modest landowner Tatyana whom everyone loves because she is so generous. In spite of being illiterate she is generous to everyone and does not care for typical dealings that landowners spend their time on and does not care for other women landowners in her area. In the story her nephew Andryusha (an orphan) comes to live with her and loves to draw. He eventually gains the interest of Pyotr Benevolensky, a local collegiate counsellor who is a minor acquaintance of Tatyana, who then takes him to St. Petersburg to be trained in art. When he returns, after asking his aunt for money through the mail several times, she finds he has become Benevolensky and is corrupted. He is fat and annoying and spends his time poorly singing words to songs written by Glinka. Her friends stop visiting her because he is so annoying. Death In this story the narrator opens with a hunting story concerning his neighbor. They find the trees in the area dying with many fallen onto the ground because of a terrible frost (this is an actual event from Russia in 1840). After this he and his friend come upon a peasant who they are told has been smashed by a tree and they watch him die. This reminds the narrator of several stories he remembers about dying and he uses them to explain how the Russian character presents itself when dying. Each character continues as if performing a ritual, not lamenting or even caring. One old woman, with her final breath, reaches for a ruble under her pillow to pay the priest who says her last rites. Here Turgenev appears to be commenting on the isolation of human personality in the face of nature. Singers The narrator comes across a “terrible village” and goes to a tavern set at the end of a ravine. In the tavern he finds that some locals are having a singing contest. The one, Yakov, has the gift of technical prowess. The other, Yasha, has natural talent. Yakov goes first and the group believes he's won due to the skill he displays but when Yasha sings, he sings beautifully with the “collective voice of the Russian identity,” leading everyone to cry with no discussion of his skill afterward. Yakov stammers that he won and they are about to drink, but the narrator is disturbed by this since he found the scene