On the Eve | Page 2

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 pere 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 Tourguenev (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