In the Library
Bezhin Meadow
Ivan Turgenev, 1851
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 35 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Constance Garnett (1895)
- Original
- Original ru
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 8k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
It was a glorious July day, one of those days which only come after many days of fine weather.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
Night comes down over the open steppe, and a hunter who has lost his way stumbles to the edge of a wide hollow where two fires burn and a circle of peasant boys sit guarding the horses till morning. He lies in the grass, pretends to sleep, and listens. The boys trade the stories children tell in the dark: the water-sprite laughing in the reeds, the drowned who will not lie still, the dead master hunting the meadow for his grass, the forest spirit that walks a man in circles until dawn. Around them Turgenev pours the whole Russian night, the warm dark and the smell of the grass, the firelight trembling on each frightened face, and he loves these boys with a tenderness that never once tips into pity. Then, in a single line at the close, he tells you which of them did not live out the year, and the whole long beautiful night turns into an elegy you did not know you were reading.