Torrents of Spring

What It's About

In middle age, Dmitry Sanin finds a small keepsake that sends him back to the summer of 1840, when he was twenty-two and passing through Frankfurt on his way home from Italy. A chance act of help for a fainting boy brings him into the household of an Italian confectioner's family, and into an intense, rapid love for the daughter, Gemma. Her engagement to a respectable German businessman complicates matters, and a strong-willed, worldly woman soon draws Sanin into a very different kind of entanglement. The story moves between the headlong emotion of youth and the cold clarity of looking back on it.

Key Concepts

First love and its lasting hold on memory; regret and the weight of past decisions; weakness of will, as Sanin drifts between loyalty and temptation; and the contrast between a young man's idealism and an older man's reckoning. The novella is also notable for being largely free of the political and social debate found in much of Turgenev's fiction, and for being drawn closely from his own experience.

About the Author

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) was a Russian novelist born into a wealthy landowning family. He spent much of his adult life in Western Europe, moving between Russia, Germany and France, and became one of the first Russian writers to find a wide readership abroad. His writing is known for its restrained style, its psychological precision and its sensitivity to nature and to the pain of unfulfilled feeling.

About This Edition

This is an 1897 translation by Constance Garnett.