But the vast background of nature need not be always before the eyes of an audience. In "The Hamlet of the Shtchigri District," for instance, where--through the railings of an embittered man against the petty boredom of provincial life, together with a characteristically Russian confession of his own sloth and mediocrity--we breathe the heated air of a big landowner's house, the window on nature is, so to say, shut down. So in "Lebedyan" the bustle and humours of a horse-fair in the streets of a small country town, and in "The Country House" the sordid manoeuvres of the stewards and clerks of the lazy landed proprietor, Madame Losnyakov, against their victims, the peasants on the estate, exclude the fresh atmosphere of forest and steppe. But even so we are conscious that the sky and earth encompass these people's meetings in market-place and inns, in posting-stations, peasants' huts and landowners' domains, and always a faint undertone murmurs to us that each generation is like a wave passing in the immensity of sea. Sometimes, as in "The District Doctor," a tragedy within four walls is shut in by a feeling of sudden night and the isolation of the wintry fields. Sometimes, as in "Biryuk," the outbreak of a despairing peasant is reflected in the fleeting storm-clouds and lashing rain of a storm in the forest. But the people's figures are always seen _in just relation to their surroundings, to their fellows and to nature_. By the relations of a man with his neighbours and their ideas, a man's character is focussed for us and his place in his environment determined. Thus in "Raspberry Spring" the old steward Tuman's complacent panegyrics on the lavish ways of his former master, a grand seigneur of Catherine's time, are a meaning accompaniment to the misery of Vlass the harassed serf. Vlass has just returned from his sad errand to Moscow (his son has died there penniless), where he has had his master's door shut in his face, and he has been ordered to return and pay the bailiff his arrears of rent. Whether under the ancient régime of Catherine, or of Nicholas I., Vlass is the "poor man" of Scripture whose face is ground by the rich. All the irony of poor Vlass's existence steals upon us while we hear the old steward's voice descanting on the dead count's sumptuous banquets, on his cooks and fiddlers and the low-born mistresses who brought him to ruin; while the humble peasant sits still and hears, too, of the "embroidered coats, wigs, canes, perfumes, _eau de cologne_, snuff-boxes, of the huge pictures ordered from Paris!" It is the cruelty, passive or active, innate in the web of human existence that murmurs here in the bass.