When Tolstoy and Dostoevsky became known and widely read at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, they not only overshadowed Turgenev but were opposed to him as genuine interpreters of the Russian national scene. Compared to those two giants who shattered the world by the depth and frenzy of their moral and religious search, Turgenev lost in stature. Some critics advanced the theory that he was but an isolated phenomenon in Russian letters; that in any case he did not represent its main stream. His art, they argued, was strangely devoid of any serious moral intent, he never affirmed anything in any area of human endeavour, he never defended any doctrine and never fought on the side of any group. In this he differed fundamentally from other Russians. They were believers or searchers for truth and seekers after God, and he was an agnostic and a skeptic. He belonged much more to the old world of Western decadent culture than to the rising lands of the revolutionary East. And this is why, to quote Mr Kazin again, Turgenev’s “civilized and European art seems no longer in the foreground of Russian literature but behind it.” His unhappy noblemen and his delicately portrayed girls appeared elusive, sentimental, and pallid next to Dostoevsky’s holy sinners and Tolstoy’s robust, full blooded men and women. While the rest of Russian literature conveyed the feeling of exuberant vitality and deep passions, Turgenev’s watercolors exuded melancholy and passivity, and his protagonists (except for Bazarov) talked and acted like second rate Werthers or poor versions of Hamlet. Was he not, in fact, the author of a story entitled _Hamlet of the Shchigrov District_?