The Torrents of Spring

The Torrents of Spring, by Ivan
Turgenev

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Title: The Torrents of Spring
Author: Ivan Turgenev
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THE TORRENTS OF SPRING
BY IVAN TURGENEV
Translated from the Russian
BY CONSTANCE GARNETT
1897

CONTENTS
THE TORRENTS OF SPRING
FIRST LOVE
MUMU

THE TORRENTS OF SPRING

'Years of gladness, Days of joy, Like the torrents of spring They
hurried away.'
--From an Old Ballad.
... At two o'clock in the night he had gone back to his study. He had
dismissed the servant after the candles were lighted, and throwing
himself into a low chair by the hearth, he hid his face in both hands.
Never had he felt such weariness of body and of spirit. He had passed
the whole evening in the company of charming ladies and cultivated
men; some of the ladies were beautiful, almost all the men were
distinguished by intellect or talent; he himself had talked with great
success, even with brilliance ... and, for all that, never yet had the
taedium vitae of which the Romans talked of old, the 'disgust for life,'
taken hold of him with such irresistible, such suffocating force. Had he
been a little younger, he would have cried with misery, weariness, and
exasperation: a biting, burning bitterness, like the bitter of wormwood,
filled his whole soul. A sort of clinging repugnance, a weight of
loathing closed in upon him on all sides like a dark night of autumn;
and he did not know how to get free from this darkness, this bitterness.
Sleep it was useless to reckon upon; he knew he should not sleep.
He fell to thinking ... slowly, listlessly, wrathfully. He thought of the
vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human. All the
stages of man's life passed in order before his mental gaze (he had
himself lately reached his fifty-second year), and not one found grace
in his eyes. Everywhere the same ever-lasting pouring of water into a
sieve, the ever-lasting beating of the air, everywhere the same
self-deception--half in good faith, half conscious--any toy to amuse the
child, so long as it keeps him from crying. And then, all of a sudden,
old age drops down like snow on the head, and with it the ever-growing,
ever-gnawing, and devouring dread of death ... and the plunge into the
abyss! Lucky indeed if life works out so to the end! May be, before the
end, like rust on iron, sufferings, infirmities come.... He did not picture
life's sea, as the poets depict it, covered with tempestuous waves; no, he
thought of that sea as a smooth, untroubled surface, stagnant and
transparent to its darkest depths. He himself sits in a little tottering boat,

and down below in those dark oozy depths, like prodigious fishes, he
can just make out the shapes of hideous monsters: all the ills of life,
diseases, sorrows, madness, poverty, blindness.... He gazes, and behold,
one of these monsters separates itself off from the darkness, rises
higher and higher, stands out more and more distinct, more and more
loathsomely distinct.... An instant yet, and the boat that bears him will
be overturned! But behold, it grows dim again, it withdraws, sinks
down to the bottom, and there it lies, faintly stirring in the slime.... But
the fated day will come, and it will overturn the boat.
He shook his head, jumped up from his low chair, took two turns up
and down the room, sat down to the writing-table, and opening one
drawer after another, began to rummage among his papers, among old
letters, mostly from