Three famous plays: A month in the country, A provincial lady, A poor gentleman

by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

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Translated by Constance Garnett Three Plays by Turgenev includes A Month in the Country, A Provincial Lady and A Poor Gentleman. Turgenev wrote A Month in the Country in France between 1848 and 1850. Published in 1855 and first staged in 1872 the plot revolves around Natalya Petrovna, the 29-year-old wife of older landowner Arkadi Islaev. Set in Islaev's country estate in the 1840s the play pivots around the character of Natalya and her pursuit of attention, first from Mikhailo Rakitin and show more then with handsome young Aleksei Belyaev, her son's tutor. Problems arise when Vera, her 17-year-old foster daughter, also falls in love with Aleksei. Exploring themes of love, jealousy, rivalry and ennui A Month in the Country is just one example of Turgenev's brilliance. A Provincial Lady, written in 1851, was a comedy in one act. As Richard Freeborn wrote in 1994, 'Turgenev's comedy has often been called Chekhovian, even though it preceded Chekhov's mature work by more than forty years'. A Poor Gentleman (1840s) was a two-act play whose themes were compared to the works of Nikolai Gogol, a writer that Turgenev greatly admired and was influenced by. It was for writing an obituary for Gogol that Turgenev found himself arrested and imprisoned for a month, having managed to publish the obituary despite its being banned by the censor. show less

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Ivan Turgenev, 1818 - 1883 Novelist, poet and playwright, Ivan Turgenev, was born to a wealthy family in Oryol in the Ukraine region of Russia. He attended St. Petersburg University (1834-37) and Berlin University (1838-41), completing his master's exam at St. Petersburg. His career at the Russian Civil Service began in 1841. He worded for the show more Ministry of Interior from 1843-1845. In the 1840's, Turgenev began writing poetry, criticism, and short stories under Nikolay Gogol's influence. "A Sportsman's Sketches" (1852) were short pieces written from the point of view of a nobleman who learns to appreciate the wisdom of the peasants who live on his family's estate. This brought him a month of detention and eighteen months of house arrest. From 1853-62, he wrote stories and novellas, which include the titles "Rudin" (1856), "Dvorianskoe Gnedo" (1859), "Nakanune" (1860) and "Ottsy I Deti" (1862). Turgenev left Russia, in 1856, because of the hostile reaction to his work titled "Fathers and Sons" (1862). Turgenev finally settled in Paris. He became a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1860 and Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford University in 1879. His last published work, "Poems in Prose," was a collection of meditations and anecdotes. On September 3, 1883, Turgenev died in Bougival, near Paris. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

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Garnett, David (Introduction)

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Genre
Fiction and Literature
DDC/MDS
891.723Literature & rhetoricLiteratures of other languagesEast Indo-European and Celtic literaturesRussian and East Slavic languagesRussian drama1800–1917
LCC
PG3421 .A19 .G3Language and LiteratureSlavic languages and literatures. Baltic languages. Albanian languageSlavic. Baltic. AlbanianRussian literatureIndividual authors and works1800-1870Turgenev
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