SOURCE: Sänger, Wolfgang R. “The ‘Favourite Russian Novelist’ in William Trevor's Reading Turgenev: A Postmodern Tribute to Realism.” Irish University Review 27, no. 1 (spring-summer 1997): 182-98.

In the following essay, Sänger traces the role of Turgenev's work in Trevor's novella Reading Turgenev.

A title such as Reading Turgenev must kindle vastly different expectations in different readers, but they are very likely to include well-read or bookish characters of genuine or pretentious intellectuality and a real or pseudo-cultured background of unspecified nationality. The first pages of the short novel, creating an image of “a woman, not yet fifty-seven, slight and seeming frail, eats carefully at a table in the corner”¹ do nothing to contradict such expectations: her solitary position, the coherent argument running through her mind, the placid superiority with which she ignores adverse comments of “the others”, all mark her out as a potential Turgenev reader under any...