A Month in the Country by Brian Friel

"In my opinion ...every love, happy as well as unhappy, is real disaster when you give yourself over to it entirely." This heart-felt sentiment expressed by Turgenev's unfortunate character, Rakitin, sums up the central predicament of this, Turgenev's most celebrated play, completed in 1850 during the period of his extensive travels abroad. Probably drawn from his experiences of frustration and unhappiness at the hands of the famous Pauline Viardot, "A Month in the Country" explores the complexities of that most universal of themes, the eternal love triangle, and transforms what could be termed an almost hackneyed subject into a brilliant tragi-comedy. With his fresh and subtle play of paradox and a new psychological penetration into character that anticipates the theatre of Chekhov, Turgenev creates a dramatic "month" which surely realizes Henry James' evaluation of the writer as "beautiful genius".