was because I had
reached the point through my acquaintance with Tolstoy where I was
impatient even of the artifice that hid itself. In "Smoke" I was now
aware of an artifice that kept out of sight, but was still always
present somewhere, invisibly operating the story.--From "My Literary
Passions" (1895).

III
BY K. WALISZEWSKI

The second novel of the series, "Fathers and Children," stirred up a
storm the suddenness and violence of which it is not easy, nowadays, to
understand. The figure of Bazarov, the first "Nihilist"--thus baptized
by an inversion of epithet which was to win extraordinary success--is
merely intended to reveal a mental condition which, though the fact had
been insufficiently recognized, had already existed for some years. The
epithet itself had been in constant use since 1829, when Nadiejdine
applied it to Pushkin, Polevoi, and some other subverters of the
classic tradition. Turgenev only extended its meaning by a new
interpretation, destined to be perpetuated by the tremendous success of
"Fathers and Children." There is nothing, or hardly anything, in
Bazarov, of the terrible revolutionary whom we have since learnt to
look for under this title. Turgenev was not the man to call up such a
figure. He was far too dreamy, too gentle, too good-natured a being.
Already, in the character of Roudine, he had failed, in the strangest
way, to catch the likeness of Bakounine, that fiery organiser of
insurrection, whom all Europe knew, and whom he had selected as his
model. Conceive Corot or Millet trying to paint some figure out of the
Last Judgment after Michael Angelo! Bazarov is the Nihilist in his
first phase, "in course of becoming," as the Germans would say, and he
is a pupil of the German universities. When Turgenev shaped the
character, he certainly drew on his own memories of his stay at Berlin,
at a time when Bruno Bauer was laying it down as a dogma that no
educated man ought to have opinions on any subject, and when Max
Stirner was convincing the young Hegelians that ideas were mere smoke
and dust, seeing that the only reality in existence was the individual
_Ego_. These teachings, eagerly received by the Russian youth, were
destined to produce a state of moral decomposition, the earliest
symptoms of which were admirably analysed by Turgenev.

Bazarov is a very clever man, but clever in thought, and especially in
word, only. He scorns art, women, and family life. He does not know
what t