review of Rudin:

I was and remain in love with Turgenev’s short novels of – not ideas, exactly; not morality plays, as I used to try to describe them; at any rate, short novels that hinge on a commitment, a choice, and that emplot the questions of Turgenev’s day, or is it the question? Whether to act. How to act, given that there is wide agreement on the necessity of action and a frustrating lack of scope for it, in intelligentsia circles of Turgenev’s day. They lived under the tsar but read French utopian socialists. The nobility had an old ethic of service to the state but their once-steep service obligations had been curtailed, and they were left with the ethic – and no outlet. So the history books tell me. Also in Russia, there were no dedicated philosophers as in Germany or France, but literary circles took up this task – to respond to philosophy and social questions; so that everybody was a dilettante; so that novelists and literary critics were the ones to conduct the discussions of the day, social-political-philosophical.

You end up with novels like Turgenev’s. Not novels of ideas, but engaged as get-out, about engaged people, about the question of engagement. You have young women like Natalya in this, who are often the hinge of the decision in the plot; whose young urgency and seriousness about life I found a rare focus in classic fiction when I was her age. I recommend Turgenev’s novels to girls. Let no-one tell me Turgenev’s novels are ‘essentially love stories’, as I see around, because they are about a girl’s puzzle as to where to vest her life and energies. This time, Natalya is wasted, as is Rudin, who was too cowardly (my word, and Natalya’s) to take up her earnest offer and act upon his fine words. Rudin speaks wonderfully on the ideals afloat in the day, and fires other people with enthusiasm – this is his saving grace, that those enthusiasms are not always or altogether lost; that people can take a fine speech on with them through life, and in their seedy age, perhaps, recognise its potency in them, in what they have managed to do. So argues Rudin’s most critical friend, to console a seedy run-down Rudin in his age. He also cites the fact that Rudin has never stayed still, which need not be inability to commit but refusal to commit to the compromises most people do. We get several views of Rudin, two different verdicts even from this friend who changes his mind. Turgenev has made him a coward but is quite kind to him, early and late.

review of On the Eve:

This was the Turgenev that spoke most directly to me when I was young, which makes for a peculiarly intense reading experience now: Yelena and Insarov are as if people known to me, I believe in them entirely; and indeed the whole novel comes alive to me in that rare way…

A dangerous novel to do this with, as it is Turgenev at his most gloomy. Although he took the plot from life, he wants to use it to dash our spirits with the futility of effort – for he had these moods of pessimistic metaphysics. I’ll admit that doesn’t commonly come across to me in his writing. Perhaps I resist his lessons; if so it’s his own fault – he paints Yelena and Insarov too richly in their heroic energies, hope and passion, to philosophise futility of effort at me at the end.

I can see why this one annoyed fellow Russians who loved Russianness, for instance Dostoyevsky. To say ‘there are no human beings yet’ in Russia is going a bit far; particularly when you give us Bersenev, Yelena’s Russian suitor, an awkward scholar and future professor, who is eminently human and likeable. Also, Turgenev, answer me this: if Russia is such a dump that the human species has yet to be found in it, how can you make your young women the most splendid people on earth? Caught you out there. Liza in Home of the Gentry was the Turgenev girl Dostoyevsky thought his greatest achievement; for me, Yelena. She managed to cause controversy too, and I must say I was startled at how bold he makes bold to make her.

Critics, at the time and since, like to mock Insarov, the Bulgarian freedom-fighter. I can only say I’d be spoilt for choice between Bersenev and Insarov, but that Yelena chose well, as she does everything well. ( )

My first attempt at anything in Russian, and it was delightful. While the story of forbidden love between an aristocractic Russian daughter and a penniless Bulgarian revolutionary was relatively familiar, it was done in a simple, but beautiful, way. Particularly moving was the scene were Yelena is at the point of leaving her homeland and her father, up to that point fiercely resistant, arrives and pours champagne. His upset, such that he pours the glasses too full and some ends up in the snow at his feet, is a perfect little scene. ( )