"ON THE EVE"
_On the Eve_, not finished and published till 1859, but projected in
1855, and then laid aside for _Rudin_ and _A House of Gentlefolk_,
holds depths of meaning which at first sight lie veiled under the
simple harmonious surface. To the English reader _On the Eve_ is a
charming picture of a quiet Russian household, with a delicate analysis
of a young girl's soul. For Russians, however, on the background is
cast the wavering shadow of Russia's national aspirations.
Elena, the heroine, as Turgenev tells us, was "a new type in Russian
life," when his idea of her first began to trouble his imagination;
but "I could not find the hero to whom she, with her vague but strong
aspirations for liberty, could give herself." In comparing her with
Natalya and Liza the reader will remark that he is allowed to come into
even closer spiritual contact with her than with them. When Elena
stands before us we know the innermost secrets of her character. Her
strength of will, her serious, courageous, proud soul, her capacity
for passion, all the play of her idealistic nature troubled by the
contradictions, aspirations, and unhappiness that the dawn of love
brings to her, all this is conveyed to us by a simple and consummate
art. The diary (chap. 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, in the hands of Turgenev are used with deftness
and certainty to bring to light the complexity of motives and
instincts which is always lying hidden beneath the surface, beneath
the commonplace 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 one of the secrets of Turgenev's supremacy. As an example the
reader may note how he is made to judge Elena through six pairs of
eyes--Stahov'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. 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 father of Elena 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_, are 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 are 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
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 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
recognized, 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 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 meant to the contemporary
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. As a critic of his generation little
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 farthest 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 not only an appeal to them to hasten the death of
the old régime of Nicholas 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 symbolizes the ever-predominant type of Russian, the sleepy, the
slothful Slav of yesterday. 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 social picture. 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?[17]
[17] Written in 1895.
"'Do you remember I asked you, "Will there ever be men among us?" and
you answered, "There will be." O primæval 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 a 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 her picture of manners is as
indestructible as his, she is absolutely wanting in his poetic insight.
How petty and parochial appears her outlook in _Emma_, compared with
Turgenev's wide and unflinching gaze. 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 round 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 Kuntsevo. 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 1876-77. 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
foreigner, thus straight to the heart of the national secrets of a
great people, secrets which our own critics and diplomatists have
so often misrepresented. 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 great Russian novel, and
still, unfortunately, lingering among us;[18] 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 very 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[19] 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 it is 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 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.
[18] Passages written in 1895.
[19] Passages written in 1895.
* * * * *
Twenty-two years ago the above appreciation of _On the Eve_ was written
by the present writer, who, on re-reading it, finds it necessary to
alter only two or three sentences. The sentence "The respectful, if
slightly forced, silence that has been imposed by recent political
events on the tribe of faithful watchdogs" is an allusion to the first
attempt made by our diplomatists and our Court, on the accession of
Nicholas II., to reverse the traditional policy of England's hostility
to Russia. The sequel, despite the surprising ups and downs of the
political barometer, was determined by Germany's naval policy and the
Anglo-French _entente_.
VII
"FATHERS AND CHILDREN"