Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/111

 and we cannot formulate the sense of the novel in this way; among a number of good children there are also bad ones who are the ones that are ridiculed in the novel; this is not its aim, its purpose is quite different and may be formulated thus: the children are bad and thus are they represented in the novel in all their ugliness; but the 'fathers' are good, which is also proven in the novel."

One of the very few criticisms from a truly artistic standpoint appeared in the "Russian Herald" during the year 1862, from which a brief quotation must suffice: —

"Everything in this work bears witness to the ripened power of Turgenev's wonderful talent; the clearness of ideas, the masterly skill in sketching types, the simplicity of plot and of movement of the action, and moderation and evenness of the work as a whole; the dramatic element which comes up naturally from the most ordinary situations; there is nothing superfluous, nothing retarding, nothing extraneous. But in addition to these general merits, we are also interested in Turgenev's novel because in it is caught and held a current, fleeting moment of a passing phenomenon, and in which a momentary phase of our life is typically drawn and arrested not only for the time being but forever."

These prophetically true words constitute a great