Faust en andere verhalen by Ivan Turgenev

She left Russia with him but, soon after arriving in his country, the Bulgarian died. Having the premonition that he might not return, the 'splendid young man' handed Turgenev a diary containing the intimate record of his love affair with a woman who had at first reciprocated Karatayev's affections but later gave her heart to another man, a Bulgarian revolutionary. Vasily Vladimirovich Karatayev, 'a splendid young man – almost our only decent neighbour', had come by one evening to say goodbye to Turgenev before leaving for the front. He was living in Spasskoye, the country estate he had inherited from his mother. The tragic heroine of the novel, the self-sacrificing Elena, who dreams of duty but does not know for what, had occurred to him some six years before, during his confinement in Russia as a result of the Crimean war.

In the case of the sculptor Shubin, he went so far as to keep a diary on his character's behalf. He had spent the spring of 1859 filling one notebook after another with biographies of the characters. By the time Turgenev began writing his novel, the outcome of the conflict was known. The Crimean war broke out in October of that year. Also, the novel is set in the summer of 1853, the eve of the devastating war that set the Russian empire against an alliance that included the Ottoman, British and French empires. This was one reason behind the title another – declared by the author himself – was that On the Eve was published the year before the emancipation of the serfs. In fact, the day Turgenev wrote his letter was the day of the Battle of Solferino, an international military conflict that marked an end to an era in which armies were led personally by their monarchs. He was, as he wrote in that same letter, 'in that half-elated, half-depressed mood which always takes possession of me before working but,' he continued, 'if I were younger I would stop working altogether, go off to Italy and breathe that now doubly beneficial air.' The 'doubly' was because Garibaldi, that great man of action, had launched his campaign to unify Italy.

'I s there any enthusiasm for anything left in the world? Do people still know how to sacrifice themselves? Can they enjoy life, behave foolishly, and have hopes for the future? If I could see it all, I might know.' Ivan Turgenev, then aged 40, wrote these words in a letter to his friend Countess Lambert on 24 June 1859, days before he began work on his third novel, On the Eve.

Faust en andere verhalen by Ivan Turgenev