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 made possible by their rights over the peasants, afforded such a fertile soil; and the young generation which was carried away by realism and negation, — this is what made up the essence of the movement of the epoch in the sixties. Turgenev with the instinct of genius saw through this fundamental movement in life and imaged it in living bright pictures with all its positive and negative, pathetic and humorous sides.

"In his novel Turgenev did not at all side with the 'fathers' as the unsympathetic progressive critics of that time insisted, he did not wish to in the least extol them above the 'children' in order to degrade the latter. Just so he had no intention of showing up in the character of the representative of the 'children' some kind of model of a 'thinking realist' to whom the young generation should have bowed and imitated, as the progressive critics who received the work sympathetically imagined. Such a one-sided view was foreign to the author; he sketched both the 'fathers' and the 'children' as far as possible impartially and analytically. He spared neither the 'fathers' nor the 'children' and pronounced a cold and severe judgment both on the ones and the others. He positively sings a requiem to the 'fathers' in the person of the Kirsanovs, and especially Paul Kirsanov, having shown up their aristocratic idealism, their sentimental aestheticism,