Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/110

 could not solve his problem; instead of sketching the relations between the 'fathers' and the 'children' he wrote a panegyric to the 'fathers' and a decrial against the 'children'; but he did not even understand the children; instead of a decrial it was nothing but a libel. The spreaders of healthy ideas among the young generation he wanted to show up as corrupters of youth, the sowers of discord and evil, haters of good, and in a word, very devils. In various places of the novel we see that his principal hero is no fool; on the contrary, a very able and gifted man, who is eager to learn and works diligently and knows much, but notwithstanding all this, he gets quite lost in disputes, utters absurdities, and preaches ridiculous things, which should not be pardoned even in a most narrow and limited mind … In general the novel is nothing else but a merciless and destructive criticism on the young generation. In all the contemporaneous questions, intellectual movements, debates and ideals with which the young generation is occupied, Turgenev finds not the least common sense and gives us to understand that they lead only to demoralisation, emptiness, prosaic shallowness, and cynicism. Turgenev finds his ideal in quite a different place, namely in the 'fathers,' in the more or less old generation. Consequently, he draws a parallel and contrast between the 'fathers' and the