Brigadier_. It is greater art because life's prosaic growth is revealed
not merely realistically, but also poetically, life as a tiny part of
the great universe around it. The tale is a microcosm of Turgenev's own
nature; his love of Nature, his tender sympathy for all humble, ragged,
eccentric, despised human creatures; his unfaltering keenness of gaze
into character, his fine sense of proportion, mingle in. _The
Brigadier_, to create for us a sense of the pitiableness of man's tiny
life, of the mere human seed which springs and spreads a while on earth,
and dies under the menacing gaze of the advancing years. 'Out of the
sweetness came forth strength' is perhaps the best saying by which one
can define Turgenev's peculiar merits in _The Brigadier_.

_Punin and Baburin_ presents to us again one of those ragged ones, one
of 'the poor in spirit,' the idealist Punin, a character whose portrait
challenges Dostoievsky's skill on the latter's own ground. That
delicious Punin! and that terrible grandmother's scene with Baburin! How
absolutely Slav is the blending of irony and kindness in the treatment
of Punin, Cucumber, and Pyetushkov, few English readers will understand.
All the characters in _Punin and Baburin_ are so strongly drawn, so
intensely alive, that, like Rembrandt's portraits, they make the living
people, who stand looking at them, absurdly grey and lifeless by
comparison! Baburin is a Nihilist before the times of Nihilism, he is a
type of the strong characters that arose later in the movement of the
'eighties.'

A pre-Nihilistic type is also the character of Sophie in _A Strange
Story_. But the chief value of this last psychological study is that it
gives the English mind a clue to the fundamental distinction that marks
off the Russian people from the peoples of the West. Sophie's
words--'You spoke of the will--that's what must be broken' (p.