Five Short Novels (a Bantam Classic) (The Diary of a Superfluous Man, Rudin, First Love, A King Lear of the Steppe, and Spring Torrents)

In the novels of Turgenev we have a flawless portrait of the Russian spirit and way of life in the nineteenth century. We learn to understand the rich landowner, the young intellectual, the peasant, the serf on the threshold of liberation, their women. But Turgenev was never a crusader or preacher; he was an artist, a precise and loving craftsman, who wanted, above all, to create beauty. Through his sensitive art we have not only some of the greatest novels ever written, but a finger on the pulse of a civilization in upheaval.Includes The Diary of a Superfluous Man, Rudin, First Love, A King Lear of the Steppe, and Spring Torrents.About the Author: Turgenev, 1818-1883Ivan Turgenev was the son of a rich, cold woman and a fashionable army officer who married her for her money. From youth to the end of his life Turgenev suffered from his adoration of Pauline Viardot, the great opera singer. Madame Viardot had a husband, and other lovers as well as Turgenev. Nevertheless, the Viardot household was Turgenev's refuge. When the Tsar persecuted him for his outspoken liberal convictions, when literary and artistic Russia turned against him, it was to Madame Viarddot and her husband that Turgene fled. He lived with them, traveled with them, and in their company wrote some of his most significant books. Under their roof Turgenev endured his painful last illness. The world mourned the passing of the first great Russian novelist to emerge from the feudal darkness of nineteenth-century Russia.