have all the force of autobiography, they are not shown us in the round. Mr. Baring has been seduced, one imagines, by our generation's preference for the "photographic likeness" in art, which nevertheless, at critical moments, often leaves us in the air: for example, the scene of Vronsky's attempted suicide in _Anna Karenin_. Turgenev could never have been guilty of this piece of banal, doubtful psychology. And the latter-day school of Russian critics, when they ask with Mr. Baring, "Did men ever meet the double of a Bazarov or a Rudin in flesh and in blood? if not, then these characters are bookishly exaggerated or have an element of caricature in them," may be asked in reply, "Did you ever meet Dostoevsky's Alyosha or Prince Myshkin walking and talking in life?" Again, are not three-fourths of Dostoevsky's people permeated by "the faults of the author's own character"? Do they not behave extravagantly or fantastically in a manner all their own? Is there not a strong element of caricature in them? Of course there is, and Mr. Baring and his Russian critics delight in it, and for that very reason exalt Dostoevsky above Turgenev. They exalt the exaggerated Satanic element in Dostoevsky's work, even while they declare "Dostoevsky's Nihilists are not only truer than Turgenev's, but the _very quintessence of truth_"! We are more humble in our claims for Nezhdanov and Marianna and Mashurina in _Virgin Soil_; we do not assert that they are "the very quintessence of truth"; but we know that these creations are not "caricatures" in the sense that Stepan Trofimovitch and Karmazinov in _The Possessed_ are caricatures. We know, on the contrary, that Turgenev's Nihilists, in Kropotkin's words, are real representatives of "the very earliest phases of the movement.... Turgenev had, with his wonderful intuition, caught some of the most striking features of the movement, viz. the early promoters' 'Hamletism,' and their misconception of the peasantry." How curious it is that Stepniak and Kropotkin, who themselves lived with and knew intimately these early Nihilists, bear witness to the truth of Turgenev's portraiture, while MM. Baring and Brückner and Haumant, these critics of our own generation, tell us "Turgenev's Nihilists are not the real thing"! While admitting that Turgenev had his comparative failures, such as Insarov in _On the Eve_, one observes that Turgenev's detractors demand from his social pictures what they demand from no other of his contemporaries, "the whole objective truth and nothing but the truth." And this curious demand, fundamentally at the root of the widespread misunderstanding about Turgenev's work, has been spread and caught up and re-echoed by the great tribe of partisan critics, political propagandists, Slavophils, reactionaries, progressives, for two generations. Necessarily Turgenev, this consummate artist whose contemporary pictures synthesize many aspects of the social