"I have lived in this world fifty-five ears; with the exception of the fourteen or fifteen ears of childhood, I have lived thirty-five years a Nihilist in the true sense of the word, — not a socialist or a revolutionist according to the perverted sense acquired by usage, but a true Nihilist — that is, subject to no faith or creed whatever."
This long delayed confession was quite unnecessary; the man's entire work published it, although the dreadful word is not once expressed by him. Critics have called Turgenef the father of Nihilism because he had given a name to the malady, and described a few cases of it. One might as well affirm the cholera to have been introduced by the first physician who gave the diagnosis of it, instead of by the first person attacked by the scourge. Turgenef discovered the evil, and studied it objectively; Tolstoi suffered from it from the first day of its appearance, without having, at first, a very clear consciousness of his condition; his tortured soul cries out on every page he has written, to express the agony which weighs down so many other souls of his own race. If the most interesting books are those which faithfully picture the existence of a fraction of humanity at a given moment of history, this age has produced nothing more remarkable, in regard to its literary quality, than his work. I do not hesitate in giving my opinion that this writer, when considered merely as a novelist, is one of
