The Project Gutenberg EBook of Virgin Soil, by Ivan S. Turgenev

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Title: Virgin Soil

Author: Ivan S. Turgenev

Translator: R. S. Townsend

Posting Date: January 8, 2009 [EBook #2466]
Release Date: January, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIRGIN SOIL ***

Produced by Martin Adamson

VIRGIN SOIL

By Ivan S. Turgenev

Translated from the Russian by R. S. Townsend

INTRODUCTION

TURGENEV was the first writer who was able, having both Slavic and
universal imagination enough for it, to interpret modern Russia to the
outer world, and Virgin Soil was the last word of his greater testament.
It was the book in which many English readers were destined to make
his acquaintance about a generation ago, and the effect of it was, like
Swinburne's Songs Before Sunrise, Mazzini's Duties of Man, and other
congenial documents, to break up the insular confines in which they had
been reared and to enlarge their new horizon. Afterwards they went on to
read Tolstoi, and Turgenev's powerful and antipathetic fellow-novelist,
Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he was the
greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country's
predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a
style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do.
without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he
cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy which belonged
to his temperament. He suffered in youth, and suffered badly, from the
romantic malady of his century, and that other malady of Russia, both
expressed in what M. Haumand terms his "Hamletisme." But in Virgin Soil
he is easy and almost negligent master of his instrument, and though he
is an exile and at times a sharply embittered one, he gathers experience
round his theme as only the artist can who has enriched leis art
by having outlived his youth without forgetting its pangs, joys,
mortifications, and love-songs.

In Nejdanov it is another picture of that youth which we see--youth
reduced to ineffectiveness by fatalism and by the egoism of the lyric
nature which lo