excepting Tolstoi, who came to the front only after his death. But
full recognition he had not, because he happened to produce his works in
a troubled epoch of political and social strife, when the best men were
absorbed in other interests and pursuits, and could not and would not
appreciate and enjoy pure art. This was the painful, almost tragic,
position of an artist, who lived in a most inartistic epoch, and whose
highest aspirations and noblest efforts wounded and irritated those
among his countrymen whom he was most devoted to, and whom he desired
most ardently to serve.

This strife embittered Turgenev's life.

At one crucial epoch of his literary career the conflict became so
vehement, and the outcry against him, set in motion by his very artistic
truthfulness and objectiveness, became so loud and unanimous, that he
contemplated giving up literature altogether. He could not possibly
have held to this resolution. But it is surely an open question whether,
sensitive and modest as he was, and prone to despondency and diffidence,
he would have done so much for the literature of his country without the
enthusiastic encouragement of various great foreign novelists, who were
his friends and admirers: George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, in France;
Auerbach, in Germany; W. D. Howells, in America; George Eliot, in
England.

We will tell the story of his troubled life piece by piece as far as
space will allow, as his works appear in succession. Here we will only
give a few biographical traits which bear particularly upon the novel
before us, and account for his peculiar hold over the minds of his
countrymen.

Turgenev, who was born in 1818, belonged to a set of Russians very small
in his time, who had received a thoroughly European education in no way
inferior to that of the best favoured young German or Englishman. It
happened, moreover, that his paternal uncle, Nicholas Turgenev, the
famous 'Decembrist,' after the failure of that first attempt (December
14, 1825) to gain by force of arms a constitutional government for
Russia, succeeded in escaping the vengeance of the Tsar Nicholas I., and
settled in France, where he published in French the first vindication of
Russian revolution.

Whilst studying philosophy in the Berlin University, Turgenev paid short
visits to his uncle, who initiated him in the ideas of liberty, from
which he never swerved throughout his long life.

In the sixties, when Alexander Hertzen, one of t