A Desperate Character

Late Turgenev: a ruined nobleman who destroys himself with a kind of gaiety, a duel, a village, a dog. He was the first Russian to win a European readership, admired by Flaubert and James, and was arrested for his obituary of Gogol; these stories are quieter than the novels and colder, the work of a man who had watched his class come to nothing and did not need to raise his voice about it. Sixty plates of Russian and European painting, 1812 to 1899, from Venetsianov's peasants to Polenov's Normandy coast, catch a world of estates and quiet decline much like the one in these stories.