Russia, a stripling with stout, straight limbs and white hair, is all
fire, caprice, melancholy and revolt. Turgenev, more cosmopolitan,
lighter in his touch than Tolstoy or Tschaïkowsky, is able to give us
in these two prose poems the sadness and the big heart of the Slav, but
in Tschaïkowsky we get the melancholy, the caprice, the fire and the
revolt. If he be not the most Russian of composers, he is certainly the
greatest composer of Russia!