Fifty-Two Stories

HISTORY OF A BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

ANDREI ANDREEVICH SIDOROV inherited four thousand roubles from his mother and decided to open a bookshop with this money. Such a shop was extremely necessary. The town was drowning in ignorance and prejudice; the old people went to the bathhouse, the officials played cards and guzzled vodka, the ladies gossiped, the young people lived without ideals, the girls spent their days dreaming of getting married and eating buckwheat kasha, husbands beat their wives, and pigs walked in the streets.

“Ideas! More ideas!” thought Andrei Andreevich. “Ideas!”

He rented a space for the shop, went to Moscow, and brought back many old and recent authors and many textbooks, and he put all these goods on the shelves. For the first three weeks, no buyers came. Andrei Andreevich sat behind the counter reading Mikhailovsky¹ and tried to think honestly. When it inadvertently came to his head, for example, that it might be nice right now to eat some bream with kasha, he immediately caught himself: “Ah, how banal!” Every morning a chilled wench in a kerchief and leather galoshes over bare feet rushed into the shop and said:

“Gimme two kopecks’ worth of vinegar!”

And Andrei Andreevich replied disdainfully:

“You’ve picked the wrong door, madam!”

When one of his friends came by, he would assume a significant and mysterious air, take from the furthest shelf the third volume of Pisarev,² blow the dust off it, and looking as if he had something else in his shop but was afraid to show it, would say:

“Yes, my dear fellow…This thing, I must tell you, is not…Yes…Here, in a word, my dear fellow, I must point out, is something, you understand, that you read and just spread your arms…Yes.”

“Watch out, brother, you may catch hell!”

After three weeks, the first customer came. He was a fat, gray-haired gentleman with side-whiskers, wearing a peaked cap with a red band, in all likelihood a landowner. He requested the second volume of the textbook Russian Literature.

“And do you have lead pencils?” he asked.

“I don’t carry them.”

“Too bad…A pity. Who wants to drive to the market for a trifle…”

“In fact, it’s too bad I don’t carry lead pencils,” Andrei Andreevich thought when the customer left. “Here in the provinces, you shouldn’t have a narrow specialization, you should sell everything related to education and contributing to it in one way or another.”

He wrote to Moscow, and before the month was out there was in his shop window a display of pens, pencils, notebooks, slates, and other school supplies. Boys and girls began coming to him occasionally, and there was even one day when he made a rouble and forty kopecks. Once the wench in leather galoshes came flying headlong to him; he had already opened his mouth to tell her disdainfully that she had picked the wrong door, but she shouted:

“Give me a kopeck’s worth of paper and a seven-kopeck stamp!”

After that Andrei Andreevich began to carry postage and revenue stamps, and promissory note forms along with them. Some eight months later, counting from the day he opened, a lady came to buy pens.

“And might you have school satchels?” she asked.

“Alas, ma’am, I don’t carry them!”

“Ah, what a pity! In that case show me what dolls you have, only of the cheaper sort.”

“I have no dolls, either, ma’am!” Andrei Andreevich said sorrowfully.

Without thinking twice, he wrote to Moscow, and soon satchels, dolls, drums, sabers, harmonicas, balls, and all sorts of toys appeared in his shop.

“That’s all nothing!” he said to his friends. “Just wait till I start selling training manuals and intelligence games! In my shop, you understand, the educational section will be grounded, as they say, in the finest achievements of science, in a word…”

He ordered dumbbells, croquet, backgammon, children’s billiards, gardening tools for children, and some two dozen very sophisticated games of reasoning. Then the inhabitants, walking past his shop, to their great delight saw two bicycles: one big, the other smaller. And the trade went famously. It went especially well before Christmas, when Andrei Andreevich put a notice in the window that he was selling Christmas tree ornaments.

“I’m going to slip some hygiene in for them, you understand,” he said to his friends, rubbing his hands. “Just wait till I get to Moscow! I’ll have such filters and scientific advancements of every sort, you’ll all lose your minds, in a word. Science, my dear fellow, cannot be ignored! No-o-o!”

Having made a lot of money, he went to Moscow and bought all sorts of merchandise for five thousand roubles, in cash and on credit. There were filters, and exquisite desk lamps, and guitars, and hygienic underwear for children, and pacifiers, and wallets, and zoological collections. Besides that he also bought five hundred roubles’ worth of exquisite china, and was glad to have bought it, because beautiful objects develop refined taste and soften morals. On returning home from Moscow, he started placing the new merchandise on the shelves and on stands. And it somehow happened that, when he climbed up to clear an upper shelf, there was some sort of tremor, and ten volumes of Mikhailovsky fell from the shelf one after another. One volume hit him on the head, the rest fell down right on the lamps and broke two glass spheres.

“Anyhow, that’s…heavy writing!” Andrei Andreevich murmured, scratching himself.

He gathered up all the books, tied them with string, and hid them under the counter. A couple of days later he was informed that his neighbor the grocer had been sentenced to a penal battalion for torturing his nephew, and that his shop was for rent. Andrei Andreevich was very happy about it and asked to rent the shop himself. Soon a doorway was broken through the wall, and the two shops, united into one, were chock-full of merchandise. Since the customers who came to the other half of the shop were in the habit of asking for tea, sugar, and kerosene, Andrei Andreevich, without thinking twice, introduced groceries as well.

Nowadays he is one of the most prominent shopkeepers in our town. He sells china, tobacco, tar, soap, pretzels, fabric, haberdashery and chandlery, guns, hides, and hams. He has rented a wine cellar at the market, and they say he is going to open a family bathhouse with private rooms. The books that used to stand on his shelves, including volume three of Pisarev, were sold long ago at one rouble five kopecks per thirty pounds.

At birthday parties or weddings, former friends, whom Andrei Andreevich now mockingly styles “Americans,” occasionally start talking to him about progress, literature, and other lofty matters.

“Have you read the latest issue of The Messenger of Europe?”³ they ask him.

“No, sirs, I haven’t…,” he replies, narrowing his eyes and playing with a heavy watch chain. “That doesn’t concern us. We’re taken up with more positive things.”

1892