Lavretsky comes home to his estate at forty, ruined by a wife he has left in Paris, and meets a girl of nineteen who plays the piano — and then a newspaper reports that the wife is dead. Turgenev was the first Russian read across Europe and admired by Flaubert and James; this 1859 novel was the one Russians loved most in his lifetime, and the last scene, in a monastery garden, is the quietest ending he wrote. Twenty-three plates by painters including Polenov and Venetsianov follow the novel's own landscape of old gardens, quiet interiors and returning travellers.
