Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev Poems
I fancied I was somewhere in Russia, in the wilds, in a simple country
house.
...
Somewhere, sometime, long, long ago, I read a poem. It was soon forgotten
… but the first line has stuck in my memory-
...
I was returning from hunting, and walking along an avenue of the garden, my
dog running in front of me.
...
The last days of August…. Autumn was already at hand.
The sun was setting. A sudden downpour of rain, without thunder or
...
I stood before a chain of beautiful mountains forming a semicircle. A
young, green forest covered them from summit to base.
...
It was a vision…
Two angels appeared to me… two genii.
I say angels, genii, because both had no clothes on their
...
Stay! as I see thee now, abide for ever in my memory!
From thy lips the last inspired note has broken. No light, no flash is
...
'Neither the Jungfrau nor the Finsteraarhorn has yet been trodden by the
foot of man!'
...
There was once a town, the inhabitants of which were so passionately fond
of poetry,
that if some weeks passed by without the appearance of
...
Near a large town, along the broad highroad walked an old sick man.
He tottered as he went; his old wasted legs, halting,
...
I saw myself, in dream, a youth, almost a boy, in a low-pitched wooden
church. The slim wax candles gleamed, spots of red, before the old pictures
...
A prisoner, condemned to confinement for life, broke out of his prison and
took to head-long flight…. After him, just on his heels flew his
...
I was walking along the street… I was stopped by a decrepit old beggar.
Bloodshot, tearful eyes, blue lips, coarse rags, festering
...
There lived a fool.
For a long time he lived in peace and contentment; but by degrees rumours
...
What shall I think when I come to die, if only I am in a condition to think
anything then?
...
When I hear the praises of the rich man Rothschild, who out of his immense
revenues devotes whole thousands to the education of
...
We had once been close and warm friends…. But an unlucky moment came…
and we parted as enemies.
...
How empty, dull, and useless is almost every day when it is spent! How few
the traces it leaves behind it! How meaningless, how foolish
...
I dreamed that we were sitting, a party of twenty, in a big room with open
windows.
...
A peasant woman, a widow, had an only son, a young man of twenty, the best
workman in the village, and he died.
...
Ivan Turgenev Biography
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (November 9 [O.S. October 28] 1818 – September 3 [O.S. August 22] 1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction.)
The Best Poem Of Ivan Turgenev
A Dream
I fancied I was somewhere in Russia, in the wilds, in a simple country
house.
The room big and low pitched with three windows; the walls whitewashed; no
furniture. Before the house a barren plain; gradually sloping downwards, it
stretches into the distance; a grey monotonous sky hangs over it, like the
canopy of a bed.
I am not alone; there are some ten persons in the room with me. All quite
plain people, simply dressed. They walk up and down in silence, as it
were stealthily. They avoid one another, and yet are continually looking
anxiously at one another.
Not one knows why he has come into this house and what people there are
with him. On all the faces uneasiness and despondency… all in turn
approach the windows and look about intently as though expecting something
from without.
Then again they fall to wandering up and down. Among us is a small-sized
boy; from time to time he whimpers in the same thin voice, 'Father, I'm
frightened!' My heart turns sick at his whimper, and I too begin to be
afraid… of what? I don't know myself. Only I feel, there is coming
nearer and nearer a great, great calamity.
The boy keeps on and on with his wail. Oh, to escape from here! How
stifling! How weary! how heavy…. But escape is impossible.
That sky is like a shroud. And no wind…. Is the air dead or what?
All at once the boy runs up to the window and shrieks in the same piteous
voice, 'Look! look! the earth has fallen away!'
'How? fallen away?' Yes; just now there was a plain before the house, and
now it stands on a fearful height! The horizon has sunk, has gone down, and
from the very house drops an almost overhanging, as it were scooped-out,
black precipice.
We all crowded to the window…. Horror froze our hearts. 'Here it is…
here it is!' whispers one next me.
And behold, along the whole far boundary of the earth, something began to
stir, some sort of small, roundish hillocks began heaving and falling.
'It is the sea!' the thought flashed on us all at the same instant. 'It
will swallow us all up directly…. Only how can it grow and rise upwards?
To this precipice?'
And yet, it grows, grows enormously…. Already there are not separate
hillocks heaving in the distance…. One continuous, monstrous wave
embraces the whole circle of the horizon.
It is swooping, swooping, down upon us! In an icy hurricane it flies,
swirling in the darkness of hell. Everything shuddered-and there, in
this flying mass-was the crash of thunder, the iron wail of thousands of
throats….
Ah! what a roaring and moaning! It was the earth howling for terror….
The end of it! the end of all!
The child whimpered once more…. I tried to clutch at my companions,
but already we were all crushed, buried, drowned, swept away by that
pitch-black, icy, thundering wave! Darkness… darkness everlasting!
Scarcely breathing, I awoke.
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