These stories of the 19th-century Russian rural landscape and the difficult life of those who inhabited it were universally popular with the reading public at large and contributed in no small measure to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

Drama / 9 m., 6 f. / Var. sets. In rural Russia in the mid nineteenth century, a brilliant, anarchic young medical student arrives at the provincial family villa of his best friend, Arkady, for the summer vacation. He wants to despise the family for their imperturbable complacency and bourgeois effeteness, but he is tormented by conflicting emotions. His desperate action has tragic consequences. "The evening leaves you pondering not just the play's political implications but the ageless tragedy of parent child relationship." London Guardian . "Drama at its most stimulating and eloquent... has...

An unabridged edition, from the translation by Constance Garnett, with introduction by Edward Garnett

Sergeevich Turgenev was a major 19th century Russian novelist. His novel Fathers and Sons is his best-known work. Stories in this collection include The Diary of a Superfluous Man, A Tour in the Forest, Yakov Pasinkov, Andrei Kolosov, and A Correspondence. The Diary of a Superfluous Man begins, "The doctor has just left me. At last I have got at something definite! For all his cunning, he had to speak out at last. Yes, I am soon, very soon, to die. The frozen rivers will break up, and with the last snow I shall, most likely, swim away ... whither? God knows! To the ocean too. Well, well,...

Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons explores generational differences and their tragic consequences. The story centers around Arkady and Bazarov, two young men who return home from college to a world that has remained static. They have changed but must now redefine old relationships, both their friendship with one another and their relationships with their fathers. The main conflict of the novel is between the nihilistic Bazarov, who espouses a strictly materialistic attitude toward life, and Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, an uncle of Arkady's, who upholds the aristocratic tradition in the face of...

Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons explores generational differences and their tragic consequences. The story centers around Arkady and Bazarov, two young men who return home from college to a world that has remained static. They have changed but must now redefine old relationships, both their friendship with one another and their relationships with their fathers. The main conflict of the novel is between the nihilistic Bazarov, who espouses a strictly materialistic attitude toward life, and Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, an uncle of Arkady's, who upholds the aristocratic tradition in the face of...

Turgenev's first major prose work is a series of twenty-five Sketches: the observations and anecdotes of the author during his travels through Russia satisfying his passion for hunting. His album is filled with moving insights into the lives of those he encounters - peasants and landowners, doctors and bailiffs, neglected wives and bereft mothers - each providing a glimpse of love, tragedy, courage and loss, and anticipating Turgenev's great later works such as First Love and Fathers and Sons. His depiction of the cruelty and arrogance of the ruling classes was considered subversive and led...

Turgenev's timeless tale of generational collision, in a sparkling new translation
When Arkady Petrovich returns home from college, his father finds his eager, naive son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought home with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father with his criticisms of the landowning way of life and his determination to overthrow the traditional values of contemporary society. Vividly capturing the hopes and fears, regrets and delusions...

When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith." Turgenev's masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when it was published in 1862 and continues today to seem as fresh and outspoken as it did to those who first encountered its nihilistic hero.

This new translation, specially commissioned for the Oxford World's Classics, is the first to draw on Turgenev's working manuscript, which only came to...