The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rudin, by Ivan Turgenev

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Title: Rudin

Author: Ivan Turgenev

Translator: Constance Garnett

Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6900]
Posting Date: June 1, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUDIN ***

Produced by Eric Eldred

RUDIN

A Novel

By Ivan Turgenev

Translated from the Russian By Constance Garnett

[With an introduction by S. Stepniak]

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1894

INTRODUCTION

I

Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the
last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public,
first in France, then in Germany and America, and finally in England.

In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical
of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest
writers of our times: 'The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed
our century, stands more than any other man as the incarnation of a
whole race,' because 'a whole world lived in him and spoke through his
mouth.' Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic
world, to which it was 'an honour to have been expressed by so great a
Master.'

This recognition was, however, of slow growth. It had nothing in it of
the sudden wave of curiosity and gushing enthusiasm which in a few years
lifted Count Tolstoi to world-wide fame. Neither in the personality of
Turgenev, nor in his talent, was there anything to strike and carry away
popular imagination.

By the fecundity of his creative talent Turgenev stands with the
greatest authors of all times. The gallery of living people, men, and
especially women, each different and perfectly individualised, yet all
the creatures of actual life, whom Turgenev introduces to us; the vast
body of psychological truths he discovers, the subtle shades of men's
feelings he reveals to us, is such as only the greatest among the great
have succeeded in leaving as their artistic inheritance to their country
and to the world.

As regards his method of dealing with his material and shaping it into
mould, he stands even higher than as a pure creator. To