Turgenev wrote at intervals during his whole career are thoroughly
worth reading, his great reputation is based on his seven complete
novels, which should be read in the order of composition, even though
they do not form an ascending climax. All of them are short; compared
with the huge novels so much in vogue at this moment, they look like
tiny models of massive machinery. Turgenev's method was first to write
a story at great length, and then submit it to rigid and remorseless
compression, so that what he finally gave to the public was the
quintessence of his art. It is one of his most extraordinary powers
that he was able to depict so many characters and so many life
histories in so very few words. The reader has a sense of absolute
completeness.

It was in his first novel, "Rudin," that Turgenev made the first
full-length portrait of the typical educated Russian of the nineteenth
century. In doing this, he added an immortal character to the world's
literature. "Such and such a man is a Rudin," has been a common
expression for over fifty years, as we speak of the Tartuffes and the
Pecksniffs. The character was sharply individualised, but he stands as
the representative of an exceedingly familiar Slavonic type, and no
other novelist has succeeded so well, because no other novelist has
understood Rudin so clearly as his creator. It is an entire mistake to
speak of him, as so many do nowadays, as an obsolete or rather a
"transitional" type. The word "transitional" has been altogether
overworked in dealing with Turgenev. Rudins are as common in Russia
to-day as they were in 1850; for although Turgenev diagnosed the
disease in a masterly fashion, he was unable to suggest a remedy. So
late as 1894 Stepniak remarked, "it may be truly said that every
educated Russian of our time has a bit of Dmitri Rudin in him." If
Rudin is a transitional type, why does the same kind of character