Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/116

100 He was a complete Nihilist in religion, and even in politics he disclaimed any didactic intention. Possessing to a supreme degree the genius of observation and of psychological analysis, he contented himself with reproducing the reality which surrounded him, and the society and personalities which he knew. This surrounding reality, this society, and these personalities he saw thus through an artistic temperament, which received its profoundest impressions from its environment. To understand this temperament of his, his moral physiognomy, his jarring discords, his eccentricities, his contrasts, one must transport oneself to the Russia of former days.

Tradition has it that Turgenev was a fatherly and patriarchal "grand old man," six feet in height, with white hair and a flowing beard, the soul of a child in the body of a giant, full of kindness and good nature, ingenuousness, and simplicity. In reality, no one was less ingenuous than Turgenev, as Daudet and Zola learnt to their sorrow. The simplicity of the Slav in him was mingled with the duplicity of the Byzantine.

Turgenev is full of contradictions and fundamentally obscure; and these contradictions