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Turgenev is your best choice if you want to tussle with Russian classics without embarking on forests of nervy insanity (Dostoevsky) or bricky pomposity (Tolstoy), for Ivan serves up stylishly concise narratives of unhappy families in a permanent tizzy at the only things the 1800s were concerned with—maintaining hereditary privilege, staying in ill-fated marriages until one spouse conveniently dies, and keeping the peasants at bay. Turgenev is a writer thoroughly involved in his deftly drawn characters, and the cast of this novel are exquisitely rendered across 200+ sublimely written pages of mellow Russian mastery.