ngs to gain dramatic freedom, but cannot achieve it.
It is one of a series of portraits, wonderfully traced psychological
studies of the Russian dreamers and incompatibles of last mid-century,
of which the most moving figure is the hero of the earlier novel,
Dimitri Rudin. If we cared to follow Turgenev strictly in his growth
and contemporary relations, we ought to begin with his Sportsman's Note
Book. But so far as his novels go, he is the last writer to be taken
chronologically. He was old enough in youth to understand old age in the
forest, and young enough in age to provide his youth with fresh hues for
another incarnation. Another element of his work which is very finely
revealed and brought to a rare point of characterisation in Virgin Soil,
is the prophetic intention he had of the woman's part in the new order.
For the real hero of the tale, as Mr. Edward Garnett has pointed out in
an essay on Turgenev, is not Nejdanov and not Solomin; the part is cast
in the woman's figure of Mariana who broke the silence of "anonymous
Russia." Ivan Turgenev had the understanding that goes beneath the old
delimitation of the novelist hide-bound by the law--"male and female
created he them."

He had the same extreme susceptibility to the moods of nature. He
loved her first for herself, and then with a sense of those inherited
primitive associations with her scenes and hid influences which still
play upon us to-day; and nothing could be surer than the wilder or tamer
glimpses which are seen in this book and in its landscape settings of
the characters. But Russ as he is, he never lets his scenery hide his
people: he only uses it to enhance them. He is too great an artist to
lose a human trait, as we see even in a grotesque vignette like that of
Fomishka and Fimishka, or a chance picture like that of the Irish girl
once seen by Solomin in London.

Turgenev was born at Orel, son of a cavalry colonel, in ISIS. He died in
exile, like his early master in romance Heine--that is in Paris-on the
4th of September, 1883. But at his own wish his remains were carried
home and buried in the Volkoff Cemetery, St. Petersburg. The grey
crow he had once seen in foreign fields and addressed in a fit of
homesickness.

"Crow, crow, You are grizzled, I know, But from Russia you come; Ah me,
there lies home!" called him back to his mother country, whose true son
he remained despite all he suffered at her hands, and all the delicate
revenges of the ar