Note 9 — Chapter II

M. Haumant has been at great pains to show that Turgenev in his early prose and verse “commenced by appropriating the form and the subjects of the romantics of the ’twenties and the ’thirties, that his ‘half revolt’ against the romantic convention became accentuated later, and that we find in the plays and poems a ‘degradation of the romantic heroes’ of Pushkin and Lermontov” (Haumant, pp. 113-122). Although there is not a little truth in his thesis, M. Haumant has forgotten to add that the social atmosphere of the preceding generation, as well as of its literature, music and art, was “romantic,” and that the youth of the period, as well as the heroes of Goethe and Stendhal, did act, think and feel in a “romantic” manner.