"No one can deny that the characters of Turgenev live; they are intensely vivid. Whether they are true to life is another question. The difference between the work of Tolstoy and Turgenev is this: that Turgenev's characters are as living as any characters are in books, but they belong, comparatively speaking, to bookland and are thus conventional; whereas Tolstoy's characters belong to life. The fault which Russian critics find with Turgenev's characters is that they are exaggerated, that there is an element of caricature in them, and that they are permeated by the faults of the author's own character, namely, his weakness, and, above all, his self-consciousness. "... Than Bazarov there is no character in the whole of his work which is more alive ... (but he is) a book-character, extraordinarily vivid and living though he be.... Dostoevsky's Nihilists, however outwardly fantastic they may seem, are inwardly not only truer, but the very quintessence of truth.... (_Virgin Soil_) Here in the opinion of all Russian judges, and of most latter-day judges who have knowledge of the subject, he failed. In describing the official class, although he does this with great skill and cleverness, he makes a gallery of caricatures; and the revolutionaries whom he sets before us as types, however good they may be as fiction, are not the real thing. "The lapse of years has only emphasized the elements of banality--and conventionality--which are to be found in Turgenev's work. He is a masterly landscape painter; but even here he is not without convention. His landscapes are always orthodox Russian landscapes, and are seldom varied. He seems never to get face to face with nature, after the manner of Wordsworth; he never gives us any elemental pictures of nature, such as Gorky succeeds in doing in a phrase; but he rings the changes on delicate arrangements of wood, cloud, mist, and water, vague backgrounds and diaphanous figures, after the manner of Corot."--_Landmarks in Russian Literature_, pp. 99-110.