Gilbert Gardiner / Ivan Turgenev
Librería Samer Atenea
Librería Aciertas (Toledo)
Kálamo Books
Librería Perelló (Valencia)
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Donde los libros
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public first in France then in Germany and America and finally in England. In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical of European nations Ernest Renan hailed him as one of the greatest writers of our times: 'The Master whose exquisite works have charmed our century stand more than any other man as the incarnation of the whole race ' because 'a whole world lived in him and spoke through his mouth.' Not the Russian world only we may add but the whole Slavonic world to which it was 'an honour to have been expressed by so great a Master.' As regards his method of dealing with his material and shaping it into mould he stands even higher than as a pure creator. Tolstoy is more plastical and certainly as deep and original and rich in creative power as Turgenev and Dostoevsky is more intense fervid and dramatic. But as an artist as master of the combination of details into a harmonious whole as an architect of imaginative work he surpasses all the prose writers of his country and has but few equals among the great novelists of other lands. To one familiar with all Turgenev’s works it is evident that he possessed the keys of all human emotions all human feelings the highest and the lowest the novel as well as the base. But there was in him such a love of light sunshine and living human poetry such an organic aversion for all that is ugly or coarse and discordant that he makes himself almost exclusively the poet of the gentler side of human nature. We may say that the description of love is Turgenev’s speciality.
