'Torrents Of Spring'

Ivan Turgenev published Torrents of Spring in 1872, just 11 year before he would pass away in 1883 having been a contemporary of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

It's significant because its considered at least partially autobiographical and it speaks to the frustrations of the female and love that Turgenev toiled under for this entire life.

Torrents of Spring revolves around that of Sanin, a young Russian landowner. Not too rich. Not too poor. He's staying in Frankfurt when he saves the life of a 14-year-old shopowner's son. At this time, he meets the boy's sister, the 16-year-old Gemma and falls madly in love. They eventually get engaged and in order to procure some money in order to get married, Sanin, by happenstance, runs into an old schoolmate, and decides to go to another city to sell his property in Russia to the schoolmate's wife.

Well, after much foreboding from Gemma, he leaves and immediately falls in love with the schoolmate's wife, they have an affair and he breaks off the engagement to follow this woman around.

The book ends with Sanin at the end of his wife and he looks up Gemma, who's moved to New York, gotten married, had children and led a generally good life.

Turgenev never married. He was born to a father who was a philanderer (when he was alive_ and a mother who was an abusive heiress. These characters really not unlike that of Sanin's schoolmate and his wife.

Much like Sanin living in Frankfurt, travelling in the West and learning the different languages, Turgenev, too, had an affinity to the West. He studied in Germany and England and lived for a time in Western Europe. This further strained his relations with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The former he had a duel with until Tolstoy called it off and apologized, not unlike the duel in Torrents of Spring.

In Torrents of Spring, we don't find a love-lost cad, but instead a writer, who didn't know how to handle women or was simply extremely unlucky and found himself in his twilight years in search of absolution.