Late Turgenev at his strangest: an officer convinced a tapping in the night is a summons from the dead; a man who tells the story of a woman he watched destroy herself; a dream that will not stay in its own head. He was the first Russian read across Europe and was arrested for his obituary of Gogol; these last stories abandon the country-house novel for something colder and more uncertain, and Russians found them un-Turgenev. Sixty plates by painters including Perov and Kramskoi, from moonlit terraces to hunters at rest, carry the same watchful, haunted Russian air as these late tales.
