A complete despair in the capacity for action of the educated man in Russia runs through all the novels of this period. Those few men who seem to be an exception--those who have energy, or simulate it for a short time, generally end their lives in the billiard room of the public house, or spoil their existences in some other way. The years 1854 and 1855, when these novels were written, fully explain the pessimism of Turguéneff. In Russia they were perhaps the darkest years of that dark period of Russian history--the reign of Nicholas I.--and in Western Europe, too, the years closely following the _coup d’état_ of Napoleon III. were years of a general reaction after the great unrealised hopes of 1848. Turguéneff, who came very near being marched to Siberia in 1852 for having printed at Moscow his innocent necrological note about Gógol, after it had been forbidden by the St. Petersburg censorship, was compelled to live now on his estate, beholding round him the servile submissiveness of all those who had formerly shown some signs of revolt. Seeing all round the triumph of the supporters of serfdom and despotism, he might easily have been brought to despair. But the sadness which pervades the novels of this period was not a cry of despair; it was not a satire either; it was the gentle touch of a loving friend, and that constitutes their main charm. From the artistic point of view, _Asya_ and _Correspondence_ are perhaps the finest gems which we owe to Turguéneff. * * * * * To judge of the importance of Turguéneff’s work one must read in succession--so he himself desired--his six novels: _Dmitri Rúdin_, _A Nobleman’s Retreat_ (_Une nichée de Gentilshommes_, or, _Liza_, in Mr. Ralston’s version), _On the Eve_, _Fathers and Sons_, _Smoke_, and _Virgin Soil_. In them, one sees his poetical powers in full; at the same time one gets an insight into the different aspects which intellectual life took in Russia from 1848 to 1876, and one understands the poet’s attitude towards the best representatives of advanced thought in Russia during that most interesting period of her development. In some of his earlier short tales Turguéneff had already touched upon Hamletism in Russian life. In his _Hamlet of the Schigróvsky District_, and his _Diary of a Useless Man_, he had already given admirable sketches of that sort of man. But it was in _Rúdin_ (1855) that he achieved the full artistic representation of that type which had grown upon Russian soil with especial profusion at a time when our best men were condemned to inactivity and--words. Turguéneff did not spare men of that type; he represented them with their worst features, as well as with their best, and yet he treated them with tenderness. He loved Rúdin, with all his defects, and in this love he was at one with the best men of his generation, and of ours, too.