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Spring Torrents
  • Published: 31 October 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241414095
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Spring Torrents



In the critical essay that accompanies his moving translation of Spring Torrents, Leonard Schapiro discusses Turgenev's life and works, his relationships with women, autobiographical aspects and themes of the novel, and the influence of Schopenhauer.

Returning to Russia from a tour in Italy, twenty-three-year-old Dimitry Sanin breaks his journey in Frankfurt. There he encounters the beautiful Gemma Roselli, who works in her parents' patisserie, and falls deeply and deliriously in love for the first time. Convinced that nothing can come in the way of everlasting happiness with his fiancée, Dimitry impetuously decides to begin a new life and sell his Russian estates. But when he meets the potential buyer, the intriguing Madame Polozov, his youthful vulnerability makes him prey for a darker, destructive infatuation. A novel of haunting beauty, Spring Torrents (1870-1) is a fascinating, partly autobiographical account of one of Turgenev's favourite themes - a man's inability to love without losing his innocence and becoming enslaved to obsessive passions.

  • Published: 31 October 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241414095
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

About the author

Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in 1818 in the province of Oryol. After the family had moved to Moscow in 1827 he entered St Petersburg University where he studied philosophy. When he was nineteen he published his first poems and went to the University of Berlin. After two years he returned to Russia and took his degree at the University of Moscow. After 1856 he lived mostly abroad, and he became the first Russian writer to gain a wide reputation in Europe. He wrote many novels, plays, short stories and novellas, of which First Love (1860) is the most famous. He died in Paris in 1883.

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