The author of
Rudin, written in 1855, and of
Virgin Soil, written in 1876, is one and the same person. Throughout all this time I tried, to the best of my strength and ability, conscientiously and impartially, to depict and embody in appropriate characters both what Shakespeare calls 'the body and pressure of time' [in English in the original], and the rapidly changing physiognomy of cultured Russians, who were above all the object of my observations.
This apologia serves as a useful yardstick, for while writing his novels, and even after their publication, Turgenev was far from consistent in his use of genre designation, not infrequently referring to the novels as "povesti" (novellas). Turgenev's novels, of a modest length by nineteenth-century standards (let alone by comparison with the popular perception of the elephantine dimensions of "the Russian novel"), are indeed distinguished from his novellas--not by length or by a distinction in protagonists, as much as by their context, a context that attempts to identify a specific and particular phenomenon or stage in the development of Russian society. Thus, the novel Dym (Smoke, 1867) and the novella Veshnie vody (Spring Torrents, 1872) have a similar story line: both are set, for much of their plots, in Germany, but the novella does not include the context of a critical examination of the diverse post-emancipation Russian groups abroad that is found in the novel.
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