Ivan Turgenev published On the Eve in 1860. Elena Stakhova, a young Russian woman of unusual seriousness and purposefulness for her setting, is surrounded by two suitors, Shubin, a sculptor, and Bersenyev, a classical scholar, when the Bulgarian revolutionary Insarov arrives in their orbit. Insarov is devoted entirely to the liberation of Bulgaria from Turkish occupation; his life has a single, absorbing purpose that the Russians around him cannot match. Elena falls in love with him, not romantically in the conventional sense but because his total commitment to a cause larger than himself offers something no Russian man of her acquaintance can provide: a model of purposive action that her own restlessness demands.
Turgenev published On the Eve the year before Fathers and Sons, and the two novels work as companion pieces on the question of what Russian society lacked to produce action adequate to its condition. Insarov's commitment is treated with admiration precisely because it requires no philosophical justification; he acts because the situation demands action, without the ruminative paralysis that Turgenev identified in the Russian intelligentsia as characteristic. His death before reaching Bulgaria, from tuberculosis, in Venice, while Elena makes arrangements to carry on without him, transforms the novel's final section into a study of how a person continues to act in the absence of the person who modeled action for them.
On the Eve is the least read of Turgenev's major novels outside Russia, which is a pity given what it does with the relationship between individual commitment and political action. Elena is a more unusual protagonist than she appears: a woman in early 1860s Russian fiction who identifies her life's purpose not through marriage or family but through attachment to a cause, and whose intelligence and determination are taken entirely seriously by the narrative. The novel's brevity, shorter than either Fathers and Sons or Rudin, makes it an accessible entry point to Turgenev's method.
Jane Austen wrote all six major novels without a dedicated writing room, she hid her work under blotting paper whenever visitors arrived.
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