Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/80

 then from regular foreign tutors. The language of his own country, of which he was to become the greatest master that has ever lived, he was forced to learn from the house-servants. His father and mother conversed only in French; his mother even prayed in French. Later, he studied at the Universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. At Berlin he breathed for the first time the free air of intellectual Europe, and he was never able long to live out of that element again. One of his closest comrades at the University was Bakunin, a hot-headed young Radical, who subsequently became a Nihilist agitator. There is no doubt that his fiery harangues gave Turgenev much material for his later novels. It is characteristic, too, that while his student friends went wild at the theatre over Schiller, Turgenev immensely preferred Goethe, and could practically repeat the whole first part of "Faust" by heart. Turgenev, like Goethe, was a natural aristocrat in his manner and in his literary taste—and had the same dislike for extremists of all kinds. With the exception of Turgenev's quiet but profound pessimism, his temperament was very similar to that of the great German—such a man will surely incur the hatred of the true Reformer type.

Turgenev was one of the best educated among modern men-of-letters; his knowledge was not superficial and fragmentary, it was solid and