His _Bezhin Meadow_, where the children tell each other bogey stories in the evening, is a gem with which no other European literature has anything to compare. _The Singers_, _Death_, and many others are likewise incomparable. _The Nest of Gentlefolk_, to which Turgenev owed his great popularity, is quite perfect of its kind, with its gallery of portraits going back to the eighteenth century and to the period of Alexander I; its lovable, human hero Lavretsky, and Liza, a fit descendant of Pushkin's Tatiana, radiant as a star. All Turgenev's characters are alive; but, with the exception of his women and the hero of _Fathers and Sons_, they are alive in bookland rather than in real life.
George Meredith's characters, for instance, are alive, but they belong to a land or rather a planet of his own making, and we should never recognize Sir Willoughby Patterne in the street, but we do meet women sometimes who remind us of Clara Middleton and Carinthia Jane. The same is true with regard to Turgenev, although it is not another planet he created, but a special atmosphere and epoch to which his books exclusively belong, and which some critics say never existed at all. That is of no consequence. It exists for us in his work.
But perhaps what gave rise to accusations of unreality and caricature against Turgenev's characters, apart from the intenser reality of Tolstoy's creations, by comparison with which Turgenev's suffered, was that Turgenev, while professing to describe the present, and while believing that he was describing the present, was in reality painting an epoch that was already dead. _Rudin_, _Smoke_, and _On the Eve_ have suffered more from the passage of time. _Rudin_ is a pathetic picture of the type that Turgenev was so fond of depicting, the _génie sans portefeuille_, a latter-day Hamlet who can only unpack his heart with words, and with his eloquence persuade others to believe in him, and succeed even in persuading himself to believe in himself, until the moment for action comes, when he breaks down. The subjects of _Smoke_ and _Spring Waters_ are almost identical; but, whereas _Spring Waters_ is one of the most poetical of Turgenev's achievements, _Smoke_ seems to-day the most banal, and almost to deserve Tolstoy's criticism: "In _Smoke_ there is hardly any love of anything, and very little pity; there is only love of light and playful adultery; and therefore the poetry of that novel is repulsive." _On the Eve_, which tells of a Bulgarian on the eve of the liberation of his country, suffers from being written at a time when real Russians were hard at work at that very task; and it was on this account that the novel found little favour in Russia, as the fiction paled beside the reality.