The Jew and Other Stories

Turgenev at short range: an officer's memory of a Jewish spy hanged in wartime, and other stories that turn on a single decision and its cost. He was the first Russian to hold a European readership — Flaubert and Henry James both learned from him — and his gift was for the moment when a life turns without anyone noticing. These pieces show it working at close quarters. Sixty plates of battlefields and pine forests by painters including Alexander von Kotzebue and Ivan Shishkin give these stories of sudden turns the visual weather of their century.