![]() ![]() ![]() In “Asya”, the novella which I finished this week, the formula is little changed. No character really feels strongly enough to actually do anything, so opportunities are always being missed and everyone ends up sad. Either way, hesitancy leading to quiet failure is the common thread in Turgenev’s work. It’s either love spoiling the young revolutionary, or his own weakness of will. They think they believe something, but it always turns out that they don’t quite know themselves. His characters are shown, time and again, to fail to achieve their goals because of their own hesitations and inaction. If I were feeling charitable, I’d say Turgenev’s stories are mostly about the failures of an ideological way of living. In On the Eve, we have a classic Turgenev tale of a revolutionary who forgets about his convictions when love appears. Unlike Dostoevsky, ideas don’t seem to interest him, and though he tries to write passionate characters he can’t actually write characters who ideas seem to interest either. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve always found Turgenev boring. This is fair enough, for a man who corresponded with Theodor Storm and Gustave Flaubert, and spent much of his life in Europe rather than Russia. Among the major Russian writers of the 19th century he bears the fewest marks of the land of his birth. What I mean is that I’ve never been particularly impressed by him. ![]()
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