****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Already in his thirties, Lavretsky returns to his hometown of O... in Russia. He descends form a strange family of landed gentry. At some point in the book his biography is revealed, a life of reclusion, loneliness, and disappointment. Very Russian. Lavretsky returns a defeated man, for his wife has cheated on him in every corner, has taken lots of money from him, and disgraced him through half Europe. And everybody knows. After dismissing her, he travels to Italy, in order to get himself together, and he decides that his mission is Voltaire-like, to go back to Russia and "tender his own garden". He decides not to go back to the old estate where he had suffered so much, but to a smaller house where a wicked old aunt had died. Trying to recover some social links, he visits a distant relative, Maria Dimitrevna Kalitin, a widow with two young daughters. I won't spoil the rest, but what follows is a tale of mishap, love, suffering, unwelcome surprises. The epilogue is masterful, an ode to memory, to the passage of time, and to bodily-felt homesickness.Traditional, serene, and making no concessions, this novel is part of the work that makes Turgenev deserve his place up above with Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, in his own style. Russian to the bone, but without paranoid delirium or epic ambitions, it is a perfect novel. I would like to read it again when I am old, sitting on a bench of a park, in autumn.
