Fathers and Children

cancer of the spinal cord. His body was taken to St. Petersburg and was buried with national honors.

For praising Gogol, who had just died, he was arrested and imprisoned for a short time, and for the next two years kept under police surveillance.

tyrannical woman with an ungovernable temper, was eager that he should make a brilliant official career; so, when he resigned from the Ministry in 1845, she showed her disapproval by cutting down his allowance and thus forcing him to support himself by the profession he had chosen.

$5,000 a year he became a wanderer.

Most of Turgenev’s books I have read many times over, all of them I have read more than twice. For a number of years I read them again and again without much caring for other fiction

His themes were oftenest those of the French novelist, but how far he was from handling them in the French manner and with the French spirit! In his hands sin suffered no dramatic punishment; it did not always show itself as unhappiness, in the personal sense, but it was always unrest, and without the hope of peace. If the end did not appear, the fact that it must be miserable always appeared

He reserves the treasures of his poetic fancy for the young girls of his creation. To him the young girl of the country province is the cornerstone of the fabric of society.

Reared in the freedom of country life, placed in the most healthy social conditions, she is conscientious, frank, affectionate, without being romantic; less intelligent than man, but more resolute.

The favorite hero of young girls and romantic women is neither the brilliant officer, the artist, nor rich lord, but almost universally this provincial Hamlet, conscientious, cultivated, intelligent, but of feeble will, who, returning from his studies in foreign lands, is full of scientific theories about the improvement of mankind and the good of the lower classes, and eager to apply these theories on his own estate.

In regard to the women of this class, Turgenev, strange to say, has little to say of the mothers. This probably reveals the existence of some old wound, some bitter experience of his own. Without a single exception, all the mothers in his novels are either wicked or grotesque.