“But he possessed certain innate talents which Khor himself was willing to recognize; he could charm away bleeding, terror and rages, and he could cure worms; bee’s obeyed him because of his light touch. Kalinych was closer to nature whereas Khor was closer to people and society; Kalinych never liked thinking things out for himself and believed everything blindly, whereas Khor had reached a high pitch of irony in his attitude to life. He had seen much, knew much and i learned a lot from him.” From Ivan Turgenev’s ‘Khor and Kalinych’, his first short story. Turgenev’s short portraits of Russia’s rural poor are hypnotizing. Photo is of a high area on the old road from Hakone to Tokyo taken on December 26th 2009.