familiar character, to English households. His essentially
masculine meanness, his self-complacency, his unconscious indifference
to the opinion of others, his absurdity as '_un pere de famille_' is
balanced by the foolish affection and jealousy which his wife, Anna
Vassilyevna, cannot help feeling towards him. The perfect balance and
duality of Turgenev's outlook is here shown by the equal cleverness with
which he seizes on and quietly derides the typical masculine and typical
feminine attitude in such a married life as the two Stahovs'.

Turning to the figure of the Bulgarian hero, it is interesting to find
from the _Souvenirs sur Tourguenev_ (published in 1887) that Turgenev's
only distinct failure of importance in character drawing, Insarov, was
not taken from life, but was the legacy of a friend Karateieff, who
implored Turgenev to work out an unfinished conception. Insarov is a
figure of wood. He is so cleverly constructed, and the central idea
behind him is so strong, that his wooden joints move naturally, and the
spectator has only the instinct, not the certainty, of being cheated.
The idea he incarnates, that of a man whose soul is aflame with
patriotism, is finely suggested, but an idea, even a great one, does
not make an individuality. And in fact Insarov is not a man, he is an
automaton. To compare Shubin's utterances with his is to perceive that
there is no spontaneity, no inevitability in Insarov. He is a patriotic
clock wound up to go for the occasion, and in truth he is very useful.
Only on his deathbed, when the unexpected happens, and the machinery
runs down, do we feel moved. Then, he appears more striking dead than
alive--a rather damning testimony to the power Turgenev credits him
with. This artistic failure of Turgenev's is, as he no doubt recognised,
curiously lessened by the fact that young girls of Elena's lofty
idealistic type are particularly impressed by certain stiff types of
men of action and great will-power, whose capacity for moving straight
towards a certain goal by no means implies corresponding brain-power.
The insight of a Shubin and the moral worth of a Bersenyev are not so
valuable to the Elenas of this world, whose ardent desire to be made
good use of, and to seek some great end, is best developed by strength
of aim in the men they love.

And now to see what the novel before us means to the Russian mind, we
must turn to the infinitely suggestive background. Turgenev's genius was