exception to the prevailing contemporary criticism, which, as has been seen, was passionately unjust. Twenty years later, a Russian writer, Boorenin, was able to view the novel as we see it to-day: —
"We can say with assurance that since the time of Dead Souls not a single Russian novel made such an impression as Fathers and Children has made. A deep mind, a no less deep observation, an incomparable ability for a bold and true analysis of the phenomena of life, and for their broadest relations to each other, — all these have shown themselves in the fundamental thought of this positively historical creation. Turgenev has explained with lifelike images of 'fathers' and 'children' the essence of that life struggle between the dying period of the nobility which found its strength in the possession of peasants and the new period of reforms whose essence made up the principal element of our 'resurrection' and for which, however, none had found a real, true ('bright') definition. Turgenev not only gave such a definition, not only illumined the inner sense of the new movement in the life of that time, but he also has pointed out its principal characteristic sign — negation in the name of realism, as the opposition to the old ideally liberal conservatism. It is known that he found not only an unusually appropriate nickname for this negation, but a nickname which later became attached to a cer-
