Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883)

Spring Torrents by Ivan Turgenev is a novella about love, lust and betrayal. It opens with the elderly Dmitry Sanin remembering his past and contemplating his
failure to secure love, marriage and children in his life.

As a young man in 1840, Sanin arrives in Frankfurt where he meets and falls in love with Gemma Roselli. Although Gemma is engaged to another, Sanin pursues her. They eventually admit to loving each other and go on to become engaged. He declares himself deliriously happy and decides to sell his Russian estate to fund his marriage to Gemma. He then meets a wealthy young married woman, the seductive Maria. He allows himself to fall for her charms and though feeling remorseful he decides to follow Maria and leave Gemma.

The story sharply defines the idea of love versus the concept of lust. Love is meant to be the ideal, but Sanin turned toward lust and ended up losing everything. Although Spring Torrents is meant to be autobiographical I still found it difficult to have much sympathy for Sanin. He didn’t have the strength of character to resist Maria, who was obviously toying with him. The author does give the story a sense of closure by having Sanin write to Gemma in later life and in turn receives her forgiveness.… (more)

Every intellectually curious young man tends toward either Arkady or Bazarov. Whichever you are, following upon the key idea of Turgenev’s book, it would be best to seek out your counterpart. Turgenev knows that what makes Bazarov a charismatic and compelling character is that he actually is a lot more coherent than the people and the ideologies he sets himself against. There is a simple satisfaction easily acquired by the just-intelligent-enough, in negating any of the imperfect and absurd reasons that “normal “ people give themselves for existing. Nietzsche said that these negators were like lions set apart from the sheep, and like lions they can inspire awe, fear, and admiration. Nietzsche, like Turgenev before him, saw the dead end that one inevitably reached if one lived as a lion for too long. The true genius is one who can become like a child again, playfully engaging with the complexity of life, without animus or judgement.
Ironically, it is easier to become like a child as one grows older, when the passions of youth cool and experience reveals each and every dogma as the shadow that it is. Bazarov, in his extreme lion-ness, could never have grown old, and indeed he didn’t.… (more)