A minor classic: Spring Torrents

I was remembering or trying to remember reading Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (sometimes, Fathers and Children) years ago, for book group I think, and M and L asked what it was about. Uh, it's Russian, so: steppes,wolves, snow, droshkies, peasants, people with long names ... in other words, I couldn't remember a thing (keep that in mind those of you who think you have a lousy memory for books - many other readers do as well). I forgot one essential Russian novel convention, however: duels! Which I was reminded of in reading Turgenev's novella "Spring Torrents" (sometimes The Torrents of Spring), in the Everyman edition, First Love and other stories (only 2 others, as it happens). And actually, Turgenev is not the typical Russian novelist, certainly not in this novella. I read in the introductory chronology that Everyman editions so helpfully provide and T. spent a lot of time in France, corresponded with Flaubert, even wrote in French - and he does seem more European and less Slavic that his great Russian contemporaries. This novel, for example, is set in Frankfort, as the main character, a young Russian gentleman who's inherited some money which he's spending on a tour of Europe before returning and starting government service - is on his way home when fate brings him together with a family of Italian emigres in Frankfort. He - Sanin - falls in love with the beautiful daughter, who's engaged to a German shopkeeper. In the central scene the shopkeeper takes the Italian family and Sanin on a country excursion; a group of soldiers insults the beautiful daughter; the fiance in a huff leaves the restaurant w/out tipping - leaving it to Sanin to speak to the soldier - ultimately to a duel - and the upshot is that the beautiful daughter wants out of the engagement - she seems to be in love with Sanin, but breaking an engagement and marrying someone she's just met, a Russian no less, will ruin the reputation of her family. Turgenev is great at sketching in a character w/ just a few strokes - the insufferably correct and narcissistic fiance is a great example - and he has a sense, rare in Russian writers, of the nuances of status among the working classes: he understands the precarious social position of this emigre Italian family, and he's sympathetic to their plight rather than contemptuous. The story moves along rapidly and is really easy to follow and to comprehend - doesn't have the great drama of Dostoyevsky or the grand scope of Tolstoy but is a minor classic and a bridge between the dark and brooding Russian novels and the more open European style of the French naturalists, with a bit of a foretaste of the innocents abroad themes of Henry James and of the old man's retrospective on lost youth of Joseph Conrad.