The special strength of the "school of the '40's" consisted in its combining in one organic and harmonious whole several currents of literature which had hitherto flowed separately and suffered from one-sidedness. The two chief currents were, on the one hand, the objectivity of the Pushkin school, artistic contemplation of everything poetical in Russian life; and on the other hand, the negatively satirical current of naturalism, of the Gogol school, whose principal attention was directed to the imperfections of Russian life. To these were added, by the writers of the '40's, a social-moral movement, the fermentation of ideas, which is visible in the educated classes of Russian society in the '40's and '50's. As this movement was effected under the influence of the French literature of the '30's and '40's, of which Victor Hugo and Georges Sand were the leading exponents (whose ideas were expressed under the form of romanticism), these writers exercised the most influence on the Russian writers of the immediately succeeding period. But it must be stated that their influence was purely intellectual and moral, and not in the least artistic in character. The influence of the French romanticists on the Russian writers of the '40's consisted in the fact that the latter, imbued with the ideas of the former, engaged in the analysis of Russian life, which constitutes the strength and the merit of the Russian literature of that epoch. Of all the Russian writers of that period, Turgeneff was indisputably the greatest. No one could have been more advantageously situated for the study of the mutual relations between landed proprietors and serfs. The Turgeneff family offered a very sharp type of old-fashioned landed-proprietor manners. Not one gentle or heartfelt trait softened the harshness of those manners, which were based wholly upon merciless despotism, and weighed oppressively not only upon the peasants, but upon the younger members of the family. Every one in the household was kept in a perennial tremor of alarm, and lived in hourly, momentary expectation of some savage punishment. Moreover, the author's father (who is depicted in the novel "First Love"), was much younger than his wife, whom he did not love, having married her for her money. His mother's portrait is to be found in "Punin and Baburin." Extremely unhappy in her childhood and youth, when she got the chance at last she became a pitiless despot, greedy of power, and indulged the caprices and fantastic freaks suggested by her shattered nerves upon her family, the house-servants, and the serfs. It is but natural that from such an experience as this Turgeneff should have cherished, from the time of his miserable childhood (his disagreements with his mother later in life are matters of record also), impressions which made of him the irreconcilable foe of serfdom. In depicting, in his "Notes of a Sportsman," the tyranny of the landed gentry over their serfs, he could