Constance Garnett
Constance Garnett translated the whole of Turgenev into English in the fifteen volumes of The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, published between 1894 and 1899. Skomlin publishes two of those stories in her texts, King Lear of the Steppes and The Diary of a Superfluous Man.
Constance Garnett (1861-1946) was an English translator who brought most of the nineteenth-century Russian canon into English for the first time. Born Constance Black in Brighton, she won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge in 1879 and married the literary critic Edward Garnett in 1889; their son David Garnett became a novelist. She learned Russian in the early 1890s from political exiles in London, published her first translation, Goncharov's A Common Story, in 1894, and travelled to Russia that year, where she met Tolstoy. Over some forty years she produced about seventy volumes of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Turgenev, working on through failing eyesight. Her fifteen-volume Novels of Ivan Turgenev (1894-1899) included the stories Skomlin publishes as King Lear of the Steppes and The Diary of a Superfluous Man.
Titles at Skomlin
A decidedly Russian adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear set in the countryside. It concerns the disrespectful treatment the protagonist Kharlov receives from his ungrateful daughters and the revenge he wreaks upon them.
Turgenev's iconic tale of love and mortality set in 19th century Tsarist Russia is a skillfully written sad story of heartache and unrequited love. It is also is one of literature's finest portraits of alienation loss and hopelessness.