_Fathers and Sons_ produced a tremendous impression. Turguéneff was assailed on all sides: by the old generation, which reproached him with being “a nihilist himself”; and by the youth, which was discontented at being identified with Bazároff. The truth is that, with a very few exceptions, among whom was the great critic, Písareff, we do not properly understand Bazároff. Turguéneff had so much accustomed us to a certain poetical halo which surrounded his heroes, and to his own tender love which followed them, even when he condemned them, that finding nothing of the sort in his attitude towards Bazároff, we saw in the absence of these features a decided hostility of the author towards the hero. Moreover, certain features of Bazároff decidedly displeased us. Why should a man of his powers display such a harshness towards his old parents: his loving mother and his father--the poor old village-doctor who has retained, to old age, faith in his science. Why should Bazároff fall in love with that most uninteresting, self-admiring lady, Madame Odintsóff, and fail to be loved, even by her? And then why, at a time when in the young generation the seeds of a great movement towards freeing the masses were already ripening, why make Bazároff say that he is ready to work for the peasant, but if somebody comes and says to him that he is bound to do so, he will hate that peasant? To which Bazároff adds, in a moment of reflection: “And what of that? Grass will grow out of me when this peasant acquires well-being!” We did not understand this attitude of Turguéneff’s nihilist, and it was only on re-reading _Fathers and Sons_ much later on, that we noticed, in the very words that so offended us, the germs of a realistic philosophy of solidarity and duty which only now begins to take a more or less definite shape. In 1860 we, the young generation, looked on it as Turguéneff’s desire to throw a stone at a new type with which he did not sympathise. And yet, as Písareff understood at once, Bazároff _was_ a real representative of the young generation. Turguéneff, as he himself wrote later on, merely did not “add syrup” to make his hero appear somewhat sweeter.