Bazarov might have been the main character, but these two felt so much more real than him, more filled with life. Which, I suppose, they were.
Not necessarily active life, but the baggage each held made them so full as characters.
And Pavel was just lovely - really very much like an English gentleman in a Victorian novel. He should reside in the pages of The Chap.
What I found most interesting, though, was that Nikolai felt so old. Only 44, but he was more like 60 in the way he spoke and acted. I suppose that 44 in those days was probably close to 60 today, but he seemed to have an old man's soul, right to the very end when Pavel made him marry Fenichka.
Not necessarily active life, but the baggage each held made them so full as characters.
And Pavel was just lovely - really very much like an English gentleman in a Victorian novel. He should reside in the pages of The Chap.
What I found most interesting, though, was that Nikolai felt so old. Only 44, but he was more like 60 in the way he spoke and acted. I suppose that 44 in those days was probably close to 60 today, but he seemed to have an old man's soul, right to the very end when Pavel made him marry Fenichka.
*MySmiley*
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
Russian Book Club: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev.
- 17/10/2010 01:39:16 AM
1095 Views
Bazarov
- 17/10/2010 02:12:03 PM
920 Views
*NM*
oh, and
- 17/10/2010 06:42:38 PM
813 Views
Re: oh, and
- 18/10/2010 12:09:10 AM
786 Views
Arkady
- 17/10/2010 02:15:54 PM
770 Views
Well, that makes sense
- 17/10/2010 05:12:09 PM
766 Views
Re: Well, that makes sense
- 18/10/2010 12:04:05 AM
775 Views
See, I liked Arkady
- 17/10/2010 06:08:57 PM
708 Views
Oh...Rebekah, I was going to mention that I saw your post only much later because I was very drunk.
- 17/10/2010 05:13:41 PM
795 Views
Good book.
- 17/10/2010 06:37:16 PM
821 Views
I loved it. Great book.
- 18/10/2010 10:49:27 PM
746 Views
I think it's very relevant. It's also unusually un-Russian.
- 18/10/2010 11:54:03 PM
713 Views
Yeah... the Russian nobility at the time seems to have been kind of un-Russian, really.
- 20/10/2010 04:03:34 PM
797 Views
It felt very Russian to me as well
- 20/10/2010 04:12:50 PM
719 Views
There was little of the usual ... histrionics that happen in Russian novels.
- 22/10/2010 07:02:12 PM
783 Views
I really wish I'd bought a properly annotated version.
- 22/10/2010 07:07:16 PM
821 Views
The answer to that is to just read a great book on Nineteenth Century Russian history.
- 22/10/2010 10:55:06 PM
794 Views
Not just Russian, though, there's a lot of mentions of other European history.
- 22/10/2010 11:19:28 PM
740 Views
Nikolai and Pavel - I love them.
- 22/10/2010 07:14:11 PM
904 Views
Perhaps it's Pavel's "The Chap"-ish nature that makes the novel seem less Russian to me.
- 22/10/2010 10:53:56 PM
866 Views