Stephen Hayes reviewed On the eve by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (The novels of Ivan Turgenev -- III)
None
4 stars
I've read quite a lot about [a:Ivan Turgenev|410680|Ivan Turgenev|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1239589274p2/410680.jpg], especially in connection with nihilism, but this is the first book of his that I've actually read, mainly because it's the first one I've seen. I picked it up from a toss-out box at the Russian Church in Midrand. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this.
It's a story about romantic love and romantic nationalism during the build-up to the Crimean War There's not a breath of nihilism in it that I could discern.
Concerning nationalism, I was once inveigled into joining a web site called Quora, where people ask questions and other people try to answer them, though most of them are quite unanswerable, and if you want examples of "begging the question", you'll find plenty on Quora. One of those questions was Why is nationalism bad?. I was tempted to respond with corollary …
I've read quite a lot about [a:Ivan Turgenev|410680|Ivan Turgenev|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1239589274p2/410680.jpg], especially in connection with nihilism, but this is the first book of his that I've actually read, mainly because it's the first one I've seen. I picked it up from a toss-out box at the Russian Church in Midrand. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this.
It's a story about romantic love and romantic nationalism during the build-up to the Crimean War There's not a breath of nihilism in it that I could discern.
Concerning nationalism, I was once inveigled into joining a web site called Quora, where people ask questions and other people try to answer them, though most of them are quite unanswerable, and if you want examples of "begging the question", you'll find plenty on Quora. One of those questions was Why is nationalism bad?. I was tempted to respond with corollary question: Why is imperialism good?.
[b:On the Eve|9297774|Eve (Eve, #1)|Anna Carey|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389188190s/9297774.jpg|14180376] will not answer either question. But what it does do is give a sympathetic portrayal of the nationalist hero, which, I think, shows insight into the mindset of 19th-century romantic nationalists. Though the hero is not a poet, and is in fact rather prosaic, he did remind me of romantic poets like Byron and Shelley who sympathised with nationalist struggles in the Balkans.
Twentieth-century nationalism seems somehow to have been less romantic. There were plenty of nationalist struggles in Africa and elsewhere against imperialist powers, and some of them generated poetry and novels, but nothing, to my knowledge, as overtly romantic as this.
To the person who asked "Why is nationalism bad?" on Quora, I would recommend this book. As I said, it won't answer the question, but it may show why it is the wrong question to ask. ,
