Fathers and Children Ivan Turgenev (brene brown rising strong .txt) 📖
- Author: Ivan Turgenev
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Sometimes Bazarov went into the village, and in his usual bantering tone entered into conversation with some peasant: “Come,” he would say to him, “expound your views on life to me, brother; you see, they say all the strength and future of Russia lies in your hands, a new epoch in history will be started by you—you give us our real language and our laws.”
The peasant either made no reply, or articulated a few words of this sort, “Well, we’ll try … because, you see, to be sure. …”
“You explain to me what your mir is,” Bazarov interrupted; “and is it the same mir that is said to rest on three fishes?”
“That, little father, is the earth that rests on three fishes,” the peasant would declare soothingly, in a kind of patriarchal, simple-hearted singsong; “and over against ours, that’s to say, the mir, we know there’s the master’s will; wherefore you are our fathers. And the stricter the master’s rule, the better for the peasant.”
After listening to such a reply one day, Bazarov shrugged his shoulders contemptuously and turned away, while the peasant sauntered slowly homewards.
“What was he talking about?” inquired another peasant of middle age and surly aspect, who at a distance from the door of his hut had been following his conversation with Bazarov.—“Arrears? eh?”
“Arrears, no indeed, mate!” answered the first peasant, and now there was no trace of patriarchal singsong in his voice; on the contrary, there was a certain scornful gruffness to be heard in it: “Oh, he clacked away about something or other; wanted to stretch his tongue a bit. Of course, he’s a gentleman; what does he understand?”
“What should he understand!” answered the other peasant, and jerking back their caps and pushing down their belts, they proceeded to deliberate upon their work and their wants. Alas! Bazarov, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously, Bazarov, who knew how to talk to peasants (as he had boasted in his dispute with Pavel Petrovitch), did not in his self-confidence even suspect that in their eyes he was all the while something of the nature of a buffooning clown.
He found employment for himself at last, however. One day Vassily Ivanovitch bound up a peasant’s wounded leg before him, but the old man’s hands trembled, and he could not manage the bandages; his son helped him, and from time to time began to take a share in his practice, though at the same time he was constantly sneering both at the remedies he himself advised and at his father, who hastened to make use of them. But Bazarov’s jeers did not in the least perturb Vassily Ivanovitch; they were positively a comfort to him. Holding his greasy dressing-gown across his stomach with two fingers, and smoking his pipe, he used to listen with enjoyment to Bazarov; and the more malicious his sallies, the more good-humouredly did his delighted father chuckle, showing every one of his black teeth. He used even to repeat these sometimes flat or pointless retorts, and would, for instance, for several days constantly without rhyme or reason, reiterate, “Not a matter of the first importance!” simply because his son, on hearing he was going to matins, had made use of that expression. “Thank God! he has got over his melancholy!” he whispered to his wife; “how he gave it to me today, it was splendid!” Moreover, the idea of having such an assistant excited him to ecstasy, filled him with pride. “Yes, yes,” he would say
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