Sunday Morning! Darrell Epp talks “On the Eve” by Ivan Turgenev

When I think back to my life in Hamilton, Ontario, what I miss are the people I ran into on the street. Sometimes, in small towns, this can be a problem; if you hope to avoid someone, you’ll see them constantly. But then I would run into someone like Darrell Epp, a local poet and raconteur, in the mall and he’d start the conversation with something like: “Hey, fella, so I’ve been watching the Rockford Files lately, and I really think it’s a masterpiece about the meaning of friendship” before segueing into Tarkovsky, Chekov, and Iggy Pop.

Darrell’s been raving about Ivan Turgenev for some time now, which came to mind as I was knocking about the East Village on my day off and passed by Codex Books off Bleecker, where a staff worker was arranging the shop. He said they weren’t open for another hour, but he had five more minutes and would love to grab me something, if I had a title in mind.

“Well, do you have any Turgenev?” Why, sure! They had three of his titles and I picked On the Eve, which I’ve heard all about from Darrell.

Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev’s third novel, On the Eve is a fairly simple boy-meets-girl story. Everyone around the girl, Elena Stakhova, is a bit superfluous: her mother’s a hypochondriac; her father a retired military man with a mistress; and her two suitors, Shubin and Berzyenev, are a flighty young sculptor and a philosophically-minded student: when we meet them, they’re literally lounging in a field dreaming! Maybe you were a bit like this in your twenties as well.

Berzynev fatefully introduces Elena to his friend Dmitri Insarov, a young revolutionary who’s ready, even eager, to give his life to Bulgarian independence. She’s soon in love and ready to give her life up and follow him to Bulgaria, on the verge of war with the Turks, behavior that, again, is understandable if you remember your twenties. They marry in secret and Insarov is soon running around trying to get documents to bring her to Bulgaria, where his fellow revolutionaries need him; in the process, he comes down with pneumonia, but keeps pushing himself too hard. Love has brought Elena to life, in a sense, for the first time. Meanwhile, Insarov is burning the candle at both ends and its glow is quickly running out.

It’s an interesting novel because all of this drama never really reaches a high pitch. Turgenev hangs back and observes and, for the most part, his characters are all sympathetic. Their needs are at cross-purposes, but they adapt to the new reality. The young dreamers act nobly. The mother just cares about her daughter’s safety. Even the rigid military father’s a bit too absurd to take too seriously. And the life these characters lead seems just too enjoyable to willingly give up.

But, I’ll let Darrell share his thoughts:

Darrell Epp

“Forever in the shadow — in this hemisphere, at least! — of those sermonizing blowhards Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (Nabokov, for one, thought him a far greater writer than Dostoyevsky, and I certainly agree.)– Turgenev achieves astonishing effects by working in quite a different register. Unlike those two, T never preaches, never hectors, he is far too much IN LOVE with the proceedings he documents to hurl pronouncements onto it like Moses on Sinai. It reminds me of the Aesop fable of the storm who wanted to traveler to take off his jacket, but no matter how the storm raged, the traveler just clutched tighter….Turgenev breaks your heart, and changes you and the way you view the world, gently, gently….

“Turgenev gets lost in the shuffle because Dostoyevsky is full of grist for undergraduate term papers, that meaty low hanging fruit is all over the place, so much to write easy essays about….and Turgenev’s rewards require some acclimation…in many ways, he feels ‘chekhovian’ 3 decades before chekhov. …. Turgenev said, “The critics say my novels don’t have much plot, but, I find, I have all the plot I need…” In an age when folks are amused by Thanos snapping his finger and wiping out half the universe, Turgenev’s breathtakingly vivid glimpses of the plotless everyday are a thrilling, and i would say crucial, tonic.

T’s plots barely rise above ‘boy meets girl’ and certainly don’t want any more, your mind is already overwhelmed with the truth and beauty and sensation as it is…. if asked, what is he all about, what makes him so great, i’d say, “Turgenev is about, to a hypersensitive degree, noticing people noticing, and noticing that people are just on the verge of NOTICING that they are noticing.” Here’s a Turgenevian sentence I’ll never forget:

“We barely noticed the moon at all; it was such a tiny sliver.”

On the Eve is one of his best books, one of the most Turgenevian….early on, HE notices:

“But do you know, my friend, here’s rather a surprising thing? Just imagine, here I’ve been living in the same house with her for 2 years, and I’m in love with her, too, and yet only now, this very minute — no, I didn’t understand her– but I SAW her. I saw her and was amazed.”

and in chapter 15, ta da! SHE notices!

“True, she had been frightened during the first minute or two; then she had been struck by the expression on his face; and then she had begun to think — though she was not quite clear WHAT she thought. The emotion which she had experienced during the day had gone — that she realized; but it had given place to something else, something which she still did not understand…” –

-and you’re on the edge of your seat, right there with her, as she experiences a new sensation that she doesn’t have words for.

“Over and over, across decades, Turgenev documented the sensations that accompany falling in love better than any one else — “Heyyy….suddenly everything is so much more vivid, this field of rye has never seen so golden before, i’ve never seen grass this green before, it’s crazy, but i also feel like my judgment is impaired, this is risky uncharted territory….” The vividness of the description of mental states are so on the money you’ll forget to breathe, and you certainly won’t care that his novels aren’t ‘plotted’ like a tom clancy novel or whatever.

“That quote from chapter 15 leads right into another of his great strengths — besides the naked human moment of people noticing, T also provides gorgeous descriptions of nature that are lovely in their own right, but are also skillfully used as a counterpoint. Conrad was another writer who thought seriously about this: how to juggle the tactile, the sensory data, with the more abstract, big picture, meaning of life stuff? Because either one of those can go a long way, and that juggling act is a lot of what good writing is all about.

{Rufus: Just to jump in here, it’s what I love about Proust, who can write a novel about a jealous and possessive young man smothering his first love, and “cut to” a description of a painter observing a beach that goes on for pages and immerses you so completely in the beauty of the world you start wondering if that’s not the real meaning of the world. The thing I kept thinking while reading On the Eve is maybe the two young men dreaming of art and beauty are the ones who really get what life is about. Maybe we try to learn too much from pain and too little from joy.}

Darrell continues:

“Anyway, I refer to Turgenev’s technique of switching from heartstopping descriptions of psychological states to gorgeous descriptions of the natural world as ‘the zoom in/zoom out.’ All your favourite modernist novelists copied this from him, but he was the master…..

so in chapter 15, after Elena realized she’s feeling something she doesn’t have the words for,

” — imperceptibly, evening changed into night. The carriage sped on, now beside fields of ripening corn, where the air was heavy and fragrant with the scent of grain, now beside open meadows whose open freshness surged in gentle waves upon their faces; the sky melted into haze on the horizon; at last, a dull red moon came up.”

Bits of sensory data, never too much or too little, perfectly timed — what a pleasure! When I have a writing day, he’s always what I’m aiming at. I always want to master the zoom in/zoom out — when have I got to abstract or internal and need to add a tactile detail, like a snickers wrapper impaled on an electrified fence, or vice versa…. That is a large part of what separates amateurs from professionals —

{Rufus: Here, incidentally, is a bit of what Darrell works on when he’s writing. His fifth collection of poems, Permanent Smoke, is coming out on Tuesday.}

Darrell continues: “THEN, you turn the page to chapter 16, and then, what now??? The master storyteller, so daring, and so sly, says, ‘after this, elena started keeping a diary, here are some excerpts!’ and you almost want to laugh for joy, to know you’re in the hands of such gifted and joyful a storyteller. one diary excerpt reads:

“…What is it that I really WANT?! Why is my heart so heavy, so oppressed? Why do I watch the birds with envy as they fly past? I feel that I could fly with them, fly, where I don’t know, but far from here. And isn’t that desire sinful? I have here mother, father, home. Don’t I love them? No, I don’t love them, as I should like to love. It’s dreadful to put that in words, but it’s the truth. Perhaps I am a great sinner; perhaps that is why I am so sad, why I have no peace. Some hand seems laid on me, weighing me down, as though I were in prison, and the walls would fall on me directly. But why don’t OTHER people feel like this?..”

A powerful reminder of what great literature is FOR: it makes us feel less alone. When you think you are going crazy, and nobody has ever felt the way you feel, you can just stretch out your arm toward your bookshelf and communicate with the greatest minds of all time, who are there to teach you, no, it’s not just you, you’re part of something universal, some things DON’T change, hang in there…. the most rarefied and powerful form of language, with the power to transcend, transform, something to be grateful for.”

{Rufus: I couldn’t have said it any better, so I’ll leave it there.}

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, pondering, playing, watching, or noticing this weekend?