Word: magarshack
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
TURGENEV: A LIFE (328 pp.)-David Magarshack-Grove...
...Russian slavishness. The Turgenev Family, an eyewitness report written in 1884 by Varvara Zhitova, adopted daughter of Turgenev's mother, is like the beginning of a psychiatrist's case history: it deals with the patient's heredity and early environment. Turgenev: A Life, by David Magarshack. a competent. Russian-born biographer (Chekhov: A Life), is more a full-dress analysis of his great artistic achievement and personal unhappiness...
...mother who had herself suffered all the ignominies of enslavement. As a young girl, she was abused with "drunken violence" by her stepfather until she was 16 years old. She ran away and took refuge in the house of a "severe and miserly" uncle, who, says Biographer Magarshack, threatened not only to throw her out of his house but also to disinherit her. But when he died, she inherited his vast estates, married Turgenev's father-and set out to get her own back for the miseries she had suffered...
Father Turgenev was a landowner who spent his life chasing women; he kept out of the home and let his wife "do anything she liked." What she liked, according to Magarshack, was to make her household resemble the Czarist government as closely as possible. She gave her serfs court titles: "Maid of Honor," "Court Chamberlain." When her family physician came to treat her little adopted daughter, he was told: "Remember! If you don't cure her . . . Siberia!" Mother Turgenev discouraged marriage among her serfs because she liked their undivided attention for herself, so her women bore illegitimate children instead...
...Leon Edel's first volume of Henry James) ; some were long on sympathy if short on brilliance (Reginald Pound's Arnold Bennett, Lionel Stevenson's able Ordeal of George Meredith); and a few actually enlarged their subjects' dimensions (Betty Miller's Robert Browning, David Magarshack's Chekhov, Antony Alpers' Katherine Mansfield). In one book that was not properly a biography, two well-known men told a great deal about themselves and about each other in one of the longest correspondences of the century. The Holmes-Laski Letters were part mutual-admiration society, part...