“We must forget all that,” she brought out at last.  “It is left for us to do our duty.  You, Fedor Ivanitch, must be reconciled with your wife.”

“Lisa!”

“I beg you to do so:  by that alone can you expiate...”

“Lisa, for God’s sake!—­to be reconciled to her now!”

“I do not ask of you—­do not live with her if you cannot.  Remember your little girl; do it for my sake.”

“Very well,” Lavretsky muttered between his clenched teeth; “I will do that; in that I shall fulfil my duty.  But you—­what does your duty consist in?”

“That I know myself.”

Lavretsky started:  “You cannot be making up your mind to marry Panshin?”

Lisa gave an almost imperceptible smile—­“Oh, no!” she said.

“Now you see for yourself, Fedor Ivanitch, as I told you before, that happiness does not depend on us, but on God.”

* * * * *

Smoke

Considered simply as stories, “Fathers and Sons” and “Smoke” are to all intents and purposes independent of each other, yet in important particulars the latter is a sequel to the first.  Once on his arrival at St. Petersburg, Turgenev was met with the words, “Just see what your Nihilists are doing!  They have almost gone so far as to burn the city.”  Thus again he took up the question of social reform, and in “Smoke” ("Dim”) he views with apprehension the actions of the so-called “intellectuals,” who would make themselves responsible for the shaping of future Russia.  Charlatans among the leaders of the new thought, and society dilettantism, both came under his merciless lash.  In his opinion the men and ideas in the two camps are no more than smoke—­dirty, evil-smelling smoke.  The entire atmosphere is gloomy, and throughout is only relieved by the character of Irina, the most exquisite piece of feminine psychology in the whole range of Turgenev’s novels.

I.—­A Broken Idyll

Early in the fifties there was living in Moscow, in very straitened circumstances, almost in poverty, the numerous family of the Princes Osinin.  These were real princes—­not Tartar-Georgians, but pure-blooded descendants of Rurik.  Time, however, had dealt hardly with them.  They had fallen under the ban of the Empire, and retained nothing but their name and the pride of their nobility.

The family of Osinins consisted of a husband and wife and five children.  It was living near the dog’s place, in a one-storied little wooden house with a striped portico looking on to the street, green lions on the gates, and all the other pretensions of nobility, though it could hardly make both ends meet, was constantly in debt at the green-grocer’s, and often sitting without firewood or candles in the winter.  Though their pride kept them aloof from the society of their neighbours, their straitened circumstances compelled them to receive certain people to whom they were under obligations.  Among the number of these was Grigory Mihalovitch Litvinov, a young student of Moscow, the son of a retired official of plebeian extraction, who had once lent the Osinins three hundred roubles.  Litvinov called frequently at the house, and fell desperately in love with the eldest daughter, Irina.