"In the doorway,...stood a peasant with a big beard and a clever face, "
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Nineteenth-century Russian Literature, like a perfectly chilled glass of one hundred and fifty year-old Chardonnay, is to be observed, inhaled, then slowly savored to fully appreciate how carefully selected words are almost impeccably combined to create images, feelings, presence.
I read today’s passage, from A Quiet Backwater by Ivan Turgenev, perhaps three times before I selected it; then two or three more times as I prepared it for publication. What I enjoyed about this passage is of little importance or relevance. What does matter however are the sensations, allusions, and images, I hope you will experience while reading and savoring this passage hopefully once, maybe twice, or perhaps a third time.
“A Quiet Backwater”
“…., a young man in an overcoat was sitting on a narrow wooden chair at a little warped old table, looking over some accounts. Two stearine candles burned in travelling silver candlesticks set in front of him; in one corner of the room, on a bench, stood an open hamper, in another a servant was setting up an iron bedstead. Behind a low partition a samovar hissed and grumbled; a dog was turning round and round on a freshly strewn bed of hay. In the doorway, intently watching the seated young man, stood a peasant with a big beard and a clever face, wearing a new long overcoat belted with red sash,…..Against one wall of the room was a tiny and very ancient piano, and beside it a chest of drawers of equal antiquity, with holes instead of locks; between the windows glimmered a dark looking-glass; on the partition hung an old portrait, from which much of the paint had peeled away, of a woman with powered hair, wearing a hooped skirt and with a black ribbon round her slender neck. Judging by the noticeable crookedness of the ceiling and the slope of the crannied floor, the little house into which we have introduced the reader has existed for a very long time; nobody lived permanently in it, it merely served to house the owner of the estate on his visits. The young man sitting at the table was in fact the owner of the village of Sasovo.”