“Across the fields many a path is winding,” he sang, and we all felt entranced and thrilled. I must confess I have seldom heard such a voice: it was a little broken and had a sort of cracked ring; at first, indeed, there seemed to be an unhealthy note in it; but there was in it also genuine deep passion, and youthfulness and strength and sweetness, and a sort of charmingly careless, mournful grief. A warmhearted, truthful Russian soul rang and breathed in it and fairly clutched you by the heart, clutched straight at your Russian heartstrings. The song expanded and went flowing on. Yashka was evidently overcome by ecstasy: he was no longer diffident; he gave himself up entirely to his feeling of happiness; his voice no longer trembled—it quivered, but with the barely perceptible inner quivering of passion which pierces like an arrow into the hearer’s soul, and it grew continually in strength, firmness, and breadth. I remember once seeing in the evening, at low tide, a great white seagull on the flat sandy shore of the sea which was roaring away dully and menacingly in the distance: it was sitting motionless, its silky breast turned toward the scarlet radiance of sunset, only now and then spreading out its long wings toward the familiar sea, toward the low, blood-red sun; I remembered that bird as I listened to Yashka. He sang, completely oblivious of his rival and of all of us, but visibly borne up, like a strong swimmer by the waves, by our silent, passionate attention. He sang, and every note recalled something that was very near and dear to us all, something that was immensely vast, just as though the familiar steppe opened up before you, stretching away into boundless distance.

I cast another glance at Yashka and went out. I did not want to stay—I was afraid to spoil my impression. But the heat was still as unbearable as before. It seemed to hang over the earth in a thick, heavy layer; through the fine, almost black dust, little bright points of light seemed to whirl round and round in the dark blue sky. Everything was hushed; there was something hopeless, something oppressive about this deep silence of enervated nature. I made my way to a hayloft and lay down on the newly mown but already almost dried grass. For a long time I could not doze off; for a long time Yashka’s overpowering voice rang in my ears; but at last heat and fatigue claimed their due and I sank into a deep sleep. When I awoke, it was dark; the grass I had heaped all round me exuded a strong scent and felt a little damp to the touch; through the thin rafters of the half-open roof, pale stars twinkled faintly. I went out. The sunset glow had died away long ago and its last trace could be just distinguished as a pale shaft of light low on the horizon; but through the coolness of the night one could still feel the warmth in the air which had been so glowing-hot only a short while before, and the breast still yearned for a cool breeze. There was no wind, no cloud; the sky all round was clear and translucently dark, quietly shimmering with countless, hardly visible stars. Lights gleamed in the village; from the brightly lit pub nearby came a discordant and confused uproar through which I seemed to recognize Yashka’s voice. At times there were wild bursts of laughter.

In the pub, we felt singing as a mode of communication, elevating these rough men. The singing made some of them cry, gave them access to a register of emotion mostly denied them in their everyday lives. But singing, here, at the end of the story, is a way of getting some violence arranged, a form of trickery committed by one brother on another. So the story also becomes about that—about exalted things being brought low. The men were uplifted and fell; the town was once nice and is now a wreck; singing can be a transcendent form of communication or a way of getting someone home to take a beating. Singing (art) is persuasive but what it will be used to persuade us to do is an open question.

Now let’s go on and try to articulate the exact nature of the good feeling we get when we juxtapose “ravine” and “singing contest.”

One thing that comes to mind is the notion of a binary: there are two singers, and the town is cleft in two. This makes me ask, of the story: Any other binaries in there? Actually, the story is full of them: the doleful, sympathy-seeking rooks and crows vs. the relatively content, chirping, energetic sparrows; the town’s former pastoral glory (it had a common, a pond, a mansion) vs. its present state (the common is “scorched” and “dust-laden,” the pond “black and almost incandescent,” the mansion “grown over with nettles”); Yashka vs. the contractor; technique vs. emotion; Boy #1 vs. Boy #2; the opposition of the beautiful artistic moment Yashka produced vs. the ugly town in which he produced it; the comfortable gentleman who is our narrator vs. the lowly rustics he’s dropped in here to observe.

So, yes, I feel that the lines needed to get that ravine into the story were “worth it.” It’s a lesser story without the ravine. The ravine, we might say, “unlocks” all of the binary references that are, we now see, seeded within the story.

What does it mean, that Yashka has won? To answer, we try to distill the essential characteristics of the two performances. Broadly speaking: the contractor was technically wonderful but produced no feeling in his audience except amazement at his proficiency. Yashka, a little wobbly on technique, evoked undeniably deep feelings in his audience and caused a startling, not entirely rational memory to arise in the mind of the narrator. So, we feel the story to be saying something about technical proficiency vs. emotional power, and coming down in favor of the latter. It is saying that the highest aspiration of art is to move the audience and that if the audience is moved, technical deficiencies are immediately forgiven.

And this is where I always fall in love, again, with the story and forgive it all its faults. Here I’ve been resenting Turgenev’s technical bumbling—those piles of noses and brows and hairlines; the stop-and-start action; the digressions inside of digressions—and suddenly I’m moved: by Yashka’s performance, which is beautiful though not particularly technically accomplished, and by Turgenev’s performance, an analogous performance, also beautiful though technically rickety.

I’m moved by this clumsy work of art that seems to want to make the case that art may be clumsy if only it moves us.

Suddenly the horse under him tumbled into something and, sinking into a snowdrift, began to plunge and fell on his side. Vasili Andreevich jumped off, and in so doing dragged to one side the breechband on which his foot was resting, and twisted round the pad to which he held as he dismounted. As soon as he had jumped off, the horse struggled to his feet, plunged forward, gave one leap and another, neighed again, and dragging the drugget and the breechband after him, disappeared, leaving Vasili Andreevich alone on the snowdrift.

The latter pressed on after the horse, but the snow lay so deep and his coats were so heavy that, sinking above his knees at each step, he stopped breathless after taking not more than twenty steps. “The copse, the oxen, the leasehold, the shop, the tavern, the house with the iron-roofed barn, and my heir,” thought he. “How can I leave all that? What does this mean? It cannot be!” These thoughts flashed through his mind. Then he thought of the wormwood tossed by the wind, which he had twice ridden past, and he was seized with such terror that he did not believe in the reality of what was happening to him. “Can this be a dream?” he thought, and tried to wake up but could not. It was real snow that lashed his face and covered him and chilled his right hand from which he had lost the glove, and this was a real desert in which he was now left alone like that wormwood, awaiting an inevitable, speedy, and meaningless death.

“Always be escalating,” then, can be understood as “Be alert, always, to the possibilities you have created for variation.” If an element recurs, the second appearance is an opportunity for variation and, potentially, escalation. Let’s say that, in a film, we show a place setting (plate, spoon, fork, knife), and then the camera tracks across three other, identical place settings. That’s static. But make the right adjustments to each of the four plate/spoon/fork/knife arrangements, show these in sequence, and that more variation-blessed sequence will be felt to have escalation in it and, therefore, meaning. For example: let’s say that, as we track over the plates in sequence, we see: (1) correct/full arrangement (plate/spoon/fork/knife), (2) spoon missing, (3) spoon and fork missing, (4) all the silverware missing (only the plate remains); this will be felt to mean, let’s say, “evacuation” or “diminishment.”

Here, the pattern of variation isn’t too neat or directly metaphorical. (The clothes don’t, for example, go from unfrozen to frozen, as Nikita and Vasili soon will, but are frozen the first time we see them.) We barely notice the variations at speed but, on closer examination, feel them to be perfectly pitched. Rather than neatly spitting out some predetermined, reductive meaning, they produce a feeling of mystery, the metaphorical world lightly infiltrating the physical.

Now, the Vasili we’ve come to know is a blusterer and a bully. To be happy, he has to be in control, correct, victorious, obeyed. We imagine him at home, a petty tyrant, not loved much, not feared much either; avoided when possible, probably; laughed at behind his back for his incompetence and ego.

He’s already declared that they’re not staying. And what kind of master reverses himself? The weak kind, that’s who, like this old guy—the kind whose household is falling apart, the crying kind, the kind Vasili has been trying all his life not to be but secretly knows he is.

Had they stopped at another house, a house where, say, a young and still-powerful master was making the case for the considerate treatment of one’s servants, Vasili, wishing to emulate that powerful master, might have been willing to reverse himself, to show how considerate he was of Nikita, his servant.

But instead he meets this old, weak, defeated master and feels an aversion, and that aversion combines with the fact that the horse has already been harnessed (the dictatorship of politeness) to drive him back out into the night, and to his death.

In a sense, Vasili is killed by his fealty to the idea that, to preserve and broadcast his power, a “master” must be firm, strong, and unpersuadable.

Death is coming for Vasili, and it’s nothing personal. This is just what Death does. But now, Vasili, of the charmed life, finds himself in its path. Although he knows and accepts that everything must, in time, pass from the earth, he finds himself having trouble accepting that he’s included in that “everything.” In his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy writes, of the terminally ill Ivan: “The syllogism…‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself….He was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa….What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of?”

The wormwood is a brilliant and crazy “symbol” that represents several things at once. It’s a marker of futility (Vasili would like the wormwood to be a village, but it isn’t; he’d like to not keep circling back to it, but he does). It’s a physical reminder of the chillingly egalitarian nature of death and the impossibility of avoiding it (no matter where he goes, there it is, not hostile, just indifferent). He identifies with it, sees himself and the wormwood as being in similar straits (like him, it is being “tormented by the pitiless wind”; like it, he has been “left alone” and is “awaiting an inevitable, speedy, and meaningless death”).

But, of course, it’s also real wormwood: swaying in the moonlight, the only dark patch in a world of white, being looked at by…well, me. Whenever I read this section I feel the cold and the dead-end panic (there is literally nowhere I can go where I won’t freeze to death) and see the black-blue Russian sky overhead and hear the crunching of my pathetic, familiar boots on the snow, boots soon to be full of (horrors!) my frozen, dead feet.

Once, I was teaching a flawed but considerable Gogol story called “Nevsky Prospect” and a student said she didn’t like it because it was sexist. I responded with a rare bit of teacherly wisdom by asking, “Where?” And she showed us exactly where, by offering two examples of places where a character gets insulted. When a man was insulted, Gogol went into the character’s head and we got to hear his response. When a woman was insulted, the third-person narrator stepped in and made a joke at her expense.

Then I asked the class to imagine the story if Gogol had kept things fair, by allowing the woman her own internal monologue. There followed a bit of silence and then a collective sigh/smile, as we all, at once, saw the better story it could have been: just as dark and strange, but funnier and more honest.

So, yes, the story was sexist, but another way of saying this was that it was a story with a technical flaw. That flaw was (or would have been, had Gogol not been dead) correctable. The sexism my student identified was definitely there, and it was manifesting in a particular way in the text, in the form of “inequitable narration.”