Virginia Woolf, in her last essays, wrote that “his books were curiously of our own time, undecayed, and complete in themselves.... His novels are so short and yet they hold so much. The emotion is so intense and yet so calm. The form is in one sense so perfect, in another so broken. They are about Russia in the fifties and sixties of the last century, and yet they are about ourselves at the present moment.” What struck her as his greatest accomplishment was the union of fact and vision that he aimed at in all his writings. Turgenev himself formulated his ideal in a letter in which he said that the artist should not be simply satisfied to catch life in all its manifestations; he ought to understand them, to comprehend the laws according to which they evolve—even though those laws are not always visible. While Turgenev’s national authenticity has been fully reestablished in the last decade and his universality and perfection often stressed by Western and Russian writers, a revision has also taken place with regard to his “objectivity.” The legend of his “impersonality” has been easily denounced by the psychological brand of criticism which found that Turgenev, as an individual, was prey to morbid complexes and obsessions, and suffered from many inner contradictions and fears. Already at the end of the nineteenth century George Moore assumed that “what influenced Turgenev’s life is put forward in his books,” and went on to argue that Turgenev exposed his own weaknesses and failures through the medium of his heroes and their unlucky experiences with life and women. Extremely representative of this trend in contemporary interpretation is the brilliant essay (1958) by Edmund Wilson which examines Turgenev’s art in the light of his biography. Of course the flow of literary fortune is in constant ebb, and the rejection of yesterday’s formulae by critics and readers of our time is not final. Yet one has the feeling that we have overcome the biased and inimical judgments of the beginning of the century and particularly those of the twenties and thirties. Turgenev is returning to the Pantheon of world literature, not by sufferance but by merit. His lasting qualities as a story teller, as a painter of Russian life and character, and as an incomparable analyst of love seem more evident to us today than they did to the pre-war generation. He will remain a beloved writer for years to come—as long as elegiac grief combined with his exaltation of love and beauty and his vision of art as an orderly arrangement of emotional values can still quicken the feelings and the esthetic sense of men and women throughout the world. M. S. _Sarah Lawrence College_ Works by Turgenev COLLECTED WORKS COLLECTED EDITIONS [Turgenieff’s Works] New York, Holt etc 1867–85. 1 This series, although published not as a collected edition but as part of Holt’s Leisure Hour series, often has binder’s title, “Turgenieff’s Works.”