people, and the iniquitous administration of the autocratic government. It was from that circle that Hertzen, Bakunin, Lavrof, and others were to come forward, to become the teachers and leaders of generations, to found a free Russian press on the continent of Europe, and to leave their indelible imprint upon the revolutionary movements of the world in the characteristic saying: "Die Zerstürende Lust ist die Schaffende Lust," "The triumph of destruction is the triumph of creation!"

In the forties, social and intellectual life in Russia was fully awake. The voices of Pushkin, Lermontof, and Gogol, the voices of the critics of the time, had not spoken in vain; they roused in the breasts of those who heard them the consciousness of the great evil of the existing state of things, the consciousness of outrage on the dignity of the human personality, and indignation and hatred against the conditions which permitted the physical and personal subjection and bondage of millions of people, people of one blood, of one race, of one country, professing the same faith, speaking the same language. Tourgenief, who had already attracted considerable notice as a rising literary man, was keenly alive to all these ills, and was resolute to battle against them. "All that I saw then," he says, "excited in me a sense of alarm, a feeling of indignation, of absolute aversion." For all those who felt like him there were but two means of action, either to submit quietly and tolerate indifferently all the evils which they detested, or to turn round and declare an uncompromising war against them. There was no via media between these two alternatives; and Ivan Sergeiyevitsh, who felt all the evils, who saw all the outrages, but who could not resort to the same means and measures to which a great number of his contemporaries, more impatient of remedies and alleviation, resorted, left his own country and from the "beautiful distance," when oppressed with the feeling of love for native land, the feeling of sympathy with his people who were oppressed and brutalized, wrote those famous tales, The Reminiscences of a Sportsman, in which he depicted so gracefully, so feelingly, with such wondrous beauty and truth, the life of the peasantry and the condition of serfdom under which they labored. "I was unable to breathe the same atmosphere,"

he says, "to remain on the same level of existence with what I detested; to be able to do that I probably had not sufficient patience. I had not sufficient firmness of character to wait. It was necessary for me to retreat from my enemy, that from a distance I might be able to make a more vigorous attack upon him. To my eyes that enemy had a distinctive image, a notorious name, the system of serfdom. Under that designation I collected and concentrated all, against whom I resolved to wage a war to the end, with whom I swore never to conclude peace, never to grant a truce to. This was my Hannibal oath."

The Russian reading public were then watchfully alive to the artistic production of their writers. In the realism founded by their novelists they sought not only the truthful reflection of national life, of national character, but under its form they watched for the words of struggle against the regime of meanness and social degradation. The forces of an independent, critical, and protesting personality rose then against falsehood, against everything that had fraudulently been legalized, against everything that usurped the authority of command, and irrationally claimed the subjection of the individual. About that time Gogol, the leader of the Realistic school, the unconscious revolutionizer of Russian. thought, published his Correspondence, in which he showed such inconsistency of personal belief with his writings as almost to constitute a departure. The public soon turned away from their idol. Gogol himself failed to comprehend the storm of discontent his Correspondence provoked; he maintained that he had professed throughout the same creed, the same opinions; and Tourgenief writes: "I remember the conversation broached the subject of the necessity of maintaining the old order of things, and the strict and unconditional subjection to the authorities on high. "There now,' said Gogol, 'I have always maintained the same doctrines, I have always thought so, and enunciated the same convictions as I do now. Why then reproach me with treason, with faithlessness?' And this was said by the author of the Revisor, one of the most thorough negation comedies ever presented on the stage."

Gogol also defended the institution of the press censorship as beneficial for the developing the best powers of an

artist, the best virtues of a citizen, and as the guardian of its children, in whom it inoculated the virtue of patience and other Christian attributes. "To prove the necessity of censorship!" exclaims Ivan Sergeiyevitsh; "does not this amount to the praising and lauding the wisdom and beneficence of slavery?"

The June days were drawing near; Belinsky died, - of whom he speaks as a man who in the name of his ideal denied and destroyed everything leaving in his last speech an appeal to the Russian nation for progress and advancement. Tourgenief, who lived abroad at the time, soon beheld the tragedy grow out of the comedy which had begun on the Parisian boulevard. He had not to fight "either on this or that side of the barricade," but he heard "the shooting of the insurgents," and saw that "simple man in the blouse, of unconscious and majestic simplicity," whom he left for generations to behold in his story of Ours have sent me! Gogol died. "Death that reconciles all living enmities" awakened in every Russian heart the deepest notes of regret. Ivan Sergeiyevitsh, who perhaps more than all appreciated the heavy loss of the great artist, gave vent to his feelings in a touching and simple letter, in which he mourned the untimely bereavement of the nation. "Envy and malice remain silent before the most insignificant of graves; they will not speak over the grave of Gogol . . . and we are certain that nobody will hesitate to repeat with us: Peace to his ashes, eternal memory to his life, and everlasting glory

with a desire for intellectual activity, with indefinite longings for action and progress, without knowing where to move, where to advance, how to go onward. This was a time when all these longings, all these vague ideas, attracted those youths together to talk, — to talk of everything that came to their minds with all the serious consciousness of significance of the newly wakened youthful mind. They came together and talked "while the night soars onward, still and smooth, as on wings." Rudin stands in the middle of a dusky room and expatiates about philosophy and truth, so eloquently beautiful, that he appears almost like a "young Demosthenes before the tumultuous sea.... Already the morning dawns, when we depart, lively and elated, honest and sober (we had no mention of wine, then), with something like an agreeable weariness on our souls.... Ah, that was an excellent time, and I don't want to believe it to have passed away uselessly." These assemblies were mostly constituted of boys, of unlearned boys. "Philosophy, science, art, life itself— all these were mere words to us. I will admit, if you like, they were notions, — very beautiful and alluring notions, but they were all disjointed and scattered notions. There was no common centre to these notions, that we were conscious of, there was no general mundane law that we acknowledged, that we felt, though we talked of it, and endeavored to give ourselves an account of it.... In listening to Rudin, it appeared to us for the first time that we had grasped that thread which bound them all together, that we had raised at last the veil from it." The outcome of these very same circles, who became the leader of these coteries for a time, was the same Rudin, a man who had read much, heard much, thought little, but always spoke. The sense of duty has become the most paramount consideration to his understanding, who out of a sense of duty interferes with everybody and everything, teaches everybody everything, makes people fall in love with one another, makes them separate, makes them rave about notions they can hardly comprehend, who out of a sense of duty makes himself ridiculous, pitiable, refuses the love of a girl who had the strength and courage to renounce everything and follow him implicitly and faithfully; a man who was in reality empty and remarkable, and who

succeeded at the time in giving rise in the minds of the youth to a veritable chaos. "Simply everything whirled and revolved, and appeared as if in a camera-obscura : white appeared black; black, white; falsehood, truth; fantasy, duty." A man whose dream is always to be useful and serviceable to society, who speaks sincerely of the felicity of action," and who does nothing but talk and talk. "Words were his ruin," says Lejenev; "his tongue is his enemy.... But it is his servant also "; who speaks and advocates simplicity, and who could not button his coat, otherwise than "as if it were a holy duty"; who knows himself to a detail, all his defects and shortcomings, and who cannot find the means, the power of mending and improving. "Nature has given me many gifts, but I shall die without having done anything worthy of my talent, without leaving behind me any beneficial results. . . . I shall end by sacrificing myself for some nonsense, in which I have not faith, even"; who could preach words of wisdom, words of ethical and moral advice, and yet who failed to apply those very counsels to his own conduct, to his own life, and the pity of which is, that he knows he will remain "the same unfinished being" that he has been hitherto.

...

"Yes, friend," he began, "I could now say with Koltsof, To what end, youth mine, hast thou brought me, hast thou led me, that now I cannot make a step in advance?' And yet was I really so utterly useless for anything, was there really no occupation for me on the face of this earth? I have frequently put the same question to myself, and no matter how much I endeavored to lower myself in my own eyes, I could not help being conscious of a presence of energy and force in me, of which many people are destitute. . . . I am wholly and entirely a well-intentioned man; I get easily reconciled, and wish to adapt myself to circumstances; I want to reach at a near object, to bring but the least use to the world.... No! and I can't do it!... Why is it that I can't live and act as others do?... Words, words, nothing but words!... Phrases have been my utter ruin.... And I have ruined my life, and did not serve ideas as I ought to have done!" The same psychologic tragedy of Rudin's nature is characterized in a small story, The Correspondence, written in the

same year, where Tourgenief makes the hero say, "In my youth I was bent upon conquering the heavens. . . then I began to dream of the welfare of humanity, of the welfare of my country; then that phase also passed away; I began to think only how best to construct for myself a quiet, domestic life, . . . when I stumbled over an ants' nest, fell to the ground, and towards my grave. . . . We Russians are masters at finishing up, that way."

Rudin was a type and outcome of his times; but Ivan Sergeiyevitsh saw that these times produced not only such men as Rudin, but men like Pokorsky, in whom he represented his friend Stankevitsh, Russia's "hope and pride," who spoke less than Rudin, but who excited his hearers to more definite action, to more definite virtues, and more tangible resolutions. He also saw the type of the appreciative and practical man whom he represented in Lejenev. The greatest service rendered by such men as Rudinwho are always striving towards a higher and higher ideal, who at least are able to conceive it, though they do not act and advance towards it is by generating the same ideas, by disseminating them amongst men, who will believe in it, who will advance towards it, and who will realize it. They know both the faults and virtues of their teachers; they appreciate the entire goodness that is in them; and the evil influences to which they have been subjected they generally throw off with the facility native to a virtuous understanding. Tourgenief saw that the times were producing men who are not contented with mere all-comprehending ideas of beauty and goodness and righteousness; but who, under all these grand terms, under all these abstractions, sought a limited ideal towards which they could come near, a concrete fact which they could grasp, struggle for, and conquer. In a time when everybody had become "intolerably reasonable, indifferent, and slow," when everybody had "frozen up and fallen asleep," it was a thing to be grateful for to any one who could wake them up, and stir them up to life and action. If Rudin cannot do anything himself, nobody has a right to reproach him with being useless. "Who has a right to say that his words, his good words, have not taken root in the hearts and souls of many young men whom nature

endowed with the powers of useful action, and the capacities for realizing their own ideas." Rudin's great misfortune consists in the fact of his ignorance of Russia; and this really is a great misfortune indeed! Russia could very well get on without every one of us; but none of us could get on very well without her. Cosmopolitanism is nonsense! a cosmopolitan is a nought; worse than a nought. Apart from nationalism there is no art, no truth, no life; there is nothing. There is no ideal face without a physiognomy. It would take us too long to discover the causes why we have Rudins in Russia. But the fact remains, nevertheless, a fact. Rudins were, then, in our country; he was a prominent type of his times; he brought use by his words, by the preaching of his ideals, by the wakening in those who listened to him reflections and thoughts of self and their surroundings. "Yes, even to Rudin we owe much."

But words alone do not suffice; an example is necessary. True men and women are necessary, who, embodying their precepts in their lives, shall go forth, and by their action excite emulation, and provoke the desire of imitation and following. Martyrs are necessary. The action of their lives is sanctified by their faithful death; the legend of their ideas, of their achieve ments, weaves, gradually, an aureole round their lives, which becomes the fascinating nucleus, the stimulating signal for advancement, and inspires thousands rather to die a thousand deaths than submit to conditions incompatible with the dignity of human life, moral or intellectual. And men of such resolution, of such ideas, were now more necessary than ever.

It was the new reign then; Alexander II. ascended the throne, and the new epoch that succeeded was one of transitory reforms, in which Russian intelligence indulged much sanguine hope. Tchernishevsky, the author of "What's to be done?" who has since then expiated the crime of wishing for reforms by a long and dreary incarceration in Siberia, was then the editor of the Sovremenik (the Contemporary), and had Dobroloufoff, the great critic and radical, as his chief contributor. Katkof, the late reactionist, the friend and protector of every retrogressive movement and measure of Russian political and social life, was then the advocate

of constitutional rights and liberties. The struggle against the regime of oppression and meanness was fermenting in the realms of critical and imaginative literature; and the apparent conquests, the apparent success, raised men's hopes high then, not in "legal" Russia alone, but even among the Revolutionary emigres. "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean," Hertzen wrote from abroad. "We have to deal, not with an accidental successor of Nicholas, but with a powerful worker, framing a new era for Russia. . . . He works with us for her great future. . . . From hence, Alexander II.'s name belongs to history." And a few years later, he added, on the event of the liberation of serfs, "From the distance of our exile we congratulate him, . . . with the name of liberator!"

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Ivan Sergeiyevitsh was also infatuated with that movement, and shared the universal exultation. In 1857, when he was in Rome with a few of the leading men of Russia, he even prepared a plan of a new system of local administration which would 'honestly endeavor to elevate the life of the peasant," and he spoke of "the secret and open resistance which the nobles" make to such a scheme. "We go to the government," he added, "not because it is a ruling power, but because it desires truth and the welfare of the people."

In the same epoch of hopes and their destructions, Tourgenief delivered his famous lecture on "Don Quixote and Hamlet," and completed his great novel, On the Eve, which was destined to have such an influence on the life of the Russian youth. In his lecture he speaks of Hamlets as "C solitary, fruitless, and useless to mankind," though they have an irreconcilable "enmity with falsehood and injustice"; their "scepticism is not indifferentism," but they doubt, hesitate, waver, and accomplish nothing, for "who knows that the very ground is really under our feet?" In Don Quixote, on the contrary, he saw the type of man who solely devotes himself to the service of goodness, who wholly gives himself up to the service of mankind, who is "all self-sacrifice!" What matter that he fights windmills? He thinks that he is encountering the might of giants, he is battling evil and oppression. What matter that he attacks a harmless flock of sheep? "A certain element of the ridiculous always, inevitably, attaches itself to the

conduct of those men who are called forth for a great action.... The mass of the people ends by following, in implicit belief, those whom it scoffed at, those whom it cursed and persecuted, but who, fearless of curses and persecutions, heedless of ridicule, go unheedingly and unwavering onwards. . . . Their spiritual gaze resting on their goal before them, they go, they seek, they stumble, they fall, they rise and find at last.... To be trampled on by swine is always essential in the lives of Don Quixotes; it is the last tribute they pay to rough accident, to ignorant misconception; ... it is the blow of the Pharisee. . . . After that, they can die,... immortality is unveiled before them." But Tourgenief saw that for the forthcoming struggle and transition there were not so much necessary any great and transcendent heroes, nor even any "specially great talents and minds - nothing stupendous, obtrusive, and too individualistic." What was necessary was "the capacity of self-sacrifice, without display or glamour; it is necessary to be able to reconcile one's self to all the small things of life, to all, everyday, dark labors; ... to teach the peasant to read, to help him, to found hospitals, to found schools, to assist him in every way.... Of what avail is talent or learning here? The heart alone is what is wanted, the heart that is capable of renouncing her egoism. . . . The sense of duty, the glorious sense of patriotism, in the right comprehension of the word, that is all that is necessary!" And this he endeavored to embody in On the Eve. The hero, Insarov, almost recalls to us the devoted faith of Don Quixote. Of course he is not altogether like him, for, as Tourgenief himself says, "Nature, fortunately, never produces complete Hamlets or complete Don Quixotes" and Ivan Sergeiyevitsh is a social artist, not a creator of ideal types. "Elena [the heroine], then only a new type in Russian life," was in clear relief in his mind; "but there was not a hero to whom Elena, with all her misty, though powerful, eagerness for liberty, should entrust herself. Amongst

:

...

Russians of the time there was not such a

one." Insarov has neither a great intellect nor much poetry in him; he is all devoted to one cause, and that is the redemption of his country, Bulgaria, of his own people, the Bulgarians, whom the Turks are oppressing, "taking away their churches, driving them from their homes, insulting, mutilating, killing them." For that cause he is ready to do everything in his power, to sacrifice all his very life; the smallest fact connected with it is of as much importance with him as the greatest. "And over such a little sum, over such trifles, you walked such a distance, you went to such trouble?' asks Elena. 'These are not trifles,' replies Insarov, 'where one's countrymen are concerned. To refuse in such an instance is a positive sin. . . . Our time doesn't belong to ourselves.'

"Whom, then, does it belong to?'

"To all who are in need of it.'" Who could answer, when he is asked whether he loves his country, "That is not known yet. When we die for our country, it is then that we could say we have loved her. ... Do I love my own country? What else could one love on this earth? What else is there that is always faithful, never changes, that is above all doubts, that one could not help believing in, next to God? And especially when that fatherland is in need of you. Mark this, Elena Nikolayevna: the last peasant, the last beggar in Bulgaria, and myself, we all want one and the same thing, we all aim at the one end!'"

If the artist saw at the time that as yet "there were no heroes in Russia"; if Elenas, who were eager for action, eager to do something good, something useful, had only to content themselves by asking, "What is to be done in Russia?" - he yet felt that the great need in Russia was that of men, who could, like Insarov, consciously devote themselves "to a difficult undertaking" and resolve to subject themselves, if need be, "not only to dangers alone, but even to deprivations, degradations" also; and he hopefully predicted, with true instinct, "Give them time! they will come !"