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Passinkof belongs to the type of Russian personalities
which Turgenief describes with partiality. He is not
specially noble in his exterior, tall, thin,
round-shouldered, and his nose even a little red. But his forehead
is magnificent, his voice mild and subdued, and, as it is
significantly enough said of him, “In his mouth the
words goodness, truth, life, knowledge, love sound
always like phrases, however enthusiastically he utters
them.” In his story Turgenief’s fundamental theme
comes out in a double form. He is in love with a
beautiful young girl, who does not give him a thought.
When he dies, forgotten and alone in an obscure corner
of Siberia, he still has some mementos of her on his
breast. He needed some faults, some selfishness, some
levity, to win her favor. In the mean time, as a requital,
without his knowing it, he was silently loved by her plain,
rather ugly and awkward sister, who has always kept him
faithfully in mind, and who for his sake had never been
willing to marry.
Turgenief’s story, written somewhat late in life, “The
Living Relic,” is certainly the best specimen of these
monographs of misfortune, which are just as fine and
perfect as they are simple. It is almost an unadorned
soliloquy; it is only the account of her life which a
young, formerly beautiful Russian peasant girl, now
worn to a skeleton, gives to the author. He finds her
lying on her back, after a fateful fall, and she has been
lying thus for nearly seven years. Her head is emaciated,
sallow as bronze; her nose sharp and pointed as a
knife-blade; her lips sunken in, only the teeth and the
white of her eyes have any lustre; some tufts of thin,
flaxen yellow hair fall down over her forehead. Outside
of the bed-clothing were lying a pair of very small
hands whose fingers, like little dark brown pins, move
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