THIS FIRST BOOK OF his is somewhat drawn out, but the fault is less noticeable here than in his later works. Some of the scenes are most realistic, with tragic vigour. A young woman recounts the death of a student living in the same house, the despair of his father, an unlettered, simple old man who lived in apprehensive admiration of his son’s intelligence – “so learned”!

Anna, daughter of Feodor, our landlady, arranged the funeral. She bought a coffin – quite a plain one – and hired a man with his dust cart. To cover her outlay she possessed herself of his books and all his clothes. The old man quarreled with her over this with much noise, and seized all the books he could get hold of. He was a dolt without any memory. He ran round and round the coffin in a fussy manner, thinking to make himself useful, rearranging the wreaths placed on the body, or the candles. His mind could not remain fixed long on any one object…

Neither my mother nor Anna, the daughter of Feodor, went to church for absolution. My mother was ill, Anna had quarreled with the old man and would have nothing to do with the arrangements. I went alone with him. During the ceremony I was seized with a vague fear, with a presentiment for the future. I could hardly stand on my feet. At least they nailed down the coffin, placed it on the cart and off they went. The carter made his horse trot, the old man ran behind moaning in a loud voice; his sobs were in gasps, intermingled with hiccoughs due to loss of his breath by running; the poor man lost his hat and did not stop to pick it up; rain poured down on his head; the wind got up and changed rain into hail, which stung his face. The old man did not seem to notice the frightful weather and kept on sobbing and running from one side of the cart to the other. The tails of his long, shabby coat flapped in the wind like huge wings. From out of every pocket books kept falling out. In his hands he had a large volume, which he pressed to his bosom with all his might. The passers-by uncovered and cross themselves. Some turned round and looked at the old man in astonishment. Every moment he lost some books, which rolled in the mud. He stopped to pick them up and then ran all the faster to come up with the cart. At the corner of the street an old beggar woman joined the procession, also running. The cart disappeared round the corner and was lost to view.

I would like to quote other and similar passages, but I hesitate, nor can I find them; and that is the highest praise one can give a novel. The structure is so solid, the material so simple and so well adapted to giving the general impression as a whole that to isolate a passage would be to impair its value. It would be like detaching a single stone from a Greek temple, whose beauty is derived solely from its general outline. This is an innate gift of all Russian writers. The pages of their books silently accumulate like drops of water, slow and sure. Suddenly, before having realized the rising of the tide, one finds oneself standing in a deep lake and gradually submerged by the swelling of a dismal flood.

There is another feature they have in common – in which Turgeneff excelled and where Dostoyevsky possibly ever surpassed him – it is the art of being able with one line, one word, to raise infinite memories, innumerable sentiments and ideas. This art is fully exemplified in Poor Folk. The sentences in those pages do not seem to be written lengthways but down into the depths, and cause subdued vibrations which gradually lose themselves in the unknown. They resemble the narrow keys of an organ whence the sound seems to arise, but which are only the means for acting on the invisible connections with the heart of the instrument – that source of harmony, whence really proceeds the “tempest’s thunder.” On reaching the last page, we have got to know these two people as if we had lived with them all our lives. The author has not told us the thousandth part of what we ourselves know of them, because of the scientific exactitude of what his mere indications reveal. I apologize to the schools of “precise and exact” study, but the writer is indeed the more powerful because he does not describe everything. We are grateful to him for what he allows us to imagine.