated his linguistic and structural...

This introduction to Waugh's complete fiction devotes a chapter to each of his novels in chronological order, providing a lucid outline of his creative and spiritual trajectory from carefree unbeliever to committed Catholic, from modernist to traditionalist, from comic satirist to ironic realist. The critical analysis of each novel is preceded by a biographical introduction with an unprecedented focus on apparently trivial experiences in Waugh's life which had a significant impact on the themes, images, and structures peculiar to that novel. Waugh always rated his linguistic and structural...