Twilight of Love - Travels with Turgenev

Picador, 2004. Good second-hand condition.

Robert Dessaix has had his own forty-year relationship with Turgenev and his work, first as a student of Russian in both Melbourne and Moscow, then as a tutor, and now as an old friend. Dessaix has come to see Turgenev's life and work as illustrating a turning point in the history of love, as much as the history of Russia - the moment the Romantic became the Modern, the moment love became sex, and sex became a commodity. In a truly remarkable work of memoir, literary biography and travel writing - a cultural and physical exploration - Robert Dessaix has found the pulse that quickened Turgenev's age, and that has failed in ours.