On the Eve

Elena Stakhova has three men orbiting her father's garden: Shubin, a sculptor who flirts and postures; Bersenev, a scholar who reasons carefully about everything and commits to nothing; and Insarov, a Bulgarian revolutionary who talks about a single subject, the liberation of his homeland from Ottoman rule, with a single-mindedness the Russian men around him find almost embarrassing. Turgenev stacks the comparison so plainly that it reads less like a love triangle than an argument: aesthetic sensitivity and intellectual refinement, the two things Russian gentry culture prizes most in its young men, both lose to a foreigner whose only qualification is that he has one goal and will not be talked out of it.

Elena's diary, which the novel quotes directly, tracks her arriving at the same verdict as the reader: that loving Insarov means choosing to leave Russia, her family, and the entire framework of a comfortable domestic future for a cause that has nothing to do with her own country. Turgenev wrote the novel in 1859, on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs the title gestures toward, and the pointed absence of any Russian equivalent to Insarov, a native man willing to act rather than merely feel correctly about injustice, was read by the radical critic Nikolai Dobrolyubov as a direct provocation. His essay on the novel, titled 'When Will the Real Day Come?', argued that Russia badly needed its own Insarov and all but accused Turgenev's own class of producing only Shubins and Bersenevs. Turgenev, a liberal gradualist by temperament, was furious at being drafted into a revolutionary argument he hadn't intended to make, and the dispute helped end his relationship with the journal that published Dobrolyubov.

Shubin spends the novel failing to finish a bust of Insarov, abandoning it half-formed once he realizes he cannot capture whatever quality makes the Bulgarian compelling to Elena. The detail is Turgenev's driest joke at his own artistic class's expense: the sculptor can render likeness but not conviction, and a Russian art devoted to sensibility keeps discovering it has no vocabulary for a man who simply does what he says he will do. Shubin's other unfinished works, sketches of local peasant women, tally the same gap between technical facility and any subject worth the effort.