Most Popular Books by Constance Garnett

Gerasim is a silent servant who works for an elderly widow surrounded by other servants who work for her. Among the other employees is Tatiana, a woman for whom Gerasim feels captivated. However, her foreman forces her to marry Kapiton Klimov, another servant who, unlike the others, is a compulsive drinker and thinks that in this way he will overcome his alcoholism, however a year goes by and Klimov turns out to be a useless what is banished with Tatiana to a very distant place leaving Gerasim with a broken heart.

In the midst of the steppes, of the mountains, of the impenetrable forests of the desert regions of Siberia, one meets from time to time with little towns of a thousand or two inhabitants, built entirely of wood, very ugly, with two churches-one in the centre of the town, the other in the cemetery-in a word, towns which bear much more resemblance to a good-sized village in the suburbs of Moscow than to a town properly so called. In most cases they are abundantly provided with police-master, assessors, and other inferior officials. If it is cold in Siberia, the great advantages of the Government service compensate for it. The inhabitants are simple people, without liberal ideas. Their manners are antique, solid, and unchanged by time. The officials who form, and with reason, the nobility in Siberia, either belong to the country, deeply- rooted Siberians, or they have arrived there from Russia. The latter come straight from the capitals, tempted by the high pay, the extra allowance for travelling expenses, and by hopes not less seductive for the future. Those who know how to resolve the problem of life remain almost always in Siberia; the abundant and richly-flavoured fruit which they gather there recompenses them amply for what they lose. As for the others, light-minded persons who are unable to deal with the problem, they are soon bored in Siberia, and ask themselves with regret why they committed the folly of coming. They impatiently kill the three years which they are obliged by rule to remain, and as soon as their time is up, they beg to be sent back, and return to their original quarters, running down Siberia, and ridiculing it. They are wrong, for it is a happy country, not only as regards the Government service, but also from many other points of view. The climate is excellent, the merchants are rich and hospitable, the Europeans in easy circumstances are numerous; as for the young girls, they are like roses and their morality is irreproachable. Game is to be found in the streets, and throws itself upon the sportsman''s gun. People drink champagne in prodigious quantities. The caviare is astonishingly good and most abundant. In a word, it is a blessed land, out of which it is only necessary to be able to make profit; and much profit is really made.

Torrents of Spring, also known as Spring Torrents is a novel by Ivan Turgenev that was first published in 1872. It is highly autobiographical in nature, and centers on a young Russian landowner, Dimitry Sanin, who falls deliriously in love for the first time while visiting the German city of Frankfurt. Written during 1870 and 1871, when Turgenev was in his fifties, the novel is widely held as one of his greatest.

A sequel to Rudin, A House of Gentlefolk was originally published in 1858 and was translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett in 1894. A quintessential Turgenev novel about Russian society, idealism, innocence and disillusionment it is set amidst the green fields owned by bourgeois Russians. The novel pivots around the character of Lisa, a smart and accomplished young woman who represents the traditional, dutiful, innocent and modest Russian girlhood from that era. Lavretsky, the hero, is a man of action and a man of culture. He, like Lisa, is a democratic Russian and so it is almost inevitable that he and Lisa fall in love. Their contentment is short-lived, however, as a woman from Lavretsky''s past enters their lives and threatens to ruin their happiness forever. Although a melancholy story the novel''s overall tone remains one of hope and it is easy to see how A House of Gentlefolk became the favourite Turgenev novel for English-speaking readers.

Referred to by Henry James as ''the first novelist of his time'' Ivan Turgenev''s works focus on class, love and suffering. Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories with its themes of the supernatural was, therefore, something of a departure for a writer who was well-known for his more humanitarian and liberal views. However, Turgenev uses these supernatural elements as a vehicle for exploring the irrationalities of the human psyche and he leaves the rational explanations for apparently supernatural events ambiguous - as Avrahm Yarmolinsky writes in his biography of Turgenev perhaps ''there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in positivist philosophy''. Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories includes Knock, Knock, Knock, The Inn, Lieutenant Yergunov''s Story, The Dog and The Watch. ''Turning from side to side I stretched out my hands ... My finger hit one of the beams of the wall. It emitted a faint but resounding, and as it were, prolonged note ... I must have struck a hollow place. I tapped again ... this time on purpose. The same sound was repeated. I knocked again ...'' From Knock, Knock, Knock (1871)

Alexander Herzen''s own brilliance and the extraordinary circumstances of his life combine to place his memoirs among the great testimonies of the modern era. Born in 1812, the illegitimate son of a wealthy Russian landowner, he became one of the most important revolutionary and intellectual figures of his time - as theorist, polemicist and political actor; and fifty years after his death Lenin pronounced him ''the father of Russian socialism''. My Past and Thoughts uniquely assimilates the personal to the historical, and is both a classic of autobiography an an unparalleled record of his century''s remarkable life. His account of a privileged childhood among the Russian aristocracy is illuminated with the insight of a great novelist; his friends and enemies - Marx, Wagner, Mill, Bakunin, Garibaldi, Kropotkin - are brought brilliantly to life; and as a sceptical and free-thinking observer, he unerringly traces the line of revolutionary development, from the earliest stirrings of Russian radicalism through the tumultuous ideological debates of the International. ''His power of observation is extraordinary. He tells a story with the economy of a great reporter. His gift is for knowing not only what people are, but how they are historically situated. Somewhere in the pages of this hard, honest observer of what movements do to men, we shall find ourselves.'' - V. S. Pritchett

Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o''clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows. Some of the passengers by this particular train were returning from abroad; but the third-class carriages were the best filled, chiefly with insignificant persons of various occupations and degrees, picked up at the different stations nearer town. All of them seemed weary, and most of them had sleepy eyes and a shivering expression, while their complexions generally appeared to have taken on the colour of the fog outside. When day dawned, two passengers in one of the third-class carriages found themselves opposite each other. Both were young fellows, both were rather poorly dressed, both had remarkable faces, and both were evidently anxious to start a conversation. If they had but known why, at this particular moment, they were both remarkable persons, they would undoubtedly have wondered at the strange chance which had set them down opposite to one another in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw Railway Company. One of them was a young fellow of about twenty-seven, not tall, with black curling hair, and small, grey, fiery eyes. His nose was broad and flat, and he had high cheek bones; his thin lips were constantly compressed into an impudent, ironical-it might almost be called a malicious-smile; but his forehead was high and well formed, and atoned for a good deal of the ugliness of the lower part of his face. A special feature of this physiognomy was its death-like pallor, which gave to the whole man an indescribably emaciated appearance in spite of his hard look, and at the same time a sort of passionate and suffering expression which did not harmonize with his impudent, sarcastic smile and keen, self-satisfied bearing. He wore a large fur-or rather astrachan-overcoat, which had kept him warm all night, while his neighbour had been obliged to bear the full severity of a Russian November night entirely unprepared. His wide sleeveless mantle with a large cape to it-the sort of cloak one sees upon travellers during the winter months in Switzerland or North Italy-was by no means adapted to the long cold journey through Russia, from Eydkuhnen to St. Petersburg.

One morning, just as I was about to set off to my office, Agrafena, my cook, washerwoman and housekeeper, came in to me and, to my surprise, entered into conversation. She had always been such a silent, simple creature that, except her daily inquiry about dinner, she had not uttered a word for the last six years. I, at least, had heard nothing else from her. "Here I have come in to have a word with you, sir," she began abruptly; "you really ought to let the little room." "Which little room?" "Why, the one next the kitchen, to be sure." "What for?" "What for? Why because folks do take in lodgers, to be sure." "But who would take it?" "Who would take it? Why, a lodger would take it, to be sure." "But, my good woman, one could not put a bedstead in it; there wouldn''t be room to move! Who could live in it?" "Who wants to live there! As long as he has a place to sleep in. Why, he would live in the window." "In what window?"

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Coming back to the nest of his family home in Russia after years of fruitless endeavours away from his roots, Lavretsky decides to turn his back on the vacuous salons of Paris and his frivolous and unfaithful wife Varvara Pavlovna. On his return he meets Liza, the daughter of one of his cousins, whom he had known when they were children and who rekindles in him long-smothered feelings of love. News of Varvara''s death arrive from France, offering Lavretsky the prospect of a new life, but a cruel twist threatens to shatter his dreams and forces him to re-evaluate his plans.

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) was a great Russian novelist and playwright. His novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of major works of 19th-century fiction. After the standard schooling for a child of a gentleman''s family, He studied for one year at the University of Moscow and then moved to the University of St Petersburg, focusing on the classics, Russian literature and philology.

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is a short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky written in 1877. It chronicles the experiences of a man who decides that there is nothing of any value in the world. Slipping into nihilism with terrible anguish, he is determined to commit suicide. However, after a chance encounter with a young girl, he begins an inner journey that re instills a love for his fellow man. The story was first published in A Writer''s Diary

First Love (Russian: Первая любовь, Pervaya ljubov) is a novella by Ivan Turgenev, first published in 1860. It is one of his most popular pieces of short fiction. It tells the love story between a 21-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy.