“When the writer said that Tourgenieff was not for the general public, he meant, of course, the English or the French general public,” said Feodor Petrovitch. “In Russia his novels are read by every schoolboy; they are generally the first grown-up books to be read by young boys and girls at school. We have all read Tourgenieff in our youth, and we have all come under his spell as a writer. But to many of us, and certainly to me when I read him now, much of the glamour has gone. The beauty of style remains. And first and foremost, I consider Tourgenieff to be a poet. The books of his which give me the most pleasure are _The Poems in Prose_, _The Sportsmen’s Sketches_, and _Spring Waters_. These works seem to me incomparable for their harmony and many-sided beauty. Besides being a poet Tourgenieff was a chronicler of his time; but he has always seemed to be more a chronicler of the atmosphere of the epoch he deals with than a portrait painter of the human beings that crowded it--I mean a portrait painter like Velasquez and not a writer of _romans à clef_. Of course, his characters are living, but to me they are living as the characters in Trollope’s novels are living. They are people who existed in an imaginary world, and that imaginary world has the atmosphere of the Sixties. But with Tolstoi the case is different; he gives you the human beings who did actually exist. You know that what he described happened. I do not mean to say that he was a photographer, but an artist of the calibre of Velasquez; he recreated a world and made the human beings which he put into it breathe and live and speak as they actually did in real life. Tourgenieff’s novels at their best are novels. One knows quite well that _Smoke_ never happened. On the other hand, we know that the doings and sayings of Pierre, and Levin, and Natasha, and Dolly are as true as the doings of Dr. Johnson and Pepys, or as true as the sayings and doings of any of our acquaintances. For this reason, I don’t care a fig for Tourgenieff’s psychology.