The description of the story certainly sounds timeless or even contemporary, and certainly not confined to one specific location. Father is excited about his son's return from college, only to find that he has changed and no longer is the young man the father saw off to college. That all said, Fathers and Sons is incredibly Russian. Incredibly.
Fortunately, I really like Russian novels. I have many favorite books from this project, but my favorite whole class of books that I wouldn't have really gotten into without this project has got to be Russian novels. Turgenev is not my favorite Russian author, but I have to say I disagree with Tolstoy about him (of course, in the Dostoevsky versus Tolstoy debate, my favorite is the former).
For my next read, I went back to Google Books for The Unfortunate Traveler. I'm still trying to finish off the pre 1700s, of which I have six to go (which would be much more impressive, except there are only 13 on the pre 1700s list).
I think that it's a bad sign when your main point of musing from a book is that it might be interesting to do a study on the ways portrayals of rape have changed over time. Really, this book lives up to its title. It's very unfortunate; I guess I thought it would be a bit of a satire, but it's not. Mostly it's a catalog of terrible things that happened to this guy and the people he runs into. But hey, at least now we've past the half-way point for the pre 1700s.
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