I loved this beautifully paced, insightful and wise Russian tale about the arrogance and disrespect of youth towards the older generation, contrasted with the dignity, good manners, liberalism and respect of the country estate ‘little aristocrats’. Turgenev writes with great sensitivity, evoking the profound social change and conveying characters’ deep emotion without ever stating it; such understated writing and unhurried pace comforts and absorbs. He leaves the reader to infer what goes unsaid and, in this short novel, puts across a gently ironic overview of the social structure of the time; the liberal enlightened landowners are caught between trying, on the one hand, to give ‘their’ peasants autonomy, while on the other hand, they have the peasants mocking them and not seeming to want responsibility for their own living. The blurring of the old boundaries and systems is disquieting to everyone. He does kill off the dangerous young student scientist nihilist, who is a threat to everything and everyone, and happily restores the nice young man to his family farm where he begins to introduce a fresh, but not revolutionary approach to managing the country. Makes me want to read more Russian literature.
An email from a friend of mine arrives; she complains that, at work, she is routinely subjected to gruesome accounts of female colleagues’ intimate medical procedures and gynaecological problems. I am all commiseration because I, too, have had years of listening to workplace chats about periods, childbirth and sex lives. Oh please. Later, I wander off for a walk in the early evening sunshine and it is so silent and so beautiful that I flop down on the grass and lay awhile gazing out over the rolling fields, and the mouth of the river, and fall into a reverie. Two men pass by. A few minutes later sounds of women’s talk float nearer and, by the time the two females of the species draw level with me, I have risen up from my deliciously recumbent position in the meadow, alert and tense, something like a meerkat. “I do feel for her. Going down that IVF route is such an emotional roller coaster. I was never prepared for how terrible it was going to be.” I remain frozen in my meerkat position...
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