Rudin

Written in 1856, Ivan Turgenev’s first novel, Rudin, presents us with a small, play-like dramatis personae centred around the family, friends and servants of Darya Mikhaylovna Lasunsky, a wealthy widow staying at her country estate.

Dmitry Nikolayevich Rudin, a former student, becomes acquainted with Darya Mikhaylovna when acting as an emissary, from  Baron Mueffel, who fails to arrive on a planned visit. Darya Mikhaylovna accepts the Baron’s apologies and his introduction to Rudin, who is then invited to stay in his place.

Over the course of the next few months, Rudin’s influential, philosophical rhetoric has a major impact on the household and its connections, but his doomed love affair with Darya Mikhaylovna’s daughter Natalya leads to his departure – his failure to elope with her holds up a mirror to his character’s shortcomings and he leaves before he is thrown out.

Rootless and unconnected he then embarks on a series of inappropriate careers and projects where he fails to turn his education and his eloquence to any practical account, with each attempt resulting in disaster. 

Mikhaylo Mikhaylych Lezhnev, a wealthy neighbour of Darya Mikhaylovna’s was a student and good friend of Rudin, in his youth, but they grew apart as Lezhnev started to understand Rudin’s unintentionally destructive philosophical influence. Meeting Rudin again, after many years, at Darya Mikhaylovna’s home, his opinion remains unchanged and over the course of the action he gradually narrates the events of his early life with Rudin, to a friend (Alexandra Pavlovna Lipin).

Time passes and with Rudin’s departure, life at Darya Mikhaylovna’s estate slowly starts to return to its previous state. Natalya agrees to marry a long time admirer (Alexandra Pavlovna Lipin’s brother) and Alexandra Pavlovna Lipin marries Lezhnev.  

The action then moves to an unnamed provincial town where Lezhnev is staying on business. He accidentally meets the down and out Rudin and they agree to spend the evening together, before Rudin moves on again, this time intending to return to the ruins of his own estate.

As the evening progresses, Lezhnev extends his friendship again to Rudin, who bewails his wasted life.

Before night sets in, Rudin leaves.

The novel ends, with a final page relating Rudin’s dramatic death, shot by a sniper and incorrectly identified as Polish, on the barricades during the 1848 Revolution in Paris:

‘… On a sultry afternoon on the 26th of July in 1848 in Paris, when the Revolution of the ateliers nationaux had already been almost suppressed, a line battalion was taking a barricade in one of the narrow alleys of the Faubourg St Antoine. A few gunshots had already broken it; its surviving defenders abandoned it, and were only thinking of their own safety, when suddenly on the very top of the barricade, on the frame of an overturned omnibus, appeared a tall man in an old overcoat, with a red sash, and a straw hat on his grey dishevelled hair. In one hand he held a red flag, in the other a blunt curved sabre, and as he scrambled up, he shouted something in a shrill strained voice, waving his flag and sabre. A Vincennes tirailleur took aim at him—fired. The tall man dropped the flag—and like a sack he toppled over face downwards, as though he were falling at some one’s feet. The bullet had passed through his heart.

‘Tiens!’ said one of the escaping revolutionists to another, ‘on vient de tuer le Polonais!’

‘Bigre!’ answered the other, and both ran into the cellar of a house, the shutters of which were all closed, and its wall streaked with traces of powder and shot.

This ‘Polonais’ was Dmitri Rudin….’

With thanks to Project Gutenberg for the extract.