On the Eve

In a summer near Moscow, the young and restless Elena Stahova is courted by two gifted Russians — Shubin, a sculptor who lives for beauty, and Bersenyev, a scholar bound for a quiet life of thought. Each is admirable; neither is enough. Elena is waiting, without quite knowing it, for someone who knows what he is for. Then Bersenyev brings into the house a poor Bulgarian named Insarov, a man given over wholly to a single purpose — the liberation of his homeland from the Turks — and Elena recognizes at once the thing she has been longing for.

She chooses him, and the choosing is the heart of the book. In secret, against her family and the comfortable Russian future arranged for her, Elena marries Insarov and prepares to leave everything she has known to follow him to a war that is not hers. The lovers set out for Bulgaria by way of Venice — and there, on the very threshold of the cause they have given their lives to, Turgenev springs the tragedy the title has been quietly promising all along.

Published in 1860, a year before the emancipation of the serfs, On the Eve caught Russia poised on the edge of a transformation no one could yet shape. Its title points beyond a single war to a whole country waiting, like Elena, for a hero who can act — and the fact that Turgenev had to make his man of action a foreigner became the wound his radical critics would not forgive. In Elena, one of the first “new women” of Russian fiction, he created a heroine who judges men by what they live for and stakes her life on a purpose of her own choosing.

This edition pairs the complete public-domain English translation by Constance Garnett with an editor's foreword on the novel's meaning and reception, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.