A brilliant talker arrives at a country estate, dazzles everyone in an evening, and a young woman falls in love with the man he sounds like - after which he is asked to act, and cannot. Turgenev was the first Russian read across Europe, admired by Flaubert and James, and was arrested for his obituary of Gogol; Rudin is the superfluous man in his purest form, and the last two pages forgive him in a way nobody expects. Sixty plates of summer light and rural quiet by painters including Ivan Shishkin and Caspar David Friedrich carry the novel's brief warmth and its long Russian stillness.
