Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VII).djvu/159

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 * 'A long while I had not been in my own land.
 * But I found in it no change to notice—
 * Everywhere the same deathlike, senseless stagnation,
 * Houses without roofs, walls tumbling down,
 * And the same filth and stench and poverty and boredom!
 * And the same slavish glance, now insolent, now abject!
 * Our people were made free; and the free arm
 * Hangs as before like a whip unused.
 * All, all is as before. And in one thing alone
 * Europe, Asia, the whole world we have outstripped!
 * No! never yet have my dear countrymen
 * Sunk into a sleep so terrible!


 * 'Everything is asleep; everywhere, in village and in town,
 * In cart, in sledge, by day, by night, sitting and standing
 * The merchant, the official sleeps; the sentinel at his post
 * Stands asleep in the cold of the snow and in the burning heat!
 * And the prisoner sleeps; and the judge snores;
 * Dead asleep are the peasants; asleep, they reap and plough;
 * They thresh asleep; the father sleeps, the mother and children
 * All are asleep! He that flogs is asleep, and he too that is flogged!
 * Only the Tsar's gin-shop never closes an eye;
 * And grasping tight her pot of gin,
 * Her brow on the Pole and her heels on the Caucasus,
 * Lies in interminable sleep our country, holy Russia!