“Fathers and Sons” by Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev’s novel takes place in the landscape of 19th century Russia, a place and time undergoing rapid change as enlightenment ideas flowed eastward from Europe and gradually began to affect the Russian landed gentry and intelligentsia  This novel is largely about the generational divide in these changing times. It was a time when the young were exerting themselves and the old felt their time had come and gone. New scientific and political ideas ruled the day. The serfs were now free and were paying rent on their newly granted lands. Masters bent over backwards to think of themselves as liberal and servants walked about with an air of self respect bordering on haughtiness. However, this novel is about even more than all of that. It turns on the universal nature of man, his eternal needs, the meaning of life, and on love itself. Turgenev was himself pulled in competing directions- not liberal enough for the reformers and dangerously free thinking for the conservative establishment. He sometimes tried to have it both ways, but firmly considered himself an enlightened mind. Belinsky was his mentor, friend, and inspiration. This novel successfully depicts the changing times in Russia, while doing credit to both the old guard and the new fashions of thinking, just like the author himself.

“On the Eve” by Ivan Turgenev (translated by Michael Pursglove)

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.”