Historical Fiction Turgenev, Ivan. A House of Gentlefolk. v1 28 Sept 2017

[AlexBell]

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) has been described as the first Russian writer known to the Western world, and the only one with a European outlook and sympathies. He was the second son of a cavalry officer and a rich property owner, and lived in the periods before and after the emancipation of serfs in Russia.

Constance Garnett (1861-1946) was an English translator whose translations of 70 nineteenth-century Russian classics introduced them to the English speaking public. Her work has been both praised and criticised.

Sergius Stepniak, 1851-1895, was a Ukranian revolutionary, perhaps best known for assassinating the head of the Russian secret police.

A House of Gentlefolk was written in 1850, and translated by Constance Garnett in 1894. There are other translations with similar names. It is set in Russia before the emancipation of the serfs, and tells of a rich nobleman whose wife is unfaithful and leaves him, and of his romance with a much younger woman. I have enlarged the List of Characters, and included the Introduction.

The source text was taken from the University of Adelaide ebook library, and checked against the Heinneman 1920 edition in the Internet Archive. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotation marks, replaced italics, diacritics, and scene breaks, and made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

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