I found this novel attractive primarily for its description of life in the country. It would be a mistake, I think, to focus too much on the story which is nothing if not a melodramatic: Lavretsky, whose upbringing (said to resemble Turgenev’s more than a little bit) was, uh, problematic, falls in love with the perfect woman. The marriage predictably falls apart and he returns to Russia (from Paris, of course) intent on shutting himself away. But he hasn’t counted on falling in love again. The supporting characters are colorful, the scenery—as always with Turgenev—important and beautifully captured, the lives and problems of the people often moving. All that said, I wouldn’t recommend this as an introduction to Turgenev or even a second (or third) work. He wrote a number of better things. ( )

This book was not off to a good start for me:

“Before the open window of a handsome house, in one of the streets on the outskirts of the provincial town of O, sat two ladies, one of fifty and the other an old lady of seventy.”

What? Who are you calling old? Lol.

Okay, I recovered myself and dove in with good intentions and tackled the second problem, which is just something that comes with reading Russian novels, you have to sort out all those names so that you don’t have to pause and say “who?” all the time.

But finally, I had conquered them and never blinked knowing that Fyodor Ivanych Levretsky was Fedya and Elena Mikhaylovna Kalitin was also Lenochka.

I settled into the story, and was fairly interested when we got our first glimpses of Fedya (we are on endearment terms at this point) falling for his wife. We are told the moment we meet him that he has left her in Paris, so we know there is going to be something juicy here. But alas, that part passes rather quickly and I dare say everything after that is boring.

I am going to admit to being disappointed that the choice this time for the Obscure group was a Russian novel. The last one was a Russian novel as well, so this might be turning into the Obscure Russian novels group. But, no, that is unfair, because the other Russian novel was [b:The Brothers Karamazov|4934|The Brothers Karamazov|Fyodor Dostoevsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427728126l/4934._SX50_.jpg|3393910], and that one isn’t even obscure.

If you want to read Turgenev, and you have not read him before, go for [b:Fathers and Sons|19117|Fathers and Sons|Ivan Turgenev|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390793535l/19117._SY75_.jpg|1294426]. Far superior. Some novels are obscure for a reason.




( )

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Title: A House of Gentlefolk
Series: (The Russians)
Author: Ivan Turgenev
Translator: Constance Garnett
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Classic
Pages: 228
Words: 62K

Synopsis:

From Wikipedia

The novel's protagonist is Fyodor Ivanych Lavretsky, a nobleman who shares many traits with Turgenev. The child of a distant, Anglophile father and a serf mother who dies when he is very young, Lavretsky is brought up at his family's country estate home by a severe maiden aunt, often thought to be based on Turgenev's own mother, who was known for her cruelty.

Lavretsky pursues an education in Moscow, and while he is studying there, he spies a beautiful young woman at the opera. Her name is Varvara Pavlovna, and he falls in love with her and asks for her hand in marriage. Following their wedding, the two move to Paris, where Varvara Pavlovna becomes a very popular salon hostess and begins an affair with one of her frequent visitors. Lavretsky learns of the affair only when he discovers a note written to her by her lover. Shocked by her betrayal, he severs all contact with her and returns to his family estate.

Upon returning to Russia, Lavretsky visits his cousin, Marya Dmitrievna Kalitina, who lives with her two daughters, Liza and Lenochka. Lavretsky is immediately drawn to Liza, whose serious nature and religious devotion stand in contrast to the coquettish Varvara Pavlovna's social consciousness. Lavretsky realizes that he is falling in love with Liza, and when he reads in a foreign journal that Varvara Pavlovna has died, he confesses his love to her and learns that she loves him in return.

After they confess their love to one another, Lavretsky returns home to find his supposedly dead wife waiting for him in his foyer. It turns out that the reports of her death were false, and that she has fallen out of favor with her friends and needs more money from Lavretsky.

Upon learning of Varvara Pavlovna's sudden appearance, Liza decides to join a remote convent and lives out the rest of her days as a nun. Lavretsky visits her at the convent one time and catches a glimpse of her as she is walking from choir to choir. The novel ends with an epilogue which takes place eight years later, in which Lavretsky returns to Liza's house and finds that, although many things have changed, there are elements such as the piano and the garden that are the same. Lavretsky finds comfort in his memories and is able to see the meaning and even the beauty in his personal pain.

My Thoughts:

The “official” title of this book is actually The Home of the Gentry. If you search for A House of Gentlefolk on wikipedia, you end up on the page for Home. Obviously Garnett did a bang up job of translating back in the late 1800's. Which of course makes the rest of the book completely suspect and while it didn't ruin my read, it did make me cranky and suspicious the whole time that what I was reading wasn't actually what I was supposed to be reading. I feel like I got gypped out of 99 cents from buying this “Complete Collection” on amazon.

This was ALL THE DRAMA! If you've ever seen a spanish soap opera, add a mega-dose of melancholy and nothing working out and you'll get this story. Lavretsky gets cuckolded, then used by his wife, abandons his daughter, falls in love with a woman only to have his wife return from the dead, and gets cuckolded again. And then the woman he loves becomes a nun and his wife lives her life out in society in Paris or something and the kid either dies or is so sickly that you know she is going to die. And the book ends with Lavretsky returning to his village and having memories. Ugh.

With all of that it would seem that this should have been a 2star book for me. And this is where the power of the russian writing shows its power over me. I enjoyed every second of this book.

In many ways this seemed the opposite of Turgenev's Rudin. Rudin is brash, impulsive, self absorbed and willing to fight anyone on any point and as such he dies in France in one of their many “revolutions”. Lavretsky on the other hand doesn't want conflict with anyone, ever, under any circumstances, to the point where he gives his wife a massive amount of money to go live her life and to leave him alone when she first cuckolds him. Lavretsky SHOULD have killed her lover in a duel and then given her the choice of honorably taking her own life or casting her out into the streets ignobly. Then when his wife returns, he has no fire to fight her on any point and just lets her slide back into his life. It was a complete contrast in people and I rather enjoyed that contrast, as a study.

One thing I have noticed is that the russian writers tend to have their women be the ones who are religious and try to convert the men they are interested in. In this book, Lisa is very God oriented and while Lavretsky isn't, she's convinced she can lead him to God after they are married. Once again, a lack of knowledge about what the Bible says on a subject seems to form the majority of the religious in these books. They, the characters have an idea that is kind of Biblical, but not actually based on it and then go with it however it seems to fit the circumstances instead of using the Bible as their yardstick and plumbline. I guess that's what one would expect to see if Christianity was just a cultural thing instead of a personal thing. It is very disconcerting to me though and I suspect it will continue to be that way through all the russian books I read.

I think that's enough for me. I'm right around the 600 word mark and that seems to be my happy place, at least according to the statistics that wordpress supplies me.

★★★★☆ ( )

review of
Ivan Turgenev's Home of the Gentry
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 29, 2013

I think I started reading this, Turgenev's 2nd novel, around the same time I was reading an SF bk. It seemed like about time to return to Turgenev b/c I'd previously only read Fathers and Sons, his 4th novel, in March of 1976, 37 yrs before. I read Fathers and Sons largely b/c its characters were based on actual revolutionaries, such as Bakunin, that were contemporary w/ Turgenev & that Turgenev had had some contact w/. It seemed to me in 1976, & still seems to me now, in 2013, that writing such a novel in 1861 was remarkable. SO, time to finally revisit him.

As I started reading Home of the Gentry, I was deeply impressed by the quality of the writing & I found myself wondering: 'Why am I bothering to read the functional but linguistically uninspired writing of this SF novel when I cd be reading great literature like this instead?' - much as I had when I was a teenager & discovering such writers for the 1st time. Take, eg, this acerbic description from p 43 (as translated by Richard Freeborn):

"he was a simple country squire, fairly devil-may-care, loud-mouthed and slow-witted, rude but not malicious, fond of entertaining and following the hounds. He was over thirty when he inherited from his father two thousand souls in perfect condition, but he soon dispersed them, sold part of the estate and over-indulged his house-serfs. Like cockroaches, various nonentities, both friends and strangers, crawled from all sides into his spacious, warm and dowdy manor house; the whole lot of them ate their fill of whatever came their way, drank themselves tipsy and pilfered what they could, praising and glorifying their gracious host as they did so; and the host, when he was in low spirits, also glorified his guests with such titles as spongers and scoundrels, but grew bored without them."

All of Turgenev's character descriptions are incisive & seemingly fairly accurate pegging of 'types' that he had observed in his social circles. In Isaiah Berlin's "'Fathers and Children' Romanes Lecture 1970" as reproduced at the beginning of the Penguin edition of Fathers and Sons that I have, Berlin states that "some of the young Russian revolutionaries freely conceded the accuracy and justice of his portraits of them." (P 9)

Turgenev's novel has a current of awareness of the vicissitudes of class: "Her master, Dmitry Pestov, Marya Dmitievna's father, a quiet and modest man, saw her once during the threshing, talked to her and fell passionately in love with her. She was soon widowed; Pestov, although a married man, took her into his house and dressed her like a house-serf. Agafya at once acclimatized herself to her new position, just as if she had never lived otherwise. She grew paler and fuller; her arms beneath her muslin sleeves grew 'white as wheaten flour', like those of a merchant's wife; the samovar was never off the table; she would wear nothing but silk and velvet and slept on feather beds. This life of bliss lasted about five years, until Dmitry Pestov died; his widow, a kindly woman, in deference to the dead man's memory, had no wish to deal dishonourably with her rival, more especially since Agafya had never been disrespectful to her; however she married her off to a cowherd and banished her from sight." - p 144

In the light of Turgenev's hypothetical sensitivity to revolutionary issues, I do find the quote from p 43 of Home of the Gentry above to be a little peculiar. It seems that Turgenev accepts the notion that people who inherit power & wealth somehow 'deserve' it while those who parasitize off it don't deserve it & are "sponges". Aren't they both just living off the wealth accrued by others? At least the 'sponge' has to ingratiate himself &/or be entertaining while the host need not to've done anything other than be born fortunate.

&, yet, the later harsh treatment of these "sponges" isn't exactly condoned either: "Certain changes were certainly made in the house: the spongers and parasites underwent immediate expulsion; among those who suffered were two old women, one blind, the other afflicted by paralysis". (p 55)

Then again, not everything is written to express the author's perspective:

"'Yes, indeed, indeed. They say, you know, that she's keeping company with artists and with pianists, and with lions, as they call them over there, and wild beats of every sort. She has completely lost all shame . . .'" - p 22

Being a musician myself, & observing the lack of respect that musicians often get (I was told by a government official once that "musician" is not a profession), it was interesting for me to get a 19th century peek:

"Christopher Theodore Gottlieb Lemm was born in 1786 into a family of penurious musicians in the town of Chemnitz in the Kingdom of Saxony. His father played the French horn, his mother played the harp; by his fifth year he was himself practicing three different instruments. At eight he was orphaned and at ten he began earning his daily bread by his playing. For a long time he led a vagrant life, playing everywhere — at inns, at fairs, at peasant weddings and at balls. Finally he found a place in an orchestra and, moving ever higher and higher, eventually became conductor. He was a rather poor performer, but he had a fundamental understanding of music. In his twentieth-eighth year he emigrated to Russia. He had been booked by a grandiose member of the gentry who could not endure music but maintained an orchestra for show. Lemm spent seven years as his director of music and left without a penny to show for it: the gentleman in question went bankrupt, wanted to give him an I.O.U. but later refused to give him even that — in short, did not pay him a farthing." - pp 30-31

In translator Freeborn's introduction to Home of the Gentry he says that "Turgenev became the chronicler of this type of 'superfluous man' intellectual." (p 9) I find this a particularly engaging notion partially b/c I spent much of my young adulthood feeling as if I were treated as a useless "'superfluous man' intellectual" but thinking that this perception of the 'uselessness' of intellectualism was a symptom of the lack of appreciation of intelligence more than it was an accurate criticism.

Freeborn goes on to compare Home of the Gentry to the 2 novels to follow it by saying that "Turgenev's generation of the intelligentsia (the so-called 'men of the forties') was first seriously challenged by the new, radical, nihilistic generation of the 1860s, whom Turgenev was to depict obliquely in On the Eve (1860) and directly in the figure of Bazarov in Fathers and Children (1862)." [aka Fathers and Sons] "Home of the Gentry is thus the last of Turgenev's major works to be concerned exclusively with his own generation." (p 10)

There were moments when reading this seemed entirely too irrelevant to my own 'contemporary' life. But for people wanting an educational taste of attitudes past, it's still entertaining: "On the other hand, after his own fashion, he did take trouble over his son's education: Vladimir Nikolaich could speak French beautifully, English well and German badly. Which is as it should be: decent people are ashamed of speaking German well, but the art of dropping a German word into one's conversation at certain, usually humorous, moments - c'est même très chic, as our St. Petersburg Parisians express it." (p 25) This, over 200 yrs after the founding of Die Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft in 1617 by German scholars and nobility to promote German as a scholarly and literary language on par w/ Italian & French!

Turgenev excels in social description of a not necessarily flattering sort:

"The promised land of high society spread out before him. Panshin soon learned the secret of such a life; he learned how to imbue himself with real respect for its rules, how to talk nonsense with quasi-facetious importance and giving the impression of considering everything important to be nonsense, how to dance to perfection and dress in the English style." - p 26

"Ivan Petrovich returned to Russia an Anglomaniac. With his hair cut short, the starched frill on his shirt front, the long pea-green frock-coat with its multitude of collars, a sour expression on his face, something both brusque and negligent in his manner, the pronunciation of words through his teeth, a sudden wooden laugh, lack of smiles, exclusively political and politico-economic talk, a passion for underdone roast-beef and port wine — everything about him literally reeked of Great Britain". - pp 54-55

Just as Fathers and Sons can be alternately translated as Fathers and Children, etc, so can Home of the Gentry be alternately translated as Nest of the Gentry: "His 'nest of the gentry' appeared dirty, impoverished and unkempt to him". - p 44 & how do these gentry keep their nests feathered?:

"Six months later he declared himself to Varvara Pavlovna and offered her his hand. His offer was accepted; the general had long ago, almost on the eve of Lavretsky's first visit, inquired of Mikhalevich the number of Lavretsky's serfs; and Varvara Pavlovna, moreover, who throughout the young man's courtship and even at the very moment he had declared himself to her maintained her customary serenity and lucidity of soul — even Varvara Pavlovna knew full well that her fiancé was rich". - p 67

Of the 3 countries other than Russia that get the most mention, France gets the most respect & admiration: "A week had not gone by before she was making her way across the street wearing a shawl, opening an umbrella or pulling on gloves no less expertly than the most pure-blooded native of Paris." - p 70

But, it's perhaps the theme of the main character's age that most resonated w/ me. I was 35 when I was 1st accused of being a "dirty old man" by a girl that I'd been having sex w/ who was 20. She didn't seem to mind during the sex. In Home of the Gentry, the main character is already looked upon as over-the-hill by the time he's 37. "At the very height of this deafening fun a muddy tarantass drove up to the gates and a man of about forty-five, in a travelling cloak, stepped out of it and stopped in astonishment." (p 198) "'Don't feel you have to entertain me; we old people have an entertainment of our own, which you don't know about yet and which can't be replaced by any other: our memories.'" (p 201) "He had become tranquil and — what point is there in hiding the truth? — old, not in face and body alone, but in his soul as well; to keep the heart young into old age, as some claim they can, is difficult and almost comic". (p 202) "but for you there are things to be done, there is work to do, and the blessing of us old men will go with you. But for me, after this day, after such sensations as these, it remains only to make you a final bow — and, if with sadness, but without envy, without any dark feelings, to say, in sight of the end, in sight of ever-waiting God: "Welcome, lonely old age! Burn out, useless life!"'" (p 203)

That might seem excessively maudlin & melodramatic but I think of research I once did about the average life span of males in France in the late 19th century: as I recall, it was 45. Just imagine a hundred yrs from now when lifespans might be once again doubled as they have been in the last 100 yrs: 160 will be old but 45? A mere babe. ( )

PB-2