Virgin Soil, Turgenev’s last novel, is about the Populist movement in Russia in the late 1860s and 1870s, a hundred years before my experiences in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Turgenev's idealistic revolutionaries want to awaken the slumbering people and help them take back their country from the ruling classes. The story focuses on Alexey Nezhdanov, a young student in St. Petersburg, who wants to devote his life to the cause, condemning as elitist the poetry he cannot keep himse More...

If I had to come up with a slogan for Ivan Turgenev, it would be, "Turgenev - For God's sake, would somebody read something besides Fathers and Sons?" Granted, Fathers and Sons is his best novel, but he's got some other good stuff. I dare you to read First Love and tell me that it isn't moving. It's a short story, so quit complaining and just go read it. As for this novel, Virgin Soil, those of you who have read Fathers and Sons will find a lot of similar things. It's another book about Nihilism More...

Ramping up on Russia books in prep for my trip to St.Petersburg in May. Thsi book is very much like Fathers and Sons,depicting the clash of generations and the emerging radical underground movements. It has a sharp critique of the landed class, but also the foibles and naviete of the radicals. So he made everyone mad at him. Dostoyevsky said he was a Westernizer, whihc he was but I don't think of it as a negative. I think he is a wonderful writer -like Dickens, he can combine social commentary More...

Einstein tells us that the purpose of time is so that everything does not happen at once. This novel is about that time expansion and the conflict of events happening outside of the time frame, Turgenev writes in The Virgin Soil that the future belongs to Anonymous Russia and this novel was a tale of a future that over time came to be, alas not as easily as smoothly as perhaps he would have wanted. There is a deep arc in the story that may in fact have a contemporary application.

Passages are lo More...

Turgenev's 1877 classic about revolutionaries going out to raise up the peasantry. Very, very funny with the full menagerie of lefties: the bourgeois in denial, passion addicts, noblesse oblige driven gentry condescending to lead the people, bitter intellectuals, grand gesture donors, morally superior know-it-alls, and hangers on, all unquestioningly following each other to some utopia they cannot name. As timely today as it ever was.

Interesting study of the early nihilist/revolutionary movement, and what problems it had to face in its very early stages.

Dramatic vision of the "age of nihilism" for later 19th century Russia. Lays the foundation for the revolution to come.

This book explores the personnal experience of ideology and social activism. Through describing the different characters' motivations for joining the cause, the author explores the hesitations, deceptions, setbacks and outbreaks inherent in ideological engagement.

Having not read much from the nineteenth century Russian novelists, I hope this will set me well down the path.

A good story and an excellent portrait of the Russian countryside.

I don’t know what was in the water around the time these guys in Russia were writing. Turgenov has such clarity. This book helped me see I had to move beyond my phase of focusing on all the things that weren’t working for me in this society.

با نام "خاک بکر" به فارسی برگردانده شده و در سری انتشارات کتاب های جیبی در سال های دهه ی 40 چاپ و منتشر شده است.

I really enjoyed this book, especially the sendup of the revolutionaries romanticizing and idealizing "The People." The ending was disappointing, though.

842. Virgin Soil, Ivan Turgenev
خاک بکر - ایوان‌سرگی‌یویچ تورگنیف (امیرکبیر) ادبیات روسیه

Los libros de Turgenev siempre parecen saber algo de nosotros que nosotros no queremos saber...

a heavy read, but well done. takes a bit of concentration.

A lesser known Turgenev, probably for a reason.

Turgeneyev's novel about a group of rather clueless revolutionaries trying to propagandise the Russian peasantry, who just get them drunk and beat them up. The characters are idealistic, noble and riven by self doubt. Very readable.