One of the last messages which Turguéneff addressed to Russian writers from his death-bed was to implore them to keep in its purity “that precious inheritance of ours--the Russian language.” He who knew in perfection most of the languages spoken in Western Europe had the highest opinion of Russian as an instrument for the expression of all possible shades of thought and feeling, and he had shown in his writings what depth and force of expression, and what melodiousness of prose, could be obtained in his native tongue. In his high appreciation of Russian, Turguéneff--as will often be seen in these pages--was perfectly right. The richness of the Russian language in words is astounding: many a word which stands alone for the expression of a given idea in the languages of Western Europe has in Russian three or four equivalents for the rendering of the various shades of the same idea. It is especially rich for rendering various shades of human feeling--tenderness and love, sadness and merriment--as also various degrees of the same action. Its pliability for translation is such that in no other language do we find an equal number of most beautiful, correct, and truly poetical renderings of foreign authors. Poets of the most diverse character, such as Heine and Béranger, Longfellow and Schiller, Shelley and Goethe--to say nothing of that favourite with Russian translators, Shakespeare--are equally well turned into Russian. The sarcasm of Voltaire, the rollicking humour of Dickens, the good-natured laughter of Cervantes are rendered with equal ease. Moreover, owing to the musical character of the Russian tongue, it is wonderfully adapted for rendering poetry in the same metres as those of the original. Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” (in two different translations, both admirable), Heine’s capricious lyrics, Schiller’s ballads, the melodious folk-songs of different nationalities, and Béranger’s playful _chansonnettes_, read in Russian with exactly the same rhythms as in the originals. The desperate vagueness of German metaphysics is quite as much at home in Russian as the matter-of-fact style of the eighteenth century philosophers; and the short, concrete and expressive, terse sentences of the best English writers offer no difficulty for the Russian translator.