Twilight of Love

Travels with Turgenev

Plot

"Ivan Turgenev, one of the greatest novelists of Russia's Golden Age, spent forty years in love with the diva Pauline Viardot. He followed her and her husband around Europe until the day he died." "And yet, as far as we can tell, their connection was chaste. Both had passionate relationships with other people; Monsieur Viardot and Turgenev became great friends; and from time to time Turgenev lived amicably as part of the Viardot household." "What, then, did Turgenev mean by 'love', the word at the core of his life and work?" "Robert Dessaix has had his own forty-year relationship with Turgenev, first as a student of Russian in both Australia and Russia, then as a teacher and now as what he calls a 'close friend'." Works such as Turgenev's Hunter's Notes and Fathers and Sons, still widely read around the world, were pivotal in transforming the Russian social landscape. However, as Dessaix follows Turgenev across Germany, France and Russia, he comes to see his life and work as, above all, an expression of a turning point in the history of love - the moment the Romantic became rational, and love unravelled into sentiment and eroticism.