A Desperate Character

Late Turgenev: a ruined nobleman who destroys himself with a kind of gaiety, a duel, a village, a dog. He was the first Russian to win a European readership, admired by Flaubert and James, and was arrested for his obituary of Gogol; these stories are quieter than the novels and colder, the work of a man who had watched his class come to nothing and did not need to raise his voice about it. Sixty p...