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Category:1965 booksArthur Miller was too busy with his own work to finish one of his personal projects: a review of the Turgenev novel Fathers and Sons, which he finally sent to his publisher in the middle of May, 1920, more than five years after the author’s death. The manuscript was undated.
The first line, on a snowy evening in Saint Petersburg, reads: “The snow on the street was so thick that I was afraid to step out into the street.” It’s a long sentence, and Miller wrote it without consulting a dictionary. He probably wasn’t conscious of it when he first started, or of how heavy the first sentence would be for the rest of the book. He was so preoccupied with finishing what he had started that he no longer had the time, or maybe the interest, to organize the many different things that could have been done to the book.
“All that remains of it is the name, Turgenev, and what he writes about, and that’s the name of my book,” he would explain after he had left the theater, in May of 1945, by which point the theater—and the novel—were well in his past. But for the time being, the only thing that was about to be completed was his relationship with his publisher.
Turgenev’s novel is set in Saint Petersburg in the 1870s, at a time when the city was being modernized and Westernized. Turgenev’s father was an original liberal, a member of the state council, and the author lived and worked in Moscow, then the most progressive city in the Russian empire. He began writing Fathers and Sons when he was twenty-seven, and died of heart disease at thirty-seven.
At his father’s request, Turgenev began work on the book right after his father’s death. He gave his mother a copy of Fathers and Sons, but she never read it, or made any comment on it, and eventually it was given to Turgenev’s younger brother, the only member of the family who would have known its full importance. The novel has never been translated into English.
Miller’s review of the be359ba680
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