he did not even understand the children; instead of a decrial it was
nothing but a libel. The spreaders of healthy ideas among the young
generation he wanted to show up as corrupters of youth, the sowers of
discord and evil, haters of good, and in a word, very devils. In
various places of the novel we see that his principal hero is no fool;
on the contrary, a very able and gifted man, who is eager to learn and
works diligently and knows much, but notwithstanding all this, he gets
quite lost in disputes, utters absurdities, and preaches ridiculous
things, which should not be pardoned even in a most narrow and limited
mind. . . . In general the novel is nothing else but a merciless and
destructive criticism on the young generation. In all the
contemporaneous questions, intellectual movements, debates and ideals
with which the young generation is occupied, Turgenev finds not the
least common sense and gives us to understand that they lead only to
demoralisation, emptiness, prosaic shallowness, and cynicism. Turgenev
finds his ideal in quite a different place, namely in the 'fathers,'
in the more or less old generation. Consequently, he draws a parallel
and contrast between the 'fathers' and the 'children,' and we cannot
formulate the sense of the novel in this way; among a number of good
children there are also bad ones who are the ones that are ridiculed
in the novel; this is not its aim, its purpose is quite different and
may be formulated thus: the children are bad and thus are they
represented in the novel in all their ugliness; but the 'fathers' are
good, which is also proven in the novel."

One of the very few criticisms from a truly artistic standpoint
appeared in the "Russian Herald" during the year 1862, from which a
brief quotation must suffice:--

"Everything in this work bears witness to the ripened power of