On the Eve

A Russian girl of the 1850s, courted by a sculptor and a scholar, chooses instead a Bulgarian revolutionary with no money and one idea, and follows him out of Russia. Turgenev was the first Russian to be read across Europe, admired by Flaubert and James, and was arrested for his obituary of Gogol; this 1860 novel asked where the Russian man of action was, and answered that he was not Russian — which cost him half his friends. Fifty-six plates of forest rivers, Baltic coast and open water by painters including Ivan Shishkin and Ilya Repin give the novel's journey out of Russia its weather and its leaving.