As far as I know, my father never had any serious difference
with any other human being during the whole course of his
existence. And Turgenieff, in a letter to my father in
1865, wrote, "You are the only man with whom I have ever had
misunderstandings."
Whenever my father related his quarrel with Ivan
Sergeyevitch, he took all the blame on himself.
Turgenieff, immediately after the quarrel, wrote a letter
apologizing to my father, and never sought to justify his own part
in it.
Why was it that, as Turgenieff himself put it, his
"constellation" and my father's "moved in the ether with
unquestioned enmity"?
This is what my sister Tatyana wrote on the subject in
her article "Turgenieff," published in the supplement to
the "Novoye Vremya," February 2, 1908:
All question of literary rivalry, it seems to me, is utterly
beside the mark. Turgenieff, from the very outset of my
father's literary career, acknowledged his enormous talents, and
never thought of rivalry with him. From the moment when, as early
as 1854, he wrote to Kolbasina, "If Heaven only grant
Tolstoy life, I confidently hope that he will surprise us all," he
never ceased to follow my father's work with interest, and always
expressed his unbounded admiration of it.
"When this young wine has done fermenting," he wrote to
Druzhenin in 1856, "the result will be a liquor worthy of
the gods.
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