This lecture fully explains, I believe, the attitude of Turguéneff towards Bazároff. He himself belonged to a great extent to the Hamlets. Among them he had his best friends. He loved Hamlet; yet he admired Don Quixote--the man of action. He felt his superiority; but, while describing this second type of men, he never could surround it with that tender poetical love for a sick friend which makes the irresistible attraction of those of his novels which deal with one or other of the Hamlet type. He admired Bazároff--his roughness as well as his power; Bazároff overpowered him; but he could by no means have for him the tender feelings which he had had for men of his own generation and his own refinement. In fact, with Bazároff they would have been out of place. This we did not notice at that time, and therefore we did not understand Turguéneff’s intention of representing the _tragic_ position of Bazároff amidst his surroundings. “I entirely share Bazároff’s ideas,” he wrote later on. “All of them, with the exception of his negation of art.” “I _loved_ Bazároff; I will prove it to you by my diary,” he told me once in Paris. Certainly he loved him--but with an intellectually admiring love, quite different from the compassionate love which he had bestowed upon Rúdin and Lavrétskiy. This difference escaped us, and was the chief cause of the misunderstanding which was so painful for the great poet. * * * * * Turguéneff’s next novel, _Smoke_ (1867), need not be dwelt upon. One object he had in it was to represent the powerful type of a Russian society lioness, which had haunted him for years, and to which he returned several times, until he finally succeeded in finding for it, in _Spring Flood_, the fullest and the most perfect artistic expression. His other object was to picture in its true colours the shallowness--nay, the silliness, of that society of bureaucrats into whose hands Russia fell for the next twenty years. Deep despair in the future of Russia after the wreck of that great reform movement which had given to us the abolition of serfdom pervades the novel; a despair which can by no means be attributed entirely, or even chiefly, to the hostile reception of _Fathers and Sons_ by the Russian youth, but must be sought for in the wreck of the great hopes which Turguéneff and his best friends had laid in the representatives of the reform movement of 1859-1863. This same despair made Turguéneff write “_Enough; from the Memoirs of a Dead Artist_” (1865), and the fantastic sketch, “_Ghosts_” (1867), and he recovered from it only when he saw the birth in Russia of a new movement, “towards the people!” which took place amongst our youth in the early seventies.