A review by will___to___flower
Rudin by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
5.0
Wanted to write a long review, but I feel as if this book is short enough to warrant a gleaming recommendation.
This book is about inaction. In all of us we see Rudin; our under-confidence, over-compensating selves, dreaded to roam from place to place and never finding his home. But Rudin is a greatly flawed man, who tries his best to please all around him and defeats his passion when faced in opposition; doomed to roam the lands of a country he was never familiar with, and this what creates what became of Rudin at the end of the book.
What is most striking was the beautiful extended passages of natural description. I couldn’t help but love how richly detailed and florid in emotion that Turgenev writes everything from description to dialog. It’s remarkable how understated this book is in general. His contemporaries would have wrote 600 page epics that would ultimately pale in comparison to this succinct and masterly crafted work. This is an unsung masterpiece of the Russian 19th century, and we can all learn something about ourselves from the titular ‘superfluous man’ in this book.
Rudin is in all of us, and that is what makes us so beautiful.
This book is about inaction. In all of us we see Rudin; our under-confidence, over-compensating selves, dreaded to roam from place to place and never finding his home. But Rudin is a greatly flawed man, who tries his best to please all around him and defeats his passion when faced in opposition; doomed to roam the lands of a country he was never familiar with, and this what creates what became of Rudin at the end of the book.
What is most striking was the beautiful extended passages of natural description. I couldn’t help but love how richly detailed and florid in emotion that Turgenev writes everything from description to dialog. It’s remarkable how understated this book is in general. His contemporaries would have wrote 600 page epics that would ultimately pale in comparison to this succinct and masterly crafted work. This is an unsung masterpiece of the Russian 19th century, and we can all learn something about ourselves from the titular ‘superfluous man’ in this book.
Rudin is in all of us, and that is what makes us so beautiful.