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coarser qualities of his style, and could scarcely imagine
with what elegance he was wont to express himself, and
would be just as far from understanding his allusions as
from being able to compare his interpretation and
description of persons and ways of thinking in Russia with
the reality from which they were taken. Turgenief
conquered in the artistic race, although he was heavily
handicapped; he was triumphant in the great arena,
although he wielded a sword without a point.
For the cultured people of Western Europe, he has
peopled the great empire of the East with human beings
of the present time. Thanks to him, we know the
spiritual characteristics of its men and women. Although
in the vigor of his age he left Russia, never again to
dwell in his native land, he has never described anything
else than the inhabitants of this country, and Germans
and Frenchmen only as half Russianized or even only in
contact with Russians. He only presents to us beings
with whose peculiarities he was familiar from his youth.
That gradually, during his long exile and the
estrangement which existed between the Slavophile and
European Russians, it came to be regarded as proper, in
certain Russian circles, to depreciate his knowledge of
his fatherland, and treat him as a kind of Western
European, was natural. But, if he had been a degree
less cosmopolitan, he certainly would never have made
his way into the whole civilized world as he has done.
He has given pictures from the forest and the steppes,
from spring and autumn, from all ranks and classes of
society, and all grades of culture, in Russia. He has
drawn the serf and the princess, the peasant and the
proprietor, and the student; the young girl who is pure
soul, endowed with the finest Slavic charms, and the
cold, beautiful, egotistical coquette, who in his hands
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