![]() Turgenev is very deft in setting up his characters and bringing them together and that he is more interested in his main characters reactions and development following on from the events of the stories gives them an interest beyond the narratives themselves. Somebody else probably has written that novel, but it is not the story that Turgenev is interested in. ![]() He can manage to be concise because he is so focussed - in First Love we only learn about the narrator - and not that much about him, we don't know about the woman he loves or why there is a crowd of, rather unlikely, suitors around her. ![]() But you can enjoy it infinitely because of its artistry, Penelope Fitzgerald was a Turgenev fan and beyond his pessimism I can imagine that she was inspired by his concision, all of these stories are short and I felt the shorter they were the stronger they were, the longest story here - the King Lear retelling, was the weakest for me The song of triumphant Love was unfinished and is, I assume, only in the collection as a filler. ![]() This collection consists of the stories Diary of a superfluous man, Mumu, Asya, First Love, King Lear of the steppes and The song of triumphant Love Asya and First Love I had read before, back when I was a teenager, the edition was a hardback bound in green - though that could have been a library binding I suppose, from a Russian publishing house.įirst Love I imagine is one of the stories that inspired Freud, it is a very nice story, but it is not the kind of the story that you can read the same way twice. ![]()
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