I have read Tourgénef's _On the Eve_. This is my opinion: to write novels is undesirable, especially for people who are depressed and do not well know what they want from life. However, _On the Eve_ is much better than _A Nest of Gentlefolk_, and there are in it excellent negative characters: the artist and the father. The rest are not types; even their conception, their position, is not typical, or they are quite insignificant. That however is always Tourgénef's mistake. The girl is hopelessly bad: 'Ah, how I love thee ... her eyelashes were long.' In general it always surprises me that Tourgénef, with his mental powers and poetic sensibility, should even in his methods not be able to refrain from banality. This banality shows itself most of all in his negative methods, which recall Gógol. There is no humanity or sympathy for the characters, but the author exhibits monsters whom he scolds and does not pity. This jars painfully with the tone and intention of Liberalism in everything else. It was all very well in the days of Tsar Goroh [a character in a fairy story] or of Gógol (though if one does not pity even the most insignificant of one's characters, one should scold them so that the heavens grow hot, or laugh at them so that one's sides split, and not as our splenetic and dyspeptic Tourgénef does). On the whole, however, there is now no one else who could write such a novel, though it will not meet with success. Ostróvsky's _The Storm_ is, in my opinion, a wretched work, but will be successful. Not Ostróvsky and Tourgénef are to blame, but the times.... Something else is now needed: not that we should learn and criticise, but that we should teach Jack and Jill at least a little of what we know. This letter to Fet, who was in Moscow, ends with requests to procure some books, including a veterinary handbook, a veterinary instrument, and a lancet for use on human beings; to see about procuring six ploughs of a special make, and to find out the price of clover and timothy-grass, of which Tolstoy had some to sell. 1860 At this time Tolstoy worked at his story _The Cossacks_, the plan of which he had sketched out in 1852, but which he did not complete till 1862. One comes across notes in his Diary which indicate his state of mind at this period with regard to religion. After reading a book on Materialism he notes: I thought of prayer. To what can one pray? What is God, imagined so clearly that one can ask him to communicate with us? If I imagine such an one, he loses all grandeur for me. A God whom one can beseech and whom one can serve--is the expression of mental weakness. He is God, because I cannot grasp his being. Indeed, he is not a Being, but a Law and a Force. He was a great puzzle to his friends and acquaintances--always ready to take his own line strenuously, yet sometimes far from sure what that line was. Tourgénef wrote to Fet: