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.
Glorious 39 strips away illusions. Poliakoff presents the apparent idyll of an English aristocratic family headed by genteel patriarch Lord Keyes (Bill Nighy). He presides over a country estate in Norfolk and his elegant townhouse in London – a world of golden light, romantic ruins, servants, house parties and happy children. But this is 1939, a mere 21 years since the Great War, the war to end all wars, in which millions died, Britain was crippled with war debt, and the English country house system which he so values was almost annihilated. There are many references to the ancientness of his family and tradition, but now, few male servants remained alive or unmaimed to work the English landscape or to be in service to the old families. Fearing domestic and political upheaval, appeasers such as Keyes sought to prevent Churchill leading the country and taking Britan to war, and to buy off Hitler to preserve British cultural and national identity. Nighty is excellent, contro...
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