Fathers and Sons

by Ivan Turgenev

nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.”

made some wonderful discoveries in the amelioration

oneself over forty miles on a wild-goose chase. Mathieu

‘Of course, you can’t understand me; we belong,’ I said, ‘to two different generations.’ She was dreadfully offended, while I thought, ‘There’s no help for it. It’s a bitter pill, but she has to swallow it.’ You see, now, our turn has come, and our successors can say to us, ‘You are not of our generation; swallow your pill.’”

The enchanted world into which he was just stepping, which was just rising out of the dim mists of the past, was shaken—and vanished.

In his heart he was highly delighted with his friend’s suggestion, but he thought it a duty to conceal his feeling. He was not a nihilist for nothing!

TIME, IT IS well known, sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a worm; but man is wont to be particularly happy when he does not even notice whether it passes quickly or slowly.

Every man hangs on a thread, the abyss may open under his feet any minute, and yet he must go and invent all sorts of discomforts for himself, and spoil his life.”

only the wine was not quite up to the mark; it was almost black sherry, bought by Timofeitch in the town at a well-known merchant’s, and had a faint coppery, resinous taste, and the flies were a great nuisance.

Arina Vlasyevna was a genuine Russian gentlewoman of the olden times; she ought to have lived two centuries before, in the old Moscow days. She was very devout and emotional; she believed in fortunetelling, charms, dreams, and omens of every possible kind; she believed in the prophecies of crazy people, in house-spirits, in wood-spirits, in unlucky meetings, in the evil eye, in popular remedies, she ate specially prepared salt on Holy Thursday, and believed that the end of the world was at hand; she believed that if on Easter Sunday the lights did not go out at vespers, then there would be a good crop of buckwheat, and that a mushroom will not grow after it has been looked on by the eye of man; she believed that the devil likes to be where there is water, and that every Jew has a blood-stained patch on his breast; she was afraid of mice, of snakes, of frogs, of sparrows, of leeches, of thunder, of cold water, of draughts, of horses, of goats, of red-haired people, and black cats; and she regarded crickets and dogs as unclean beasts; she never ate veal, doves, crayfishes, cheese, asparagus, artichokes, hares, nor water-melons, because a cut water-melon suggested the head of John the Baptist, and of oysters she could not speak without a shudder; she was fond of eating—and fasted rigidly; she slept ten hours out of the twenty-four—and never went to bed at all if Vassily Ivanovitch had so much as a headache; she had never read a single book except Alexis or the Cottage in the ...

“I was going to say that they now—my parents, I mean—are absorbed and don’t trouble themselves about their own nothingness; it doesn’t sicken them ... while I ... I feel nothing but weariness and anger.”