SOURCE: Costlow, Jane T. “Love, Attachment, and the ‘Objects of Our Regard’: Ivan Turgenev's ‘The Meeting’ and Aleksandra Markelova's ‘In the Work Corner.’” In Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert Louis Jackson, edited by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen and Gary Saul Morson, pp. 42-52. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Costlow explores the concept of attachment in Turgenev's “The Meeting” and Aleksandra Markelova's “In the Work Corner.”

Inscribed in a rambling, meditative letter of May 1848 is a brief descriptive passage in which Ivan Turgenev lovingly renders the arrested details of country life and makes what we might call a profession of aesthetic attachment. He is writing to Pauline Viardot, turning from the “eternal immensities” of Pascalian vision to a humbler, more immediate sight:

Ah! I cannot bear the sky—but life, reality, its caprices, its accidents, its customs, its fugitive beauty. … I...