Dream Tales and Prose Poems

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Title: Dream Tales and Prose Poems
Author: Ivan Turgenev
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DREAM
TALES AND PROSE POEMS ***
Produced by William Flis, Keren Vergon, and Distributed Proofreaders
DREAM TALES AND PROSE POEMS
BY
IVAN TURGENEV
Translated from the Russian by CONSTANCE GARNETT
CONTENTS
CLARA MILITCH
PHANTOMS
THE SONG OF TRIUMPHANT LOVE
THE DREAM
POEMS IN PROSE
CLARA MILITCH
I
In the spring of 1878 there was living in Moscow, in a small wooden
house in Shabolovka, a young man of five-and-twenty, called Yakov
Aratov. With him lived his father's sister, an elderly maiden lady, over
fifty, Platonida Ivanovna. She took charge of his house, and looked
after his household expenditure, a task for which Aratov was utterly
unfit. Other relations he had none. A few years previously, his father, a
provincial gentleman of small property, had moved to Moscow together
with him and Platonida Ivanovna, whom he always, however, called
Platosha; her nephew, too, used the same name. On leaving the
country-place where they had always lived up till then, the elder Aratov
settled in the old capital, with the object of putting his son to the

university, for which he had himself prepared him; he bought for a
trifle a little house in one of the outlying streets, and established
himself in it, with all his books and scientific odds and ends. And of
books and odds and ends he had many--for he was a man of some
considerable learning ... 'an out-and-out eccentric,' as his neighbours
said of him. He positively passed among them for a sorcerer; he had
even been given the title of an 'insectivist.' He studied chemistry,
mineralogy, entomology, botany, and medicine; he doctored patients
gratis with herbs and metallic powders of his own invention, after the
method of Paracelsus. These same powders were the means of his
bringing to the grave his pretty, young, too delicate wife, whom he
passionately loved, and by whom he had an only son. With the same
powders he fairly ruined his son's health too, in the hope and intention
of strengthening it, as he detected anæmia and a tendency to
consumption in his constitution inherited from his mother. The name of
'sorcerer' had been given him partly because he regarded himself as a
descendant--not in the direct line, of course--of the great Bruce, in
honour of whom he had called his son Yakov, the Russian form of
James.
He was what is called a most good-natured man, but of melancholy
temperament, pottering, and timid, with a bent for everything
mysterious and occult.... A half-whispered ah! was his habitual
exclamation; he even died with this exclamation on his lips, two years
after his removal to Moscow.
His son, Yakov, was in appearance unlike his father, who had been
plain, clumsy, and awkward; he took more after his mother. He had the
same delicate pretty features, the same soft ash-coloured hair, the same
little aquiline nose, the same pouting childish lips, and great
greenish-grey languishing eyes, with soft eyelashes. But in character he
was like his father; and the face, so unlike the father's face, wore the
father's expression; and he had the triangular-shaped hands and hollow
chest of the old Aratov, who ought, however, hardly to be called old,
since he never reached his fiftieth year. Before his death, Yakov had
already entered the university in the faculty of physics and mathematics;
he did not, however, complete his course; not through laziness, but

because, according to his notions, you could learn no more in the
university than you could studying alone at home; and he did not go in
for a diploma because he