Ivan Turgenev
However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart that lies hidden beneath the tombstone, the flowers blooming above it gaze at us with serene and innocent eyes. They speak not only of eternal peace—the great stillness of indifferent Nature—they whisper, too, of reconciliation beyond strife, of a life that knows no end. Between the sea-like vastness of Tolstoy and the mountain-like immensity of Dostoevsky, the name of Ivan Turgenev flows quietly like a river, meandering across the level plains. Tolstoy did not care for him, for Turgenev resisted the moralizing impulse in literature. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, dismissed him as a bourgeois writer of the upper classes. His lucid narrative style, his natural romanticism, could never stretch into the horizon under the shadows of those two towering banyans. Yet he could never be erased, for without him the Russian steppe would lack the green rice-fields that soften its endless flatness. In his personal life, Turgenev res...