“Bazároff,” he wrote, “puts all the other personalities of my novel in the shade. He is honest, straightforward, and a democrat of the purest water, and you find no good qualities in him! The duel with Petr Petróvitch is only introduced to show the intellectual emptiness of the elegant, noble knighthood; in fact, I even exaggerated and made it ridiculous. My conception of Bazároff is such as to make him appear throughout much superior to Petr Petróvitch. Nevertheless, when he calls himself nihilist you must read _revolutionist_. To draw on one side a functionary who takes bribes, and on the other an ideal youth--I leave it to others to make such pictures. My aim was much higher than that. I conclude with one remark: If the reader is not won by Bazároff, notwithstanding his roughness, absence of heart, pitiless dryness and terseness, then the fault is with me--I have missed my aim; but to sweeten him with syrup (to use Bazároff’s own language), this I did not want to do, although perhaps through that I would have won Russian youth at once to my side.” The true key to the understanding of _Fathers and Sons_, and, in fact, of whatever Turguéneff wrote, is given, I will permit myself to suggest, in his admirable lecture, _Hamlet and Don Quixote_ (1860). I have already elsewhere intimated this; but I am bound to repeat it here, as I think that, better than any other of Turguéneff’s writings, this lecture enables us to look into the very philosophy of the great novelist. Hamlet and Don Quixote--Turguéneff wrote--personify the two opposite particularities of human nature. All men belong more or less to the one or to the other of these two types. And, with his wonderful powers of analysis, he thus characterised the two heroes: