Such are the majority of Turgeneff's heroes, beginning with the hero of "Asya," and ending with Sanin, in "Spring Floods," and Litvinoff, in "Smoke." Several Don Quixotes are to be found in his works, but not many, and they are of two sorts.

One typically Russian category includes Andrei Kolosoff, and Yakoff Pasinkoff, Punin, and a few others; the second are Volyntzeff and Uvar Ivanovitch, in "On the Eve." A third type, invented by Turgeneff as an offset to the Hamlets, is represented by Insaroff in "On the Eve." With the publication, in 1862, of "Fathers and Children," a fateful crisis occurred in Turgeneff's career.

In his memoirs and in his letters he insists that in the character of Bazaroff he had no intention of writing a caricature on the young generation, and of bearing himself in a negative manner towards it.

"My entire novel," he writes, "is directed against the nobility as the leading class." Nevertheless, the book raised a tremendous storm.

His mistake lay in not recognizing in the new type of men depicted under the character of Bazaroff enthusiasts endowed with all the merits and defects of people of that sort; but on the contrary, they impressed him as skeptics, rejecters of all conventions, and he christened them with the name of "nihilists," which was the cause of the whole uproar, as he himself admitted.