While all these criticisms were widespread in literary circles of the thirties, World War II and its aftermath brought about a change of heart and a revision of current judgments of Turgenev. Apparently readers both in Russia and the Western countries as well as throughout Asia (particularly in China and Japan) showed more stability than the critics: they did not seem to find Turgenev so dated as to drop him. Turgenev emerged as one of the most popular authors in the Soviet Union, particularly in the decade following the war with Hitler. Between 1948 and 1958 the USSR press turned out an average of three to four million copies of his works yearly, and in America and Europe there was a definite revival of interest. His novels and short stories were issued in new translations and found a large following among young and old.
It is evident that only few went to Turgenev for wisdom on the fate of communism or to gain some “first hand knowledge of Russia,” a fashionable slogan of the time. But historians of literature and students of Turgenev suddenly discovered more profound reasons for his hundred-year hold over the general public. Charles Morgan, in an essay in his _Reflections in a Mirror_ (1944), observed that Turgenev was criticised for his calm and his outward lack of dynamism, but then appropriately quoted Tolstoy’s letter to Strakhov (Dostoevsky’s biographer and disciple) after Turgenev’s death: “The longer I live,” wrote Tolstoy, “the more I like horses that are not restive. You say that you are reconciled to Turgenev. And I have come to love him very much, and curiously enough, just because he is not restive but gets to his destination. Turgenev will outlive Dostoevsky and not for his artistic qualities but because he is not restive.”
Tolstoy pointed out that Turgenev’s quiet tone was the result of control and not indifference. The strength of his understatement, enhanced by the neatness of his composition, was based on his essential humanity. Therefore it is erroneous to rank Turgenev with the representatives of the “well-made novel.” Of course, he used the “dramatic technique,” followed strictly the rule of the withdrawal of the author from his narrative, and built the latter on the revelation of characters through their actions and words. But he never tried to conceal his aversions and sympathies. The spontaneity of his emotional response and the freedom of his treatment of topics and characters made his works totally different from conventional Anglo-Saxon standards and from the French logical formality in constructing the “well-made novel.”