On the Eve (Alma Classics) Read online

  On the Eve

  Ivan Turgenev

  Translated by Michael Pursglove

  ALMA CLASSICS

  Alma classics

  an imprint of:

  Alma books Ltd

  3 Castle Yard

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  Surrey TW10 6TF

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  On the Eve first published in 1860

  This translation first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2017

  Translation © Michael Pursglove, 2017

  Extra Material © Alma Classics

  Cover design by Will Dady

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  isbn: 978-1-84749-632-4

  All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or pre­sumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Contents

  On the Eve

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Notes

  Extra Material on Ivan Turgenev’s On the Eve

  Ivan Turgenev’s Life

  Ivan Turgenev’s Works

  Select Bibliography

  Introduction

  On the Eve was the third of Turgenev’s six novels to be published. He had, however, begun to plan it as early as 1853, before he had published a single novel. Work on Rudin and A Nest of the Gentry then took priority, and he did not return to On the Eve until 1859; on the manuscript he wrote: “Begun in Vichy 16th/28th June 1859. Finished at Spasskoye Sunday 25th October/6th November 1859.” He had completed the second half of the novel in a little over two weeks. A few days later he sent a fair copy to Countess Yelizaveta Lambert (1821-83), the recipient of over one hundred letters from Turgenev, a devout Christian who had had a decisive influence on the writing of A Nest of the Gentry. She thoroughly disliked the novel, so much so that Turgenev was briefly tempted to burn the manuscript. He did not burn it, however; nor did he offer it to the Contemporary, in which A Nest of the Gentry had been published. Instead, On the Eve was published in the first two numbers of the Russian Herald for 1860. It appeared in book form shortly afterwards. Meanwhile the Contemporary had to make do with Turgenev’s article ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’ which, like On the Eve was published in January 1860. The novel demonstrates, in the character of Insarov, Turgenev’s growing interest in the Quixotic type, the man who, above all else, has faith in the truth, the enthusiast, the idealist prepared to make any sacrifice to obtain that ideal. Of all Turgenev’s characters, Insarov is probably the most Quixotic, although one critic, while lambasting Yelena’s supposed immorality, inadvertently hit on a truth when he called Yelena a “Don Quixote in a skirt”. The Hamlet type is represented to a greater or lesser degree by Bersenev and Shubin, and also by Kurnatovsky who, in early versions of the novel, had a much bigger role than the relatively minor role assigned to him in the published version.

  Almost immediately after its publication in Russia, On the Eve was translated into French (by Pierre-Paul Douhaire) as La Veille, although Turgenev had a very low opinion of Douhaire’s efforts. By 1886 two more French translations had appeared, as well as the first English translation (by Charles Turner, 1871) and translations into six other European languages.

  As Turgenev makes clear in a letter of 1871, the title of the novel refers in the first instance to the Emancipation of the Serfs. Ever since the accession of Alexander II in 1855, it had become clear that some solution to the serf problem was needed, on both moral and economic grounds. However, Turgenev set his novel between summer 1853 and spring 1854 – on the eve of the Crimean War, to which there are a number of references. The war was seen by the Slav peoples of south-east Europe as an opportunity to throw off the Ottoman yoke, and this, of course, is Insarov’s primary concern in life. However, the events of 1853–54 did not turn out to be the hoped for “eve of liberation”. The Turks dealt harshly with an insurrection, and Bulgaria did not gain its independence until 1882. While Turgenev introduces the single Russian word which means “on the eve” (nakanune) several times in more mundane, less symbolic contexts, it is surely no accident that it is the concluding word of Chapter 10, in which Bersenev first introduces Yelena to Insarov.

  The novel produced what Turgenev himself called an “epidemic” of critical reaction, most of it centred on Yelena. In 1860 alone there were at least fifteen reviews of the novel in ten different publications, with one weekly, Our Time, responsible for no less than four of them. The concern of most critics was the propriety or otherwise of Yelena’s behaviour, an aspect of the novel which Turgenev refused point-blank to change. By far the most important of the critical responses was the article by the young radical critic of the Contemporary, Nikolai Dobrolyubov, entitled ‘When Will the Real Day Come?’ (a paraphrase of Shubin’s question to Uvar Ivanovich at the end of Chapter 30) and published in the Contemporary in 1860. Turgenev asked the editor, his old friend Nikolai Nekrasov, not to publish it, and when his request was declined he, like other liberals, broke with the Contemporary.

  Dobrolyubov was not concerned with Yelena’s behaviour; rather he saw in her, rather than in Insarov, the main protagonist of the story. He devotes almost a quarter of his article to justifying this thesis and to analysing her character in sentences such as: “In her was manifested that obscure longing for something, that unconscious, yet irresistible demand for new life, for new people, which is now gripping the whole of Russian society… In Yelena we find a vivid reflection of the highest aspirations of contemporary life.”

  It was not only in Russia that critics felt that Yelena, rather than Insarov, was the most interesting, not to say controversial character. In the French translation by Henri-Hippolyte Delaveau, published in Paris in 1863, under an umbrella title Nouvelles scènes de la vie russe (the volume includes First Love), Turgenev’s novel is given the title Éléna. Turgenev heartily approved of this translation. The first translation into German, published in 1871, bore the title Helene, with a literal translation of Turgenev’s title (Am Vorabend) in brackets. Such titles seem justified when one considers that Yelena appears in person, or is mentioned by name, in thirty-two of the novel’s thirty-five chapters.

  All Turgenev’s major characters are drawn from life, but this is not to say that individual prototypes can be identified. In all his novels his characters are composite characters, and this is particularly true of Yelena. Turgenev had many real-life examples, Russian and foreign, of self-sacrificing young women to choose from. These included the Decembrist wives who followed their husbands into Siberian exile in 1826 and did not return until 1856, or Garibaldi’s first wife, Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro, a Brazilian, who left friends and family and died in Italy fleeing from Austrian and French troops. Both in life and in his fiction, Turgenev was drawn to strong-willed, independent women. His first two novels provide classic variants of the type: Natalya Lasunskaya (Rudin) and Liza Kalitina (A Nest of the Gentry), and there are equally striking examples in his post-1860 novels. Turgenev was probably equally, if not more, influenced by fictional exampl
es, both Russian and foreign, of the strong-willed woman: George Sand’s heroines and, from Russian literature, a number of such characters from the 1820s onwards, the most famous of which is Pushkin’s Tatyana, the heroine of Eugene Onegin. Turgenev was a great admirer of Pushkin and, only three years after the publication of On the Eve, completed, with Louis Viardot, a translation of Pushkin’s masterpiece into French.

  Dobrolyubov’s emphasis on Yelena leaves open at least three obvious questions. Why is Insarov not the hero? Why are there no Russian Insarovs? Are strong-willed people to be found among Russian women rather than Russian men? The very premise of the first question is rejected by some critics, for whom Insarov is the hero. They point to a neat linear development from Rudin to Fathers and Children and beyond in Turgenev’s search for the “new man” who would be a leader of society in the new, post-Emancipation Russia. He begins with two variants of the Romantic “superfluous man” (a term which he himself had popularized): Rudin and Lavretsky. Conscious that they were “men of the Forties” rather than “men of the Sixties”, and that the radical critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky, in a famous article, ‘A Russian at the Rendezvous’ (1858), had excoriated the vacillating, ineffectual heroes of Asya and Rudin, Turgenev set about trying to portray a “new man”. He was, however, unable to detect the presence of any “new men” in the Russia of his day. In a letter of 1859, he said that the underlying idea of On the Eve was “the need for consciously heroic natures… so that the thing could move forward”. He found the germ of such a heroic nature in a document that fell into his hands almost fortuitously. In 1853 his neighbour, a young landowner called Vasily Alexandrovich Karateyev, who was leaving home to join Russian forces in the Crimea and feared he would be killed there, presented Turgenev with a small notebook and asked him to arrange for its publication. The notebook has not survived, and its contents can only partially be reconstructed from subsequent comments by Turgenev and others. It appears to have been a fictional tale, based on Karateyev’s own experiences. The story was badly written and ultimately unpublishable; only the episode at Tsaritsyno was sufficiently well written to be later incorporated into Turgenev’s novel as Chapter 15. Turgenev was, however, able to include the broad outlines of Karateyev’s notebook in his new novel: an affair between two Russians; the girl, a Muscovite, rejects the Russian in favour of a Bulgarian student; they leave for Bulgaria; the Bulgarian falls ill with tuberculosis and the pair go to Venice in a vain attempt to retrieve his health. The Bulgarian in the story was based on Nikolai Dimitrov Katranov (1829-53), a Russian-educated Bulgarian poet, translator of Byron and Goethe and revolutionary, who, like Insarov, died in Venice of tuberculosis. Karateyev himself did in fact survive the Crimean War, but died in 1859, before the publication of On the Eve. Writing in 1880, Turgenev recalled his reaction to reading Karateyev’s notebook: “That’s the hero I’ve been looking for.” Having found the next best thing to a Russian “new man” – the Bulgarian Insarov – Turgenev, so the argument runs, went on to create a Russian “new man” in Bazarov, the hero of Fathers and Children.

  Dobrolyubov himself addresses the second question and, in effect, repeats explicitly the question and answer that Turgenev puts into the mouth of Yelena in Chapter 16: “Why is he not a Russian? No, he couldn’t be a Russian.” Given the impossibility of proving a negative, the reader has to take such assertions on trust. Turgenev had not, of course, ever met Katranov: he knew him only from the clumsily written pages of Karateyev’s notebook. In the view of many, Turgenev’s attempt to flesh out Katranov/Insarov into a three-dimensional, believable, sympathetic character is not wholly successful. Dobrolyubov makes this point at some length, complaining that Insarov’s “inner world is inaccessible to us”, while his fellow radical Dmitry Pisarev wondered why Turgenev “wrote away to Bulgaria for the impossible and unnecessary Insarov”, adding that he could not “accept Insarov as a living being”. Turgenev’s portrayal of the other important Russian males in the novel – Bersenev, Shubin, Nikolai Artemyevich Stakhov and the enigmatic Uvar Ivanovich – is far more convincing. Indeed, so well is the character of the half-French, half-Russian sculptor Shubin drawn that Turgenev’s friend and translator William Ralston was moved to say: “Scarcely any other novelist has been able to produce a striking portrait by so few strokes”. Yelena, however, has no hesitation in rejecting her Russian suitors to elope with her Bulgarian. It is only the parting with her mother which causes her any grief.

  Any assessment of the novel has to take account of several dominant themes: guilt, fate, art, nature, happiness and, especially, death. The latter theme comes to the fore in what is in effect the epilogue to the novel, the three final chapters – the Venice chapters – in which Insarov and Yelena attend a performance of La traviata. Turgenev had attended the last performance of Angiolina Bosio – the Italian soprano famous for her portrayal of Violetta, who died in Moscow in 1859 at the age of twenty-nine – and been profoundly moved. What Richard Freeborn calls “the pessimistic futility of his vision of the world” is more marked in this novel than in any of Turgenev’s other works.

  Whether the reader focuses on Insarov or Yelena, On the Eve is still likely to be read as primarily a love story. The nature of love – as pleasure or sacrifice – is an important element in the conversation between Bersenev and Shubin in the first chapter of the novel. All six of Turgenev’s novels, even the more satirical and politically engaged Smoke and Virgin Soil, as well as many of his shorter works, are basically love stories – although it is true that they all have satirical elements in them to a greater or lesser degree. Here, for instance, in the characters of the complacent high official Kurnatovsky and the ludicrously garrulous and ill-informed Lupoyarov, Turgenev indirectly laments the lack of Russian Insarovs. Whereas for Dobrolyubov, “the real day will come” in the shape of a real-life personage, a revolutionary after his own heart, for Turgenev – although he subsequently revised his opinion – it was to come in the shape of Bazarov, the “nihilist” (another word popularized by Turgenev) who dominates Fathers and Children. However, when, at the end of the novel, Uvar Ivanovich is asked to repeat his assertion in Chapter 30 that “there will be” real people produced in Russia, he declines to do so and merely wags his fingers again.

  * * *

  It is an unwise translator who fails to take account of the work of previous translators. The work of Constance Garnett (1895) and the more recent translations of Gilbert Gardiner (1950) and David McDuff (1999) have all played their part in the preparation of this translation. So too did the late Felix Abramovich Litvin, who elucidated a number of linguistic problems which had escaped the notice of previous editors, and Christian Müller, who, on behalf of Alma Classics, edited the translation with his usual thoroughness and expertise.

  – Michael Pursglove

  On the Eve

  1

  On one of the hottest of summer days of 1853, on the bank of the Moscow River, not far from Kuntsevo,* two young men lay on the grass in the shade of a tall lime tree. One, who looked about twenty-three years old, was tall and swarthy, had a sharp and somewhat bent nose, a high forehead and a suppressed smile on his wide lips. He was lying on his back and gazing thoughtfully into the distance, his small grey eyes half-closed. The other lay prone, supporting his head, with its mop of fair curls, on his hands, and also gazing into the distance. He was three years older than his companion, but seemed much younger; his moustache was barely visible and his chin was covered with wispy down. There was something childishly appealing, something attractively refined in the delicate features of his fresh, round face, in his soft brown eyes, handsome thick lips and small white hands. Everything about him exuded the joy and happiness of health, the youthfulness, insouciance, self-confidence, indulgence and charm of youth. He even rolled his eyes, smiled and propped up his head, as little boys do when they know they are the object of admiring looks. He was wearing a capacious white top, rather like a blouse; a blue kerchief was encircle
d round his thin neck and a battered straw hat was lying about in the grass beside him.

  Compared with him, his companion seemed an old man, and no one, looking at his angular figure, would have thought that he was happy and enjoying himself. He was lying awkwardly; his large head, broad at its top and pointed at its base, sat awkwardly on his long neck; this awkwardness could be seen in the very position of his arms, of his body – which was tightly wrapped in a short black coat – and of the raised knees of his long legs, which were like the back legs of a grasshopper. For all that, he could not fail to be acknowledged as an educated man; the stamp of “orderliness” lay on his whole clumsy being; his face, unlovely and even somewhat comical, was expressive of kindness and habitual thoughtfulness. His name was Andrei Petrovich Bersenev; the fair-haired young man was called Pavel Yakovlevich Shubin.

  “Why don’t you lie on your front, like me?” Shubin began. “It’s much better that way. Especially when you lift your legs up and bang your heels together – like this. Grass under your nose; if you get fed up of looking at the landscape, look at some fat-bellied beetle crawling up a blade of grass or an ant scurrying about. It’s true – it’s much better. But you’ve adopted some sort of pseudo-classical pose, for all the world like a ballerina resting her elbows on a cardboard rock. Just remember that you’re now perfectly entitled to relax. Not everyone gets a third-class degree! Relax, sir; stop straining yourself. Stretch your limbs!”

  Shubin delivered this speech through his nose, half lethargically, half jokingly (spoilt children speak like this to friends of the family who bring them sweets) and, without waiting for an answer, went on:

  “What amazes me most of all in ants, beetles and other members of the insect race is their remarkable seriousness: they run back and forth with such serious physiognomies, as if their lives too mean something! You wouldn’t credit it, but Man, the king of creation, the highest of beings, looks at them, yet they’ve no time for him; then again, some gnat will settle on the nose of the king of creation and begin to feed off it. It’s an insult. But, on the other hand, how is their life any worse than ours? And why shouldn’t they put on airs if we allow ourselves to do likewise? Go on, then, Mr Philosopher, solve that problem for me! Why are you silent, eh?”