Rudin [Paperback]

Ivan Turgenev (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 13, 2008

Turgenev was a major 19th century Russian novelist. His novel Fathers and Sons is his best-known work. Rubin was Turgenev's first post Russian work. It tells the story on a man in his 20's torn between his unhappy life in Europe and his love of his barbaric homeland. Turgenev shows a real nostalgia for the 1840's in this novel.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Russian (translation) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: Book Jungle (March 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1605972029
• ISBN-13: 978-1605972022
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,458,456 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb. Rudin illustrates is one of the greatest portraits of man ever written., July 5, 2006

By 

Andrew Hamilton "Andrew" (London and High Wycombe) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rudin (Paperback)

I found Rudin profoundly touching and an almost astonishing work for a novel so slender. Rarely in so few pages can a writer have illustrated his themes so emphatically and so artfully. Throughout Turgenev uses nature as a proxy for narrative description and as a result the novel has a very calm and controlled feel. The characters are bound by their differing natures and their development is shadowed by changes in the natural environment they find themselves in.

More importantly, to my mind, however is the way in which the character of Rudin exposes the central contradiction between a desire for truth and a desire for love. By his nature, as we discover, Rudin is unable to conquer love but is however able to remain true to his ideals, despite being unable to act upon them. To this extent Rudin is impotent, he is clear about what he wishes to achieve - to become a man of action - yet he is fundamentally unable to achieve such a goal. As such he is destined to remain unhappy. However, unlike others, he perceives this and so is able to remain truthful to his self and thus in contrast to those other characters in the novel that are destined to remain unhappy, as he too is destined, he at least discovers and embraces his true self and as such realises the higher being in him. A higher being so often alluded to by others.

In such a fashion Turgenev exposes this central dialectic beautifully. By positing Rudin amidst a decaying social setting and allowing his seemingly constant passage of self-discovery inadvertently to fuel the self-discovery of those who come into contact with him, Turgenev demonstrates how a synthesis between self-knowledge and self-sacrifice is essential before true love can be sown within one's soul. Rudin, by being so lucid regarding what he loves (truth), whilst simultaneously illustrating to all the futility of his love, shines a light upon the ready attainability of the loves of other characters. Thus those characters who sought to see in Rudin something approaching an ideal are shocked and provoked into attaining their own, real, ideals. It is only those who refused to see in Rudin anything but impotence, coldness and bluster who emerge unchanged characters at the novel's conclusion.

As of Rudin himself, his love (truth) is attained only at the cost of discovering that he is less a mighty oak and more a shallow tumbleweed (Rudin himself goes from using the Oak as an analogy for his feelings to that of a tumbleweed by the end of the novel). Perhaps it is this inevitable conclusion to Rudin's long search, the same search that befalls all of us, that provokes Rudin (in the Epilogue) to finally attain his ideal as a man of action and thus ensure that, against the greatest odds, his seed was not, after all, sown upon barren ground.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Self-deception and a facade we place between us and reality, September 9, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Rudin (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

This is a simple parable, told within a beautiful story.
We meet Rudin through several people's eyes and learn much
more about him from the differences others see in him than
we learn directly. It is facsinating to see the interplay
between the man's fantasies and his facade.

You are left with very profound and troubling unanswered
questions about your own life and our tenuous connections
to "reality." This is a powerful volume for anyone who is
seriously and sincerely examining their own motives,
especially if you are dissatisfied with your current
conclusions.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Second reading, twenty years later, May 9, 2005

By 

Fred Martin (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rudin (Russian Studies) (Paperback)

I was very pleased to read this one for the second time. No doubt I was too young to appreciate its virtues twenty years ago. I look forward to reading more of his work, much of which will be new to me.