On the Eve (Alma Classics)

by Ivan Turgenev

  As well as novellas and short stories, Turgenev wrote six novels. The first four were published in the space of just six years, between 1856 and 1862. Possibly as a consequence of the criticism he had received for these works in the Russian press – especially for the fourth, Fathers and Children – his following novel appeared only five years later, and the last one ten years after that.

  Originally entitled A Highly Gifted Nature, Turgenev’s first novel, Rudin (1856), tells the tale of another “superfluous man”. He is a well-educated but impecunious young nobleman, who has been educated at Moscow University, as well as in Heidelberg and Berlin. The setting is the country estate of a wealthy noblewoman, Darya Lasunskaya, in a provincial backwater. The charismatic Rudin, whom nobody knows, is introduced into their circle and totally disrupts the settled life of the household, especially affecting the peace of mind of young Natalya. When he leaves, things return to their normal state, but some of the characters have subtly changed for ever. The unexpected entry of an outsider into a social circle and the turmoil it causes is a leitmotif in Turgenev’s writings: other examples are Lavretsky in A Nest of the Gentry, Insarov in On the Eve, Bazarov in Fathers and Children and Belyayev in A Month in the Country. The feckless Rudin now moves into Darya’s mansion, sponging off the family, and obviously striking up a liaison with her impressionable young daughter Natalya. This budding romance becomes known to Darya, who strongly disapproves of it. Instead of standing up firmly for their love, however, Rudin declares one must “submit to destiny”, leaving Natalya hurt, confused and feeling deceived by him. When Rudin departs from the estate, he sends her a letter confessing that he has always been guilty of such indecision.

  The final section of the novel portrays events some two years later. Natalya is now engaged to a staid, worthy local landowner, and Rudin is still drifting around Russia, living at the expense of anybody he can latch on to. There is a very short epilogue which is not entirely convincing, and seems to have been appended as an afterthought: Rudin takes the part of the workers manning the barricades in the Paris Insurrection of 1848, which Turgenev had been witness to. He is shot dead by the soldiers, and even in death his sacrifice appears to have been meaningless, as somebody shouts out: “They’ve got the Pole!” Perhaps the message of this apparently incongruous ending is that, ironically, the first time this aimless Russian nobleman tries to exert himself to do something useful, he dies, and nobody even realizes that he is Russian, or has any personality of his own. He is still just another “superfluous man”.

  Although the critics noted the novel’s lucid prose style, the press reaction was puzzled; the right-wing journals accused Turgenev of disrespecting the upper classes in his portrayal of them as ineffective drifters and spongers, while the radicals thought that Rudin was a satirical portrait of one of them – well-educated, full of fine words, but ineffectual, and able to make no lasting impact on anything. As mentioned before, it was even claimed that Rudin was a caricature of the revolutionary Bakunin, who became one of the founders of the Russian anarchist movement, and whom Turgenev had met when they were both students in Berlin.

  A Nest of the Gentry is Turgenev’s second novel. Turgenev had heard, when he was in Rome in 1857, that the Tsarist government was at last considering the question of the emancipation of the serfs, and decided that he should devote himself entirely to depicting the reality of the social situation in Russia in his writings. Accordingly, he started planning A Nest of the Gentry, which was completed in 1858 and published in early 1859. Whereas in Rudin he had been portraying an aimless member of the educated upper classes, in his next novel he depicted what he most valued in Russian life and tradition and, unusually for him, looked quite critically at some aspects of Western culture.

  The setting is the country house of a wealthy family in the town of O— (most probably Oryol, the county town of the region where Turgenev was born). This house, and the family’s estate, represent here for Turgenev an oasis of peace and stability amidst the turbulent changes taking place around them. Towards the beginning of the novel, the hero, Lavretsky, comes back to re-establish himself in his real home, his “nest”, after years of fruitless strivings away from his roots. We are given a long “pre-history” of the character: his family had used him as an experimental subject for all kinds of advanced educational theories, and so he had fled abroad to escape from them. There he had married a thoroughly vacuous and unscrupulous woman, who soon abandoned what she saw as an uncouth Russian backwoodsman for the greater attractions of the European rakes she encountered. Lavretsky returns to Russia without his wife, embittered but determined to justify his existence by hard work for the social good. He meets again the nineteen-year-old Liza, whom he had known when they were children. They fall in love and, when a false rumour of his wife’s death reaches them, they decide to marry. However, they learn that his wife is still alive. Liza is profoundly religious and, believing that she has committed a grave sin in daring to love a married man, she enters a convent to atone. Some years later, Lavretsky visits the convent, although as an outsider he is not allowed to speak to the nuns. Liza passes by just a few feet away from him and, obviously aware of his presence, simply drops her head and clasps her rosary beads tightly to her.

  However, Lavretsky, in the epilogue to the novel, seems to have achieved some measure of contentment: he has become a good landowner, and has worked very hard at improving the lot of his peasants. Therefore, he has done something positive with his life, and has to a certain extent re-established contact with his roots and ensconced himself within his Russian family “nest”.

  The novel was extremely popular in Russia, because it showed the country’s traditional values in a positive light. This was acceptable for all sections of Russian society, both the reactionary classes and the progressives who desired political change but believed that the fount of all wisdom was to be found in indigenous rural culture.

  The genesis of Turgenev’s next novel On the Eve (1860) – if we are to believe Turgenev – is very peculiar. While under house arrest at Spasskoye in 1852–53, he was visited by a young local landowner, Vasily Karatayev, an army officer who was shortly due to go abroad with his regiment. Just before he departed, he gave Turgenev a story he had written, based on his own experiences as a student in Moscow, when he’d had an affair with a girl who then left him for a Bulgarian patriot. Karatayev felt he had neither the time nor the talent to work this tale up into a decent artistic work, and asked Turgenev to do so. Turgenev later claimed that Karatayev had died in the Crimean War of 1854–56, and so some years later he had devoted himself to reworking the officer’s original sketch.

  In the story, Yelena Stakhova, a Russian girl, falls in love with a Bulgarian patriot, Dmitry Insarov, who is an exile in Russia striving to free his country from its Turkish overlords. He and Yelena marry, and leave for Bulgaria together. However, on the way there, he falls seriously ill and dies in Venice. She decides to take on his struggle for Bulgarian freedom and continues to Bulgaria, where she becomes a nurse. After a few letters home, she is never heard of again. There is a brief meditation at the end of the novel on the death of such young, idealistic people. However much Turgenev admired them, he also, with his usual objectivity, seems to have found them slightly naive and perhaps even rather unpleasantly fanatical.

  When the work appeared in the Russian Herald, the twenty-three-year-old radical critic Nikolai Dobrolyubov issued a long review which, though very warm in praise of the novel’s style and Turgenev’s sympathy for his characters, took issue with his objectivity and impersonality. He declared that this kind of standpoint was now obsolete and irrelevant, and that writers should take an explicit position as to the necessity of improving the conditions of life around them.

  Sometimes erroneously translated as Fathers and Sons, Fathers and Children (1862) is generally considered to be Turgenev’s masterpiece. In this novel he attempts to portray the kind of Russian “new man” who has
energy and drive, and is actively striving to alter Russian society.

  In a letter to an acquaintance, Countess Lambert, Turgenev claimed that he had the first idea of the novel while walking along the beach at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, but in a later article, ‘Concerning Fathers and Children’, he tells his readers that he thought of it while swimming in the sea off the same town.

  Between the writing of On the Eve and Fathers and Children a vast social change had taken place in Russia: the serfs had at last, in March 1861, been emancipated from their owners. Perhaps buoyed up by this positive trend in Russian social life, Turgenev sat down to write a novel with a central character, Yevgeny Bazarov, who is an idealistic young doctor describing himself as a “nihilist” – a word which, as we have seen before, in this context has a positive connotation, signifying someone who subjects every commonly held viewpoint or belief to profound rational analysis.

  The story begins in May 1859. Arkady, a young university student who has just graduated, brings back to his father’s estate a university friend, Yevgeny Bazarov, who is a newly qualified doctor and the only son of a family living on a small country estate. Bazarov represents the new young, idealistic, scientific mentality in Russian society. While there, Yevgeny becomes involved in violent arguments both with Arkady’s father, who is a well-meaning liberal, and particularly with his uncle who, for all his Western ways, is an inveterate reactionary.

  Love interest is provided by the appearance of Anna Odintsova, described as a frivolous woman who spends most of her time reading silly French novels. Bazarov has always scoffed at love as being irrational, but despite that he becomes infatuated with her and has to accept that not everything can be explained scientifically.

  After a couple of weeks, Bazarov finally goes back home to his parents. His father is a retired doctor who still occasionally goes out to tend the local peasantry free of charge. Bazarov accompanies his father on some of these missions, and one day, while carrying out an autopsy on a typhus victim without any disinfectant, he accidentally cuts himself and becomes infected with the disease, soon falling ill and dying. His heartbroken parents are depicted as visiting his grave right into their old age, while beautiful but indifferent nature looks on.

  The story was met with total incomprehension across the political spectrum, with radical reviewers calling Bazarov a malicious caricature of Dobrolyubov, while the conservative press accused him of prostrating himself to the radicals and grovelling at their feet.

  Although the idea for his next novel, Smoke, may have oc­curred to Turgenev as early as 1862, shortly after the publication of Fathers and Children, he took more than five years to write it, and it was not published until March 1867. He began drafting Smoke in Baden-Baden in November 1864, and most of the story takes place there, over less than a fortnight in August 1862, among the large community of wealthy Russians living in the town. The central character, the thirty-year-old Grigory Litvinov, after completing his university education in Western Europe, is awaiting the arrival of his fiancée Tatyana, who is also holidaying in Western Europe, so that they can return to Russia together. However, in Baden-Baden he meets Irina, a woman he had known and been infatuated with some ten years before, now married to another man. Their love affair is rekindled. He breaks off his engagement to Tatyana and begs Irina to run off with him, but she does not have the courage to do so. Litvinov returns to Russia desolate and alone. After several years, he becomes a successful farmer on his estate, meets Tatyana again. She forgives him and they marry.

  The title derives from the frequent appearance in the novel of smoke (such as when Litvinov is on the train back to Russia and the smoke from the steam engine is billowing around both sides of his carriage, making the surroundings almost invisible) as a symbol of the confusion and futility of life.

  Most of the critics deplored the novel, both for its immorality – a married woman falling in love with an old flame – and for its negative – indeed, almost contemptuous – portrait of the typical Russians who lived abroad.

  The background of Virgin Soil (1877) is the great movement of young idealistic students, most of them from the educated and moneyed classes, who from the late 1860s through to the early 1870s “went to the people”. Living among the peasantry and urban working classes, they shared their work and living conditions – and, of course, tried to imbue them with modern democratic ideals. Especially among the reactionary country people these youths were met with anything from amusement to contempt, and in many cases were actually handed over to the police by them as troublemakers, leading to large-scale trials, with many of the radicals being exiled to Siberia and other remote areas of the Russian Empire.

  The story, the most complex and ambitious that Turgenev ever attempted, presents many minor characters and sub­sidiary plots. Mashurina is a follower of the fanatical and charismatic Vasily Nikolayevich. However, not all his ad­herents are uncritical of him – for example Nezhdanov, with whom Mashurina is in love, who is too objective and sceptical to follow anybody unquestioningly. The illegitimate and impecunious son of a nobleman, he has to earn his living by tutoring the children of wealthy reactionary members of the aristocracy and high government bureaucrats. Nezhdanov, who is in love with Marianna, another naive radical, proves to be a “superfluous man” – unsure both of his revolutionary ideals and of his love for Marianna. He is, more than anything else, an aristocrat who longs to be a peasant, and a poet and dreamer, not a political activist.

  Nezhdanov and Marianna run off together, and are given protection by Solomin, a rural factory manager who, although not a revolutionary, is sympathetic to those who want change. He is the novel’s real hero, a hard-working modern man: he has studied science and maths, and lived and worked in Britain. He – like Turgenev – believes in slow and patient change. Nezhdanov, trying to become one of the local peasantry, simply succeeds in drinking himself into stupor in the local pubs and having to be carried back home. Solomin persuades Marianna that she can be far more useful to the common people, not by trying to spread revolutionary ideals, but by becoming a nurse or teacher to the local children. Humiliated as a result of his failure to communicate with the local working people, and even more depressed when he realizes that he and Marianna are drifting apart, Nezhdanov writes to Marianna and Solomin telling them to marry each other, then he shoots himself. Marianna and Solomin plan to get married and, although we are never told what happens in the end, they presumably devote themselves to the improvement of society in the ways advocated by Solomin. As mentioned before, barely two months after Virgin Soil had been published, as Turgenev was being criticized in Russia as out of touch with the present reality of the country, fifty young people were put on trial – of whom eighteen were women.

  Select Bibliography

  Biographies:

  Magarshack, David, Turgenev: A Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1954)

  Pritchett, Victor, The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev (London: Chatto and Windus, 1977)

  Schapiro, Leonard, Turgenev: His Life and Times (Oxford: OUP, 1978)

  Troyat, Henri, Turgenev, tr. Nancy Amphoux (London: W.H. Allen, 1989)

  Yarmolinsky, Avrahm, Turgenev: The Man, His Art and His Age (New York, NY: Orion Press, 1959)

  Additional Recommended Background Material:

  Andrew, Joe, Offord, Derek and Reid, Robert, eds., Turgenev and Russian Culture (Amsterdam and New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008)

  Andrew, Joe, and Reid, Robert, eds., Turgenev: Art, Ideology and Legacy (Amsterdam and New York, NY: Rodopi, 2010)

  Beaumont, Barbara, tr., and ed., Flaubert and Turgenev: A Friendship in Letters (London: Athlone Press, 1985)

  Costlow, Jane, Worlds within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)

  Freeborn, Richard, Turgenev the Novelist’s Novelist: A Study (Oxford: OUP, 1963)

  Kettle, Arnold, On the Eve (Open Univ
ersity Press, 1982)

  Knowles, A.V., Ivan Turgenev (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1988)

  Lampert, E., Sons against Fathers (Oxford: OUP, 1965)

  Lowe, David, tr., Turgenev: Letters (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1983)

  Lowe, David, ed., Critical Essays on Ivan Turgenev (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall and Co., 1989)

  Sundkvist, Luis, Turgenev and the Question of the Russian Artist, (Unpublished doctoral thesis, 2010). Available online at: www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1810/228706/Turgenev_thesis.pdf

  Matlaw, Ralph (ed.)., Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov (Indiana University Press, 1976)

  Moser, Charles, Ivan Turgenev (New York, NY, and London: Columbia University Press, 1972)

  Seeley, Frank, Turgenev: A Reading of his Fiction (Cambridge: CUP, 1991)

  Waddington, Patrick, ed., Turgenev and Britain (Oxford: Berg, 1995)

  Waddington, Patrick, Turgenev and England (London: MacMillan, 1980)

  Woodward, James, Metaphysical Conflict: A Study of the Major Novels of Ivan Turgenev (Munich: Sagner, 1990)