Book Description
What makes a great writer? What should his attitude be to his own environment and to European culture? How should he transmute his own experience of life into a work of art? And how should he keep his integrity in face of censorship.These and other vital questions bearing directly on the art of creative writing Ivan Turgenev considers in his immensely fascinating Literary Reminiscences, towards the end of his life and now translated for the first time into English. These Reminiscences contain several brilliant sketches of famous Russian writers; including Belinsky, Gogol, Krylov and Lermontov, as well as tantalizing glimpses of Pushkin. In addition, the book contains fragments of Turgenev's autobiography, each one of which is not only of biographical value but of outstanding psychological interest among them is his own account of A Fire at Sea'.The Literary Reminiscences have been translated by David Magarshack, who has written an introduction filling in the of the various in the book and thus making it into one conservative and casily comprehensible whole. Edmund Wilson, in his long, full and characteristically stimulating prefatory Essay, combines literary criticism with an examination of Turgenev's extraordinary family and early environment.


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


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IT was the summer of 1840. Sanin was in his twenty-second year, and he was in Frankfort on his way home from Italy to Russia. He was a man of small property, but independent, almost without family ties. By the death of a distant relative, he had come into a few thousand roubles, and he had decided to spend this sum abroad before entering the service, before finally putting on the government yoke, without which he could not obtain a secure livelihood.

FROM THE PUBLISHER