On the Eve

Product Description<br/><br/><br/>This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.<br/><br/><br/>About the Author<br/><br/><br/><br/>Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in 1818 in the Province of Orel, and suffered during his childhood from a tyrannical mother. After the family had moved to Moscow in 1827 he entered Petersburg University where he studied philosophy. When he was nineteen he published his first poems and, convinced that Europe contained the source of real knowledge, went to the University of Berlin. After two years he returned to Russia and took his degree at the University of Moscow. In 1843 he fell in love with Pauline Garcia-Viardot, a young Spanish singer, who influenced the rest of his life; he followed her on her singing tours in Europe and spent long periods in the French house of herself and her husband, both of whom accepted him as a family friend. He sent his daughter by a sempstress to be brought up among the Viardot children. After 1856 he lived mostly abroad, and he became the first Russian writer to gain a wide reputation in Europe; he was a well-known figure in Parisian literary circles, where his friends included Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, and an honorary degree was conferred on him at Oxford. His series of six novels reflect a period of Russian life from 1830s to the 1870s: they are<br/>Rudin (1855),<br/>A House of Gentlefolk (1858),<br/>On the Eve (1859; a Penguin Classic),<br/>Fathers and Sons (1861),<br/>Smoke (1867) and<br/>Virgin Soil (1876). He also wrote plays, which include the comedy<br/>A Month in the Country; short stories and<br/>Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (a Penguin Classic); and literary essays and memoirs. He died in Paris in 1883 after being ill for a year, and was buried in Russia.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Review<br/><br/><br/>Novel by Ivan Turgenev, published in Russian as Nakanune in 1860. It is a major work concerning love amid a time of war and revolutionary social change. Set in 1853, On the Eve deals with the problems facing the younger intelligentsia on the eve of the Crimean War and speculates on the outcome of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Elena, its principal character, is a charming yet serious-minded, morally courageous young woman. Her concern for justice finds no outlet in her small circle of family and friends until she is introduced to the young Bulgarian patriot Insarov, whose idealism matches her own and who becomes Elena's companion and the catalyst for the changes in her life. --