A Month In The Country - Ivan Turgenev

Prefiguring Chekhov’s theatre work, Turgenev in dramatic form can perhaps seem to lack the precision and beauty of his prose work. On the page, A Month In The Country seems to offer little more than the romantic complications of Russian ladies and gentlemen in a setting isolated from the rest of the world with little in the way of any defining national or social characteristics, but its openness necessarily allows much more to be drawn from it in a stage setting. Despite the lack of any real drama - the romantic entanglements are almost entirely verbal, the complications and realisations agonised over in soliloquies - structurally the drama and the interaction between the various players of differing ages and classes is purposefully and powerfully achieved, reaching a conclusion of complete devastation of almost everyone involved without anything actually seeming to have occurred.

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