Turgenev was one of the greatest novelists of all time--the greatest, as it seems to me, of all impressionistic novelists. Except in the one quality of unity--for his work was on its surface fragmentary in structure--this preëminent Russian met perfectly Poe’s ideal of impressionism: he felt an impression of character or of nature and then reproduced in his reader just what he himself felt. And this impression was oftenest elevated above the merely physical. Brutalities, gaucheries, physicalities, were to him expressions of the man in whose inner life the novelist was more deeply interested than in the outer. Thus his realism is neither so physical as Zola’s nor so materialistic in philosophy as Maupassant’s. Turgenev’s pessimism is social, and not primarily moral; hence character is always the big element in his novels and shorter fictional pieces. As with Tolstoi, so with Turgenev, plot is a negligible quantity. Yet in a way that quite defies any explanation but one, the final impression is fairly unified, and certainly tremendously effective. That one explanation is that all the scattered pictures of traits, appearances, oddities, mannerisms of bearing and speech, and, above all, the marvellous reproduction of _characteristically_ personal language, result in an individual presentment of character unequalled for vividness in all fiction. Turgenev lets no significant detail escape. The units may be trivial, the entire effect is almost always big. The little thing he seizes upon shows us with the infallibility of a master diagnostician the trends of character. The sum of it all is wizardry. All this is true primarily of his great novels. Here I have space only for mention, at the same time venturing to place them in the order of their importance: “A House of Gentlefolk” (“A Nest of Nobles”), a masterpiece of depiction; “Fathers and Children,” a severe castigation of the old and the new in Russia; “On the Eve,” a pessimistic inquiry as to whether there is hope of better things for his fatherland; “Rudin,” a character study of unusual penetration; “Torrents of Spring,” in which a devilish woman ruins the hero; “Smoke,” a brilliant but bitter satire on things Russian; and “Virgin Soil,” whose “villain,” as in all of the author’s novels, is a woman! * * * * *