M. Haumand terms his "Hamletisme." But in Virgin Soil he is easy
and almost negligent master of his instrument, and though he is
an exile and at times a sharply embittered one, he gathers
experience round his theme as only the artist can who has
enriched leis art by having outlived his youth without forgetting
its pangs, joys, mortifications, and love-songs.

In Nejdanov it is another picture of that youth which we see--
youth reduced to ineffectiveness by fatalism and by the egoism of
the lyric nature which longs to gain dramatic freedom, but cannot
achieve it. It is one of a series of portraits, wonderfully
traced psychological studies of the Russian dreamers and
incompatibles of last mid-century, of which the most moving
figure is the hero of the earlier novel, Dimitri Rudin. If we
cared to follow Turgenev strictly in his growth and contemporary
relations, we ought to begin with his Sportsman's Note Book. But
so far as his novels go, he is the last writer to be taken
chronologically. He was old enough in youth to understand old age
in the forest, and young enough in age to provide his youth with
fresh hues for another incarnation. Another element of his work
which is very finely revealed .and brought to a rare point of
characterisation in Virgin Soil, is the prophetic intention he
had of the woman's part in the new order. For the real hero of
the tale, as Mr. Edward Garnett has pointed out in an essay on
Turgenev, is not Nejdanov and not Solomin; the part is cast in
the woman's figure of Mariana who broke the silence of "anonymous
Russia." Ivan Turgenev had the understanding that goes beneath
the old delimitation of the novelist hide-bound by the law--"male
and female created he them."