Ivan Turgenev – Fathers and Sons – Easton Press – 1977 100 Greatest Books Ever Written Series Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) was the first Russian novelist to win a wide European readership and the writer who, more than any other, introduced Russian literature to the West. Born into a wealthy landowning family in Oryol Province, he was educated at the universities of Moscow, St Petersburg, and Berlin, and from his early thirties lived for long periods in Germany and France. His sketches of peasant life, A Sportsman's Notebook (1852), contributed to the climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and his subsequent compact novels — Rudin, A Nest of Gentlefolk, On the Eve, Smoke, and Virgin Soil — established him as the most lucid stylist of his generation. Friend and sometime rival of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, admired by Flaubert and Henry James, he died at Bougival, near Paris, in 1883. This volume presents Turgenev's masterpiece, Fathers and Sons, first published in The Russian Messenger in 1862 and in book form the same year. Set on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs, the novel follows the young medical student Yevgeny Bazarov and his friend Arkady Kirsanov as they return from St Petersburg to their provincial families. In Bazarov, the self-declared nihilist who rejects every inherited authority of art, family, and feeling, Turgenev created the figure that gave the word its lasting place in European thought, and dramatised the rupture between two generations of educated Russians with a clarity that has rarely been equalled. The text is given in the classic translation by Constance Garnett, first published in London in 1895. The illustrations are wood engravings by Fritz Eichenberg (1901–1990), the German-born American artist whose work for the great Russian novels — Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Wuthering Heights — established him as one of the most distinguished book illustrators of the twentieth century. His engravings for Fathers and Sons were first published by the Limited Editions Club in 1951 and are reproduced here throughout. Full genuine leather binding in dark green, almost black Front and back covers with an all-over gilt diaper pattern of squared panels and central dots Spine with raised bands, gilt panel decorations, and gilt title and author lettering Easton Press monogram stamped in gilt on the lower spine panel All edges gilt Frontispiece portrait of Ivan Turgenev, specially commissioned Printed on archival-quality acid-neutral paper Printed and bound in the United States of America Condition is fine. A well-preserved collector's copy. Ships from Germany. Carefully packed in cardboard book mailer with protective wrapping.