Sanin misses his coach, but no matter, he can’t take his eyes off of the beautiful Gemma. Signora Leonora Roselli, the owner of the patisserie, is a widow with two children, Emilio, a young boy who does not appear to have the best health, and his gorgeous sister, Gemma. This dramatic event is the beginning of Sanin’s relationship with the Roselli family.
Urged by a beautiful young Italian girl to save her brother, Sanin steps in and revives the boy. So his life is arranged, or appears to be. Then fate sends him into an Italian patisserie for a glass of lemonade, but just as he arrives, a young boy, the son of the owner has collapsed. He has reserved a seat in a coach, the last coach leaving that night at 10 o’clock. Sanin has inherited a little money, and he decided to use it travelling before returning to Russia and “ putting on the harness of employment in a government department.” He has just left Italy, and is now in Frankfurt with just enough money to return to Russia. This is a frame story, and the novel opens with a middle-aged man, Dimitry Pavlovich Sanin, now in his 50s, who, after an evening’s entertainment, feels a vague disgust and discontentment with his life. He reminisces about his past and his loves, and this brings us to Sanin at age 23, thirty years before. Spring Torrents, published in 1872, is short–only 176 pages in my Penguin Classics edition, and it’s superb quintessential Turgenev. Bitter regret and love go hand in hand in Turgenev’s fiction. Perhaps a Turgenev character will lose love from a failure to commit or perhaps he will discover that the woman has another game even as he’s drawn in deeper and deeper. Turgenev (1818-1883), one of the giants of 19th century Russian literature, is the master at creating fictional male characters who engage in relationships with women only to experience the destructive nature of passion.
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