Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/106

 and the title, On the Eve, was a subject for vehement discussion everywhere. What did Turgenev mean? On the eve of what? Turgenev made no answer; but over the troubled waters of his story moves the brooding spirit of creation. Russians must and will learn manhood from foreigners, from men who die only from bodily disease, who are not sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. At the very close of the book, one man asks another, "Will there ever be men among us?" And the other "flourished his fingers and fixed his enigmatical stare into the far distance." Perhaps Turgenev meant that salvation would eventually come through a woman — through women like Elena. For since her appearance, many are the Russian women who have given their lives for their country.

The best-known novel of Turgenev, and with the possible exception of A House of Gentlefolk, his masterpiece, is Fathers and Children, which perhaps he intended to indicate the real dawn suggested by On the Eve. The terrific uproar caused in Russia by this book has not yet entirely ceased. Russian critics are, as a rule, very bad judges of Russian literature. Shut off from participation in free, public, parliamentary political debate, the Russians of 1860 and of to-day are almost certain to judge the