A Month in the Country

Ivan Turgenev

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

The Inspector

The Cherry Orchard

A Month in the Country is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 8th Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156

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The publication of A Month in the Country, by Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, through TCG’s Book Program, is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, 1818–1883.

[Mesiats v derevne. English]

A month in the country : a comedy in five acts / Ivan Turgenev ; translated from the Russian by Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

pages cm.

(TCG Classic Russian Drama series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-55936-781-3 (ebook)

I. Nelson, Richard, 1950– translator. II. Pevear, Richard, 1943– translator. III. Volokhonsky, Larissa, translator. IV. Title.

PG3421.M4N45 2014

891.72’3—dc23 2014044685

Book design and composition by Lisa Govan

Cover design by John Gall

First Edition, December 2014

CONTENTS

Introduction

by Richard Pevear

A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY

Notes

INTRODUCTION

In 1844, the twenty-six-year-old Ivan Turgenev wrote the beginnings of a one-act comedy entitled Two Sisters, consisting of a brief note “instead of a preface,” a list of characters and two scenes, the second broken off in mid-page. The manuscript eventually turned up in Paris and was published almost a century later. Turgenev had been serving in the Russian interior ministry at the time and dabbling in various sorts of literary work—fantasies, lyrics, longer poems, plays—most of it quite unoriginal, as he himself admitted. His models were Pushkin and Gogol among the Russians, Prosper Mérimée and Alfred de Musset among the French. A year earlier he had written his first play, the one-act “Imprudence,” a slight comedy set in Spain. The publication of his long poem, Parasha, in the same year, had brought him some critical recognition. He had also met the French/Spanish opera singer Pauline Viardot, who performed during winter season in Petersburg, and had fallen in love with her, a relationship that was to last with varying degrees of intimacy for the rest of his life. He also became and remained friends with the singer’s husband, Louis Viardot, twenty years her senior, a journalist, art critic and onetime director of the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris, who acted as Pauline’s manager. The two men collaborated on translations from Russian into French, of Turgenev’s own works among others, and also went hunting together.