Search -
The Novels of Ivan Turgenev; Dream Tales and Prose Poems
The Novels of Ivan Turgenev Dream Tales and Prose Poems Author:Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1920 Original Publisher: Macmillan Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can selec... more »t from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CLARA MILITCH In the spring of 1878 there was living in Moscow, in a small wooden house in Shabo- lovka, a young man of five-and-twenty, called Yakov Aratov. With him lived his father's sister, an elderly maiden lady, over fifty, Platonida Ivanovna. She took charge of his house, and looked after his household expenditure, a task for which Aratov was utterly unfit . Other relations he had none. A few years previously, his father, a provincial gentleman of small property, had moved to Moscow together with him and Platonida Ivanovna, whom he always, however, called Platosha; her nephew, too, used the same name. On leaving the country-place where they had always lived up till then, the elder Aratov settled in the old capital, with the object of putting his son to the university, for which he had himself prepared him ; he bought for a trifle a little house in one of the outlying streets, and established himself in it, with all his books and scientific odds and ends. And of books and odds and ends he had many -- for he was a man of some considerable learning . . . ' an out-and-out eccentric,' as his neighbours said of him. He positively passed among them for a sorcerer; he had even been given the title of an ' insectivist.' He studied chemistry, mineralogy, entomology, botany, and medicine; he doctored patients gratis with herbs and metallic powders of his own invention, after the method of Paracelsus. These same powders were the means of his bringing to the grave his pretty, young, too delicate wife, whom he passionately loved, and by whom he had an only son. With the same po...« less