Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

The Jew and Other Stories

Herausgeber: 1stworld Library

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - In studying the Russian novel it is amusing to note the childish attitude of certain English men of letters to the novel in general, their depreciation of its influence and of the public's 'inordinate' love of fiction. Many men of letters to-day look on the novel as a mere story-book, as a series of light-coloured, amusing pictures for their 'idle hours,' and on memoirs, biographies, histories, criticism, and poetry as the age's serious contribution to literature. Whereas the reverse is the case. The most serious and significant of all literary forms the modern world has evolved is the novel; and brought to its highest development, the novel shares with poetry to-day the honour of being the supreme instrument of the great artist's literary skill. To survey the field of the novel as a mere pleasure-garden marked out for the crowd's diversion - a field of recreation adorned here and there by the masterpieces of a few great men - argues in the modern critic either an academical attitude to literature and life, or a one-eyed obtuseness, or merely the usual insensitive taste. The drama in all but two countries has been willy-nilly abandoned by artists as a coarse playground for the great public's romps and frolics, but the novel can be preserved exactly so long as the critics understand that to exercise a delicate art is the one serious duty of the artistic life. It is no more an argument against the vital significance of the novel that tens of thousands of people - that everybody, in fact - should to-day essay that form of art, than it is an argument against poetry that for all the centuries droves and flocks of versifiers and scribblers and rhymesters have succeeded in making the name of poet a little foolish in worldly eyes.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: 1st World Library - Literary Society
• Seitenzahl: 260
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. September 2005
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 140mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 371g
• ISBN-13: 9781421811482
• ISBN-10: 1421811480
• Artikelnr.: 22204393

Autorenporträt

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist, translator, and proponent of Russian literature in the West, lived from 9 November 1818 to 3 September 1883. Russia's Oryol is where Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born. His father fought in the Patriotic War of 1812 as a colonel in the Russian cavalry. Turgenev concentrated on Classics, Russian literature, and philology while attending the University of Saint Petersburg from 1834 to 1837 after spending a year at the University of Moscow. Turgenev never wed, but he had many relationships with the family's serfs, one of which gave birth to his daughter Paulinette, who was not his biological child. Oxford conferred an honorary degree on Turgenev in 1879. Turgenev periodically traveled to England, and the University of Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate in civil law in 1879. Throughout his later years, Turgenev's health deteriorated. An aggressive malignant tumor (liposarcoma) was surgically removed from his suprapubic area in January 1883, but by that time the tumor had spread to his upper spinal cord, giving him excruciating suffering in the months before his death. In his home in Bougival, close to Paris, on September 3, 1883, Turgenev passed away from a spinal abscess, a side effect of metastatic liposarcoma. His bones were transported to Russia and interred at St. Petersburg's Volkovo Cemetery.