[In "The Gentle Barbarian"] V. S. Pritchett evokes the characteristic Turgenev novel—that story of unfulfilled affections, political disappointments, human wrenchings. Delicate, short-breathed critic with delicate, short-breathed author: a happy match. Nothing in this book is "heavy," nothing analyzed into the dust of boredom, nothing stretched on the wrack of literary theory. Mr. Pritchett has written a work of cameo refinement, yielding pleasure from start to finish. (p. 1)

Mr. Pritchett has written a frail, elegant, loving book. It lacks the solidity of Isaiah Berlin's study of Turgenev's intellectual background, "Fathers and Children"; it does not have the magisterial completeness of Joseph Frank's recent biography of the young Dostoyevsky. But as we read this book we quickly realize that we are in the presence of an artist in criticism, a virtuoso of lucid evocation and precise judgment. For some four decades V. S. Pritchett has been giving us pleasure...