On the Eve

Ivan Turgenev

The great and wonderfully readable 19th century Russian short story writer and novelist Ivan Turgenev wrote a novel in 1859 called 'On the Eve', which, like all great novels, is hard to summarise in a few sentences. However, for the purposes of relevance to our own referendum ballot tomorrow, it is worth mentioning that one of the main protagonists is a Bulgarian freedom fighter, seeking to liberate his country from the Ottoman empire.  In 1853, the year 'On the Eve' is set in, Britain, France and the Turks were on the verge of going to war with Russia over the Crimea, and the good people of Moffat burned an effigy of Tsar Nicholas I in the High St, which he had visited as a teenage Grand Duke thirty seven years before.

An item on last night's 'Newsnight' broadcast live from outside St Andrew's church in Moffat asked if the secession of Scotland from the Union might be the last installment in the story of the British empire, very largely built by Scots. There is another way in which this novel is timely: it was written at the time that Garibaldi ( a great hero and personal friend of Thomas Carlyle of Ecclefechan) was leading the fight to unite Italy.

Whatever the outcome of the referendum tomorrow, it has been an enormously exciting process, a testament to the benefits to be derived from actually sitting in a public space like Moffat Town Hall with neighbours and having a serious peer-to-peer among equals discussion about stuff that matters to all of us. How about tackling the blight of the Mercury Hotel next?