Superb. Rudin is one of the greatest portraits of man ever written.
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I found Rudin profoundly touching and an almost astonishing work for a novel so slender. Rarely in so few pages can a writer have illustrated his themes so emphatically and so artfully. Throughout Turgenev uses nature as a proxy for narrative description and as a result the novel has a very calm and controlled feel. The characters are bound by their differing natures and their development is shadowed by changes in the natural environment they find themselves in.
More importantly, to my mind, however is the way in which the character of Rudin exposes the central contradiction between a desire for truth and a desire for love. By his nature, as we discover, Rudin is unable to conquer love but is however able to remain true to his ideals, despite being unable to act upon them. To this extent Rudin is impotent, he is clear about what he wishes to achieve - to become a man of action - yet he is fundamentally unable to achieve such a goal. As such he is destined to remain unhappy. However, unlike others, he perceives this and so is able to remain truthful to his self and thus in contrast to those other characters in the novel that are destined to remain unhappy, as he too is destined, he at least discovers and embraces his true self and as such realises the higher being in him. A higher being so often alluded to by others.
In such a fashion Turgenev exposes this central dialectic beautifully. By positing Rudin amidst a decaying social setting and allowing his seemingly constant passage of self-discovery inadvertently to fuel the self-discovery of those who come into contact with him, Turgenev demonstrates how a synthesis between self-knowledge and self-sacrifice is essential before true love can be sown within one's soul. Rudin, by being so lucid regarding what he loves (truth), whilst simultaneously illustrating to all the futility of his love, shines a light upon the ready attainability of the loves of other characters. Thus those characters who sought to see in Rudin something approaching an ideal are shocked and provoked into attaining their own, real, ideals. It is only those who refused to see in Rudin anything but impotence, coldness and bluster who emerge unchanged characters at the novel's conclusion.
As of Rudin himself, his love (truth) is attained only at the cost of discovering that he is less a mighty oak and more a shallow tumbleweed (Rudin himself goes from using the Oak as an analogy for his feelings to that of a tumbleweed by the end of the novel). Perhaps it is this inevitable conclusion to Rudin's long search, the same search that befalls all of us, that provokes Rudin (in the Epilogue) to finally attain his ideal as a man of action and thus ensure that, against the greatest odds, his seed was not, after all, sown upon barren ground.
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Rudin - a flawed individual or victim of his age?
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Rudin is riddled with a multitude of personal problems which contribute much more to his downfall than the difficulties of his time. Whilst it is true that the snobbery of the Russian gentry and the repressiveness of tsarism stifled the freedom of the Russian intelligentsia, Rudin, unlike Lezhnev, lacks the personal fibre to overcome these restraints. Contrary to Richard Freeborn's assertion that the hero is simply an embodiment of "the men of the 1840s", Rudin is a fully-realised human being with a complex personality. As Eva Kagan-Kans has argued, Turgenev depicts an "individual character" by the "painting of a psychological portrait", whilst the social atmosphere of the time is of "secondary importance." Yet, at the same time, Rudin can be considered a universal figure, common to all epochs. Maurice Baring has referred to Rudin as being amongst Turgenev's "gallery of Hamlets." The man of talent, fond of ideas, but unable to enact them due to self-indulgence, hypocrisy and dependence on others is common to all societies - to modern-day Britain as much as to nineteenth-century Russia. Again, this discredits the view that Rudin is merely a reflection of the difficulties of his time. Only in Rudin's death-scene, which was added by Turgenev in 1860, do the hero's problems come directly into contact with the difficulties of his time. Even then, Rudin's efforts appear futile: his fellow-insurgents know neither his name nor his nationality.
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