“When my contemporaries and I,” Feodor Petrovitch added, “first read the novels of Tourgenieff we were carried off our feet by the skill and magic of a new and great artist. To us it was all new. When I read him now, I admire _Poems in Prose_ and _The Sportsmen’s Sketches_ as much as I used to do, and I am still enchanted by his incomparable style. But the matter seems hopelessly old-fashioned. Just that which seemed so new and so daring seems to me now like mahogany furniture, crinolines, Octave Feuillet, the Second Empire, and all that is what you call ‘Early Victorian.’ And nine-tenths of his characters seem to me to be _clichés_. We know all that. We have got beyond it. What we shall never get beyond is the poet in Tourgenieff, his apprehension of certain shades and values of beauty in nature and life, and his expression of it in matchless prose. In this respect he seems to me indeed superior to Flaubert and the French in that Tourgenieff is a poet; but on the other hand I find _Madame Bovary_ infinitely more interesting than _Virgin Soil_ or _Smoke_ on account of its relation to real life, which seems to me far closer; the Frenchman’s work is, I think, more vital, more real, and more true. _Virgin Soil_ is, I think, a collection of conventional characters, or rather caricatures who bear really no relation to the period represented. And hence I consider Dostoievski so infinitely superior to Tourgenieff. In his book called _Devils_ he gives you a picture of the same epoch; the surroundings he invents are as fantastic as a picture thrown on the screen by a magic lantern; but the human beings, the naked souls of which he lays bare to you, how poignantly and terribly real they are! Tolstoi shows you life as it is, Tourgenieff life as one can imagine it, only he imagines it with the genius and skill of an artist; but Dostoievski leads you, as Virgil leads Dante, through the smoky regions which lie between the real and the unreal, regions which we all know; and although he was not a stylist, not an artist like Tourgenieff, yet in laying bare the human soul and revealing all its darkness and all its light he was without an equal. Of course, as I said, it is absurd to generalise on such things, which are matters of taste, but I am sure you will find many Russians who think that Tourgenieff is old-fashioned as a novelist, though immortal as a poet, and very few who would place him above Tolstoi or Dostoievski.” Then he went on to talk of other things. III THE BIRTH OF THE BELL