On the Eve

In the summer of 1853, at a country house near Moscow, Elena Stakhova, a serious, idealistic young woman, is courted by two young Russians: Bersenev, a gentle scholar, and Shubin, a talented, flighty sculptor. But she chooses Dmitri Insarov, a poor, determined Bulgarian student with one aim in life, to free his country from Ottoman rule. Against her family's wishes she marries him in secret and follows him towards the war that is about to begin.

Ivan Turgenev published the novel in 1860, on the eve of the great reforms in Russia, and its portrait of a woman choosing a life of purpose over comfort influenced a generation. This is Constance Garnett's translation, part of the series in which she introduced all of Turgenev's novels to English readers in the 1890s. Read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) grew up on an estate in central Russia owned by his tyrannical mother, who controlled thousands of serfs. He studied in Berlin, and his Sportsman's Sketches, with their sympathetic portraits of serfs, made him famous; an obituary of Gogol earned him a month in detention and exile to his estate.

He spent much of his life abroad, following the singer Pauline Viardot, whom he loved for forty years, and became a friend of Flaubert and a bridge between Russian and Western literature. His novel Fathers and Sons gave the world the word nihilist.