upon them to be.
His descriptions are never overburdened with wearisome details; his
action is rapid; the events are never to be foreseen a hundred pages
beforehand; he keeps his readers in constant suspense. And it seems
to me in so doing he shows himself a better realist than the gifted
representatives of the orthodox realism in France, England, and America.
Life is not dull; life is full of the unforeseen, full of suspense. A
novelist, however natural and logical, must contrive to have it in his
novels if he is not to sacrifice the soul of art for the merest show of
fidelity.

The plot of Dmitri Rudin is so exceedingly simple that an English
novel-reader would say that there is hardly any plot at all. Turgenev
disdained the tricks of the sensational novelists. Yet, for a Russian at
least, it is easier to lay down before the end a novel by Victor Hugo or
Alexander Dumas than Dmitri Rudin, or, indeed, any of Turgenev's great
novels. What the novelists of the romantic school obtain by the charm
of unexpected adventures and thrilling situations, Turgenev succeeds in
obtaining by the brisk admirably concentrated action, and, above all, by
the simplest and most precious of a novelist's gifts: his unique command
over the sympathies and emotions of his readers. In this he can be
compared to a musician who works upon the nerves and the souls of his
audience without the intermediary of the mind; or, better still, to a
poet who combines the power of the word with the magic spell of harmony.
One does not read his novels; one lives in them.

Much of this peculiar gift of fascination is certainly due to Turgenev's
mastery over all the resources of our rich, flexible, and musical
language. The poet Lermontov alone wrote as splendid a prose as
Turgenev. A good deal of its charm is unavoidably lost in translation.
But I am happy to say that the present one is as near an approach to the
elegance and poetry of the original as I have ever come across.

S. STEPNIAK.

BEDFORD PARK, April 20, 1894.

THE NAMES OF THE CHARACTERS IN THE BOOK

DMITRI NIKOLA'ITCH RU'DIN.

DAR-YA MIHA'ILOVNA LASU'NSKY.

NATA'L-YA ALEX-YE'VNA.

MIHA'ILO MIHA'ILITCH LE'ZH-NYOV (MISHA).

ALEXANDRA PA'VLOVNA LI'PIN (SASHA).

SERGEI (pron, Sergay) PA'VLITCH VOLI'NT-SEV (SEREZHA).

KONSTANTIN DIOMIDITCH PANDALE'VSKY.

AFRICAN SEME'NITCH PIGA'SOV.

BASSI'STOFF.

MLLE. BONCOURT.

In transcribing the Russian names into English--