Analysis of Cabbage Soup

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev 1818 (Oryol, Oryol Governorate) – 1883 ( Bougival, Seine-et-Oise)



A peasant woman, a widow, had an only son, a young man of twenty, the best workman in the village, and he died.

The lady who was the owner of the village, hearing of the woman's trouble, went to visit her on the very day of the burial.

She found her at home.

Standing in the middle of her hut, before the table, she was, without haste, with a regular movement of the right arm (the left hung listless at her side), scooping up weak cabbage soup from the bottom of a blackened pot, and swallowing it spoonful by spoonful.

The woman's face was sunken and dark; her eyes were red and swollen ... but she held herself as rigid and upright as in church.

'Heavens!' thought the lady, 'she can eat at such a moment ... what coarse feelings they have really, all of them!'

And at that point the lady recollected that when, a few years before, she had lost her little daughter, nine months old, she had refused, in her grief, a lovely country villa near Petersburg, and had spent the whole summer in town! Meanwhile the woman went on swallowing cabbage soup.

The lady could not contain herself, at last. 'Tatiana!' she said ...
'Really! I'm surprised! Is it possible you didn't care for your son? How is it you've not lost your appetite? How can you eat that soup!'

'My Vasia's dead,' said the woman quietly, and tears of anguish ran once more down her hollow cheeks. 'It's the end of me too, of course; it's tearing the heart out of me alive. But the soup's not to be wasted; there's salt in it.'

The lady only shrugged her shoulders and went away. Salt did not cost her much.


Scheme X X X X X X A XA X X
Poetic Form
Metre 010100101110101111001100010011 01011010101010101010111001010110100 11011 10001010101010110111010010101101110101101110110101010101001111 010111001010101011101110001101 1010101111101011101110111 0111010010110110111101010111110100101010101100011011001101011100101 010110101111011 10101111001101111111111110111111 11110101000111011110101101111111100111101101111101101 0101010100101111101
Characters 1,599
Words 309
Sentences 26
Stanzas 10
Stanza Lengths 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1
Lines Amount 11
Letters per line (avg) 108
Words per line (avg) 27
Letters per stanza (avg) 119
Words per stanza (avg) 29
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Submitted on August 03, 2020

Modified on April 20, 2023

1:33 min read
63

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (English: ; Russian: Иван Сергеевич Тургенев, tr. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, IPA: [ɪˈvan sʲɪrˈɡʲeɪvʲɪtɕ tʊrˈɡʲenʲɪf]; November 9 [O. S. October 28] 1818 – September 3, 1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator and popularizer of Russian literature in the West. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), was a milestone of Russian realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction.  more…

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