n the highest degree,
full of tenderness, of gentle humanity and kindliness, but who, at the
same time, does not contribute to life the smallest active principle,
who passively yields to circumstances, like a chip borne on the stormy
torrent. Such are the majority of Turgeneff's heroes, beginning with the
hero of "Asya," and ending with Sanin, in "Spring Floods," and
Litvinoff, in "Smoke." Several Don Quixotes are to be found in his
works, but not many, and they are of two sorts. One typically Russian
category includes Andrei Kolosoff, and Yakoff Pasinkoff, Punin, and a
few others; the second are Volyntzeff and Uvar Ivanovitch, in "On the
Eve." A third type, invented by Turgeneff as an offset to the Hamlets,
is represented by Insaroff in "On the Eve."

With the publication, in 1862, of "Fathers and Children," a fateful
crisis occurred in Turgeneff's career. In his memoirs and in his letters
he insists that in the character of Bazaroff he had no intention of
writing a caricature on the young generation, and of bearing himself in
a negative manner towards it. "My entire novel," he writes, "is directed
against the nobility as the leading class." Nevertheless, the book
raised a tremendous storm. His mistake lay in not recognizing in the new
type of men depicted under the character of Bazaroff enthusiasts endowed
with all the merits and defects of people of that sort; but on the
contrary, they impressed him as skeptics, rejecters of all conventions,
and he christened them with the name of "nihilists," which was the cause
of the whole uproar, as he himself admitted. But he declares that he
employed the word not as a reproach, or with the aim of insulting, but
merely as an accurate and rational expression of an historical fact,
which had made its appearance.

Turgeneff always regarded himself as a pupil of Pushkin, and a worthy
pupil he was, but he worked out his own independent style, and in turn
called forth a horde of imitators. It may be said of Turgeneff, that he
created the artistic Russian novel, carrying it to the pitch of
perfection in the matter of elegance, and finely proportioned exposition
and arrangement of its parts--its architecture, so to speak--combined
with artless simplicity and realism. The peculiarity of Turgeneff's
style consists in the remarkable softness and tenderness of its tones,
combined with a certain mistiness of coloring, which recalls the air and
sky of central Russia. Not a single harsh or co