Virgin Soil

Praise

Every class of society, every type of character, every degree of fortune, every phase of manners, passes through his hands; his imagination claims its property equally, in town and country, among rich and poor, among wise people and idiots, dilettanti and peasants, the tragic and the joyous, the probable and the grotesque. He has an eye for all our passions and a deeply sympathetic sense of the wonderful complexity of our souls.
— Henry James

Turgenev’s Russia is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great light and free air of the world….All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors, are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves out in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions. They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day the ever-receding future.
— Joseph Conrad