principal characters. And with what wonderful skill the author solves
this puzzling problem--to place in narrow, limited frames the broadest
and newest themes (CONTENT). Hardly one of the novelists of our age,
beginning with Dickens and ending with George Sand and Spielhagen, has
succeeded in doing it so compactly and tersely, with such an absence
of the DIDATIC element which is almost always present in the works of
the above-mentioned authors, the now kings of western literatures,
with such a full insight into the very heart of the life movement
which is reflected in the novel. I repeat again, "Fathers and
Children" is thought of highly by European critics, but years will
pass and it will be thought of even more highly. It will be placed in
a line with those weighty literary creations in which is reflected the
basic movement of the time which created it."

It would have been well for Turgenev if he could have preserved an
absolute silence under the terrific storm of abuse that his most
powerful novel brought down on his head; it would have been well to
let the book speak for itself, and trust to time to make the strong
wine sweet. But this was asking almost too much of human nature. Stung
by the outrageous attacks of the Radicals, and suffering as only a
great artist can suffer under what he regards as a complete
misrepresentation of his purpose, Turgenev wrote letters of
explanation, confession, irony, letters that gained him no affection,
that only increased the perplexity of the public, and which are much
harder to understand than the work itself. The prime difficulty was
that in this book Turgenev had told a number of profound truths about
life; and nobody wanted the truth. The eternal quarrel between the old
and the young generation, the eternal quarrel between conservative and
liberal, was at that time in Russia in an acute stage; and everybody
read "Fathers and Children" with a view to increasing their