rehabilitating Shubin in our eyes; Shubin is simply made to criticise
Stahov; the thing is done in a few seemingly careless lines, but these
lines lay bare Shubin's strength and weakness, the fluidity of his
nature. The reader who does not see the art which underlies almost
every line of _On the Eve_ is merely paying the highest tribute to that
art; as often the clear waters of a pool conceal its surprising depth.
Taking Shubin's character as an example of creative skill, we cannot
call to mind any instance in the range of European fiction where the
typical artist mind, on its lighter sides, has been analysed with such
delicacy and truth as here by Turgenev. Hawthorne and others have
treated it, but the colour seems to fade from their artist characters
when a comparison is made between them and Shubin. And yet Turgenev's
is but a sketch of an artist, compared with, let us say, the admirable
figure of Roderick Hudson. The irresponsibility, alertness, the
whimsicality and mobility of Shubin combine to charm and irritate the
reader in the exact proportion that such a character affects him in
actual life; there is not the least touch of exaggeration, and all the
values are kept to a marvel. Looking at the minor characters, perhaps
one may say that the husband, Stahov, will be the most suggestive, and
not the least familiar character, to English households. His
essentially masculine meanness, his self-complacency, his unconscious
indifference to the opinion of others, his absurdity as '_un pere de
famille_' is balanced by the foolish affection and jealousy which his
wife, Anna Vassilyevna, cannot help feeling towards him. The perfect
balance and duality of Turgenev's outlook is here shown by the equal
cleverness with which he seizes on and quietly derides the typical
masculine and typical feminine attitude in such a married life as the
two Stahovs'.

Turning to the figure of the Bulgarian hero, it is interesting to find