BOOKS
681
Notebook,
the association of natural phenomena with human action, the
outward innocence of natural beauty and the transformation of it as
one learns its warnings. Turgenev at his best is nondidactic, and for
the reader he temporarily suspends all intellectual questions of belief
and nonbelief; it is enough to know that whatever happens seems in–
evitable. One clear example of this aspect of Turgenev's genius is in
"Bezhin Meadow," that chapter in
A Sportsman's Notebook
which
opens on a pastoral Russian midsummer evening and extends its length
through ghost stories told by boys around a camp fire: its actual content
is the premonition of death arriving in the heart of summer-that is
the story. And one can see why Henry James gave it his highest marks
of favor. But the same art of association enters the last chapter of
On
the Eve:
the scene is Venice; a cold spring wind blown from the east
across the Adriatic tosses the waters of the Grand Canal; as evening
falls the richly embossed city fades in cold gray winds; the novel's hero,
Insarov, a Bulgarian revolutionary, and its heroine, Elena, are on their
way from Russia to join the general uprising of the Slavic countries
against elder, even more ancient tyrannies; but Insarov is dying, his
ardor spent; he is warmed only by the youth, the courage of his wife.
In these few pages Turgenev conveys the idealism, the fire that illumin–
ate all hopes of a better world, the dangers of the fight to make it so,
shown in Elena's dream before Insarov's death, the dream itself a
storm at sea, and last, the cold wind filling the bedchamber. The scene
is the beginning, the middle, the end of all such adventures; its youthful
actors vanish into nameless middle age or death itself, only the cold
spring endures which may be read as either the beginning or the gray
end of an era.
It
is this complex of feelings and premonitions that gives
the closing pages of
On the Eve
an enduring quality; beyond its value
as an historical novel, it carries within it the cyclic character of life.
Magarshack does much to illuminate the well-known quarrels that
Turgenev had with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and from his newly ac–
quired facts certain hidden sources of the quarrels may be brought to
light. Antipathy between Dostoevsky and Turgenev went deeper than
any inunediate incident; the subterranean force in Dostoevsky's life was
that of a religious temperament; his final concerns were with the
absolutes of faith. How to live, what to do? was Tolstoy's greatest
question, a question which in theory denied art and all its servants. Tur–
genev's suspensions of belief; his rooted, almost feminine discernment, his
non-religious character, his inability, in short, "to take a stand" placed
him at variance with his two great friends and enemies. He had written
