This refusal was what destroyed his popularity in Russia, in his lifetime.  It is because of this refusal that he has been pursued with belittlement by one Russian writer after another since his death.  He had that sense of truth which always upsets the orthodox.  This sense of truth applied to the portraiture of his contemporaries was felt like an insult in those circles of mixed idealism and make-believe, the circles of the political partisans.  A great artist may be a member—­and an enthusiastic member—­of a political party, but in his art he cannot become a political partisan without ceasing to be an artist.  In his novels, Turgenev regarded it as his life-work to portray Russia truthfully, not to paint and powder and “prettify” it for show purposes, and the result was an outburst of fury on the part of those who were asked to look at themselves as real people instead of as the master-pieces of a professional flatterer.  When Fathers and Children was published in 1862, the only people who were pleased were the enemies of everything in which Turgenev believed.  “I received congratulations,” he wrote,

almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies.  This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach me.  I knew very well I had carried out honestly the type I had sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively with sympathy.

This is bound to be the fate of every artist who takes his political party or his church, or any other propagandist group to which he belongs, as his subject.  He is a painter, not a vindicator, and he is compelled to exhibit numerous crooked features and faults in such a way as to wound the vanity of his friends and delight the malice of his enemies.  Artistic truth is as different from propagandist truth as daylight from limelight, and the artist will always be hated by the propagandist as worse than an enemy—­a treacherous friend.  Turgenev deliberately accepted as his life-work a course which could only lead to the miseries of being misunderstood.  When one thinks of the long years of denunciation and hatred he endured for the sake of his art, one cannot but regard him as one of the heroic figures of the nineteenth century.  “He has,” Mr. Garnett tells us, “been accused of timidity and cowardice by uncompromising Radicals and Revolutionaries....  In an access of self-reproach he once declared that his character was comprised in one word—­’poltroon!’” He showed neither timidity nor cowardice, however, in his devotion to truth.  His first and last advice to young writers, Mr. Garnett declares, was:  “You need truth, remorseless truth, as regards your own sensations.”  And if Turgenev was remorseless in nothing else, he was remorseless in this—­truth as regards both his own sensations and the sensations of his contemporaries.  He seems, if we may judge from a sentence he wrote about Fathers and Children, to have regarded himself almost as the first realist.