‘He looks like something out of a Russian novel’ – so says Robert Booth about Bill Evans in That They May Face the Rising Sun. Booth is a well-spoken Ulsterman, a literary gent with a double first from Oxford, clearly modelled on McGahern's first editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, to whom he dedicates Nightlines. Bill Evans is a neighbour to the Ruttledges, a farm labourer and product of Ireland's shameful past of incarceration and mistreatment of its poor, vulnerable and abandoned. Far from being a fictional character, as Booth would have it, Ruttledge knows, in his riposte, that such men are all too common in the Irish countryside:

But while Ruttledge might want to pull Booth up for putting this real, downtrodden man into a literary frame, there is also a kind of self-referencing going on here, with McGahern conscious of the many parallels between the Ireland of his time and that narrated by the celebrated nineteenth-century Russian realists, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov.

Though McGahern admired all of these writers a great deal and is sometimes rather lazily described as ‘the Irish Chekhov’ (a journalistic term also frequently applied to Brian Friel), it is to Tolstoy I would wish to turn to consider his greatest debt to the Russians. Tolstoy is the only writer from whom McGahern has borrowed a text tout court and adapted it for his own purposes – in this case to create his one published play The Power of Darkness (1991).