The Passage - P83 Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev

the way in which the old maps showed them in the time of Catherine.  There were little streams, too, with hollow banks and diminutive ponds with narrow dams, hamlets with squat little huts beneath blackened and often half collapsing roofs, and crooked threshing barns with wattled walls and gaping doorways opening on to abandoned threshing floors, and churches, some brick-built with the stucco peeling off in patches, others of wood with crosses awry and churchyards that had gone to wrack and ruin slowly Arkydy’s heart sank.  As though to complete the pattern the peasants whom they met on the way were all in rags and mounted on the sorriest little nags; willows with broken branches and bark hanging in strips stood like tattered beggars on the roadside; emaciated and shaggy crows, gaunt with hunger, were greedily tearing up the grass along the ditches.  They looked as if they had just been snatched from the murderous talons of some terrifying monster; and the pitiful fight of the sickly cattle in the setting of that lovely spring day conjured up like a white spectre the vision of an interminable comfortless winter of blizzards, frosts and snows…‘No,’ thought Arkady, ‘there is no prosperity here, no sign of contentment or hard work.  It just can’t go on like this: this must all be transformed…but how are we to do it, how should we begin?’ Thus Arkady.  But even as he reflected spring regained its sway.  All around lay a sea of golden green-everything, trees, bushes, grass, gently shone and stirred in sweeping waves under the soft warm breath of the wind; on every side larks poured out their never-ceasing trills. P83