that every time he
read it he enjoyed a new and genuine spiritual delight. He said that not
only was everything intelligible to him in the Gospel, but that when
he read it he seemed to be reading in his own soul, and felt himself
capable of rising higher and higher toward God and merging himself in
Him.

TURGENIEFF

I DO not mean to recount all the misunderstandings which existed between
my father and Turgenieff, which ended in a complete breach between them
in 1861. The actual external facts of that story are common property,
and there is no need to repeat them. [17] According to general opinion,
the quarrel between the two greatest writers of the day arose out of
their literary rivalry.

It is my intention to show cause against this generally received
opinion, and before I come to Turgenieff's visits to Yasnaya Polyana, I
want to make as clear as I can the real reason of the perpetual discords
between these two good-hearted people, who had a cordial affection for
each other--discords which led in the end to an out-and-out quarrel and
the exchange of mutual defiance.

As far as I know, my father never had any serious difference with
any other human being during the whole course of his existence. And
Turgenieff, in a letter to my father in 1865, wrote, "You are the only
man with whom I have ever had misunderstandings."

Whenever my father related his quarrel with Ivan Sergeyevitch, he took
all the blame on himself. Turgenieff, immediately after the quarrel,
wrote a letter apologizing to my father, and never sought to justify his
own part in it.

Why was it that, as Turgenieff himself put it, his "constellation" and
my father's "moved in the ether with unquestioned enmity"?

This is what my sister Tatyana wrote on the subject in her article
"Turgenieff," published in the supplement to the "Novoye Vremya,"
February 2, 1908:

All question of literary rivalry, it seems to me, is utterly beside the
mark. Turgenieff, from the very outset of my father's literary career,
acknowledged his enormous talents, and never thought of rivalry with
him. From the moment when, as early as 1854, he wrote to Kolbasina, "If
Heaven only grant Tolstoy life, I confidently hope that he will surprise
us all," he never ceased to follow my father's work with interest, and
always expressed his unbounded admiration of it.

"When this young wine has done fermenting," he wrote to Druzhenin in
1856, "the result will be a liquor wor