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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
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.
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.
★★★★☆
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