I finished reading A Lear of the Steppes (1870), a novella written by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Constance Garnett.

Those familiar with Shakespeare’s King Lear will recognize the basics of the plot, although there are numerous and substantial differences. Turgenev writes beautiful prose and the story unfolds at a wonderfully balanced pace. The characters are rendered with agile simplicity. I felt a close sympathy with the narrator, and the story left me with more questions than answers.

“How far she had deserved such happiness …that is another question. Such questions, though, are only propounded in youth. Everything in the world, good and bad, comes to man, not through his deserts, but in consequence of some as yet unknown but logical laws which I will not take upon myself to indicate, though I sometimes fancy I have a dim perception of them.”