NEW TRANSLATION 

The story opens in 1870, with former landowner Dmitri Sanin looking back sorrowfully over his lonely, wasted life and remembering especially 1840, when, at the age of twenty-two, he found himself in Germany en route from Italy to Russia. There two women came into his life: Gemma Roselli, an expatriate Italian living with her widowed mother and younger brother, and scraping a living from a confectionery shop, and Marya Nikolayevna Polozova. Gemma was beautiful, chaste and demure, Marya Nikolayevna rich, attractive, independent-minded, feisty and quintessentially Russian.

Highly autobiographical in nature, Torrents of Spring offers a revealing insight into its author’s intimate thoughts and innermost emotions. Turgenev made three drafts of this novella, published to great public acclaim in 1872, and regarded it, justifiably, as one of his best pieces of
work. Presented in a new translation by Michael Pursglove.