SOURCE: "Turgenev's Plays 1834-1848" and "Turgenev's Plays 1848-1850," in Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev, Grove Press, Inc., 1983, pp. 116-38, 139-69.

In the following excerpt, Worrall analyzes all of Turgenev's plays except A Month in the Country.

Turgenev's reputation as a dramatist, in the English-speaking world, rests largely on a single play—A Month in the Country—the only one of his plays to be widely available in translation. Yet he was a far more prolific dramatist than Gogol. There are, in fact, five other substantial works which deserve to be considered in the same company: 'Where It's Thin, There It Breaks,' The Parasite, The Bachelor, 'Lunch with the Marshal of the Nobility' and 'A Provincial Lady' plus two other shorter, but nonetheless interesting works: 'Indiscretion' and 'Moneyless'. This still does not take into account early works such as Styeno and the incomplete 'The Temptation of St Antony'...