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Rh body the honours she had refused to his genius.

V

is important for an understanding of Turgenev to trace the main currents of his tortured existence, to remember at what date and under what influences each of his books came into being, and, above all, to recall the successive environments in which his lot was cast: Old Russia, the Black Soil, Serfdom, German Universities, the Russian Colony of Baden, the cosmopolitan society of Paris. For Turgenev was a chronicler. He could only describe with microscopic minuteness what he had seen, and make the scenes he had actually passed through live again. If he had had the magnifying imagination of a Balzac or of a Dickens, he would have transformed actuality; if he had had the historical imagination of Walter Scott, he would have taken refuge in "the past"; if he had had the reforming and Christian temperament of Tolstoy, his books would have been speeches and discussions. But Turgenev had none of these. On the one hand he had scarcely any creative faculty; on the other hand, he was entirely detached from all positive Christianity.