Product Description

Turgenev was the most liberal-spirited and unqualifiedly humane of all the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, and in Virgin Soil, his biggest and most ambitious work, he sought to balance his deep affection for his country and his people with his growing apprehensions about what their future held in store. At the heart of the book is the story of a young man and a young woman, torn between love and politics, who struggle to make headway against the complacency of the powerful, the inarticulate misery of the powerless, and the stifling conventions of provincial life. This rich and complex book, at once a love story, a devastating, and bitterly funny social satire, and, perhaps most movingly of all, a heartfelt celebration of the immense beauty of the Russian countryside, is a tragic masterpiece in which one of the world's finest novelists confronts the enduring question of the place of happiness in a political world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #986209 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-31
• Released on: 2000-08-31
• Original language: Russian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
"Every...type of character...passes through his hands...He has an eye for all our passions and a...sympathetic sense of the...complexity of our souls." -- Henry James

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

About the Author
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) was born into a wealthy family from the class of landed gentry and educated at the universities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. He first made his name with A Sportsman's Sketches, a realistic portrayal of Russian country life that is said to have influenced Tsar Alexander II to liberate the serfs. In later life, Turgenev lived in Europe and returned only occasionally to his native country. Among his most famous works are the novels Fathers and Sons, Rudin, and On the Eve.

Customer Reviews

Essential reading; Russian social history as a literary novel
While I'm unable to compare Turgenev's Russian with Constance Garnett's English translation--lucky those who know both languages--I would agree that Garnett's version is at times banal and lackluster. Perhaps the problem is that while the characters's dilemmas have become familiar (because of 20th-century Soviet history), the characters's turbulent inner dramas, the emotions, seldom catch fire on the page. And I don't know if the characters's lives are more exciting in Turgenev's original; however, I would not expect a novel published in 1877 to have the same appeal in 2008, when the heat of the era is long past. What's very familiar, and why this novel is essential reading for an understanding of the literature of the past 140 years, is that Turgenev illustrates the conflicts of men and women in their nation-building struggle. (This plot design, and the cast of characters, is probably what interested Constance Garnett's readers of her 1890 translation up to at least the 1930s.)

(Please read on, but my apologies to all: I don't yet know how to write a short review.)

We have met Turgenev's women and men before: the jingo-patriot imperialist, Tsarist landowner; the politically liberal but socially conservative landowner and his pampered, gossipy, social-climbing wife; the impulsive, hot-headed rebel; the artist-poet who would like to be a revolutionist but is more suited to writing lyrically by candlelight; and the even-tempered rational, physically attractive female rebel who, as a sign of her dedication to the cause, rejects the bourgeois marriage pact; then, not least, the ignorant, retrograde peasants, the silent factory workers, and the hard-pressed, abused man of "anonymous Russia" who must blend into the urban jungle.

But Virgin Soil is literature. Turgenev did not write with a template of socialist realism; this is not a "how to" novel on creating democracy in a system that knows only Tsarist imperialism. But, the central dilemma which Turgenev created has not changed: what should the well-meaning, educated person do when she or he is caught between two extremes? The author set up the plot of the novel by identifying himself with--and perhaps many readers will, too--the central consciousness of the novel: Alexey Dmitrievitch Nezhdanov, "the Hamlet of Russia," the educated, peace-loving poet, born out of wedlock to a Russian aristocrat.

Highly recommended: Henry James's novel, same theme but set in London, The Princess Casamassima, published in 1886. James had met Turgenev in Paris and knew the plot of Virgin Soil, and perhaps James read a French translation. But Henry James makes his characters come alive on the page: they are part and parcel of their personal and political predicaments. There's a paradox here: According to Constance Garnett and her circle, Henry James was old stuff, an old fuddy-duddy; but James was able to make the reader feel the bite of poverty, the pain of ignorance, and the tragedy of betrayal. Henry James focused on the people he created--the characters's differing levels of awareness--and, as a result, he achieved a more dynamic blending of plot and character. Certainly, The Princess Casamassima is a more cunning and cutting picture of plot and counter-plot, a behind-the-scenes look at the role of the individual in nation building. Also read Edmund Wilson's narrative non-fiction masterpiece on the rise of socialism in Europe, To the Finland Station (1940).

GARNETT UNFAIR TO TURGENEV
"Virgin Soil" (1877) was Turgenev's last, longest, but far from greatest novel. A recurring theme through all his fiction is the contrast between the romantic Russian liberalism of the 1840s, which Turgenev regarded as ineffectual, and the hard-headed populism of the 1860s and 70s. After the 1861 emancipation of the serfs (some 80% of Russia at the time), University students wanted to "go to the people" and enlighten them. When they got there, they found an unbridgeable chasm between the middle class and rural workers, who suspiciously had agitators arrested. Many of these spent years in solitary confinement, and the bitterness of their thwarted hopes for reform poisoned Russian politics and made violent revolution more likely. "Virgin Soil" begins with one such cell of radicals in St. Petersburg in 1868, and follows them to the countryside where they interact with both liberal and reactionary gentry, as well as with clear-headed Bolsheviks of the future. Little happens, and the thin, drawn-out plot lacks the economy, texture, and pungency of "Fathers and Sons." This is a decidedly second-drawer effort. To make matters worse, New York Review Books has reissued it in the incompetent, hackwork translation of Constance Garnett (1862-1946), presumably because it was in the public domain. I cannot judge her handling of Russian (though Nabokov did: "dried dung," he called her work) but her English is not even professional: NYRB could have spent some of the money they saved on a free translation by hiring a line editor to correct her egregious errors in syntax, grammar, and punctuation. It might have been better having no edition of "Virgin Soil" on the market at all.

More Russian Nihilism
"To turn over virgin soil it is necessary to use a deep plough going well into the earth, not a surface plough gliding lightly over the top."-From a Farmer's Notebook.
Virgin Soil, by Ivan Sergevich Tugenev, is another Russian revolutionist novel. The dubious main character, Nejdanov, is a young poet who tries to help spread the socialistic propaganda to the poor peasants. They must dig deep into the mother earth of Russia to plant the seeds of communism. Nejdanov is accused of being a traitor and gives useless speeches, while his lover, Mariana tries desperately to get him to accept her. Markelov, an older member of the cause, goes to the extreme to arm the peasants and start a revolution and is locked up. Solomin (the real hero), is a cool minded, patient revolutionist who thinks of the peasants as barn animals. He is Turgenev's ideal insurgent. While the main character, Nejdanov is described as, "...the idealist of realism". The book ends with death and imprisonment and an overall unhappy feeling.
Not the most exciting read, just another Russian novel full of depressing nihilist and revolutionist. Tugenev's other great work, Fathers and Sons, is a far more interesting novel, and I highly recommend it.