before or since. If Tolstoi is a purer native expression of Russia's
force, Turgenev is the personification of Russian aspiration working
with the instruments of wide cosmopolitan culture. As a critic of his
countrymen nothing escaped Turgenev's eye, as a politician he foretold
nearly all that actually came to pass in his life, and as a consummate
artist, led first and foremost by his love for his art, his novels are
undying historical pictures. It is not that there is anything
allegorical in his novels--allegory is at the furthest pole from his
method: it is that whenever he created an important figure in fiction,
that figure is necessarily a revelation of the secrets of the
fatherland, the soil, the race. Turgenev, in short, was a psychologist
not merely of men, but of nations; and so the chief figure of _On the
Eve_, Elena, foreshadows and stands for the rise of young Russia in the
sixties. Elena is young Russia, and to whom does she turn in her
prayer for strength? Not to Bersenyev, the philosopher, the dreamer;
not to Shubin, the man carried outside himself by every passing
distraction; but to the strong man, Insarov. And here the irony of
Insarov being made a foreigner, a Bulgarian, is significant of
Turgenev's distrust of his country's weakness. The hidden meaning of
the novel is a cry to the coming men to unite their strength against
the foe without and the foe within the gates; it is an appeal to them
not only to hasten the death of the old regime of Nicolas I, but an
appeal to them to conquer their sluggishness, their weakness, and
their apathy. It is a cry for Men. Turgenev sought in vain in life
for a type of man to satisfy Russia, and ended by taking no living
model for his hero, but the hearsay Insarov, a foreigner. Russia has
not yet produced men of this type. But the artist does not despair of
the future. Here we come upon one of the most striking figures of
Turgenev--that of Uvar Ivanovitch. He symbolises the ever-predominant
type of Russian, the sleepy, slothful Slav of to-day, yesterday, and