you that has cause
to envy me.

The following year he wrote a letter to my father which, it seems to me,
is a key to the understanding of Turgenieff's attitude toward him:

You write that you are very glad you did not follow my advice and become
a pure man of letters. I don't deny it; perhaps you are right. Still,
batter my poor brains as I may, I cannot imagine what else you are if
you are not a man of letters. A soldier? A squire? A philosopher?
The founder of a new religious doctrine? A civil servant? A man of
business?... Please resolve my difficulties, and tell me which of these
suppositions is correct. I am joking, but I really do wish beyond all
things to see you under way at last, with all sails set.

It seems to me that Turgenieff, as an artist, saw nothing in my father
beyond his great literary talent, and was unwilling to allow him the
right to be anything besides an artist and a writer. Any other line of
activity on my father's part offended Turgenieff, as it were, and he was
angry with my father because he did not follow his advice. He was much
older than my father, [18] he did not hesitate to rank his own talent
lower than my father's, and demanded only one thing of him, that he
should devote all the energies of his life to his literary work. And, lo
and behold! my father would have nothing to do with his magnanimity and
humility, would not listen to his advice, but insisted on going the road
which his own tastes and nature pointed out to him. Turgenieff's
tastes and character were diametrically opposed to my father's. While
opposition always inspired my father and lent him strength, it had just
the opposite effect on Turgenieff.

Being wholly in agreement with my sister's views, I will merely
supplement them with the words uttered by his brother, Nikolai
Nikolayevitch, who said that "Turgenieff cannot reconcile himself to
the idea that Lyovotchka is growing up and freeing himself from his
tutelage."

As a matter of fact, when Turgenieff was already a famous writer, no
one had ever heard of Tolstoy, and, as Fet expressed it, there was only
"something said about his stories from 'Childhood.'"

I can imagine with what secret veneration a young writer, just
beginning, must have regarded Turgenieff at that time, and all the more
because Ivan Sergeyevitch was a great friend of my father's elder and
beloved brother Nikolai.

I do not like to assert it positively, but it seems to me that just
as T