EVENT: Reading by Robert Dessaix

Robert Dessaix will discuss his new release, "Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev" and read from this captivating book.

Alongside his friends Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Turgenev was one of the three great men of the Russian novel’s golden age. Fathers and Sons and A Hunter’s Notes caused sensations when they were published; by depicting serfs as human beings, the latter was said to have persuaded the Tsar to free them.

Turgenev’s private life was, perhaps, as remarkable as his public. For forty years he was passionately devoted to Pauline Viardot, a singer, following her and her husband around Europe. Yet it seems their relationship was chaste – both had affairs with other people – and at various states Turgenev lived amicably as part of the Viardot household. What, then, did Turgenev mean by the word ‘love’? Robert Dessaix has had his own forty-year relationship with Turgenev and his work, first as a student of Russian in both Melbourne and Moscow, then as a tutor, and now as an old friend. Dessaix has come to see Turgenev’s life and work as illustrating a turning point in the history of love, as much as the history of Russia – the moment the Romantic became the Modern, the moment love became sex, and sex became a commodity.

In a truly remarkable work of memoir, literary biography and travel writing – a cultural and physical exploration – Robert Dessaix has found the pulse that quickened Turgenev’s age, and that has failed in ours.

Biographical Note Robert Dessaix is a writer, interviewer, translator and broadcaster. From 1985 to 1995, after teaching Russian language and literature for many years at the Australian National University and the University of NSW, he presented the weekly ‘Books and Writing’ program on the ABC Radio National. In more recent years he has also presented radio series on language, public intellectuals and great travellers in history. His best-known books, all translated into several European languages, are his autobiography A Mother’s Disgrace, the novels Night Letters and Corfu, and a collection of essays and short stories (and so forth). He has also published translations of works by Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, and his translations of plays by Anton Chekhov have been produced in theatres around Australia. A full-time writer since 1995, Robert Dessiax lives in Hobart, Tasmania.

No charge, but bookings required on 6488 1340 or [email protected]

Books will be available for purchase and signing on the night