Fathers and Sons — The Folio Society | Ivan Turgenev | 1979 | First Impression with Slipcase | Very Good

A father, a son, and a young man who believes in nothing at all.

When Ivan Turgenev published Fathers and Sons in 1862, he managed to infuriate almost everyone in Russia. Radicals thought he had caricatured them; conservatives thought he had flattered them. At the centre of the storm was Bazarov, the brilliant, abrasive medical student who sweeps into a sleepy country estate declaring himself a nihilist, contemptuous of art, sentiment, tradition and his friend's gentle, bewildered father. The novel did more than anything else to put the word nihilism into general use, and it has never stopped feeling modern.

What keeps it alive, though, is not the argument but the tenderness. Turgenev cannot quite bring himself to take sides. The old men are foolish and the young men are arrogant, and he loves them all regardless, which is why a quarrel between generations written more than a century and a half ago still reads like a conversation overheard at somebody's kitchen table.

This is the Folio Society edition of 1979, in Rosemary Edmonds' clear, much-admired translation, with an introduction by the writer Colin Ward and lithographs by the Hungarian illustrator Janos Kass. Kass's drawings are spare and elegant, picked out in black and a warm rust orange, and they suit Turgenev's light touch perfectly. The book is bound in quarter brown cloth with check-patterned paper boards in caramel and brown, lettered in gilt on the spine, and the text is printed letterpress. It comes in its original blue Folio slipcase.

Condition: Very Good. The spine is the headline: the gilt is bright and there is no fading, which is the fault most often found on this edition. The boards are clean, the corners square and the page edges tidy. There is light foxing to the outermost leaves; the text itself is clean throughout. The slipcase is present and sound.

About this edition: 1979 is the first Folio printing of this title, making this a first impression. Copies turn up only occasionally, and an unfaded example in its slipcase is the one worth having. A handsome, eminently readable edition of one of the great Russian novels, and a fine companion for anyone building a Folio shelf of the Russian classics.

Extra photographs available on request. Just get in touch and we will be happy to help.

Wrapped in good heavy paper — we don't skimp on that — and packed into a sturdy box so nothing shifts on the way to you, wherever in the world that happens to be. Kat packs and checks every parcel herself, and she is not easily pleased. The unwrapping ought to be half the pleasure.

The Novel Relics Team