* * * * *

Mr. Baring raises again the vexed question of Tourgeniev’s position.  It is notorious that Tourgeniev is much more highly appreciated outside Russia than in it.  One is, of course, tempted to say that Russians cannot judge their own authors, for there is a powerful and morally overwhelming cult for Tourgeniev in France, Germany, and England.  I have myself said, sworn, and believed that “On the Eve” is the most perfect example of the novel yet produced in any country.  And I am not sure that I am yet prepared to go back on myself.  However, it is absurd to argue that Russians cannot judge their own authors.  The best judges of Russian authors must be Russians.  Think of the ridiculous misconceptions about English literature by first-class foreign critics!...  But I am convinced that Mr. Baring goes too far in his statement of the Russian estimate of Tourgeniev.  He says that educated Russian opinion would no more think of comparing Tourgeniev with Dostoievsky than educated English opinion would think of comparing Charlotte Yonge with Charlotte Bronte.  This is absurd.  Whatever may be Tourgeniev’s general inferiority (and I do not admit it), he was a great artist and a complete artist.  And he was a realist.  There is all earth and heaven between the two Charlottes.  One was an artist, the other was an excellent Christian body who produced stories that have far less relation to life than Frith’s “Derby Day” has to the actual fact and poetry of Epsom.  If Mr. Baring had bracketed Tourgeniev with Charlotte Bronte and Dostoievsky with the lonely Emily, I should have credited him with a subtle originality.

About half of the book is given to a straightforward, detailed, homely account of Dostoievsky, his character, genius, and works.  It was very much wanted in English.  I thought I had read all the chief works of the five great Russian novelists, but last year I came across one of Dostoievsky’s, “The Brothers Karamazov,” of which I had not heard.  It was a French translation, in two thick volumes.  I thought it contained some of the greatest scenes that I had ever encountered in fiction, and I at once classed it with Stendhal’s “Chartreuse de Parme” and Dostoievsky’s “Crime and Punishment” as one of the supreme marvels of the world.  Nevertheless, certain aspects of it puzzled me.  When I mentioned it to friends I was told that I had gone daft about it, and that it was not a major work.  Happening to meet Mrs. Garnett, the never-to-be-sufficiently-thanked translator of Tourgeniev and of Tolstoy, I made inquiries from her about it, and she said:  “It is his masterpiece.”  We were then separated by a ruthless host, with my difficulties unsolved.  I now learn from Mr. Baring that the French translation is bad and incomplete, and that the original work, vast as it is, is only a preliminary fragment of a truly enormous novel which death prevented Dostoievsky from finishing.  Death, this is yet another proof