Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

A young man goes skipping and bounding along a street in the capital. His movements are gay and alert; there is a sparkle in his eyes, a smirk on his lips, a pleasing flush on his beaming face.... He is all contentment and delight. What has happened to him? Has he come in for a legacy? Has he been promoted? Is he hastening to meet his beloved? Or is it simply he has had a good breakfast, and the sense of health, the sense of well-fed prosperity, is at work in all his limbs? Surely they have not put on his neck thy lovely, eight-pointed cross, O Polish king, Stanislas? No. He has hatched a scandal against a friend, has sedulously sown it abroad, has heard it, this same slander, from the lips of another friend, and - has himself believed it!

'Neither the Jungfrau nor the Finsteraarhorn has yet been trodden by the foot of man!' The topmost peaks of the Alps ... A whole chain of rugged precipices ... The very heart of the mountains.

'If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly, and even to harm him,' said a crafty old knave to me, 'you reproach him with the very defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself. Be indignant ... and reproach him! 'To begin with, it will set others thinking you have not that vice. 'In the second place, your indignation may well be sincere.... You can turn to account the pricks of your own conscience.

I was sitting at the open window ... in the morning, the early morning of the first of May. The dawn had not yet begun; but already the dark, warm night grew pale and chill at its approach. No mist had risen, no breeze was astir, all was colourless and still ... but the nearness of the awakening could be felt, and the rarer air smelt keen and moist with dew.

Near a large town, along the broad highroad walked an old sick man. He tottered as he went; his old wasted legs, halting, dragging, stumbling, moved painfully and feebly, as though they did not belong to him; his clothes hung in rags about him; his uncovered head drooped on his breast.... He was utterly worn-out. He sat down on a stone by the wayside, bent forward, leant his elbows on his knees, hid his face in his hands; and through the knotted fingers the tears dropped down on to the grey, dry dust.

Who in Bagdad knows not Jaffar, the Sun of the Universe? One day, many years ago (he was yet a youth), Jaffar was walking in the environs of Bagdad. Suddenly a hoarse cry reached his ear; some one was calling desperately for help.

A peasant woman, a widow, had an only son, a young man of twenty, the best workman in the village, and he died. The lady who was the owner of the village, hearing of the woman's trouble, went to visit her on the very day of the burial. She found her at home.

I saw myself, in dream, a youth, almost a boy, in a low-pitched wooden church. The slim wax candles gleamed, spots of red, before the old pictures of the saints. A ring of coloured light encircled each tiny flame. Dark and dim it was in the church.... But there stood before me many people. All fair-haired, peasant heads. From time to time they began swaying, falling, rising again, like the ripe ears of wheat, when the wind of summer passes in slow undulation over them. All at once some man came up from behind and stood beside me.

A prisoner, condemned to confinement for life, broke out of his prison and took to head-long flight.... After him, just on his heels flew his gaolers in pursuit. He ran with all his might.... His pursuers began to be left behind. But behold, before him was a river with precipitous banks, a narrow, but deep river.... And he could not swim!

'It happened in 1803,' began my old acquaintance, 'not long before Austerlitz. The regiment in which I was an officer was quartered in Moravia. 'We had strict orders not to molest or annoy the inhabitants; as it was, they regarded us very dubiously, though we were supposed to be allies. 'I had a servant, formerly a serf of my mother's, Yegor, by name. He was a quiet, honest fellow; I had known him from a child, and treated him as a friend.

Somewhere, sometime, long, long ago, I read a poem. It was soon forgotten ... but the first line has stuck in my memory - 'How fair, how fresh were the roses ...' Now is winter; the frost has iced over the window-panes; in the dark room burns a solitary candle. I sit huddled up in a corner; and in my head the line keeps echoing and echoing -

When I lived, many years ago, in Petersburg, every time I chanced to hire a sledge, I used to get into conversation with the driver. I was particularly fond of talking to the night drivers, poor peasants from the country round, who come to the capital with their little ochre-painted sledges and wretched nags, in the hope of earning food for themselves and rent for their masters. So one day I engaged such a sledge-driver.... He was a lad of twenty, tall and well-made, a splendid fellow with blue eyes and ruddy cheeks; his fair hair curled in little ringlets under the shabby little patched cap that was pulled over his eyes. And how had that little torn smock ever been drawn over those gigantic shoulders!

I had a comrade who was my adversary; not in pursuits, nor in service, nor in love, but our views were never alike on any subject, and whenever we met, endless argument arose between us. We argued about everything: about art, and religion, and science, about life on earth and beyond the grave, especially about life beyond the grave. He was a person of faith and enthusiasm. One day he said to me, 'You laugh at everything; but if I die before you, I will come to you from the other world.... We shall see whether you will laugh then.'

Calmly and gracefully thou movest along the path of life, tearless and smileless, and scarce a heedless glance of indifferent attention ruffles thy calm. Thou art good and wise ... and all things are remote from thee, and of no one hast thou need. Thou art fair, and no one can say, whether thou prizest thy beauty or not.

I dreamed I had come into an immense underground temple with lofty arched roof. It was filled with a sort of underground uniform light. In the very middle of the temple sat a majestic woman in a flowing robe of green colour. Her head propped on her hand, she seemed buried in deep thought. At once I was aware that this woman was Nature herself; and a thrill of reverent awe sent an instantaneous shiver through my inmost soul.

A tall, bony old woman, with iron face and dull, fixed look, moves with long strides, and, with an arm dry as a stick, pushes before her another woman. This woman - of huge stature, powerful, thick-set, with the muscles of a Hercules, with a tiny head set on a bull neck, and blind - in her turn pushes before her a small, thin girl. This girl alone has eyes that see; she resists, turns round, lifts fair, delicate hands; her face, full of life, shows impatience and daring.... She wants not to obey, she wants not to go, where they are driving her ... but, still, she has to yield and go.

I was going from Hamburg to London in a small steamer. We were two passengers; I and a little female monkey, whom a Hamburg merchant was sending as a present to his English partner. She was fastened by a light chain to one of the seats on deck, and was moving restlessly and whining in a little plaintive pipe like a bird's. Every time I passed by her she stretched out her little, black, cold hand, and peeped up at me out of her little mournful, almost human eyes. I took her hand, and she ceased whining and moving restlessly about.

Whatever a man pray for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces to this: 'Great God, grant that twice two be not four.' Only such a prayer is a real prayer from person to person. To pray to the Cosmic Spirit, to the Higher Being, to the Kantian, Hegelian, quintessential, formless God is impossible and unthinkable. But can even a personal, living, imaged God make twice two not be four?

Stay! as I see thee now, abide for ever in my memory! From thy lips the last inspired note has broken. No light, no flash is in thy eyes; they are dim, weighed down by the load of happiness, of the blissful sense of the beauty, it has been thy glad lot to express - the beauty, groping for which thou hast stretched out thy yearning hands, thy triumphant, exhausted hands! What is the radiance - purer and higher than the sun's radiance - all about thy limbs, the least fold of thy raiment?

One day the Supreme Being took it into his head to give a great banquet in his palace of azure. All the virtues were invited. Only the virtues ... men he did not ask ... only ladies. There were a great many of them, great and small. The lesser virtues were more agreeable and genial than the great ones; but they all appeared in good humour, and chatted amiably together, as was only becoming for near relations and friends.

I was walking along the street ... I was stopped by a decrepit old beggar. Bloodshot, tearful eyes, blue lips, coarse rags, festering wounds.... Oh, how hideously poverty had eaten into this miserable creature! He held out to me a red, swollen, filthy hand. He groaned, he mumbled of help.

The last day of July; for a thousand versts around, Russia, our native land. An unbroken blue flooding the whole sky; a single cloudlet upon it, half floating, half fading away. Windlessness, warmth ... air like new milk! Larks are trilling; pouter-pigeons cooing; noiselessly the swallows dart to and fro; horses are neighing and munching; the dogs do not bark and stand peaceably wagging their tails.

Us two in the room; my dog and me.... Outside a fearful storm is howling. The dog sits in front of me, and looks me straight in the face. And I, too, look into his face.

I stood on the top of a sloping hillside; before me, a gold and silver sea of shifting colour, stretched the ripe rye. But no little wavelets ran over that sea; no stir of wind was in the stifling air; a great storm was gathering. Near me the sun still shone with dusky fire; but beyond the rye, not very far away, a dark-blue storm-cloud lay, a menacing mass over full half of the horizon.

He had every qualification for becoming the scourge of his family. He was born healthy, was born wealthy, and throughout the whole of his long life, continuing to be wealthy and healthy, he never committed a single sin, never fell into a single error, never once made a slip or a blunder. He was irreproachably conscientious!... And complacent in the sense of his own conscientiousness, he crushed every one with it, his family, his friends and his acquaintances.

I fancied I was somewhere in Russia, in the wilds, in a simple country house. The room big and low pitched with three windows; the walls whitewashed; no furniture. Before the house a barren plain; gradually sloping downwards, it stretches into the distance; a grey monotonous sky hangs over it, like the canopy of a bed. I am not alone; there are some ten persons in the room with me. All quite plain people, simply dressed. They walk up and down in silence, as it were stealthily. They avoid one another, and yet are continually looking anxiously at one another.

There lived a fool. For a long time he lived in peace and contentment; but by degrees rumours began to reach him that he was regarded on all sides as a vulgar idiot. The fool was abashed and began to ponder gloomily how he might put an end to these unpleasant rumours.

I dreamed that we were sitting, a party of twenty, in a big room with open windows. Among us were women, children, old men.... We were all talking of some very well-known subject, talking noisily and indistinctly. Suddenly, with a sharp, whirring sound, there flew into the room a big insect, two inches long ... it flew in, circled round, and settled on the wall.

We had once been close and warm friends.... But an unlucky moment came ... and we parted as enemies. Many years passed by.... And coming to the town where he lived, I learnt that he was helplessly ill, and wished to see me. I made my way to him, went into his room.... Our eyes met.

I used to know a monk, a hermit, a saint. He lived only for the sweetness of prayer; and steeping himself in it, he would stand so long on the cold floor of the church that his legs below the knees grew numb and senseless as blocks of wood. He did not feel them; he stood on and prayed. I understood him, and perhaps envied him; but let him too understand me and not condemn me; me, for whom his joys are inaccessible. He has attained to annihilating himself, his hateful ego; but I too; it's not from egoism, I pray not.

I stood before a chain of beautiful mountains forming a semicircle. A young, green forest covered them from summit to base. Limpidly blue above them was the southern sky; on the heights the sunbeams rioted; below, half-hidden in the grass, swift brooks were babbling. And the old fable came to my mind, how in the first century after Christ's birth, a Greek ship was sailing on the Aegean Sea.

Days of darkness, of dreariness, have come.... Thy own infirmities, the sufferings of those dear to thee, the chill and gloom of old age. All that thou hast loved, to which thou hast given thyself irrevocably, is falling, going to pieces. The way is all down-hill. What canst thou do? Grieve? Complain? Thou wilt aid not thyself nor others that way.... On the bowed and withering tree the leaves are smaller and fewer, but its green is yet the same.

I was walking over a wide plain alone. And suddenly I fancied light, cautious footsteps behind my back.... Some one was walking after me. I looked round, and saw a little, bent old woman, all muffled up in grey rags. The face of the old woman alone peeped out from them; a yellow, wrinkled, sharp-nosed, toothless face.

O realm of azure! O realm of light and colour, of youth and happiness! I have beheld thee in dream. We were together, a few, in a beautiful little boat, gaily decked out. Like a swan's breast the white sail swelled below the streamers frolicking in the wind. I knew not who were with me; but in all my soul I felt that they were young, light-hearted, happy as I! But I looked not indeed on them. I beheld all round the boundless blue of the sea, dimpled with scales of gold, and overhead the same boundless sea of blue, and in it, triumphant and mirthful, it seemed, moved the sun.

Two friends were sitting at a table drinking tea. A sudden hubbub arose in the street. They heard pitiable groans, furious abuse, bursts of malignant laughter. 'They're beating some one,' observed one of the friends, looking out of window.

The last days of August.... Autumn was already at hand. The sun was setting. A sudden downpour of rain, without thunder or lightning, had just passed rapidly over our wide plain. The garden in front of the house glowed and steamed, all filled with the fire of the sunset and the deluge of rain.

A sumptuous, brilliantly lighted hall; a number of ladies and gentlemen. All the faces are animated, the talk is lively.... A noisy conversation is being carried on about a famous singer. They call her divine, immortal.... O, how finely yesterday she rendered her last trill! And suddenly - as by the wave of an enchanter's wand - from every head and from every face, slipped off the delicate covering of skin, and instantaneously exposed the deadly whiteness of skulls, with here and there the leaden shimmer of bare jaws and gums.

I was returning from hunting, and walking along an avenue of the garden, my dog running in front of me. Suddenly he took shorter steps, and began to steal along as though tracking game. I looked along the avenue, and saw a young sparrow, with yellow about its beak and down on its head. It had fallen out of the nest (the wind was violently shaking the birch-trees in the avenue) and sat unable to move, helplessly flapping its half-grown wings.

Yellowish-grey sand, soft at the top, hard, grating below ... sand without end, where-ever one looks. And above this sandy desert, above this sea of dead dust, rises the immense head of the Egyptian sphinx. What would they say, those thick, projecting lips, those immutable, distended, upturned nostrils, and those eyes, those long, half-drowsy, half-watchful eyes under the double arch of the high brows?

Have you seen an old grey stone on the seashore, when at high tide, on a sunny day of spring, the living waves break upon it on all sides - break and frolic and caress it - and sprinkle over its sea-mossed head the scattered pearls of sparkling foam? The stone is still the same stone; but its sullen surface blossoms out into bright colours. They tell of those far-off days when the molten granite had but begun to harden, and was all aglow with the hues of fire.

It was a vision ... Two angels appeared to me ... two genii. I say angels, genii, because both had no clothes on their naked bodies, and behind their shoulders rose long powerful wings.

WORKMAN. Why do you come crawling up to us? What do ye want? You're none of us.... Get along! MAN WITH WHITE HANDS. I am one of you, comrades! THE WORKMAN. One of us, indeed! That's a notion! Look at my hands. D'ye see how dirty they are? And they smell of muck, and of pitch - but yours, see, are white. And what do they smell of?

'Thou shalt hear the fool's judgment....' You always told the truth, O great singer of ours. You spoke it this time, too. 'The fool's judgment and the laughter of the crowd' ... who has not known the one and the other? All that one can, and one ought to bear; and who has the strength, let him despise it!

On dirt, on stinking wet straw under the shelter of a tumble-down barn, turned in haste into a camp hospital, in a ruined Bulgarian village, for over a fortnight she lay dying of typhus. She was unconscious, and not one doctor even looked at her; the sick soldiers, whom she had tended as long as she could keep on her legs, in their turn got up from their pestilent litters to lift a few drops of water in the hollow of a broken pot to her parched lips. She was young and beautiful; the great world knew her; even the highest dignitaries had been interested in her. Ladies had envied her, men had paid her court ... two or three had loved her secretly and truly. Life had smiled on her; but there are smiles that are worse than tears.

How empty, dull, and useless is almost every day when it is spent! How few the traces it leaves behind it! How meaningless, how foolish those hours as they coursed by one after another! And yet it is man's wish to exist; he prizes life, he rests hopes on it, on himself, on the future.... Oh, what blessings he looks for from the future! But why does he imagine that other coming days will not be like this day he has just lived through?

When I hear the praises of the rich man Rothschild, who out of his immense revenues devotes whole thousands to the education of children, the care of the sick, the support of the aged, I admire and am touched. But even while I admire it and am touched by it, I cannot help recalling a poor peasant family who took an orphan niece into their little tumble-down hut. 'If we take Katka,' said the woman, 'our last farthing will go on her, there won't be enough to get us salt to salt us a bit of bread.'

There was once a town, the inhabitants of which were so passionately fond of poetry, that if some weeks passed by without the appearance of any good new poems, they regarded such a poetic dearth as a public misfortune. They used at such times to put on their worst clothes, to sprinkle ashes on their heads; and, assembling in crowds in the public squares, to shed tears and bitterly to upbraid the muse who had deserted them. On one such inauspicious day, the young poet Junius came into a square, thronged with the grieving populace.

What an insignificant trifle may sometimes transform the whole man! Full of melancholy thought, I walked one day along the highroad. My heart was oppressed by a weight of gloomy apprehension; I was overwhelmed by dejection. I raised my head.... Before me, between two rows of tall poplars, the road darted like an arrow into the distance.

What shall I think when I come to die, if only I am in a condition to think anything then? Shall I think how little use I have made of my life, how I have slumbered, dozed through it, how little I have known how to enjoy its gifts? 'What? is this death? So soon? Impossible! Why, I have had no time to do anything yet.... I have only been making ready to begin!'