Bazaroff put his hand to his brow.  Madame Odintsov bent down to him.  “Yevgeny Vassilyvitch, I am here....”  He at once took his hand away and raised himself.

“Good-bye,” he said, with a sudden force, and his eyes gleamed with their last light.  “Good-bye....  Listen....  You know I didn’t kiss you then....  Breathe on the dying lamp, and let it go out....”

She put her lips on his forehead.

“Enough!” he murmured, and dropped back on to the pillow.  “Now... darkness....”

Madame Odintsov went softly out.  “Well?” Vassily Ivanovitch asked her in a whisper.  “He has fallen asleep,” she answered, hardly audible.  But Bazaroff was not fated to awaken.  That night he breathed his last.  A universal lamentation arose in the house.  Vassily Ivanovitch was seized by a sudden frenzy.

“I said I should rebel,” he shrieked hoarsely, his face inflamed and distorted, shaking his fist in the air, as though threatening someone; “and I rebel, I rebel!”

But his wife, all in tears, hung upon his neck, and both fell on their faces together.  “Side by side,” said one of the servants afterwards, “they drooped their poor heads like lambs at noonday....”

* * * * *

There is a little grave in the graveyard, surrounded by an iron railing; two young fir-trees have been planted, one at each end.  Yevgeny Bazaroff is buried in this tomb.  Often from the little village not far off two quite feeble old people come to visit it—­a husband and wife.  At the iron railing they fall down and remain on their knees, and long and bitterly they weep and yearn and intently they gaze at the dumb stone under which their son is lying....  Can it be that their prayers, their tears are fruitless?  Can it be that love, sacred, devoted love, is not all-powerful?

Oh, no! however passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, that great peace of “indifferent” nature; they tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.

* * * * *

A Nest of Nobles

“A Nest of Nobles” ("Dvorianskoe Gniezdo"), published in 1858, brought Turgenev a European reputation.  Of all his novels, “A Nest of Nobles” is probably the best.  It has all the love of detail that is peculiar to the Slavonic mind, a trait which is largely responsible for that feeling of pessimism that pervades the writings of all those who have listened to the “still, sad music of humanity.”  Yet Turgenev is not typical of that Russian school of novelists of which Tolstoy and Gorki are distinguished examples; rather he belongs to the school of Thackeray, George Eliot, and Dickens.

I.—­A Student’s Marriage