The novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) is known primarily as a chronicler of his age and crafter of elegant prose--like the simplest painting of daily artifacts, his works have pleased partly because they shape a recognizable world and partly because their form gives to the content its resonant signifying power. Here Jane Costlow accounts for both the historicity and aesthetic elegance of Turgenev's realist novels in close readings of Rudin, A Nest of Gentry, On the Eve, and Fathers and Children, all written between 1855 and 1861. Each essay focuses on a particular aspect of Turgenev's art...