About the Author: Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Cyrillic: Иван Тургенев) was a novelist, poet and dramatist, and now ranks as one of the towering figures of Russian literature. His major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On the Eve (1860), and Fathers and Sons (1862). These works offer realistic, affectionate portrayals of the Russian peasantry and penetrating studies of the Russian intelligentsia who were attempting to move the country into a new age. His masterpiece, Fathers and Sons, is considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century. Turgenev was a contemporary with Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. While these wrote about church and religion, Turgenev was more concerned with the movement toward social reform.
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Ivan Turgenev, Gilbert Gardiner
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Paperback, Published in Jun 1973 by Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN10: 0140440097 | ISBN13: 9780140440096
Page count: 234
Though essentially a love story with a historical background, On the Eve hints in its title at social and political implications which no Russian reader could miss when it appeared in 1859. Turgenev's study of Elena Stahov, in love with a Bulgarian revolutionary, is a memorable achievement of character-drawing, but the authors artistry is nowhere more clearly shown than in his development of the minor characters. Turgenev's touch is light and his sense of humour delicious, and the story, as it moves to its inevitable and tragic conclusion, is never oppressive.
Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public, first in France, then in Germany and America, and finally in England. In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest writers of our times: 'The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed our century, stand more than any other man as the incarnation of the whole race', because 'a whole world lived in him and spoke through his mouth'. Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic world, to which it was 'an honour to have been expressed by so great a Master'. As regards his method of dealing with his material and shaping it into mould, he stands even higher than as a pure creator. Tolstoy is more plastical, and certainly as deep and original and rich in creative power as Turgenev, and Dostoevsky is more intense, fervid, and dramatic. But as an artist, as master of the combination of details into a harmonious whole, as an architect of imaginative work, he surpasses all the prose writers of his country, and has but few equals among the great novelists of other lands.
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