Tom's Cabin" of Russia; no title could be more absurd. In the whole
range of literary history, it would be difficult to find two
personalities more unlike than that of Turgenev and Mrs. Stowe. The
great Russian utterly lacked the temperament of the advocate; but his
innate truthfulness, his wonderful art, and his very calmness made the
picture of woe all the more clear. There is no doubt that the book
became, without its author's intention, a social document; there is no
doubt that Turgenev, a sympathetic and highly civilised man, hated
slavery, and that his picture of it helped in an indirect way to bring
about the emancipation of the serfs. But its chief value is artistic
rather than sociological. It is interesting that "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
and "A Sportsman's Sketches" should have appeared at about the same
time, and that emancipation in each country should have followed at
about the same interval; but the parallel is chronological rather than
logical.*

*There is an interesting and amusing reference to Harriet Beecher
Stowe in the fourth chapter of "Smoke."

The year of the publication of Turgenev's book (1852) saw the death of
Gogol: and the new author quite naturally wrote a public letter of
eulogy. In no other country would such a thing have excited anything
but favourable comment; in Russia it raised a storm; the
government--always jealous of anything that makes for Russia's real
greatness--became suspicious, and Turgenev was banished to his
estates. Like one of his own dogs, he was told to "go home." Home he
went, and continued to write books. Freedom was granted him a few
years later, and he left Russia never to return except as a visitor.
He lived first in Germany, and finally in Paris, one of the literary
lions of the literary capital of the world. There, on the 3 September