



Produced by Martin Adamson





VIRGIN SOIL

By Ivan S. Turgenev


Translated from the Russian by R. S. Townsend




INTRODUCTION

TURGENEV was the first writer who was able, having both Slavic and
universal imagination enough for it, to interpret modern Russia to the
outer world, and Virgin Soil was the last word of his greater testament.
It was the book in which many English readers were destined to make
his acquaintance about a generation ago, and the effect of it was, like
Swinburne's Songs Before Sunrise, Mazzini's Duties of Man, and other
congenial documents, to break up the insular confines in which they had
been reared and to enlarge their new horizon. Afterwards they went on to
read Tolstoi, and Turgenev's powerful and antipathetic fellow-novelist,
Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he was the
greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country's
predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a
style of his own which we