Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VI).djvu/184

Rh use,' Nezhdanov thought. But Fityuev turned out to be a wretched outcast; the mir had taken his land away from him, because he a healthy and positively powerful man─could not work.

'I can't!' Fityuev would sob, with deep inward groans, and with a long-drawn sigh; 'I can't work! kill me! or I shall lay hands on myself!' And he would end by begging alms─a halfpenny for a crust of bread. And a face out of a canvas of Rinaldo Rinaldini!

The factory folk, too, were no good to Nezhdanov; all these fellows were either terribly lively or terribly gloomy and Nezhdanov could not get on at all with them. He wrote a long letter on this subject to his friend Silin, complaining bitterly of his own incapacity, and ascribing it to his wretched education and disgusting artistic temperament! He suddenly came to the conclusion that his vocation, in propaganda work, was with the written, not the spoken, living word; but the pamphlets he planned did not work out. Everything he tried to put on paper made on him the same impression of something false, far-fetched, artificial in tone and language, and twice─oh horror! he caught himself unconsciously wandering off into verse or into a sceptical, personal effusion. He positively brought himself─an extraordinary sign