explain the contradictory judgments of which he has been the subject, especially in Russia, on the part of the Slavophiles, as well as the "Zapadniki." He is at once a mystic and a mystifier, an enthusiast and a sceptic, keen on revolution, and yet without illusions concerning revolutionaries ("Fathers and Children"); gentle and violent; a believer in ideas, and yet knowing all the time that these ideas will be dissipated in "smoke." ("Smoke.")
Very intelligent, very yielding, and very feeble, he was always influenced by his surroundings. Very young and very old, at once barbaric and refined, he is the product of a civilization which had a fitful and irregular development. When it was the fashion to be Byronic, and to assume a romantic pose, Turgenev startled Herzen and Tolstoy by his dandified affectation as he sported an eyeglass in the Perspective Nevski. When he was in Germany he was a Gallophobe. When he was in Paris he was a Gallophile; yet he did not hesitate to write some very bitter criticisms on the country of his adoption to his friends in Russia.
In fine, his was a nature wavering and complex, a character profoundly sympathetic, but undecided and vacillating, a luminous intelli-