On the Eve - Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich

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Résumé :
On one of the hottest days of the summer of 1853, in the shade of a tall lime-tree on the bank of the river Moskva, not far from Kuntsovo, two young men were lying on the grass. One, who looked about twenty-three, tall and swarthy, with a sharp and rather crooked nose, a high forehead, and a restrained smile on his wide mouth, was lying on his back and gazing meditatively into the distance, his small grey eyes half closed. The other was lying on his chest, his curly, fair head propped on his two hands; he, too, was looking away into the distance. He was three years older than his companion, but seemed much younger. His moustache was only just growing, and his chin was covered with a light curly down. There was something childishly pretty, some-thing attractively delicate, in the small features of his fresh round face, in his soft brown eyes, lovely pouting lips, and little white hands. Everything about him was suggestive of the happy light-heartedness of perfect health and youth-the carelessness, conceit, self-indulgence, and charm of youth. He used his eyes, and smiled and leaned his head as boys do who know that people look at them admiringly. He wore a loose white coat, made like a blouse, a blue kerchief wrapped his slender throat, and a battered straw hat had been flung on the grass beside him.

Biographie:
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist, translator, and proponent of Russian literature in the West, lived from 9 November 1818 to 3 September 1883. Russia's Oryol is where Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born. His father fought in the Patriotic War of 1812 as a colonel in the Russian cavalry. Turgenev concentrated on Classics, Russian literature, and philology while attending the University of Saint Petersburg from 1834 to 1837 after spending a year at the University of Moscow. Turgenev never wed, but he had many relationships with the family's serfs, one of which gave birth to his daughter Paulinette, who was not his biological child. Oxford conferred an honorary degree on Turgenev in 1879. Turgenev periodically traveled to England, and the University of Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate in civil law in 1879. Throughout his later years, Turgenev's health deteriorated. An aggressive malignant tumor (liposarcoma) was surgically removed from his suprapubic area in January 1883, but by that time the tumor had spread to his upper spinal cord, giving him excruciating suffering in the months before his death. In his home in Bougival, close to Paris, on September 3, 1883, Turgenev passed away from a spinal abscess, a side effect of metastatic liposarcoma. His bones were transported to Russia and interred at St. Petersburg's Volkovo Cemetery.