The letters in this volume were written for the most part to Turgenev's friends among that group of remarkable Frenchmen who made Paris what it was in the 1850s and 1860s. These letters possess a double interest, due, first, to their own intrinsic value, which they share with everything that came from the pen of this master of style, and, secondly, to the fact of their being a revelation of a side of his literary life hitherto unknown.