"I will not enlarge on the effect produced by this novel. I will only say that everywhere the word Nihilist was caught up by a thousand tongues, and that on the day of the conflagration of the Apraksinsky shops, when I arrived in St. Petersburg, the first exclamation with which I was greeted was, 'Just see what your Nihilists are doing!' ... I experienced a coldness approaching to indignation from people near and sympathetic to me. I received congratulations, almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies. This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach me. I knew very well I had carried out honestly the type I had sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively with sympathy.... While some attack me for outraging the Younger Generation, and promise me, with a laugh of contempt, to burn my photograph, others, on the contrary, with indignation, reproach me for my servile cringing to the Younger Generation.... 'You are grovelling at the feet of Bazarov. You pretend to find fault with him, and you are licking the dust at his feet,' says one correspondent. Another critic represented M. Katkoff and me as two conspirators, 'plotting in the solitude of our chamber our traps and slanders against the forces of Young Russia.' An effective picture!... My critics called my work a pamphlet, and referred to my wounded and irritated vanity.... A shadow has fallen on my name. I don't deceive myself. I know that shadow will remain." Politics is a game where the mistakes and admissions of your adversary are your good character in public opinion--a definition which goes far to account for the easy predominance of the political sharper,--and so Turgenev, the great artist, he who, in creating Bazarov for an ungrateful public, to use his own words, "_simply did not know how to work otherwise_," found to his cost. The Younger Generation, irritated by the public capital made out of Bazarov and his Nihilism by "the Fathers," flew into the other extreme, and refused to see in Bazarov anything other than a _caricature_ of itself. It denied Bazarov was of its number, or represented its views in any way; and to this day surviving Nihilists will demonstrate warmly that the creation of his sombre figure is "a mistake from beginning to end." The reason for this wholesale rejection of Bazarov is easy to account for; and Turgenev, whose clear-sightedness about his works was unaffected either by vanity, diffidence or the ignorant onslaughts of the whole tribe of minor critics, penetrates at once to the heart of the matter: