Twenty-six-year-old Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin returns to Russia after spending several years at a Swiss sanatorium. Scorned by the society of St. Petersburgh for his idiocy, generosity and innocence, he finds himself at the centre of a struggle between a beautiful kept woman and a gorgeous, virtuous girl, both of whom win his affection. Unfortunately, Myshkin's very goodness seems to precipitate disaster, leaving the impression that, in a world...

Set in nineteenth-century Russia, as the country was emerging from the painful legacy of serfdom, Fathers and Sons' theme is universal: the ideological conflict between generations. At its center are Bazarov a posturing nihilist who rejects all social institutions and Arkady, who has been taken in by Bazarov's revolutionary ideas. When they return from university in St Petersburg to visit their parents, their modern cynicism collides with the liberal-minded...

"Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Children is a masterpiece not only of the nineteenth century but of the whole of Russian literature, a book full to bursting with life. It is a novel about the relations between the young and the old, about love, families, politics, religion, about strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death. It is about the clash between liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. At the time of its publication...