Mumu and Other Stories

Russia, as it was more than a hundred years ago— as Turgenev knew it—has changed in a way that it may not have changed, perhaps, for an entire thousand years before him. In essence, everything we encounter in the foreground of his works has gone irrevocably into the past. Time has long since destroyed the last traces of the vast majority of those noble estates that so often appeared on the roads of this writer; even the unpleasant memory of landlords and of the nobility as a whole has, in our time, noticeably lost its social sharpness. And the Russian village is no longer the same. But it turns out that the fates of his characters, so far removed from our lives, awaken in us the most direct interest. It turns out that everything Turgenev hated is, in the end, hated by us too; and what he considered good is, for the most part, considered good even from our point of view. Of course, in many ways we cannot agree with him. But only the most self-satisfied (and, according to Turgenev, also the most limited) people can develop a feeling of superiority in that situation: we argue with him, as with a wise and kind contemporary.
The artist has defeated time.

Contents:
Turgenev — Asya
Turgenev — The Torrents of Spring
Turgenev — Mumu
Turgenev — First Love