Turgenieff himself said that when they first came to
know each other my father dogged his heels "like a woman in love,"
and at one time he used to avoid him, because he was afraid of his
spirit of opposition.
My father was perhaps irritated by the slightly patronizing
tone which Turgenieff adopted from the very outset of their
acquaintance; and Turgenieff was irritated by my father's
"crankiness," which distracted him from "his proper
metier, literature."
In 1870, before the date of the quarrel, Turgenieff
wrote to Fet:
"Lyoff Tolstoy continues to play the crank. It was evidently
written in his stars. When will he turn his last somersault and
stand on his feet at last?"
Turgenieff was just the same about my father's
"Confession," which he read not long before his death. Having
promised to read it, "to try to understand it," and "not to lose my
temper," he "started to write a long letter in answer to the
'Confession,' but never finished it . . . for fear of becoming
disputatious."
In a letter to D. V. Grigorevitch he called the book,
which was based, in his opinion, on false premises, "a denial of
all live human life" and "a new sort of Nihilism."
It is evident that even then Turgenieff did not
understand what a mastery my father's new philosophy of life had
obtained over him, and he was inclined to attribute his enthusiasm
along with the rest to the same perpetual "crankinesses" and
"somersaults" to which he had formerly attributed his interest in
school-teaching, agriculture, the publication of a paper, and so
forth.
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