Produced by Distributed Proofreaders A DESPERATE CHARACTER, AND OTHER STORIES By Ivan Turgenev Translated from the Russian By Constance Garnett 1899 THE NOVELS OF IVAN TURGENEV Complete in Fifteen Volumes. i. Rudin. ii. A House of Gentlefolk. iii. On the Eve. iv. Fathers and Children. v. Smoke. vi. & vii. Virgin Soil. 2 Vols. viii, & ix. A Sportsman’s Sketches. 2 Vols. x. Dream Tales and Prose Poems. xi. The Torrents of Spring and other Stories. xii. A Lear of the Steppes and other Stories. xiii. The Diary of a Superfluous Man and other Stories. xiv. A Desperate Character and other Tales. xv. The Jew and other Stories. TO JOSEPH CONRAD WHOSE ART IN ESSENCE OFTEN RECALLS THE ART AND ESSENCE OF TURGENEV INTRODUCTION The six tales now translated for the English reader were written by Turgenev at various dates between 1847 and 1881. Their chronological order is:-- _Pyetushkov_, 1847 _The Brigadier_, 1867 _A Strange Story_, 1869 _Punin and Baburin_, 1874 _Old Portraits_, 1881 _A Desperate Character_, 1881 _Pyetushkov_ is the work of a young man of twenty-nine, and its lively, unstrained realism is so bold, intimate, and delicate as to contradict the flattering compliment that the French have paid to one another--that Turgenev had need to dress his art by the aid of French mirrors. Although _Pyetushkov_ shows us, by a certain open _naïveté_ of style, that a youthful hand is at work, it is the hand of a young master, carrying out the realism of the ‘forties’--that of Gogol, Balzac, and Dickens--straightway, with finer point, to find a perfect equilibrium free from any bias or caricature. The whole strength and essence of the realistic method has been developed in _Pyetushkov_ to its just limits. The Russians are _instinctive_ realists, and carry the warmth of life into their pages, which warmth the French seem to lose in clarifying their impressions and crystallising them in art. _Pyetushkov_ is not exquisite: it is irresistible. Note how the reader is transported bodily into Pyetushkov’s stuffy room, and how the major fairly boils out of the two pages he lives in! (pp. 301, 302). That is _realism_ if you like. A woman will see the point of _Pyetushkov_ very quickly. Onisim and Vassilissa and the aunt walk and chatter around the stupid Pyetushkov, and glance at him significantly in a manner that reveals everything about these people’s world. All the servants who appear in the tales in this volume are hit off so marvellously that one sees the lower-class world, which is such a mystery to certain refined minds, has no secrets for Turgenev.