In this nineteenth century Russian novel, a young lady, Yelena, is pursued by no more than three suitors. “From the age of sixteen she became completely independent; she began to live her own life, but it was a solitary life. Her soul both blazed up and died down in solitude; she thrashed about like a bird in a cage, but there was no cage: no one was constraining her, no one was holding her back, but she struggled and exhausted herself.” Yelena ends up falling for a mysterious Bulgarian noble, Insarov, expelled from his homeland in his youth by the Ottomans on pain of death. He is living in exile in Moscow, a poor university student, helping to raise arms for the independence movement. “I’m sure you will come to love us: you love all oppressed people. If you knew how bountiful our land is! Meanwhile it is being trampled, torn apart…. We’ve been robbed of everything: our churches, our rights, our lands. The filthy Turks drive us like cattle and slaughter us.” Yelena cannot help but fall in love. She writes in her diary, “The time will come when he’ll leave us forever, will go home, will go there, beyond the sea. So? Good luck to him! But all the same I’ll be glad that I got to know him while he was here. Why is he not a Russian? No, he couldn’t be a Russian.” His rival suitors bow out to Insarov in typical Russian fashion, “We’re not blind, we see what’s going on around us, but we’re gentlemen, my dear sir, and we take revenge in a gentlemanly manner.”
No comments:
Post a Comment