Mumu Essay

1862 Words8 Pages
“Love” in Mumu “Love” is one of the most important themes in the story of Mumu, written by Ivan Turgenev. By reading the story, I learned that there are many ways of “love”, which I thought was very interesting. First of all, what does “love” mean? In the dictionary, it says “it’s an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment.” Usually when you love someone or something, you feel that you want to cherish them forever. We take good care of them, be kind and nice, and try to do what we can do for them. It is sometimes even very difficult not to think about them when one has a strong feeling of love towards them. Throughout the story, the characters express their feelings of love in various ways, including one we could hardly imagine. I would like to pick up three examples from the main character of the story, Gerasim, to explain my idea; the love of Gerasim towards Tatyana, Mumu, and his surroundings including the other servants and the nature. Gerasim, one of the main characters of the story, is a pure-hearted man who can love someone deeply although he is deaf and dumb from birth. In the first part of the story, there are some explanations of him saying that he was isolated from other servants. After a short while, he fell in love with a woman named Tatyana, who was employed as a laundress. However, in contrast to Gerasim’s love towards her, Tatyana only felt scared of his heavy moves. When the house lady decided to marry her to Kapiton, a shoemaker, everyone, especially Kapiton himself, became very afraid because they thought Gerasim would kill him for taking away Tatyana. To avoid that, they taught Tatyana to act as a drunk to make weaken Gerasim‘s love. It turned out just as they wished; Gerasim got mad and thrust her straight at Kapiton. Kapiton and Tatyana eventually married, but Gerasim did nothing. Everyone thought he now has no feeling
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