The District Doctor: A Turgenev Short Story

Ivan Turgenev

Apr 2011 · Simply Magazine Incorporated · Narrated by Deaver Brown

About this audiobook

The District Doctor is a wonderful Turgenev short story that shows its appeal to American authors such as Henry James and Fitzgerald, for its writing, and Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway, for its focus on moments. As the Doctor says to a new acquaintance, sometimes you know people for a long time and never talk about anything that touches the soul; sometimes you start there on the first conversation. This is very much like Winesburg, Ohio, where people have moments of clarity when they act or don't; here the Doctor explains such a moment in his life. The story starts quietly and ends with the Doctor being satisfied with winning a bit more than 2 rubles at Preference. A wonderful introduction to Turgenev and shows why The Atlantic Monthly, the predominant literary magazine of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, adopted Turgenev as their first major Russian author.

About the author

Ivan Turgenev, 1818 - 1883 Novelist, poet and playwright, Ivan Turgenev, was born to a wealthy family in Oryol in the Ukraine region of Russia. He attended St. Petersburg University (1834-37) and Berlin University (1838-41), completing his master's exam at St. Petersburg. His career at the Russian Civil Service began in 1841. He worded for the Ministry of Interior from 1843-1845. In the 1840's, Turgenev began writing poetry, criticism, and short stories under Nikolay Gogol's influence. "A Sportsman's Sketches" (1852) were short pieces written from the point of view of a nobleman who learns to appreciate the wisdom of the peasants who live on his family's estate. This brought him a month of detention and eighteen months of house arrest. From 1853-62, he wrote stories and novellas, which include the titles "Rudin" (1856), "Dvorianskoe Gnedo" (1859), "Nakanune" (1860) and "Ottsy I Deti" (1862). Turgenev left Russia, in 1856, because of the hostile reaction to his work titled "Fathers and Sons" (1862). Turgenev finally settled in Paris. He became a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1860 and Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford University in 1879. His last published work, "Poems in Prose," was a collection of meditations and anecdotes. On September 3, 1883, Turgenev died in Bougival, near Paris.