Produced by Keren Vergon, Lazar Liveanu and PG Distributed Proofreaders
by
Ivan Turgenev
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett
1899
VILLAGE OF SHEEP'S SPRINGS, March 20, 18—.
The doctor has just left me. At last I have got at something definite!For all his cunning, he had to speak out at last. Yes, I am soon, verysoon, to die. The frozen rivers will break up, and with the last snow Ishall, most likely, swim away … whither? God knows! To the ocean too.Well, well, since one must die, one may as well die in the spring. Butisn't it absurd to begin a diary a fortnight, perhaps, before death?What does it matter? And by how much are fourteen days less thanfourteen years, fourteen centuries? Beside eternity, they say, all isnothingness—yes, but in that case eternity, too, is nothing. I see Iam letting myself drop into metaphysics; that's a bad sign—am I notrather faint-hearted, perchance? I had better begin a description ofsome sort. It's damp and windy out of doors.
I'm forbidden to go out. What can I write about, then? No decent mantalks of his maladies; to write a novel is not in my line; reflectionson elevated topics are beyond me; descriptions of the life going onaround me could not even interest me; while I am weary of doingnothing, and too lazy to read. Ah, I have it, I will write the story ofall my life for myself. A first-rate idea! Just before death it is asuitable thing to do, and can be of no harm to any one. I will begin.
I was born thirty years ago, the son of fairly well-to-do landowners.My father had a passion for gambling; my mother was a woman ofcharacter … a very virtuous woman. Only, I have known no woman whosemoral excellence was less productive of happiness. She was crushedbeneath the weight of her own virtues, and was a source of misery toevery one, from herself upwards. In all the fifty years of her life,she never once took rest, or sat with her hands in her lap; she was forever fussing and bustling about like an ant, and to absolutely no goodpurpose, which cannot be said of the ant. The worm of restlessnessfretted her night and day. Only once I saw her perfectly tranquil, andthat was the day after her death, in her coffin. Looking at her, itpositively seemed to me that her face wore an expression of subduedamazement; with the half-open lips, the sunken cheeks, andmeekly-staring eyes, it seemed expressing, all over, the words, 'Howgood to be at rest!' Yes, it is good, good to be rid, at last, of thewearing sense of life, of the persistent, restless consciousness ofexistence! But that's neither here nor there.
I was brought up badly and not happily. My father and mother both lovedme; but that made things no better for me. My father was not, even inhis own house, of the slightest authority or consequence, being a manopenly abandoned to a shameful and ruinous vice; he was conscious ofhis degradation, and not having the strength of will to give up hisdarling passion, he tried at least, by his invariably amiable andhumble demeanour and his unswerving submissiveness, to win thecondescending consideration of his exemplary wif