Status Updates From Rudin & On the Eve

Rudin...dry and insipid in content, sentimental evocations of rural Russia and the attachment of persons to the land (as Turgenev's style dictates), but nonetheless very interesting story. Allegory to internal ideological tensions within Russia between Western-oriented liberal reforms and the Slavophil strand of nihilism. Story largely reliant on meaning conveyed through dialogue.

Lezhnev's eulogy to Rudin reflects the intellectual predicament of the Russan soul and the superfluous man: "Rudin's misfortune is that he does not know Russia...Russia can manage without any of us, but none of us can manage without Russia. Woe betide any man who thinks he can..."

Rudin's youth seems like an autobiography of Turgenev's European education.

It took me a nap before I remembered that the line, "Avdyukhin Pond ... long ago ceased to be a pond." made me wonder if its failure to maintain pond status had to do with its nuclear radioactivity.

It seems many east-Asian things have become more familiar to me than some blatantly American things, but I read on quietly, considering that Lyndon Johnson series I'd been pondering recently.

An incredibly good thing I check the back as assiduously as I do, as I'm not officially as savvy with my French as my Latin base makes me assume.

So it's not good to be as I was, but more like how I will be.

Hurrah, I knew enough French to be able to translate for myself what Mlle Boncourt was saying! (Though, aww, I am still in the "need to translate" mode when it comes to Français...)

The way Pigasov acts, it's easier-tending-towards-lazy just to claim, "Yeah, I'm just a scholar. Of everything. *wide arm sweep*" (Everything is a difficult field. Encompassing such a wide expanse of information.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances... Why do I know so little about this gentleman?

"And if she's to be believed, hospitals, schools, and so on are a lot of nonsense, superfluous inventions. Philanthropy should be individual, enlightenment too..." There are certainly plenty of illnesses that spread through hospitals, schools and prisons! I've nearly died from one, compounded with pneumonia :D (I think that's how the story went.)

Alexandra Pavlovna: "What's the good of hospital? She's going to die anyway." I'm certainly glad this attitude was not taken around me.