Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations is as fresh, outspoken, and exciting today as it was in when it was first published in 1862. The controversial portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured `nihilist' who repudiates the romanticism of his elders, shook Russian society. Indeed, the image of humanity liberated by science from age-old conformities and prejudices is one that can threaten establishments of any political or religious persuasion, and is especially potent in the modern era.

An icon of Russian literature, Turgenev was able to contain the narrative sweep of a novel in a single short story. His protagonists experience the joy and painful turbulence of first love, the thrilling adventures of youth, and the layered reflections of maturity. His great skill is to make his readers feel alongside these characters, rendering their complex interiorities, whether nobility or serf, in these stories charged with a profound social conscience. This collection, in a lyrical new translation by Nicolas Slater, places Turgenev's great novella First Love alongside a selection of his classic stories.

Turgenev’s first major publication, Memoirs of a Hunter is a series of tales based largely on the author’s own experiences while hunting on his mother’s estate of Spasskoye, where he became aware of the iniquities of the system of serfdom and the privations and indignities suffered by the Russian peasantry. Told from the perspective of a dispassionate, observing narrator, the stories in this volume are concerned with the relationship between landowner and labourer, presenting a vivid and moving portrait of life in the era before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 – a watershed whose advent some believe was hastened by Turgenev’s sympathetic depiction of the ordinary folk of rural Russia.