Virgin Soil

In the 1870s, young Russian radicals 'go to the people', trying to rouse the peasants to revolution. Alexei Nezhdanov, the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a sensitive poet torn between art and politics, becomes a tutor in the house of a liberal official, falls in love with Marianna, a young relative of the family, and runs away with her to work for the cause. But the peasants do not understand them, and Nezhdanov comes to doubt everything.

Published in 1877, Turgenev's last and longest novel is a sympathetic but sceptical portrait of the populist movement; its title comes from its epigraph, which says that virgin soil must be turned up not by a plough that skims the surface but by one that digs deep. This translation is by R. S. Townsend. Worth reading alongside it: On the Eve.

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) grew up on an estate in central Russia owned by his tyrannical mother, who controlled thousands of serfs. He studied in Berlin, and his Sportsman's Sketches, with their sympathetic portraits of serfs, made him famous; an obituary of Gogol earned him a month in detention and exile to his estate.

He spent much of his life abroad, following the singer Pauline Viardot, whom he loved for forty years, and became a friend of Flaubert and a bridge between Russian and Western literature. His novel Fathers and Sons gave the world the word nihilist.