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her lover, was punished by a forced marriage to another,
after having seen her Petruchkha put into the army. Or
there is the story of the deaf and dumb but muscular
man-servant Gerassim, whose sweetheart his gracious
mistress married to a drunkard for her own amusement,
and who was compelled to drown his dog, a little,
emaciated puppy, Mumu, — his last consolation and sole
company in the world, — because sometimes his barking
irritated his mistress when, after too great indulgence at
her meals, she was lying sleepless.
Both stories are told without comment, with no
criticism of the events; the hatred of brutality which was
manifested is expressed only in irony, and this irony,
again, disappears in the pervading sadness.
What makes Turgenief’s vein so rich and peculiar is
that he is at once a pessimist and a philanthropist; that
he loved the race of which he thought so poorly and
esteemed so lightly.
But he had seen altogether too much go wrong and
miscarry in Russia to be able to narrate any other
incidents than those with unhappy or sad results. To him,
a love story is not genuine Russian if it does not have an
unhappy issue in consequence of the inconstancy of the
man or the coldness of the woman. An undertaking
does not seem to him to be genuine Russian unless it
is beyond the capacity of him who attempts it, and falls
through in consequence of the insusceptibility of those
for whose sake it was to be carried through. But still
he cannot refrain from dwelling again and again on
vacillating love and fruitless struggles in Russia. For him,
the land of Russia, where everything comes to grief, is a
land of general shipwreck. And his chief emotion is one
which awakens and is mingled with pain in the spectator
of a shipwreck, in which the latter must give the
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