Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/136

 calm, heavy, not to say clumsy man was not only incapable of lying or bragging; one might rely on him, like a stone wall." In every scene, whether among the affected aristocrats or among the futile revolutionists, Solomin appears to advantage. There is no worse indictment of human intelligence than the great compliment we pay certain persons when we call them sane. Solomin is sane, and seems therefore untrue to life.

It is seldom that Turgenev reminds us of Dickens; but Sipyagin and his wife might belong to the great Dickens gallery, though drawn with a restraint unknown to the Englishman. Sipyagin himself is a miniature Pecksniff, unctuous, polished, and hollow. The dinner-table scenes at his house are pictured with a subdued but implacable irony. How the natural-born aristocrat Turgenev hated the Russian aristocracy! When Solomin appears in this household, he seems like a giant among manikins, so truly do the simple human virtues tower above the arrogance of affectation. The woman Marianna is a sister of Elena, whom we learned to know in On the Eve; she has the purity, not of an angel, but of a noble woman. She has that quiet, steadfast resolution so characteristic of Russian heroines. As for Mariusha, she is a specimen of Turgenev's extraordinary power of characterisation. She appears only two or three