long as one single Russian remains on Earth, Oblomov will be remembered... Another time, as I was reading him form chapters I've written in Petersburg, he suddenly rose from his divan and departed to his bedroom. 'Old sparrow as I am, you touched me to tears', he said upon his return, wiping his eyes." Tellingly, Turgenev even prompted minor detail to Oblomov, namely, in the scene where Olga and Schtoltz converse in Switzerland. Goncharov acknowledged Turgenev's priority in "discovering nihilism", and admitted there was historical and artistic authenticity to Bazarov's character. In the late 1850s relations between the two apparently deteriorated, and in March 1860 things came to a head. Accusations of plagiarism Prior to the publication of Home of the Gentry, Goncharov took an opportunity to get acquainted with the original text at recitals held by Turgenev for a circle of friends. He pointed to its author that many ideas, fragments of a plotline and situations looked very much as though they had been copied from The Precipice, the novel which was yet unpublished but very familiar to Turgenev in every detail. On March 27, 1860, Goncharov reminded Turgenev in a letter: "Remember, there was the time when you agreed that the general plan of your novel and characters' interactions had been similar [to that of mine]; you even excluded one scene, too obviously similar to mine, which made me feel totally satisfied." In another letter, dated March 28, Goncharov specified the scene similar to that which involved Vera and grandmother (in The Precipice), which, being "a weak one", had been "magnanimously sacrificed" by Turgenev. The scene mentioned was absent from the final version of Home of the Gentry, but references to it have been found in rough copies of the novel; this corroborated Goncharov's claim that Turgenev indeed had been making some cuts so as to make parallels less obvious. According to N. Budanova, "it is important to bear in mind that parallels between the two novels were for all to see and Turgenev at one point conceded as much, blaming his 'over-impressionability' for this." On March 29, 1860, in the critic Stepan Dudyshkin's flat an "arbitrary court" took place, with Pavel Annenkov, Alexander Druzhinin and Aleksandr Nikitenko present. The court's verdict was conciliatory: "Since both Turgenev's and Goncharov's novels have had for their ground the very same soil of Russian reality, similarities and coincidences, in ideas and