The twentieth volume in the Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives
series, Conrad and Turgenev: Towards the Real offers a comparative
analysis of Joseph Conrad's and Ivan Turgenev's output and focuses on
their outlooks and ideas concerning art, personality, and history. The
analysis is based on Conrad's and Turgenev's major novels such as Lord
Jim, Nostromo, Almayer's Folly, And Outcast of the Islands, The
Return, Victory, The Secret Agent and Rudin, Home of the Gentry,
One the Eve, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, as well as selected
novellas, short stories, essays and letters. The affinities and
differences between the two writers are discussed within the framework
of realism and modernism. Main problems addressed are the relation
between reality and representation in the two author's major works; the
concept of the self and its duality, and the pessimistic vision of
history devoid of purpose. The study is intended to highlight the
affinities between Conrad and Turgenev, to acquaint the readers with
those aspects of Turgenev's output that form the context for Conrad's
oeuvre, to trace the echoes of Turgenev's aesthetics and worldview in
Conrad's texts and to show how Conrad, a disciple of great realist
masters, balanced his new modernist awareness against Turgenev who
relies on the framework of realism.