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Rh freedom of thought and of conscience, Turgenev occupies, in spite of his failings, a place of honour. He also knew what prison life meant. He was exiled to his distant property. He was placed under police vigilance, and if he suffered less than others from the harshness of those in power it is because he put the frontier between himself and the police. Far from his country, he continued to fight the good fight.

III

in 1818, that is ten years before Tolstoy, in the Province of Orel, in old Russia, and on the borders of that black soil which is the granary of Europe, Turgenev belonged to the illustrious liberal and liberating generation of the forties. Attaining his intellectual majority when the despotic power of Nicholas I was at its height, he bore the marks of that terrible régime, and the misery of serfhood branded itself indelibly upon his soul. Descended from the country aristocracy, and bred of a long line of noblemen, he was the last witness of feudal customs, and became the acknowledged chronicler of a society now for ever abolished. A sad childhood was his, whose memory served to darken his whole life. His