“The only people who remain misunderstood are those who either do not know what they want or are not worth understanding.” –Ivan Turgenev (Rudin)
Most famous for his later novel, Fathers and Sons, Rudin is Turgenev’s first novel, but already contains many of the themes that define his work, especially that of the ‘superfluous man‘. The novel tells of an eloquent intellectual, Dmitry Rudin, a character modeled partly on the revolutionary agitator Mikhail Bakunin, whom Turgenev had known in Moscow in the 1830s. Rudin’s power of oratory and passionate belief in the need for progress so affect the younger members of a provincial salon that the heroine, Natalya, falls in love with him. But when she challenges him to live up to his words, he fails her.
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