day, when he is delivering the funeral oration of a
workingman, who has been suddenly killed, Vassily abruptly
interrupts the ceremony, approaches the corpse, which has begun to
decay, and addresses it thus three times:

"I tell you: arise!"

But the dead man does not move. Then the priest looks at this inert
and deformed corpse. He notices the fetid odor that arises from it,
the odor of the slow but sure decomposition, and he has a sort of
sudden revelation. The scepticism which, for a long time, has been
brooding in his heart suddenly is transformed into absolute
negation, and addressing himself to Him in whom he had believed,
Vassily cries out:

"Thou wishest to deceive me? Then why did I believe? Why hast Thou
kept me in servitude, in captivity, all of my life? No free thought!
No feeling! No hope! All with Thee! All for Thee! Thee alone! Well,
appear! I am waiting! I am waiting!... Ah! Thou dost not want to?
Very well...."

He does not finish. In a burst of savage madness he rushes forth
from the now empty church. He rushes straight ahead and finally
falls in the middle of the road. Death has put an end to his
miseries.

"Silence" also shows us a priest, stubborn in his prejudices. This
man, Father Ignatius by name, is a sort of rude and authoritative
Hercules. All tremble before his stern air, except his daughter, who
has decided to continue her studies in St. Petersburg, against the
will of her father. Coming back to her home after a long absence,
she wanders about, sad and silent. For days at a time she wanders
about, pale and melancholy, speaking little, seeking solitude. She
hides what oppresses her; she keeps her secret from all. One night,
she throws herself under a train, taking her secret with her.

Her grief-stricken mother gets a paralytic stroke which transforms
her into a sort of living corpse. The father, crushed by these two
catastrophes, which have destroyed all the joy of his life, becomes
the prey of a singular mental state: his conscience revolts against
the severe maxims and the pitiless prejudices that he has always
defended. Tender love, which he has hitherto concealed under his
pride, now softens him; he needs affection, and a vague feeling
suggests to him that he himself is to blame for all of these
misfortunes. His past life, his daughter, and his wife appear to
him as so many enigmas which raise anguishing questions in his
heart. He calls out, but no one answers. A death-like sile