On his way home from Italy, Dimitri Sanin enters a small candy store in Frankfurt and it is love at first sight when he sees Gemma, the salesgirl. Set in the 1840s, this emotionally charged (and partly autobiographical) story of natural passion and desire does not go smoothly and fate intervenes, changing the lives of both lovers. Neville Jason is a perfect match for this dramatic story, having trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he was awarded the diction prize by Sir John Gielgud. He has been a member of the BBC Radio Drama Company three times and may be heard in radio plays, documentary and arts programs. He handles the Italian, Russian, German and French with ease, and while it is a highly dramatic and passionate story, he avoids overdramatising. He steps into each character’s skin and inhabits their being. This is a terrific performance that in a less-skillful reader’s hands could have been disastrous.

Sanin is an ardent, 22-year-old Russian nobleman. Travelling through Europe, he is captivated by Gemma, the demurely flirtatious daughter of an Italian sweet-maker whose family keep a shop in Frankfurt; she manoeuvres him into discovering he is in love with her. But Sanin needs money to marry and so leaves Frankfurt to sell his estate to the rich and beautiful wife of an old acquaintance. He knows that this sale will condemn his serfs to the long-term vassal-hood he had aspired, one day, to free them from, and Fortune punishes him harshly for his abandonment of principle; inveigled into an affair with the very woman whom he had hoped would finance his marriage, Sanin’s hopes and longings end in sterility.
This novel captures superbly the wonder of first love and sexual arousal; Sanin is aquiver with emotions and sensations and though he officially worships one woman and despises the other, his feelings for the two seem in fact to flow into one another. He is carried along, as the title suggests, by forces that feel to him out of his control. Especially vivid is the description of his ride on horseback with the adulterous Maria Nicolaievna; the episode pulsates with a sexual excitement all the more powerful for not being described explicitly and ends with a seduction that can’t be described at all.
Neville Jason reads Turgenev’s novel with a measured but passionate intensity very fitting for this recollection of how it feels to be young.