“What aim do you wish to achieve, where are you
going, what is in your soul? In a word, who are you? What are you?”— Ivan
Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1861)
The kind of questions it would take a 19th-century
Russian novel to pose! Only the biggest ones we face, and still unanswered, a
century and a half after they were asked…
(The image
accompanying this post comes from an 1874 oil-on-canvas portrait of Ivan
Turgenev by Ilya Repin, now in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.)
