theories of art, belongs as you point out in
the Preface to _Smoke_ "to all time."

Turgenev's creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it came to
an end the social and political events in Russia have moved at an
accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and
intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his
work with the unerring lucidity of a great national writer. The first
stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost in
every page of the novels, of the short stories and of _A Sportsman's
Sketches_--those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforgettable figures.

Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do change, but the truth
of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the
variety of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev's art, which has captured
it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for "all time" it is hard to
say. Since, as you say yourself, he brings all his problems and
characters to the test of love, we may hope that it will endure at least
till the infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact simplicity
of perfected Eugenics. But even by then, I think, women would not have
changed much; and the women of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly,
so reverently and so passionately--they, at least, are certainly for all
time.

Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. They are Russian of
course. Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole-souledly national.
But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev's Russia is but a canvas on which
the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the
great light and the free air of the world. Had he invented them all and
also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which they move,
his personages would have been just as true and as poignant in their
perplexed lives. They are his own and also universal. Any one can
accept them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of
Shakespeare.

In the larger, non-Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic
and welcome to the English-speaking world, is his essential humanity. All
his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors, are
human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking
themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions.
They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit
to