Arina Vlassyevna Bazarov Character Analysis

Arina Vlassyevna was a true Russian gentlewoman of the old school; she ought to have lived a couple of centuries earlier, in the days of Muscovy. Very devout and emotional, she believed in fortune-telling, charms, dreams and omens of every conceivable kind; she believed in half-crazy visionaries, in house-spirits, in wood-sprites, in unlucky encounters, in the evil eye, in folk remedies, in salt prepared on Maundy Thursday, and the imminent end of the world; […] Arina Vlassyevna was very kindhearted, and in her way far from stupid. She knew that the world is divided into the gentry who were there to give orders and the common people whose duty it was to serve—and so she felt no repugnance against servile behaviour and obsequiousness; but she was always gentle and considerate with subordinates, never let a single beggar go away empty-handed, and though she gossiped at times she never criticized anyone […] Nowadays such women as she have ceased to exist. Heaven only knows whether this should be a matter for rejoicing!

“I’m thinking what a happy life my parents lead! At the age of sixty my father can still find plenty to do, talks about ‘palliative measures,’ treats patients, plays the bountiful lord of the manor with the peasants - has a gay time of it in fact; and my mother’s happy too: her days are so chockful of all sorts of occupations, sighs and groans, that she doesn’t know where she is; while […] here I lie under a haystack. . . . The tiny bit of space I occupy is so minute in comparison with the rest of the universe, […] And yet here, in this atom which is myself, in this mathematical point, blood circulates, the brain operates and aspires to something too . . . What a monstrous business! What futility!”

“I feel particularly sorry for your mother.”

“Why? Has she won your heart with her strawberries and blackcurrants?”

Arkady looked down at his feet. “You don’t understand your mother, Yevgeny. She’s not only a fine woman, she’s very clever really. This morning she talked to me for half an hour, and everything she said was so to the point and interesting.”

“I suppose she was expatiating upon me all the time?’

“We didn’t talk only about you.”

“Maybe as a detached observer you can see more clearly than I do. If a woman can keep up a conversation for half an hour, it’s already a good sign. But I’m going all the same.”

“He has gone, left us!” he faltered. “Gone, because he found it dull here with us. I’m a lonely man now, lonely as this finger,” he repeated again and again, and each time he thrust out his hand with his forefinger pointing away from the rest. Then Arina Vlassyevna came to his side and pressing her grey head to his grey head she said: “It can’t be helped, Vasya. A son is an independent person. He’s like a falcon that comes when he wills and flies off when he lists; but you and I are like the funguses growing in a hollow tree: here we sit side by side, not budging an inch. It is only I who will stay with you always, faithful for ever, just as you will stay with me.”

Supporting each other, they walk with heavy steps; they go up to the iron railing, fall on their knees and weep long and bitterly, and long and yearningly they gaze at the silent stone beneath which their son is lying; exchanging a brief word, they brush the dust from the stone, set a branch of a fir-tree right, and then resume their prayers, unable to tear themselves away from the place where they feel nearer to their son, to their memories of him.... But are those prayers of theirs, those tears, all fruitless? Is their love, their hallowed selfless love, not omnipotent? Oh yes! However passionate, sinful and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep at us serenely with their innocent eyes; they speak to us not only of eternal peace, of the vast repose of ‘indifferent’ nature: they tell us, too, of everlasting reconciliation and of life which has no end.

Arina Vlassyevna was a true Russian gentlewoman of the old school; she ought to have lived a couple of centuries earlier, in the days of Muscovy. Very devout and emotional, she believed in fortune-telling, charms, dreams and omens of every conceivable kind; she believed in half-crazy visionaries, in house-spirits, in wood-sprites, in unlucky encounters, in the evil eye, in folk remedies, in salt prepared on Maundy Thursday, and the imminent end of the world; […] Arina Vlassyevna was very kindhearted, and in her way far from stupid. She knew that the world is divided into the gentry who were there to give orders and the common people whose duty it was to serve—and so she felt no repugnance against servile behaviour and obsequiousness; but she was always gentle and considerate with subordinates, never let a single beggar go away empty-handed, and though she gossiped at times she never criticized anyone […] Nowadays such women as she have ceased to exist. Heaven only knows whether this should be a matter for rejoicing!

“I’m thinking what a happy life my parents lead! At the age of sixty my father can still find plenty to do, talks about ‘palliative measures,’ treats patients, plays the bountiful lord of the manor with the peasants - has a gay time of it in fact; and my mother’s happy too: her days are so chockful of all sorts of occupations, sighs and groans, that she doesn’t know where she is; while […] here I lie under a haystack. . . . The tiny bit of space I occupy is so minute in comparison with the rest of the universe, […] And yet here, in this atom which is myself, in this mathematical point, blood circulates, the brain operates and aspires to something too . . . What a monstrous business! What futility!”

“I feel particularly sorry for your mother.”

“Why? Has she won your heart with her strawberries and blackcurrants?”

Arkady looked down at his feet. “You don’t understand your mother, Yevgeny. She’s not only a fine woman, she’s very clever really. This morning she talked to me for half an hour, and everything she said was so to the point and interesting.”

“I suppose she was expatiating upon me all the time?’

“We didn’t talk only about you.”

“Maybe as a detached observer you can see more clearly than I do. If a woman can keep up a conversation for half an hour, it’s already a good sign. But I’m going all the same.”

“He has gone, left us!” he faltered. “Gone, because he found it dull here with us. I’m a lonely man now, lonely as this finger,” he repeated again and again, and each time he thrust out his hand with his forefinger pointing away from the rest. Then Arina Vlassyevna came to his side and pressing her grey head to his grey head she said: “It can’t be helped, Vasya. A son is an independent person. He’s like a falcon that comes when he wills and flies off when he lists; but you and I are like the funguses growing in a hollow tree: here we sit side by side, not budging an inch. It is only I who will stay with you always, faithful for ever, just as you will stay with me.”

Supporting each other, they walk with heavy steps; they go up to the iron railing, fall on their knees and weep long and bitterly, and long and yearningly they gaze at the silent stone beneath which their son is lying; exchanging a brief word, they brush the dust from the stone, set a branch of a fir-tree right, and then resume their prayers, unable to tear themselves away from the place where they feel nearer to their son, to their memories of him.... But are those prayers of theirs, those tears, all fruitless? Is their love, their hallowed selfless love, not omnipotent? Oh yes! However passionate, sinful and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep at us serenely with their innocent eyes; they speak to us not only of eternal peace, of the vast repose of ‘indifferent’ nature: they tell us, too, of everlasting reconciliation and of life which has no end.