denationalization. His words were more subtle than that in their irony.
What they meant was simply: "If to be a Russian is to be a bigot, like
most of you Pan-Slav enthusiasts, then I am no Russian, but a European."
Has he not put the whole gospel of Nationalism in half a dozen sentences
in _Rudin?_ He refused, however, to adopt along with his Nationalism the
narrowness with which it has been too often associated.

This refusal was what destroyed his popularity in Russia, in his
lifetime. It is because of this refusal that he has been pursued with
belittlement by one Russian writer after another since his death. He had
that sense of truth which always upsets the orthodox. This sense of
truth applied to the portraiture of his contemporaries was felt like an
insult in those circles of mixed idealism and make-believe, the circles
of the political partisans. A great artist may be a member--and an
enthusiastic member--of a political party, but in his art he cannot
become a political partisan without ceasing to be an artist. In his
novels, Turgenev regarded it as his life-work to portray Russia
truthfully, not to paint and powder and "prettify" it for show purposes,
and the result was an outburst of fury on the part of those who were
asked to look at themselves as real people instead of as the
master-pieces of a professional flatterer. When _Fathers and Children_
was published in 1862, the only people who were pleased were the enemies
of everything in which Turgenev believed. "I received congratulations,"
he wrote,

almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies.
This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach
me. I knew very well I had carried out honestly the type I had
sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively
with sympathy.

This is bound to be the fate of every artist who takes his political
party or his church, or any other propagandist group to which he
belongs, as his subject. He is a painter, not a vindicator, and he is
compelled to exhibit numerous crooked features and faults in such a way
as to wound the vanity of his friends and delight the malice of his
enemies. Artistic truth is as different from propagandist truth as
daylight from limelight, and the artist will always be hated by the
propagandist as worse than an enemy--a treacherous friend. Turgenev
deliberately accepted as his life-work a course which could only lead to
th