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Ivan Turgenev — poem “The Skulls”

Russian Poetry

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Russian Literature – Russian Poetry – Children’s books – Ivan Turgenev  – Poems – Obsolete Russian Words and their meaning
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The Skulls

A sumptuous, luxuriously illuminated ball-room; a multitude of cavaliers and ladies.

All faces are animated, all speeches are brisk…. A rattling conversation is in progress about a well-known songstress. The people are lauding her as divine, immortal…. Oh, how finely she had executed her last trill that evening!

And suddenly—as though at the wave of a magic wand—from all the heads, from all the faces, a thin shell of skin flew off, and instantly there was revealed the whiteness of skulls, the naked gums and cheek-bones dimpled like bluish lead.

With horror did I watch those gums and cheek-bones moving and stirring,—those knobby, bony spheres turning this way and that, as they gleamed in the light of the lamps and candles, and smaller spheres—the spheres of the eyes bereft of sense—rolling in them.

I dared not touch my own face, I dared not look at myself in a mirror. But the skulls continued to turn this way and that, as before…. And with the same clatter as before, the brisk tongues, flashing like red rags from behind the grinning teeth, murmured on, how wonderfully, how incomparably the immortal … yes, the immortal songstress had executed her last trill!

April, 1878.

Pushkin's farewell to the sea. 1877 painted by Repin

Translated from the Russian by Isabel F. Hapgood


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The Sparrow > > >

Russian Literature – Russian Poetry – Children’s books – Ivan Turgenev  – Poems – Obsolete Russian Words and their meaning

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