4 h 37 minAudiobook10 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if a dream draws you so far from ordinary life that the impossible begins to feel close?
In Visions and Other Fantastic Tales, Ivan Turgenev gathers ghosts, dreams, and uncanny love into five haunting stories. In Phantoms, a man is drawn into nightly flights with a spirit guide. Elsewhere, hauntings and desires pull people away from familiar life toward something they cannot fully explain.
Turgenev brings a realist’s patient eye to these strange encounters. Gentry estates, birch woods, and everyday details give the uncanny a place to take hold. Love arrives with longing and fear, while simple plots leave room for mood, the pace of a sentence, and the troubling force of what remains unsaid.
What you’ll discover
- Flights beyond ordinary life Follow the man in Phantoms as a spirit guide draws him into nightly journeys.
- Love shadowed by fear Encounter desire that brings longing, unease, and a sense of fate close together.
- The uncanny made close Discover how calm, exact prose gives impossible encounters the texture of familiar life.
- Mysteries that stay open Linger with dreams and hauntings whose power lies partly in what remains unexplained.
- A quieter kind of horror Find atmosphere rather than loud scares, and feeling rather than a rush of events.
Who will love it
Readers who like ghost stories, moonlit gardens and midnight visions, and who enjoy Russian settings from country estates to the streets of Petersburg. It suits anyone who loves a mystery that stays open after the last page.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A song heard twice sets a hunter searching
- A ghost named Ellis carries him through the night
- A storyteller claims the supernatural is real
- A violin tune works on a sleeping wife
- A son meets the father from his dream
- Dreams and doubts that bind the five tales
Who’s who
- LukyanitchThe silent aged freed serf who guards a shuttered manor house, answers questions slyly, and wishes only for his life to come to an end.
- EllisA woman of white mist who appears at night and carries a man across Europe and Russia, loving him yet never saying what she is.
- Porfiry KapitonovichA former hussar from Kaluga who tells a drawing room full of doubters about the dog that haunted his bedroom and the pup that saved him.
- Anton StepanovichA pompous state councilor who insists that the supernatural leaves no room for common sense, and who must listen to a tale that tests him.
- FabiusA gifted painter in sixteenth century Ferrara who wants to protect his wife Valeria from the strange friend he himself invited into his home.
- ValeriaA modest, pale young wife whose dreams and sleepwalking nights begin when her husband's old friend returns from the East.
- MutiusA musician who comes back from years in the East with a mute servant, strange tricks and a violin tune he calls the song of fulfilled love.
- The BaronA thin stranger in a long black coat, back from America, who looks exactly like the father a young man has seen in his dreams.
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- Audiobook
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- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas in about 10 minutes, to read or to hear.
- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
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Visions and Other Fantastic Tales
A hunter hears an Italian song in a Russian garden, and a ghost takes a man flying over Rome and the Volga.
Medium level2–5 hours to read25 languages
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In short
Visions and Other Fantastic Tales gathers five stories by Ivan Turgenev, the Russian writer who died in 1883. They are Three Encounters, Visions, The Dog, The Song of Triumphant Love and A Dream.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A song heard twice sets a hunter searching
In Three Encounters, a narrator hunts near the village of Glinnoe, about twenty versts from his own estate. On his way back each evening he passes a shuttered manor house on a hill. Its only resident is an aged freed serf named Lukyanitch, tall and silver haired and very sparing with words. His one wish, he says, is to see his life come to an end. The narrator thinks the house looks like a blind old man warming his face in the sun.
One night, after hunting late, the narrator stops at the garden hedge in bright moonlight. Two windows in the house are lit, and a woman begins to sing in Italian. He knows the voice. Two years earlier, in Sorrento, he heard the same song from a pavilion behind a garden wall, saw a lovely woman lean out of the window, and watched a man slip in at a gate. Now she appears again at a window on the Russian steppe, calls goodbye three times, and the light goes out.
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What is Visions and Other Fantastic Tales about?
It collects five stories by Ivan Turgenev in which strange things enter ordinary life: a woman's song heard twice, a ghost who flies a man across Europe, a phantom dog, a tune that haunts a wife, and a father met in a dream.
Which stories are in the collection?
The five tales are Three Encounters, Visions, The Dog, The Song of Triumphant Love and A Dream. Each stands alone, with its own setting, from a Russian estate to sixteenth century Ferrara and a seaside port.
Who is Ellis in Visions?
Ellis is the name a ghostly woman gives the narrator when she carries him through the night sky. She says she loves him, yet she never tells him what she is, and he guesses at spirit, vampire or lost soul.
The author
Ivan Turgenev
1818–1883 · Russian novelist
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short-story writer and playwright. He was born in Oryol in 1818 and died near Paris in 1883. He lived in Russia, Germany and France. His books include A Nobleman’s Nest (1859), Fathers and Sons (1862) and Virgin Soil (1877).
More by Ivan Turgenev
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