ABSTRACT
Everyone has heard of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the great shaggy bears of nineteenth-century Russian literature; but their contemporary Ivan Turgenev is not so well known to today’s English readers. And yet, his novel Fathers and Sons, when it was published in 1862, caused a greater storm of controversy than any other Russian novel before or since. Just why this happened, we will shortly discover. And if you haven’t yet read Fathers and Sons, I shall have the pleasure of introducing you to a moving, memorable and perfectly written story, which you will at once award an honoured place on your shelves alongside Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov.
