form, and each character as he appears serves as an expression and
representative of a certain opinion and direction. . . . All the
attention of the author is turned on the principal hero and the other
acting characters, however, not on their personality, not on the
emotions of their souls, their feelings and passions, but rather
almost exclusively on their talks and reasonings. This is the reason
why the novel, with the exception of one nice old woman, does not
contain a single living character, a single living soul, but only some
sort of abstract ideas, and various movements which are personified
and called by proper names. Turgenev's novel is not a creation purely
objective; in it the personality of the author steps out too clearly,
his sympathies, his inspiration, even his personal bitterness and
irritation. From this we get the opportunity to find in the novel the
personal opinions of the author himself, and in this we have one point
to start from--that we should accept as the opinions of the author the
views expressed in the novel, at least those views which have been
expressed with a noticeable feeling for them on the part of the author
and put into the mouths of those characters whom he apparently
favours. Had the author had at least a spark of sympathy for the
'children,' for the young generation, had he had at least a spark of
true and clear understanding of their views and inclinations, it would
have necessarily flashed out somewhere in the run of the novel.

"The 'fathers' as opposed to the 'children' are permeated with love
and poetry; they are men, modestly and quietly doing good deeds; they
would not for the world change their age. Even such an empty nothing
as Pavel Petrovich, even he is raised on stilts and made a nice man.
Turgenev could not solve his problem; instead of sketching the
relations between the 'fathers' and the 'children' he wrote a
panegyric to the 'fathers' and a decrial against the 'children'; but