life, he never allows himself to be tedious and dull, as some of the
best representatives of the school think it incumbent upon them to be.
His descriptions are never overburdened with wearisome details; his
action is rapid; the events are never to be foreseen a hundred pages
beforehand; he keeps his readers in constant suspense. And it seems to
me in so doing he shows himself a better realist than the gifted
representatives of the orthodox realism in France, England, and
America. Life is not dull; life is full of the unforeseen, full of
suspense. A novelist, however natural and logical, must contrive to
have it in his novels if he is not to sacrifice the soul of art for
the merest show of fidelity.

The plot of Dmitri Rudin is so exceedingly simple that an English
novel-reader would say that there is hardly any plot at all. Turgenev
disdained the tricks of the sensational novelists. Yet, for a Russian
at least, it is easier to lay down before the end a novel by Victor
Hugo or Alexander Dumas than Dmitri Rudin, or, indeed, any of
Turgenev's great novels. What the novelists of the romantic school
obtain by the charm of unexpected adventures and thrilling situations,
Turgenev succeeds in obtaining by the brisk admirably concentrated
action, and, above all, by the simplest and most precious of a
novelist's gifts: his unique command over the sympathies and emotions
of his readers. In this he can be compared to a musician who works
upon the nerves and the souls of his audience without the intermediary
of the mind; or, better still, to a poet who combines the power of the
word with the magic spell of harmony. One does not read his novels;
one lives in them.

Much of this peculiar gift of fascination is certainly due to
Turgenev's mastery over all the resources of our rich, flexible, and