I tried afterward to buy the gun he had spoken of from his legatees
not in the quality of a central-fire gun, but as
Turgenieff's gun; but I did not succeed.
That is all that I can remember about this delightful,
naively cordial man, with the childlike eyes and the childlike
laugh, and in the picture my mind preserves of him the memory of
his grandeur melts into the charm of his good nature and
simplicity.
In 1883 my father received from Ivan
Sergeyevitch his last farewell letter, written in pencil on
his death-bed, and I remember with what emotion he read it.
And when the news of his death came, my father would talk of
nothing else for several days, and inquired everywhere for details
of his illness and last days.
Apropos of this letter of Turgenieff's, I should like
to say that my father was sincerely annoyed, when he heard applied
to himself the epithet "great writer of the land of Russia," which
was taken from this letter.
He always hated cliches, and he regarded this
one as quite absurd.
"Why not 'writer of the land'? I never heard before that a
man could be the writer of a land. People get attached to some
nonsensical expression, and go on repeating it in season and out of
season."
I have given extracts above from Turgenieff's letters,
which show the invariable consistency with which he lauded my
father's literary talents.
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