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The Novels and Stories of Iván Turgénieff (15)
The Novels and Stories of Ivn Turgnieff - 15 Author:Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev Volume: 15 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1904 Original Publisher: Scribner's Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where ... more »you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: PREFACE "speing Freshets" was first published in the European Messenger. In commenting upon it one critic says that, in his later works, Turgenieff lingered, with special intensity of interest, over the weak-willed people (or, rather, men) who have no moral backbone. Such an one is the hero of the splendid novel, " Spring Freshets," one of the most inspired and fairest creations of art. Sanin has fallen in love with a pure and radiant affection, with a pure maiden, Gemma; but the seduction of perturbing, sensual passion is all- powerful over him; and while condemning and despising himself, he yields to that passion and slays the happiness and the love which would have been given to him in sincerity of soul. This story leaves a painful impression on the reader. In the artistic form of a story the same idea is conveyed which poured forth lyrically in " Phantoms " and in " It is Enough." We behold in the novel the poetic melancholy over the contradiction between the laws of Nature and man's aspirations toward the absolute, the eternal. This thought concerning the strife between material Nature and the spirit of mankind permeates awhole series of lesser stories written during the last fifteen or twenty years of the author's life. In them the poet subjects to microscopic and profoundly-artistic analysis the idea of the marvellous. He scrutinises the supernatural in its relations both with the accidents and the self-deception of human conceit (in the story " Knock . . . Knock . . . Knock," in this connection, he even bears himself with the greatest scepticism and i...« less