It is obvious Turgenev felt that after a tragedy must follow a farce, and therein lies the substance of his philosophy. It is also obvious that in this feeling he has the whole of European civilisation behind him. Turgenev was the most educated, the most cultured of all Russian writers. He spent nearly all his life abroad, and absorbed into himself all that European learning could offer. He knew this, although he never directly admitted it, owing to an exaggerated modesty which sometimes irritates us by its obviousness. He believed profoundly that only learning, only European science could open men's eyes to life, and explain all that needed explanation. According to this belief he judges even Tolstoy. "The saddest instance of the lack of real freedom," the sixty-year-old Turgenev writes _of War and Peace_, in his literary memoirs: "the saddest instance of the lack of real freedom, arising from the lack of real knowledge, is revealed to us in Leo Tolstoy's latest work, a work which at the same time, by virtue of its creative, poetic force, ranks almost first among all that has appeared in Russian literature since 1840. No! without culture, without freedom in the widest sense, freedom within oneself, freedom from preconceived ideas, freedom with regard to one's own nation and history, without this, the real artist is unthinkable; without this free air he cannot breathe." Listening to Turgenev one might imagine that he had learned some great secret in the West, a secret which gave him the right to bear himself cheerfully and modestly when other people despaired and lost their heads.... A year after the writing of the literary memoirs above quoted, Turgenev happened to be present at the execution of the notorious murderer, Tropman. His impressions are superbly rendered in a long article called "Tropman's Execution." The description produces a soul-shaking effect upon the reader; for I think I shall not exaggerate if I say that the essay is one of the best, at least one of the most vigorous of Turgenev's writings. It is true that Tolstoy describes scenes of slaughter with no less vigour, and therefore the reader need not yield too much to the artist's power. Yet when Turgenev relates that, at the decisive moment, when the executioners like spiders on a fly threw themselves on Tropman and bore him to the ground--"the earth quietly swam away from under my feet"--we are forced to believe him. Men respond only faintly to the horrors that take place around them, except at moments, when the savage, crying incongruity and ghastliness of our condition suddenly reveals itself vivid before our eyes, and we are forced to know what we are. Then the ground slides away from under our feet. But not for long. The horror of the sensation of groundlessness quickly brings man to himself. He must forget everything, he must only get his feet on earth again. In this sense Turgenev proved himself in as risky a state at sixty as he was when, as