This exquisite novel, first published in 1859, like so many great works
of art, holds depths of meaning which at first sight lie veiled under
the simplicity and harmony of the technique. To the English reader _On
the Eve_ is a charmingly drawn picture of a quiet Russian household,
with a delicate analysis of a young girl’s soul; but to Russians it is
also a deep and penetrating diagnosis of the destinies of the Russia of
the fifties.
Elena, the Russian girl, is the central figure of the novel. In
comparing her with Turgenev’s other women, the reader will remark that
he is allowed to come into closer spiritual contact with her than even
with Lisa. The successful portraits of women drawn by men in fiction are
generally figures for the imagination to play on; however much that is
told to one about them, the secret springs of their character are left
a little obscure, but when Elena stands before us we know all the
innermost secrets of her character. Her strength of will, her serious,
courageous, proud soul, her capacity for passion, all the play of her
delicate idealistic nature troubled by the contradictions, aspirations,
and unhappiness that the dawn of love brings to her, all this is
conveyed to us by the simplest and the most consummate art. The diary
(chapter xvi.) that Elena keeps is in itself a masterly revelation of
a young girl’s heart; it has never been equalled by any other novelist.
How exquisitely Turgenev reveals his characters may be seen by an
examination of the parts Shubin the artist, and Bersenyev the student,
play towards Elena. Both young men are in love with her, and the
description of their after relations as friends, and the feelings of
Elena towards them, and her own self-communings are interwoven with
unfaltering skill. All the most complex and baffling shades of the
mental life, which in the hands of many latter-day novelists build up
characters far too thin and too unconvincing, in the hands of Turgenev
are used with deftness and certainty to bring to light that great
kingdom which is always lying hidden beneath the surface, beneath
the common-place of daily life. In the difficult art of literary
perspective, in the effective grouping of contrasts in character and
the criss-cross of the influence of the different individuals, lies the
secret of Turgenev’s supremacy. As an example the reader may note how he
is made to judge Elena through six pairs of eyes. Her father’s contempt
for his daughter, her mother’s affectionate bewilderment, Shubin’s
petulant criticism, Bersenyev’s half hearted enthralment, Insarov’s
recognition, and Zoya’s indifference, being the facets for converging
light on Elena’s sincerity and depth of soul. Again one may note
Turgenev’s method for rehabilitating Shubin in our eyes; Shubin is
simply made to criticise Stahov; the thing is done in a few seemingly
careless lines, but these lines lay bare Shubin’s strength and weakness,
the fluidity of his nature. The reader who does not see the art which
underlies almost every line of _On the Eve_ is merely paying the highest
tribute to that art; as often the clear waters of a pool conceal its
surprising depth. Taking Shubin’s character as an example of creative
skill, we cannot call to mind any instance in the range of European
fiction where the typical artist mind, on its lighter sides, has been
analysed with such delicacy and truth as here by Turgenev. Hawthorne and
others have treated it, but the colour seems to fade from their artist
characters when a comparison is made between them and Shubin. And yet
Turgenev’s is but a sketch of an artist, compared with, let us say, the
admirable figure of Roderick Hudson. The irresponsibility, alertness,
the whimsicality and mobility of Shubin combine to charm and irritate
the reader in the exact proportion that such a character affects him in
actual life; there is not the least touch of exaggeration, and all the
values are kept to a marvel. Looking at the minor characters, perhaps
one may say that the husband, Stahov, will be the most suggestive, and
not the least familiar character, to English households. His essentially
masculine meanness, his self-complacency, his unconscious indifference
to the opinion of others, his absurdity as ‘un père de famille’ is
balanced by the foolish affection and jealousy which his wife, Anna
Vassilyevna, cannot help feeling towards him. The perfect balance and
duality of Turgenev’s outlook is here shown by the equal cleverness with
which he seizes on and quietly derides the typical masculine and typical
feminine attitude in such a married life as the two Stahovs’.
Turning to the figure of the Bulgarian hero, it is interesting to find
from the _Souvenirs sur Tourguénev_ (published in 1887) that Turgenev’s
only distinct failure of importance in character drawing, Insarov, was
not taken from life, but was the legacy of a friend Karateieff, who
implored Turgenev to work out an unfinished conception. Insarov is a
figure of wood. He is so cleverly constructed, and the central idea
behind him is so strong, that his wooden joints move naturally, and the
spectator has only the instinct, not the certainty, of being cheated.
The idea he incarnates, that of a man whose soul is aflame with
patriotism, is finely suggested, but an idea, even a great one, does
not make an individuality. And in fact Insarov is not a man, he is an
automaton. To compare Shubin’s utterances with his is to perceive that
there is no spontaneity, no inevitability in Insarov. He is a patriotic
clock wound up to go for the occasion, and in truth he is very useful.
Only on his deathbed, when the unexpected happens, and the machinery
runs down, do we feel moved. Then, he appears more striking dead than
alive--a rather damning testimony to the power Turgenev credits him
with. This artistic failure of Turgenev’s is, as he no doubt recognised,
curiously lessened by the fact that young girls of Elena’s lofty
idealistic type are particularly impressed by certain stiff types of
men of action and great will-power, whose capacity for moving straight
towards a certain goal by no means implies corresponding brain-power.
The insight of a Shubin and the moral worth of a Bersenyev are not so
valuable to the Elenas of this world, whose ardent desire to be made
good use of, and to seek some great end, is best developed by strength
of aim in the men they love.
And now to see what the novel before us means to the Russian mind, we
must turn to the infinitely suggestive background. Turgenev’s genius was
of the same force in politics as in art; it was that of seeing aright.
He saw his country as it was, with clearer eyes than any man before
or since. If Tolstoi is a purer native expression of Russia’s force,
Turgenev is the personification of Russian aspiration working with the
instruments of wide cosmopolitan culture. As a critic of his countrymen
nothing escaped Turgenev’s eye, as a politician he foretold nearly all
that actually came to pass in his life, and as a consummate artist,
led first and foremost by his love for his art, his novels are undying
historical pictures. It is not that there is anything allegorical in
his novels--allegory is at the furthest pole from his method: it is
that whenever he created an important figure in fiction, that figure is
necessarily a revelation of the secrets of the fatherland, the soil, the
race. Turgenev, in short, was a psychologist not merely of men, but of
nations; and so the chief figure of _On the Eve_, Elena, foreshadows
and stands for the rise of young Russia in the sixties. Elena is young
Russia, and to whom does she turn in her prayer for strength? Not to
Bersenyev, the philosopher, the dreamer; not to Shubin, the man carried
outside himself by every passing distraction; but to the strong man,
Insarov. And here the irony of Insarov being made a foreigner, a
Bulgarian, is significant of Turgenev’s distrust of his country’s
weakness. The hidden meaning of the novel is a cry to the coming men
to unite their strength against the foe without and the foe within the
gates; it is an appeal to them not only to hasten the death of the
old regime of Nicolas I, but an appeal to them to conquer their
sluggishness, their weakness, and their apathy. It is a cry for Men.
Turgenev sought in vain in life for a type of man to satisfy Russia, and
ended by taking no living model for his hero, but the hearsay Insarov, a
foreigner. Russia has not yet produced men of this type. But the artist
does not despair of the future. Here we come upon one of the most
striking figures of Turgenev--that of Uvar Ivanovitch. He symbolises the
ever-predominant type of Russian, the sleepy, slothful Slav of to-day,
yesterday, and to-morrow. He is the Slav whose inherent force Europe is
as ignorant of as he is himself. Though he speaks only twenty sentences
in the book he is a creation of Tolstoian force. His very words are
dark and of practically no significance. There lies the irony of the
portrait. The last words of the novel, the most biting surely that
Turgenev ever wrote, contain the whole essence of _On the Eve_. On the
Eve of What? one asks. Time has given contradictory answers to the men
of all parties. The Elenas of to-day need not turn their eyes abroad
to find their counterpart in spirit; so far at least the pessimists are
refuted: but the note of death that Turgenev strikes in his marvellous
chapter on Venice has still for young Russia an ominous echo--so many
generations have arisen eager, only to be flung aside helpless, that one
asks, what of the generation that fronts Autocracy to-day?
‘Do you remember I asked you, “Will there ever be men among us?” and
you answered, “there will be. O primaeval force!” And now from here in
“my poetic distance”, I will ask you again, “What do you say, Uvar
Ivanovitch, will there be?”’
‘Uvar Ivanovitch flourished his fingers, and fixed his enigmatical stare
into the far distance.’
This creation of an universal national type, out of the flesh and blood
of a fat taciturn country gentleman, brings us to see that Turgenev
was not merely an artist, but that he was a poet using fiction as his
medium. To this end it is instructive to compare Jane Austen, perhaps
the greatest English exponent of the domestic novel, with the Russian
master, and to note that, while as a novelist she emerges favourably
from the comparison, she is absolutely wanting in his poetic insight.
How petty and parochial appears her outlook in _Emma_, compared to the
wide and unflinching gaze of Turgenev. She painted most admirably the
English types she knew, and how well she knew them! but she failed to
correlate them with the national life; and yet, while her men and women
were acting and thinking, Trafalgar and Waterloo were being fought and
won. But each of Turgenev’s novels in some subtle way suggests that the
people he introduces are playing their little part in a great national
drama everywhere around us, invisible, yet audible through the clamour
of voices near us. And so _On the Eve_, the work of a poet, has certain
deep notes, which break through the harmonious tenor of the whole, and
strangely and swiftly transfigure the quiet story, troubling us with a
dawning consciousness of the march of mighty events. Suddenly a strange
sense steals upon the reader that he is living in a perilous atmosphere,
filling his heart with foreboding, and enveloping at length the
characters themselves, all unconsciously awaiting disaster in the
sunny woods and gardens of Kuntsovo. But not till the last chapters are
reached does the English reader perceive that in recreating for him the
mental atmosphere of a single educated Russian household, Turgenev has
been casting before his eyes the faint shadow of the national drama
which was indeed played, though left unfinished, on the Balkan
battlefields of 1876-7. Briefly, Turgenev, in sketching the dawn of love
in a young girl’s soul, has managed faintly, but unmistakably, to make
spring and flourish in our minds the ineradicable, though hidden, idea
at the back of Slav thought--the unification of the Slav races. How
doubly welcome that art should be which can lead us, the foreigners,
thus straight to the heart of the national secrets of a great people,
secrets which our own critics and diplomatists must necessarily
misrepresent. Each of Turgenev’s novels may be said to contain
a light-bringing rejoinder to the old-fashioned criticism of the
Muscovite, current up to the rise of the Russian novel, and still,
unfortunately, lingering among us; but _On the Eve_, of all the novels,
contains perhaps the most instructive political lesson England can
learn. Europe has always had, and most assuredly England has been
over-rich in those alarm-monger critics, watchdogs for ever baying at
Slav cupidity, treachery, intrigue, and so on and so on. It is useful to
have these well-meaning animals on the political premises, giving noisy
tongue whenever the Slav stretches out his long arm and opens his drowsy
eyes, but how rare it is to find a man who can teach us to interpret
a nation’s aspirations, to gauge its inner force, its aim, its
inevitability. Turgenev gives us such clues. In the respectful, if
slightly forced, silence that has been imposed by certain recent
political events on the tribe of faithful watchdogs, it may be permitted
to one to say, that whatever England’s interest may be in relation to
Russia’s development, it is better for us to understand the force of
Russian aims, before we measure our strength against it. And a novel,
such as _On the Eve_, though now nearly forty years old, and to the
short-sighted out of date, reveals in a flash the attitude of the Slav
towards his political destiny. His aspirations may have to slumber
through policy or necessity; they may be distorted or misrepresented, or
led astray by official action, but we confess that for us, _On the Eve_
suggests the existence of a mighty lake, whose waters, dammed back for a
while, are rising slowly, but are still some way from the brim. How long
will it take to the overflow? Nobody knows; but when the long winter
of Russia’s dark internal policy shall be broken up, will the snows,
melting on the mountains, stream south-west, inundating the Valley of
the Danube? Or, as the national poet, Pushkin, has sung, will there be
a pouring of many Slavonian rivulets into the Russian sea, a powerful
attraction of the Slav races towards a common centre to create an era of
peace and development within, whereby Russia may rise free and rejoicing
to face her great destinies? Hard and bitter is the shaping of nations.
Uvar Ivanovitch still fixes his enigmatical stare into the far distance.