Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VI).djvu/11

Rh art. In reality this large carelessness is a sign that the stage of the artist's maturity has been reached, and a little passed. Virgin Soil was the last of Turgenev's great novels, and appropriately ends his career as novelist: it was his last word to the young: it was the cause of his final disgrace with the Government, it was his link with most of Russia's great writers: they were exiled in life: Turgenev was exiled after death. A public funeral was forbidden him, no public honour might be shown him, and public comments on his labours were discreetly veiled and discreetly suppressed by the Government, that had feared his power in life. And this fatuous act of the autocracy is the best commentary on the truth of Virgin Soil.

To examine the characters of the novel is to see how perfectly representative they are of Russian political life. Nezhdanov, the poet and half-aristocrat, is one of the most important. Turgenev makes him the child of a mésalliance, and he is, in fact, the bastard child of Power allied to modern Sentimentality. Born with the brain of an aristocrat, he represents the uneasy educated conscience of the aristocrats, the