Firstly, that although he is and always will remain a Russian classic, he is not, rightly or wrongly, so enthusiastically admired as he used to be: new writers have risen since his time (not necessarily better ones, but men who have opened windows on undreamed-of vistas); and not only this, but one of his own contemporaries, Dostoievsky, has been brought into a larger and clearer light of fame than he enjoyed in his lifetime, owing to the dissipation of the mists of political prejudices and temporary and local polemics, differences, quarrels and controversies. But the English reader has, as a general rule, never got farther than Tourgeniev. He is generally quite unacquainted with the other Russian classics; and so when it is said that there are others greater than he--Dostoievsky and Gogol, for instance,--the English reader thinks an attempt is being made to break a cherished and holy image. And if he admires Tourgeniev,--which, if he likes Russian literature at all he is almost sure to do,--it makes him angry. Secondly, I wish to say that owing to the generally prevailing limited view of the educated intellectual Englishman as to the field of Russian literature as a whole, I do think he is inclined to overrate the genius and position of Tourgeniev in Russian literature, great as they are. There is, I think, an exaggerated cult for Tourgeniev among intellectual Englishmen.[15] The case of Tennyson seems to me to afford a very close parallel to that of Tourgeniev. Mr. Gosse pointed out not long ago in a subtle and masterly article that Tennyson, although we were now celebrating his centenary, had not reached that moment when a poet is rapturously rediscovered by a far younger generation than his own, but that he had reached that point when the present generation felt no particular excitement about his work. This seems to me the exact truth about Tourgeniev’s reputation in Russia at the present day. Everybody has read him, and everybody will always read him because he is a classic and because he has written immortal things, but now, in the year 1909, there is no particular excitement about _Fathers and Sons_ in Russia: just as now there is no particular excitement about the “Idylls of the King” or “In Memoriam” in England to-day. Tourgeniev has not yet been rediscovered. Of course, there are some critics who in “the fearless old fashion” say boldly that Tennyson’s reputation is dead; that he exists no longer, and that we need not trouble to mention him. I read some such sweeping pronouncement not long ago by an able journalist. There are doubtless Russian critics who say the same about Tourgeniev. As to whether they are right or wrong, I will not bother myself or my readers, but I do wish to make it as clear as daylight that I myself hold no such opinion either with regard to Tourgeniev or to Tennyson.