[From Books and You, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940, pp. 54-55:]

Then, after another leap across the years, I must draw your attention to three Russian novels of the nineteenth century: Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Of the three authors, Turgenev is the least considerable. But he was an artist, with a delicate sense of the poetry of life, and he had charm, pathos and humanity. He does not greatly move, but neither does he bore; and in Fathers and Sons, by far his best novel, he has depicted for the first time in fiction the Nihilist who was the forerunner of the Communist of our own day. It is curious to recognize in Bazarov, his hero, many of the traits which we have seen in men who, according to our political opinions, have wrought havoc or opened new vistas on the world we now live in. Bazarov is a brutal creature, but he is strangely impressive and not altogether unsympathetic; his power is manifest, and though he has no opportunity for action and so expends himself in words, you cannot but be convinced that, given propitious circumstances, he is capable of translating into deeds the ideas which his audacious mind has formulated. He has a dark and pitiful greatness.

[From A Writer's Notebook, Doubleday & Company, 1949, pp. 150, 161-2, 168-70:]

Then I read Fathers and Sons, in French; I was too ignorant of Russian things to appreciate its value; the strange names, the originality of the characters, opened a window on romance, but it was a novel like another, related to the French fiction of its day, and for me at all events, it had no great significance. Later still, when I found myself definitely interested in Russia, I read other books by Turgenev; but they left me cold. Their idealism was too sentimental for my taste, and unable in a translation to see the beauty of manner and style which Russians value, I found them ineffectual.

[…]

There is a deep streak of masochism in Russians. Sacher Masoch was himself a Slav and first drew notice to the malady in a volume of short stories which are not otherwise remarkable. […] In Sacher Masoch's stories the women are described as large and strong, energetic, audacious and cruel. They use men with every sort of indignity. Russian fiction is full of characters of this sort. Dostoievsky's heroines are of this overbearing type; tenderness, sweetness, gentleness, charm do not appeal to the men who love them; on the contrary they find a horrible delight in the outrages to which they are exposed. They want to abase themselves. Turgenev's heroines are intelligent, alert, active and enterprising, while the men are weak of will, dreamers incapable of action. It is a characteristic of Russian fiction, and I imagine it corresponds to a deep-rooted instinct in the Russian character.

[…]

I have been reading Turgenev. I think it would be hard to find another writer who has achieved a greater reputation on such slender qualities. No other writer is so beholden for his celebrity to the exaggerated estimation in which Russian literature is held. He is a writer of the school of Octave Feuillet or Cherbuliez, and his chief merits are theirs, a well-bred sentimentality and the facile optimism of a contented mind. It would be interesting to know what was the opinion held of him in those literary circles in Paris where his size and origin seem to have made him a remarkable object. He knew Flaubert and Maupassant, the Goncourts, Huysmans, and the circle that gathered in the drawing-room of the Princesse Mathilde. He makes soothing reading. Curiosity will never impel you to look at the last page of one of his books, and you reach it without regret. To read him is like travelling by river, a calm and steady transit, without adventure or emotion. It is said that he indicated themes which the perils of Russian politics forbade him to touch (though he wrote from the safe distance of Paris and he need not have lagged so far behind the boldness of Herzen or Bakunin) and it appears that when he talked of one of his heroes cultivating the land his Russian readers, seeing in this a veiled way of indicating revolutionary movement, were vastly thrilled; but that of course is neither here nor there, and the political situation can no more make a poor book a good one than the needs of a wife and family make a pot-boiler a work of art. The merits of Turgenev consist chiefly in his love of nature, and he should not be blamed because he describes it in the manner of his generation, by means of cataloguing the various sounds and scents and sights, rather than by giving the emotion which nature has given him; and his descriptions are graceful and charming. His descriptions also of provincial life in a noble family in the reign of Alexander II have a pleasing flavour, and changing times have given it a humorous grace and an historical interest. His character-drawing is stereotyped and the gallery of his creatures is small. There is in every book the same young girl, serious, dignified and energetic, the same vapid mother, the same talkative, ineffectual hero; and his subsidiary characters are vague and colourless. In all his books the only person who lives with a life of his own after you have turned the last page is that ponderous mass of flesh, Uvar Ivanovitch Stahov, who snaps his fingers and is plethorically inarticulate in the novel called On the Eve. But what must chiefly amaze the reader of Turgenev is the extreme triviality of his stories. A House of Gentlefolk is the story of an unhappily-married man who falls in love with a girl, and hearing that his wife is dead proposes to her. His wife turns up and the lovers separate. On the Eve is the story of a girl who falls in love with a young Bulgarian. He falls ill, they are married; he develops consumption and dies. In the one case if the hero had taken the elementary precaution of writing to his solicitor to find out if his wife was really dead, in the other if he had taken that of putting on a greatcoat when he went to get his passport, there would have been no story. An instructive parallel might be drawn between Turgenev and Anthony Trollope; in every point but style the comparison would be in favour of the English writer. He had more knowledge of the world, a greater variety, more humour, his range was wider and his characters were more diverse. Turgenev never wrote a scene that remains in the memory as that in which Bishop Proudie kneels at the bedside of his dead wife and prays God that he may not be thankful for her death.

This shows very poor judgment. It is true that Turgenev has neither the tortured passion of Dostoievsky nor the scope and the broad humanity of Tolstoy; but he has other qualities, charm and grace and tenderness. He has elegance and distinction – admirable qualities both – reasonableness, and a lovely feeling for the countryside. Even in a translation you can tell how beautifully he wrote. He is never excessive, never false, never boring. He is neither a preacher nor a prophet; he is content to be a novelist pure and simple. It may well be that a future generation will come to the conclusion that he was the greatest of the three.