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_

Fedor Ivanitch Lavretsky came of an ancient noble family. His father, a
strangely whimsical man, determined