The Collected tales of Nikolai Gogol

Here she fixed her pale eyes on the window outside which Master Danilo was sitting and stopped motionless…

"Where are you looking? Whom do you see there?" cried the sorcerer.

The airy Katerina trembled. But Master Danilo was long since on the ground and, together with his trusty Stetsko, was making his way toward his hills. "Terrible, terrible!" he repeated to himself, feeling some timorousness in his Cossack heart, and soon he was walking through his courtyard, where the Cossacks were still fast asleep, except for the one who sat on guard and smoked his pipe. The sky was all strewn with stars.

V

"How well you did to awaken me!" said Katerina, wiping her eyes with the embroidered sleeve of her nightdress and looking her husband up and down as he stood before her. "Such a terrible dream I had! How I gasped for breath! Ohh!… I thought I was dying…"

"What dream-did it go like this?" And Burulbash began to tell his wife everything he had seen.

"How did you find it out, my husband?" asked Katerina, amazed. "But no, much of what you tell is unknown to me. No, I did not dream that father had killed my mother, and I saw nothing of the dead men. No, Danilo, you're not telling it right. Ah, how terrible my father is!"

"No wonder there's much you didn't see. You don't know the tenth part of what your soul knows. Do you know that your father is an antichrist? 8 Last year, when I was going together with the Polacks against the Crimeans (I still joined with that faithless people then), the superior of the Bratsky Monastery-he's a holy man, wife-told me that an antichrist has the power to summon the soul out of any person; and the soul goes about freely when the person falls asleep, and it flies with the archangels around God's mansion. From the first your father's face did not appeal to me. If I had known you had such a father, I would not have married you; I would have left you and not taken sin upon my soul by relating myself to the race of an antichrist."

"Danilo!" Katerina said, covering her face with her hands and sobbing, "am I guilty of anything before you? Have I betrayed you, my beloved husband? How have I brought your wrath upon me? Haven't I served you faithfully? Did I ever say anything against it when you came home drunk from your young men's feasting? Didn't I give birth to a dark-browed son for you?…"

"Don't weep, Katerina, I know you now and will not abandon you for anything. All the sins lie upon your father."

"No, don't call him my father! He's no father to me. God is my witness, I renounce him, I renounce my father! He's an antichrist, an apostate! If he were to perish, to drown-I would not reach out to save him. If he were to grow parched from some secret herb, I would not give him water to drink. You are my father!"

VI

In a deep cellar at Master Danilo's, locked with three locks, the sorcerer sits bound in iron chains; away over the Dnieper, his demonic castle is burning, and waves, red as blood, splash and surge around the ancient walls. It is not for sorcery, not for deeds of apostasy, that the sorcerer sits in the deep cellar. God will be the judge of that. He sits there for secret treachery, for conspiring with the enemies of the Russian Orthodox land to sell the Ukrainian people to the Catholics and burn Christian churches. Grim is the sorcerer: a thought dark as night is in his head. He has only one day left to live, and tomorrow he will bid the world farewell. Tomorrow execution awaits him. And what awaits him is no easy execution: it would be more merciful to boil him alive in a cauldron, or flay him of his sinful hide. Grim is the sorcerer, and he hangs his head. Perhaps he is repentant before the hour of his death; only his sins are not such as God will forgive. Above him is a narrow window with iron bars for a sash. Clanking his chains, he gets himself to the window to see whether his daughter is passing by. She is meek as a dove, she does not remember evil, she might take pity on her father… But no one is there. Below runs a road; no one moves along it. Further down, the Dnieper carouses; he has no care for anyone: he storms, and it is gloomy for the prisoner to hear his monotonous noise.

Now someone appears on the road-it is a Cossack! The prisoner sighs deeply. Again all is deserted. Now someone comes down in the distance… A green cloak billows… a golden headdress blazes… It is she! He leans still closer to the window. Now she is drawing near…

"Katerina! daughter! take pity on me, have mercy!…"

She is mute, she does not want to listen, she does not even turn her eyes toward the prison, she has already passed by, already disap- peared. The whole world is deserted. Gloomy is the noise of the Dnieper. Melancholy settles into the heart. But does the sorcerer know this melancholy?

Day draws toward evening. The sun has already set. It is already gone. It is already evening: cool; somewhere an ox is lowing; sounds come wafting from somewhere-it must be people returning from work and being merry; a boat flashes on the Dnieper… who cares about the prisoner! A silver crescent gleams in the sky. Now someone walks down the road from the opposite direction. It is hard to make anything out in the darkness. Katerina is coming back.

"Daughter, for Christ's sake! even fierce wolf cubs will not tear their own mother! Daughter, at least glance at your criminal father!" She does not listen and walks on. "Daughter, for the sake of your unfortunate mother!…" She stops. "Come and receive my last word!"

"Why do you cry out to me, apostate? Do not call me daughter! There is no relation between us. What do you want from me for the sake of my unfortunate mother?"

"Katerina! My end is near: I know your husband wants to tie me to a mare's tale and send me across the fields, or maybe he'll invent a still more terrible execution…"

"Is there any punishment in the world that matches your sins? Wait for it; no one is going to intercede for you."

"Katerina! It is not execution that frightens me but the torments in the other world… You are innocent, Katerina, your soul will fly around God in paradise; but the soul of your apostate father will burn in eternal fire, and that fire will never go out; it will flare up more and more; no drop of dew falls, no wind breathes…"

"It is not in my power to lighten that punishment," said Katerina, turning away.

"Katerina! Stay for one word more: you can save my soul. You don't know yet how good and merciful God is. Have you heard about the Apostle Paul, what a sinful man he was? But then he repented and became a saint."

"What can I do to save your soul?" said Katerina. "Is it for me, a weak woman, to think about it?"

"If I manage to get out of here, I will abandon everything. I will repent: I will go to the caves, put a harsh hair shirt on my body, pray to God day and night. Not just non-lenten fare, but even fish will not pass my lips! I will spread out no clothes when I go to bed! And I will keep praying and praying! And if divine mercy does not lift from me at least a hundredth part of my sins, I will bury myself up to the neck in the ground, or immure myself in a stone wall; I will take neither food nor drink, and I will die; and I will give all my goods to the monks, so that they can serve panikhidas 9 for me for forty days and forty nights."

Katerina fell to thinking.

"Even if I were to open the door, I cannot remove your chains."

"I fear no chains," he said. "You say they have chained my arms and legs? No, I blew smoke in their eyes and held out dry wood to them instead of my arm. Here I am, look, there's not a chain on me now!" he said, stepping into the middle. "I would not fear these walls either and would pass through them, but your husband himself does not know what sort of walls they are. A holy monk built them, and no unclean power can take a prisoner out of here without unlocking it with the same key the saint used to lock his cell. I'll dig the same sort of cell for myself, when I, an unheard-of sinner, am released from here."

"Listen, I'll let you out. But what if you deceive me," said Katerina, stopping outside the door, "and instead of repenting, again become the devil's brother?"

"No, Katerina, I have not long to live now. My end is near, even without execution. Do you think I would give myself up to eternal torment?"

The locks clanged.

"Farewell! May the merciful God preserve you, my child!" said the sorcerer, kissing her.

"Do not touch me, unheard-of sinner, go quickly!…" said Katerina. But he was no longer there.

"I let him out!" she said, frightened and gazing wildly at the walls. "What will I tell my husband now? I'm lost. All that's left for me is to bury myself alive in the grave!" And, sobbing, she nearly fell onto the stump where the prisoner had been sitting. "Yet I saved a soul," she said softly. "I did a deed pleasing to God. But my husband… It's the first time I've deceived him. Oh, how terrible, how hard it will be to tell him a lie. Someone's coming! It's him! my husband!" she cried desperately and fell to the ground, unconscious.

VII

"It's me, my daughter! It's me, my dear heart!" Katerina heard, coming to her senses, and saw before her the old serving woman. The woman, bending down, seemed to whisper something, stretching her withered hand over her and sprinkling her with cold water.

"Where am I?" Katerina said, getting up and looking around. "Before me the Dnieper rushes, behind me the hills… where have you brought me to, woman?"

"Not brought you to, but brought you from, carried you out in my arms from the stuffy cellar. I locked it with the key, so that you don't get in trouble with Master Danilo."

"Where is the key?" said Katerina, glancing at her belt. "I don't see it."

"Your husband untied it so as to go and look at the sorcerer, my child."

"To go and look?… Woman, I'm lost!" cried Katerina.

"May God preserve us from that, my child! Only keep silent, my little mistress, and no one will find out anything!"

"He's escaped, the cursed antichrist! Did you hear, Katerina? He's escaped!" said Master Danilo, coming up to his wife. His eyes flashed fire; his saber, clanking, shook at his side.

His wife went dead.

"Did someone let him out, my beloved husband?" she said, trembling.

"Someone did, you're right; but that someone was the devil. Look, there's a log bound in the irons instead of him. God has made it so that the devil doesn't fear Cossack hands! If any one of my Cossacks had so much as the thought in his head, and I learned of it… I wouldn't be able to find a punishment fit for him!"

"And if it was me?…" Katerina said involuntarily and stopped, frightened.

"If it was you who thought of it, then you wouldn't be my wife. I'd sew you up in a sack and drown you in the very middle of the Dnieper!…"

Katerina's breath was taken away, and she fancied her hair was separating from her head.

VIII On the border road, in a tavern, Polacks have been gathering and feasting for two days. There are not a few of the scum. They must have come for some raid: some of them have muskets; spurs jingle, sabers rattle. The nobles make merry and boast, talking about their unheard-of deeds, mocking Orthodoxy, calling the Ukrainian people their slaves, twisting their mustaches imposingly and imposingly sprawling on the benches with their heads thrown back. They have a ksiadz with them. Only, the ksiadz is of the same ilk and does not even look like a Christian priest: he drinks and carouses with them and says shameful things with his infidel tongue. The servants do not yield to them in anything: the sleeves of their tattered jackets shoved back, they strut about as if they are something special. They play cards and slap each other on the nose with the cards. They have got other men's wives to come with them. Shouting, fighting!… The nobles are rowdy, they pull tricks: grab the Jew by his beard, paint a cross on his infidel brow; shoot blanks at their wenches and dance the Cracovienne with their infidel priest. Never has there been such temptation in the Russian land, not even from the Tartars. It must be that God destined her to suffer this disgrace for her sins! Amidst the general bedlam you can hear them talking about Master Danilo's farmstead beyond the Dnieper, about his beautiful wife… Not for anything good has this band gathered!

IX

Master Danilo is sitting at the table in his room, leaning on his elbow and thinking. Mistress Katerina is sitting on the stove seat, singing a song.

"I feel somehow sad, my wife!" said Master Danilo. "There's an ache in my head and an ache in my heart. Something is weighing me down. It must be that my death is straying somewhere nearby."

"Oh, my beloved husband!" thought Katerina, "lean your head on me! Why are you nursing such black thoughts in yourself?" But she did not dare to say it. Bitter it was for her, the guilty one, to accept her husband's caresses.

"Listen, my wife!" said Danilo, "do not abandon our son when I am no more. You'll get no happiness from God if you abandon him, either in this world or in the next. Hard will it be for my bones to rot in the damp earth; but harder still will it be for my soul."

"What are you saying, my husband! Did you not mock us weak women? And now you talk like a weak woman yourself. You must live for a long time yet."

"No, Katerina, my soul senses that death is near. It's growing sad in the world. Evil times are coming. Ah, I remember, I remember the years; they certainly will not come back! He was still alive, the honor and glory of our army, old Konashevich! 10 The Cossack regiments pass as if before my eyes now! It was a golden time, Katerina! The hetman sat on a black steed. A mace gleamed in his hand; around him his hired troops; on both sides stirred a red sea of Zaporozhtsy. The hetman started to speak-all stood as if rooted. The old fellow wept as he began to recall for us the deeds and bat-des of old. Ah, if you knew, Katerina, what slaughter we did then on the Turks! You can still see the scar on my head. Four bullets went through me in four places. Not one of the wounds has healed completely. How much gold we brought home then! Cossacks scooped up precious stones with their hats. What steeds, if you knew, Katerina, what steeds we drove away with us! Ah, I'll never fight like that again! It seems I'm not old yet, and my body is hale; yet the Cossack sword drops from my hand, I live with nothing to do and don't know myself what I live for. There's no order in the Ukraine: colonels and captains bicker among themselves like dogs. There's no chief over them all. Our nobility have changed everything according to Polish custom, they've adopted their slyness… sold their souls by accepting the Unia. Jewry oppresses the poor people. Oh, time, time! past time! where have you gone, my years?… Go to the cellar, lad, and fetch me a crock of mead! I'll drink for the old life and the years gone by!"

"How shall we receive our guests, Master? Polacks are coming from the meadow side!" said Stetsko, entering the house.

"I know what they're coming for," said Danilo, getting up from his seat. "Saddle your horses, my trusty servants! harness up! draw your sabers! don't forget to bring some lead buckwheat! We must receive our guests with honor!"

But before the Cossacks had time to mount their horses and load their muskets, the Polacks, like leaves falling from the trees in autumn, were scattered over the hillside.

"Eh, there's a few here to be reckoned with!" said Master Danilo, looking at the fat nobles bobbing imposingly in the front on their gold-harnessed horses. "Looks like we'll have one more round of famous carousing! Sport yourself, Cossack soul, for the last time! Carouse, lads, here's a holiday for us!"

And there was sport on the hills. The feast feasted: swords swing, bullets fly, horses whinny and stamp. The head goes mad from the shouting; the eyes go blind from the smoke. All is confusion. But a Cossack can sense which is friend and which foe; a bullet whistles-a dashing rider tumbles from his horse; a saber swishes-a head rolls on the ground, its tongue muttering incoherent words.

But you can see the red top of Master Danilo's Cossack hat in the throng; the golden belt over his blue jacket flashes before your eyes; the mane of his black horse flows in a whirl. Like a bird he flashes here and there; he shouts and brandishes his Damascus saber, and slashes from the right shoulder and from the left. Slash, Cossack! carouse, Cossack, as your brave heart pleases! but do not stop to gaze at the golden harness and jackets! trample gold and precious stones under your feet! Stab, Cossack! carouse, Cossack! but look back: the infidel Polacks are already setting fire to the cottages and driving the frightened cattle away. And like a whirlwind Master Danilo turns back, and now the hat with the red top flashes near the cottages and the throng around him thins out.

Not for one hour, not for two hours, does the battle between Polacks and Cossacks go on. Not many are left of the one or the other. But Master Danilo does not tire: he knocks some out of the saddle with his long lance, and his brave horse tramples the unseated ones. Now the courtyard is clearing, now the Polacks begin to scatter; now the Cossacks strip the golden jackets and rich harness from the slain; now Master Danilo prepares for the pursuit, he looks around to gather his men… and boils with rage: Katerina's father appears to him. There he stands on the hill, aiming a musket at him. Danilo urges his horse straight for the man… Cossack, you are going to your ruin!… The musket boomed-and the sorcerer disappeared over the hill. Only trusty Stetsko caught a flash of the red coat and strange hat. The Cossack staggered and fell to the ground. Trusty Stetsko rushed to his master-his master lay stretched on the ground, his bright eyes closed. Scarlet blood frothed on his breast. But he must have sensed his faithful servant near. Slowly he raised his eyelids and flashed his eyes: "Farewell, Stetsko! Tell Katerina not to abandon our son! You, too, my trusty servants, do not abandon him!" and he fell silent. The Cossack soul flew out of his noble body; his lips turned blue. The Cossack slept, never to awake.

Weeping, the trusty servant beckoned to Katerina: "Come, Mistress, come: your master is done carousing. He's lying drunk as can be on the damp earth. It will be a long time before he's sober!"

Katerina clasped her hands and fell like a sheaf on the dead body. "My husband, is it you lying here with your eyes closed? Get up, my beloved falcon, reach your arm out! arise! glance at least once at your Katerina, move your lips, speak at least one word… But you are silent, silent, my bright master! You are blue as the Black Sea. Your heart does not beat! Why are you so cold, my master? It must be that my tears are not hot, they cannot warm you! It must be that my weeping is not loud, it does not awaken you! Who will lead your regiments now? Who will race on your black steed, hallooing loudly and brandishing a saber before the Cossacks? Cossacks, Cossacks! where is your honor and glory? Your honor and glory lie with closed eyes on the damp earth. Bury me, then, bury me together with him! Pour earth on my eyes! press maple boards to my white breast! I have no more need for my beauty!"

Katerina weeps and grieves; and the distance is all clouding with dust: old Captain Gorobets is galloping to the rescue.

X Wondrous is the Dnieper in calm weather, when freely and smoothly he races his full waters through forests and hills. No rippling, no roaring. You look and do not know if his majestic breadth is moving or not, and you fancy he is all molded of glass, as if a blue mirror roadway, of boundless width, of endless length, hovers and meanders over the green world. It is a delight then for the hot sun to look down from on high and plunge its rays into the chill of the glassy waters and for the coastal forests to be brightly reflected in them. Green-curled! they crowd to the waters together with the wildflowers and, bending down, gaze into them and cannot have enough of it, enough of admiring their own bright image, and they smile to it and greet it, nodding their branches. But into the middle of the Dnieper they dare not look: no one except the sun and the blue sky looks there. Rare is the bird that flies to the middle of the Dnieper! Magnificent! no river in the world can equal him. Wondrous is the Dnieper, too, on a warm summer night, when everything falls asleep-man, beast, and bird-and God alone grandly surveys heaven and earth and grandly shakes his robes. Stars pour from his robes. Stars burn and shine over the world, and all are reflected at once in the Dnieper. All of them the Dnieper holds in his dark bosom. Not one escapes him, unless it goes out in the sky. The black forest studded with sleeping crows and the hills broken up since ancient times, hanging over, strain to cover him at least with their long shadows-but in vain! There is nothing in the world that can cover the Dnieper. Blue, deep blue, he goes flowing smoothly through the night as through the day, visible as far off as the human eye can see. Languidly pressing himself closer to the banks from the night's chill, he sends a silver ripple over his surface, and it flashes like the strip of a Damascus saber; and, deep blue, he sleeps again. Wondrous is the Dnieper then, too, and there is no river in the world to equal him! But when dark blue clouds pass mountain-like across the sky, and the black forest sways to its roots, the oaks creak, and lightning, ripping through the clouds, lights up all the world at once-then terrible is the Dnieper! Watery peaks roar as they beat against the hills, and withdraw with a shining and moaning, and weep and dissolve far away. So a Cossack's old mother grieves as she sends her son off to the army. Rakish and daring he rides on his black steed, arms akimbo and hat cocked; and she runs weeping after him, clings to his stirrup, snatches at his bridle, and wrings her hands over him and dissolves in bitter tears.

Savagely black between the battling waves are the charred stumps and stones on the jutting bank. A boat, pulling in, knocks against the bank, rising and falling. Who among the Cossacks has made so bold as to go in a boat while the old Dnieper is angry? He must not know that he swallows men like flies.

The boat pulls in, and from it steps the sorcerer. He is unhappy; he is bitter about the wake the Cossacks held for their slain master. The Polacks paid no small fee: forty-four nobles, with all their harness and jackets, cut to pieces, along with thirty-three servants; the rest rounded up with their horses as prisoners to be sold to the Tartars.

Down the stone steps he descended, between the charred stumps, to where he had a dugout shelter deep in the ground. He went in quietly, without creaking the door, placed a pot on the cloth-covered table, and with his long hands began throwing some unknown herbs into it; he took a mug made of some strange wood, scooped up some water, and began pouring it out, moving his lips and performing incantations. A rosy light appeared in the room; and terrible was it then to look into his face: it seemed bloody, only the deep wrinkles showed black on it, and his eyes were as if on fire. Impious sinner! his beard had long since turned gray, his face was furrowed with wrinkles, he was all dried up, yet he still carried out his godless design. A white cloud came to hover in the middle of the room, and something resembling joy flashed in his face. But why did he suddenly stand motionless, mouth gaping, not daring to stir, and why did the hair bristle on his head? In the cloud before him some strange face shone. Unasked, unbidden, it had come to visit him; it grew more distinct and fixed its gaze on him. Its features, its brows, eyes, lips-all were unfamiliar to him. He had never seen it in his life. And it seemed there was little in it that was terrible, yet an invincible horror came over him. And the strange, unfamiliar head kept looking at him fixedly through the cloud. Now the cloud was gone; yet the unknown features showed still more sharply, and the keen eyes would not tear themselves away from him. The sorcerer turned white as a sheet. He cried out in a wild voice not his own and overturned the pot… Everything vanished.

XI

"Calm yourself, my beloved sister!" said old Captain Gorobets. "Dreams seldom tell the truth."

"Lie down, sister!" his young daughter-in-law said. "I'll send for an old woman, a fortuneteller, and she'll pour out a flurry for you." 11

"Have no fear," said his son, grasping his saber, "no one will harm you."

Gloomily, with dull eyes, Katerina gazed at them all and could find no words. "I myself arranged for my own ruin," she thought. "I let him go." At last she said:

"He won't leave me in peace! For ten days now I've been with you in Kiev, and my grief has not lessened at all. I thought I might at least quietly raise my son for revenge… Terrible, terrible he looked in my dream! God forbid that you should see him, too! My heart is still pounding. 'I will stab your baby, Katerina,' he shouted, 'if you do not marry me!'" and, bursting into sobs, she rushed to the cradle, and the frightened baby reached out his arms and cried.

The captain's son seethed and blazed with wrath, hearing this talk. Captain Gorobets himself became furious.

"Let him try coming here, the cursed antichrist; he'll taste whether there's strength in an old Cossack's arms. God sees," he said, lifting up his clairvoyant eyes, "did I not fly to give my brother Danilo a hand? His holy will! I found him already lying on a cold bed, where many a Cossack lay. Still, was his wake not magnificent? Did we let even one Polack go alive? Calm yourself, my child! No one will dare to harm you, unless I and my son are no more."

Having spoken, the old captain went over to the cradle, and the baby, seeing the red pipe with its silver trim and the pouch with the gleaming tinderbox hanging from his belt, reached out to him and laughed.

"He'll take after his father," said the old captain, removing the pipe and handing it to him. "He's still in the cradle and already wants to smoke a pipe."

Katerina quietly sighed and began to rock the cradle. They all decided to spend the night together, and soon afterwards they fell asleep. Katerina, too, fell asleep.

Out in the yard and inside the house everything was quiet; only the Cossacks standing guard were not asleep. Suddenly Katerina gave a cry and woke up, and after her everyone woke up. "He's been slain, he's been stabbed!" she cried as she rushed to the cradle.

They all stood around the cradle, frozen with fear, seeing the dead baby lying in it. No one uttered a sound, not knowing what to think of the unheard-of evildoing.

XII Far from the Ukrainian land, past Poland, beyond the populous city of Lemberg, stretch rows of high-peaked mountains. Mountain after mountain, like a chain of stone, they push back the earth to right and left and clothe it in thick stone to keep the loud and stormy sea from seeping through. Chains of stone stretch to Wallachia and the region of the Seven Cities, and stand in a massive horseshoe between the Galician and Hungarian peoples. There are no such mountains in our parts. The eye dares not survey them; no human foot has stepped on the tops of some.

Strange, too, is their look: Is it that the eager sea overflowed its shores in a storm, heaved up its shapeless waves in a whirl, and they, petrified, remained motionless in air? Is it that heavy clouds dropped down from the sky and encumbered the earth with themselves? for they are also gray in color, and a white peak glistens and sparkles in the sun. Up to the Carpathian Mountains you still hear Russian speech, and just beyond them familiar words can be heard here and there; but then the faith is no longer the same and the speech is no longer the same. There lives the not inconsiderable Hungarian people; they ride horses, wield sabers, and drink no worse than the Cossacks; and they do not stint in producing gold coins from their pockets to pay for harness and costly caftans. Great vast lakes lie between the mountains. They are still as glass and, mirror-like, reflect the bare tops of the mountains and the green at their feet.

But who is it, in the dark of night, whether the stars shine or not, that comes riding on a huge black horse? What knight of inhuman stature gallops below the mountains, above the lakes, reflected with his gigantic horse in the still waters, his endless shadow flitting terribly over the mountains? Plate-armor gleaming, lance on his shoulder, saber clanking against his saddle, helmet pulled down, black mustache, eyes closed, eyelashes lowered-he sleeps. And, asleep, he holds the reins; and behind him on the same horse sits a child page, who also sleeps, and asleep holds on to the knight. Who is he, where is he going, and why? Who knows? Not for one day, not for two days, has he been crossing the mountains. Day breaks, the sun rises, he is not to be seen; only now and then the mountain people notice a long shadow flitting over the mountains, though the sky is clear and there is not a cloud in it. But as soon as night brings darkness, he is visible again and is reflected in the lakes, and behind him, trembling, rides his shadow. He has already crossed many mountains and gone up Krivan. There is no higher mountain in the Carpathians; like a tsar it rises above the rest. Here steed and rider have stopped, and sunk still deeper into sleep, and the clouds have descended and covered him.

XIII

"Sh… hush, woman! don't knock so, my baby's fallen asleep. For a long time my son cried, but now he's asleep. I'll go to the forest, woman! Why are you staring at me like that? You're terrible: iron tongs reach out from your eyes… such long ones, ohh! they burn like fire! You must be a witch! Oh, if you're a witch, vanish from here! you'll steal my son. He's so muddle-headed, this captain: he thinks I like living in Kiev. No, my husband is here, and my son-who is going to look after the house? I left so quietly, not a cat or a dog heard me. You want to grow young, woman? It's not hard at all, you only have to dance. Look how I dance…" And having uttered these incoherent words, Katerina started rushing about, looking crazily from side to side, her hands on her hips. She stamped her feet with a shriek; her silver-shod heels rang without time or measure. Unbraided black tresses scattered over her white neck. Like a bird she flew without stopping, waving her arms and nodding, and it seemed she would either drop strengthless to the ground or fly out of this world.

The old nurse stood by sorrowfully, and tears filled her deep wrinkles; heavy stone lay on the hearts of the trusty lads as they watched their mistress. She was already quite weak and lazily tapped her feet in one spot, thinking she was dancing the Turtledove. "And I have a necklace, boys!" she said, stopping at last, "and you don't… Where is my husband?" she suddenly cried out, snatching a Turkish dagger from her belt. "Oh! this isn't the kind of knife I need." Here tears and anguish showed on her face. "My father's heart is far away: this won't reach it. His heart is forged of iron. A witch forged it for him in hellfire. Why doesn't my father come? Doesn't he know it's time to put a knife in him? He must want me to come myself…" And she broke off with a strange laugh. "A funny story came into my head: I remembered how they were burying my husband. They buried him alive… How I wanted to laugh!… Listen, listen!" And instead of speaking, she began to sing a song:

A blood-drenched cart is driving by,

In that cart a Cossack lies,

Pierced his heart, empty his glance,

In his right hand he holds a lance,

And from this lance the blood runs down,

A river of blood pours on the ground.

Above the stream a maple bows,

Above the maple caws a crow.

Over the Cossack his mother cries.

Don't weep, mother, dry your eyes!

For your son has wed a wife,

The fairest young girl of his life.

In the wide field a house of clay,

No windows to let in the day.

And that's the end of all our song.

The fish and crayfish did a dance…

And if you don't love me, may your mother catch a chilli

So all songs had become confused in her. For a day, for two days, she has been living in her house, will hear nothing about Kiev, and does not pray, flees from people, and wanders from morning till late at night in the dark oak groves. Sharp twigs scratch her white face and shoulders; the wind tousles her unbraided tresses; old leaves rustle under her feet-she pays no heed to anything. At the hour when the sunset is fading and the stars have not yet appeared, the moon does not shine, but it is already frightening to walk in the forest: unbaptized children clamber up the trees, clutching at the branches; they sob, guffaw, roll in a tangle on the road and in the spreading nettles; maidens who destroyed their souls run out of the Dnieper's waves one after another; the hair streams from their green heads onto their shoulders, water runs loudly burbling down their long hair onto the ground; and a maiden shines through the water as through a shirt of glass; her lips smile strangely, her cheeks flush, her eyes lure one's soul out… she would burn up with love, she would kiss you to death.,. Flee, Christian man! her mouth is ice, her bed the cold water; she will tickle you all over and drag you into the river. Katerina pays no heed to anyone; the mad- woman has no fear of water nymphs, she runs about late at night with her knife out, searching for her father.

Early in the morning a visitor arrived, of comely appearance, in a red jacket, and inquired about Master Danilo; he hears it all, wipes his tearful eyes with his sleeve, and heaves his shoulders. Says he went to war together with the late Burulbash; together they fought the Crimeans and the Turks; would never have expected that such would be the end of Master Danilo. The visitor tells of many other things and wishes to see Mistress Katerina.

At first Katerina did not listen to anything the visitor said; in the end she began to listen as if reasonably to his words. He talked of having lived together with Master Danilo as brother with brother; of hiding from the Crimeans once under a dam… Katerina kept listening, not taking her eyes off him.

"She'll come round!" the lads thought, looking at her. "This visitor will cure her! She's already listening reasonably!"

The visitor meanwhile began telling how Master Danilo had told him, in a moment of frank conversation: "Look here, brother Koprian, if by the will of God I'm no longer in this world, take my wife and let her be your wife…"

Katerina pierced him terribly with her eyes. "Ah!" she cried out, "it's him! it's my father!" and she rushed at him with her knife.

He fought for a long time, trying to tear the knife away from her. At last he tore it away, swung-and a terrible deed was done: a father killed his mad daughter.

The amazed Cossacks were about to fall upon him; but the sorcerer had already leaped on his horse and vanished from sight.

XIV An unheard-of wonder appeared near Kiev. All the nobles and hetmans gathered to marvel at this wonder: the ends of the earth suddenly became visible far away. The Liman showed blue in the distance, and beyond the Liman spread the Black Sea. Experienced men recognized the Crimea, rising mountain-like from the sea, and the swampy Sivash. To the left could be seen the Galician land. 12

"And what is that?" the assembled folk inquired of the old people, pointing to the gray and white peaks showing far away in the sky and looking more like clouds.

"Those are the Carpathian Mountains!" said the old people. "There are some among them on which the snow never melts and the clouds perch and stay overnight."

Here a new marvel appeared: the clouds flew off of the highest mountain, and on its peak appeared a mounted man, in full knightly armor, with his eyes shut, and he could be seen as if he were standing up close to them.

Here, from among the folk marveling with fear, one leaped on his horse and, looking wildly around, as if trying to see whether anyone was pursuing him, hastily rode off as fast as his horse could go. It was the sorcerer. Why was he so frightened? Staring in fear at the wondrous knight, he had recognized his face as the same one that had appeared to him unbidden as he performed his incantations. He himself could not understand why everything in him became confused at this sight, and, fearfully looking back, he raced his horse on until evening overtook him and the stars peeped out. Here he turned toward home, perhaps to inquire of the unclean powers what this marvel was. He was just about to jump his horse over a narrow stream that branched out across his path, when the speeding horse suddenly stopped, turned its muzzle to him, and- oh, wonder!-laughed! Two rows of white teeth flashed terribly in the darkness. The hair on the sorcerer's head stood on end. He cried out wildly, wept frenziedly, and urged his horse straight on to Kiev. He fancied that everything on all sides rushed to catch him: around him the dark forest trees, as if alive, wagging their black beards and reaching out long branches, tried to strangle him; the stars seemed to run ahead of him, pointing the sinner out to everyone; the road itself, he fancied, raced after him. The desperate sorcerer flew to Kiev, to the holy places.

XV A hermit sat alone in his cave before a lamp, not taking his eyes from the holy book. It was already many years since he had shut himself away in his cave. He had already made himself a coffin out of boards in which he slept instead of a bed. The holy elder closed his book and began to pray… Suddenly a man of strange, terrible appearance rushed in. At first the holy hermit was astonished and recoiled on seeing this man. He was trembling all over like an aspen leaf; his eyes rolled wildly; a terrible fire poured fearfully from his eyes; his ugly face filled the soul with trembling.

"Father, pray! pray!" he cried desperately, "pray for a lost soul!" and he collapsed on the ground.

The holy hermit crossed himself, took out the book, opened it-and recoiled in horror, letting the book fall.

"No, unheard-of sinner, there is no mercy for you! Flee from here! I cannot pray for you!"

"No?" the sinner shouted like a madman.

"Look: the holy letters of the book are filled with blood. Never has there been such a sinner in the world!"

"You mock me, Father!"

"Go, cursed sinner! I do not mock you! Fear is coming over me. It is not good for a man to be with you!"

"No, no! you mock me, do not say… I see your mouth stretch: the two rows of your old teeth are showing white!…"

And, like one crazed, he rushed at the holy hermit and killed him.

Something groaned deeply, the groaning went across the field into the forest. From beyond the forest rose dry, bony arms with long claws; they shook and vanished.

And now he felt no fear, he felt nothing. Everything seemed somehow vague to him. There was a ringing in his ears and in his head, as from drunkenness; and everything before his eyes appeared covered with cobwebs. Leaping on his horse, he headed straight for Kanev, thinking to go from there through Cherkassy to the Tartars, right to the Crimea, himself not knowing why. He rode for one day, for another, but there was no Kanev. It was the right road; it should have been here long ago, but Kanev was nowhere to be seen. Church tops gleamed in the distance. But that was not Kanev, it was Shumsk. The sorcerer was astonished to see that he had gone in a completely different direction. He urged his horse back to Kiev, and a day later a city appeared-not Kiev but Galich, a city still further from Kiev than Shumsk, and not far now from the Hungarians. Not knowing what to do, he turned his horse back again, but again felt he was going ever further in the contrary direction. No man in the world could tell what was in the sorcerer's soul; and if anyone had looked into it and seen what went on there, he would not have slept the whole night long and would never have laughed again. It was not anger, or fear, or wicked vexation. There is no word in the world that could name it. He was burnt, scorched, he would have trampled the whole world under his horse's hooves, or taken the whole country from Kiev to Galich, its people and all, and drowned it in the Black Sea. But it was not from anger that he would have done so; no, he did not know why himself. He shuddered all over when just ahead of him the Carpathian Mountains appeared, and tall Krivan, its crown covered with a gray cloud as with a cap; and his horse raced on and was already roaming in the mountains. All at once the clouds cleared, and before him in terrible majesty appeared the rider… The sorcerer tries to stop, he pulls hard at the reins; the horse whinnies wildly, tossing its mane and racing toward the knight. Now the sorcerer fancies that everything in him is frozen, that the motionless rider stirs and all at once opens his eyes; he sees the sorcerer racing toward him and laughs. Like thunder the wild laughter spilled over the mountains and rang in the sorcerer's heart, shaking everything within it. He fancied someone strong got into him and went about inside him, hammering on his heart and nerves… so terribly did this laughter resound in him!

The rider seized the sorcerer with a terrible hand and lifted him up in the air. Instantly the sorcerer died and opened his eyes after death. But he was now a dead man and had the gaze of a dead man. Neither the living nor the resurrected have such a terrible gaze. He rolled his dead eyes in all directions and saw dead men rising from Kiev, from the land of Galicia, and from the Carpathians, their faces as like his as two drops of water.

Pale, pale, one taller than another, one bonier than another, they stood around the rider, who held this terrible plunder in his hand. The knight laughed once more and threw him down into the abyss. And all the dead men leaped down into the abyss, picked the dead man up, and sank their teeth into him. Yet another, taller than all of them, more terrible than all of them, wanted to rise out of the earth; but he could not, he had not the strength to do it, so great had he grown in the ground; and if he had done it, he would have overturned the Carpathians, the Seven Cities, and the land of the Turks; he stirred just slightly, and the quaking from it went all over the world. And many houses fell. And many people were crushed.

A swishing is often heard in the Carpathians, the sound as of a thousand mill wheels turning in the water. It is the dead men gnawing the dead man, in the abyss without issue, which no man has ever seen, fearing to pass near it. It happens not seldom in the world that the earth shakes from one end to the other: learned people say it is because somewhere by the sea there is a mountain out of which flames burst and burning rivers flow. But the old men who live in Hungary and the land of Galicia know better and say that the earth shakes because there is a dead man grown great and huge in it who wants to rise.

XVI In the town of Glukhov people gathered around the old bandore player and listened for an hour as the blind man played his bandore. No bandore player had ever sung such wonderful songs or sung them so well. First he sang about the old hetmans, about Sagaidachny and Khmelnitsky. 13 Times were different then: the Cossacks were in their glory; their steeds trampled down their enemies, and no one dared to mock them. The old man sang merry songs, too, and kept glancing around at the people as if he could see; and his fingers, with little bone picks attached to them, flew like flies over the strings, and it seemed the strings played of themselves; and the people around him, the old ones with their heads hanging, and the young ones looking up at the old man, dared not even whisper to one another.

"Wait," said the old man, "I'll sing to you about a deed of yore." The people moved closer still, and the blind man sang:

Under Master Stepan, 14 prince of the Seven Cities-and the prince of the Seven Cities was also king of the Polacks- there lived two Cossacks, Ivan and Petro. They lived as brother lives with brother. "Look, Ivan, whatever you gain, it's all half and half: when one of us is merry, the other is merry; when one of us grieves, we both grieve; if one of us gets some plunder, the plunder's divided in two; if one falls into captivity, the other sells everything and pays the ransom, or else he, too, goes into captivity." And truly, whatever the Cossacks got, they divided everything in two; and if they stole cattle or horses, they divided everything in two.

King Stepan made war on the Turks. For three weeks he fought the Turks and was still unable to drive them off. And the Turks had a pasha, one who with a dozen janissaries could cut down a whole regiment. So King Stepan announced that if some brave man could be found who would bring him this pasha dead or alive, he would pay him alone as much as he paid his whole army. "Let's go after the pasha, brother!" said brother Ivan to Petro. And the Cossacks went, one in one direction, the other in another.

Petro might still have caught him or he might not have, but Ivan already came back leading the pasha to the king himself with a noose around his neck. "Brave fellow!" said King Stepan and ordered that he be paid as much as the whole army; and he ordered that he be given lands wherever he himself chose and as much cattle as he wanted. As soon as Ivan got his payment from the king, that same day he divided everything equally between himself and Petro. Petro took half of the king's pay, but he could not bear that Ivan should be so honored by the king, and he kept revenge hidden deep in his heart.

The two knights went to the lands granted by the king, beyond the Carpathians. The Cossack Ivan seated his son on his horse and tied him to himself. It was dark-they were still riding. The child fell asleep, and Ivan himself began to doze. Do not doze, Cossack, the mountain roads are dangerous!… But a Cossack's horse is such that it knows its way everywhere, never stumbles and never trips. Between the mountains is a chasm; no one has ever seen the bottom of this chasm; as far as the earth is from the sky, so far is it to the bottom of this chasm. On the very edge of this chasm runs the road-two men can ride abreast on it, but three never. The horse with the dozing Cossack began to step carefully. Petro rode beside him all atremble and holding his breath for joy. He looked around and pushed his sworn brother into the chasm. And into the chasm fell the horse with the Cossack and the child.

But the Cossack seized hold of a branch and only the horse fell to the bottom. He began to climb out, his son on his back; there was still a short way to go, he raised his eyes and saw that Petro was aiming his lance at him so as to push him back. "Righteous God, better not to have raised my eyes than to see my own brother aiming a lance to push me back… My dear brother! pierce me with the lance, if such is my lot, but take my son! How is the innocent child to blame, that he should die such an evil death?" Petro laughed and pushed him with the lance, and Cossack and child both fell to the bottom. Petro took all the property for himself and began to live like a pasha. No one had such herds of horses as Petro. Nowhere had so many sheep and rams been seen. And Petro died.

When Petro died, God summoned the souls of the two brothers, Petro and Ivan, for judgment. "This man is a great sinner!" God said. "Ivan! I will not easily find a punishment for him; you choose how he shall be punished!" Ivan thought for a long time, devising the punishment, and said at last: "This man did me a great offense: he betrayed his brother like Judas and deprived me of my honorable name and my descen- dants on earth. And a man without an honorable name and descendants is like a grain of wheat cast into the ground and lost there for nothing. No sprouts-no one will even know that the seed was sown.

"Make it so, God, that his descendants have no happiness on earth! that the last one of the family be such an evildoer as the world has never seen! that after each of his evil deeds his grandparents and great-grandparents, finding no peace in the coffin, and suffering torments unknown to the world, rise out of their graves! And that the Judas Petro be unable to rise, and suffer still greater torments from that, and eat dirt in a frenzy and writhe under the ground!

"And when the hour comes that fulfills the measure of this man's evildoings, raise me, God, on my horse, from that chasm up to the highest mountain, and let him come to me, and I will hurl him from that mountain into the deepest chasm, and let all the dead men, his grandfathers and great-grandfathers, wherever they lived when alive, be drawn from all ends of the earth to gnaw on him for the torments he caused them, and gnaw on him eternally, and I will rejoice looking at his torment! And let the Judas Petro be unable to rise from the ground, and let him strain to gnaw, but gnaw only on himself, and let his bones keep growing bigger, that through this his pain may become greater. This torment will be the most terrible for him: for there is no greater torment for a man than to desire revenge and be unable to get it."

"Terrible is the punishment you have devised, man!" said God. "Let it all be as you have said, but you, too, will sit there eternally on your horse, and as long as you sit there on your horse, there will be no Kingdom of Heaven for you!" And it all happened as was said: to this day a wondrous knight stands on horseback in the Carpathians, gazing on the dead men gnawing the dead man in the bottomless chasm, and he feels the dead man lying under the ground growing and gnawing his own bones in terrible torment and shaking all the earth terribly…

The blind man finished his song; he began to strum on the strings again; he began to sing funny little verses about Khoma and Yerema, about Stklyar Stokoza… but old and young still could not come to their senses and stood for a long time, their heads bowed, pondering the terrible deed that had happened in olden times.

Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt

There was a story to do with this story: it was told us by Stepan Ivanovich Kurochka, who used to come over from Gadyach. You should know that my memory's rotten beyond words: tell me something or not, it's all the same. Just like pouring water through a sieve. Knowing this fault of mine, I asked him purposely to write it down in a notebook. Well, God grant him good health, he was always kind to me, he did write it down. I put it into a little desk; I think you know it well: it's the one in the corner as you come in… Ah, I forgot, you've never been to my place. My old woman, whom I've lived with for some thirty years now, never learned to read in all her born days-may as well admit it. So I noticed she was baking pirozhki 1 on some paper. Her pirozhki, my gentle readers, are amazingly good; you won't eat better pirozhki anywhere. I looked at the underside of one and saw some writing. My heart as if knew it. I went to the desk-not even half a notebook left! The rest of the pages she'd torn out for her pies! What could I do? you can't start fighting in old age!

Last year I happened to pass through Gadyach. Before we reached the town, I purposely tied a knot so that I wouldn't forget to ask Stepan Ivanovich about it. Not only that, but I made myself a promise-as soon as I sneezed in town, I'd remember him. All in vain. I passed through the town, and I sneezed, and I blew my nose in my handkerchief, yet I forgot everything; and I remembered only when I was some six miles beyond the town gates. Nothing to be done, I had to publish it without the end. However, if anyone really wishes to know what happened further on in the story, he need only go on purpose to Gadyach and ask Stepan Ivanovich. He'll tell it again with great pleasure, maybe even from beginning to end. He lives not far from the stone church. There's a little lane right there: you just turn down the lane and it's the second or third gate. Or better still: when you see a tall striped pole in the yard, and a fat woman in a green skirt comes out to meet you (he leads a bachelor's life, there's no harm in saying), then it's his yard. Or else you may meet him in the market, where he spends every morning till nine o'clock choosing fish and vegetables for his table and talking with Father Antip or the Jew tax farmer. 2 You'll recognize him at once, because nobody but he has printed duck trousers and a yellow nankeen frock coat. Here's another token for you: he always waves his arms as he walks. The local assessor, the late Denis Petro-vich, always used to say when he saw him in the distance: "Look, look, there goes the windmill."

I

Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka

It's four years now that Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka has been retired and living on his farmstead in Vytrebenki. When he was still Vaniusha, he studied at the Gadyach regional high school, and, it must be said, he was a most well-behaved and diligent boy. The teacher of Russian grammar, Nikifor Timofeevich Participle, used to say that if everyone in the class was as diligent as Shponka, he wouldn't have to bring in the maple ruler, with which, as he con-lessed himself, he was weary of rapping lazybones and pranksters on the knuckles. His notebook was always clean, neatly ruled, never a blot anywhere. He always sat placidly, his arms folded and his eyes fixed on the teacher, and he never hung scraps of paper on the back of the comrade in front of him, never carved on the bench or played squash your granny before the teacher came. Whenever anyone needed a penknife to sharpen his pen, he immediately turned to Ivan Fyodorovich, knowing that he always had a penknife with him; and Ivan Fyodorovich, then simply Vaniusha, would take it from the little leather case tied to the buttonhole of his gray frock coat, and asked only that they not scrape the pen with the sharp edge, assuring them that the dull edge was meant for that. Such good behavior soon attracted the attention of the Latin teacher himself, whose mere cough in the front hall, which preceded the thrusting of his frieze overcoat and pockmark-adorned face through the doorway, inspired fear in the whole class. This terrible teacher, who always had two bundles of birch switches on the lectern and half his auditors on their knees, made Ivan Fyodorovich his monitor, though there were many in the class of much greater ability.

Here we cannot omit one occasion which influenced his entire life. One of the students he had charge of as monitor, in order to incline him to put down a scit 3 on his record, though he didn't know a scrap of the lesson, brought a buttered pancake to class wrapped in paper. Ivan Fyodorovich, though he had a bent for justice, was hungry just then and unable to resist temptation: he took the pancake, stood a book in front of him, and began to eat. And he was so occupied with it that he didn't even notice the deathly silence that suddenly fell over the class. He came to his senses with horror only when the dreaded hand, reaching out from the frieze overcoat, seized him by the ear and dragged him into the middle of the classroom. "Give the pancake here! Give it here, I tell you, scoundrel!" said the terrible teacher. Then he seized the buttery pancake with his fingers and flung it out the window, strictly forbidding the boys running around in the yard to pick it up. After which he beat Ivan Fyodorovich most painfully on the hands. And rightly so: it was the fault of the hands, they and not any other part of the body had done the taking. Be that as it may, the timidity inseparable from him to begin with increased still more. Perhaps this very event was the reason why he never had any wish to enter the civil service, seeing from experience that it was not always possible to keep the lid on things.

He was approaching fifteen when he passed into the second class, where, instead of the short catechism and the four rules of arithmetic, he started on the full-length one, the book on the duties of man, and fractions. But seeing that the further into the forest, the thicker grow the trees, and receiving news that his papa had bid the world farewell, he stayed on for another two years and then, with his mother's consent, joined the P- infantry regiment.

The P-infantry regiment was not at all of the sort to which many infantry regiments belong; and, even though it was mostly quartered in villages, it was nevertheless on such a footing that it would not yield to certain cavalry regiments. The majority of the officers drank vymorozki 4 and knew how to pull Jews by their sidelocks no worse than the hussars; several of them even danced the mazurka, and the colonel of the P-regiment never missed an opportunity of mentioning it when talking with someone in society. "I have many," he used to say, patting himself on the belly after each word, "who dance the mazurka, sir. A good many, sir. A great many." To better show readers the cultivation of the P- infantry regiment, we shall add that two of the officers gambled terribly at faro and would lose uniform, visored cap, greatcoat, sword knot, and underwear to boot-something not always found even among cavalrymen.

The company of such comrades, however, by no means diminished Ivan Fyodorovich's timidity. And since he did not drink vymorozki, preferring a glass of vodka before dinner and supper, and did not dance the mazurka or play faro, he naturally always had to stay alone. And so, while the others would go in hired carriages to visit small landowners, he sat at home and exercised himself in occupations dear only to a meek and kindly soul: polishing his buttons, reading a fortune-telling book, setting mousetraps in the corners of his room, and, finally, taking off his uniform and lying in bed. On the other hand, there was no one in the regiment more disciplined than Ivan Fyodorovich. And he commanded his platoon so well that the company commander always held him up as an example. For that, in a short time, eleven years after being made ensign, he was promoted to sub-lieutenant.

In the course of that time, he received the news that his mother had died; and his aunt, his mother's sister, whom he knew only because she used to bring him dried pears and her own very tasty homemade gingerbreads when he was a child, and even sent them to Gadyach (she was on bad terms with his mother and therefore Ivan Fyodorovich had not seen her later)-this aunt, out of the goodness of her heart, undertook to manage his small estate, of which she duly informed him in a letter. Ivan Fyodorovich, being fully confident of his aunt's reasonableness, began to carry on with his service as before. Another in his place, on receiving such rank, would have grown very proud; but pride was completely unknown to him, and having become a sub-lieutenant, he was the very same Ivan Fyodorovich that he had been in the rank of ensign. Staying on for four years after this event so remarkable for him, he was preparing to set out from Mogilev province for Great Russia with his regiment when he received a letter with the following content:

My gentle nephew, Ivan Fyodorovich,

I am sending you underwear-five pairs of cotton socks and four shirts of fine linen-and I also want to discuss business with you: since you are already of a not unimportant rank, which I think you know yourself, and are already of such age that it is time you took up the management of your estate, there is no longer any need for you to serve in the army. I am old now and cannot look after everything on your estate; and indeed I have much to reveal to you personally besides. Come, Vaniusha. In anticipation of the true pleasure of seeing you,

I remain your most loving aunt

Vasilisa Tsupchevska

A strange turnip has grown in our kitchen garden-more like a potato than a turnip.

Within a week of receiving this letter, Ivan Fyodorovich wrote in reply:

My dear madam, Aunt Vasilisa Kashporovna!

I thank you very much for sending me the underwear. My socks especially were very old, so that my orderly had to darn them four times, which made them very tight. As to your opinion about my service, I fully agree with you and sent in my resignation two days ago. As soon as I am discharged, I will hire a carriage. I was unable to fulfill your prior request concerning the wheat seed, the hard Siberian variety: there is none such to be found in all Mogilev province. The pigs here are fed on homebrew mash mixed with a little flat beer.

With the utmost respect, my dear madam aunt, I remain your nephew

Ivan Shponka

At last Ivan Fyodorovich was discharged with the rank of sublieutenant, hired a Jew for forty roubles to take him from Mogilev to Gadyach, and sat himself in the kibitka just at the time when the trees became clothed in young, still sparse leaves, all the earth greened brightly with fresh green, and all the fields smelled of spring.

II

The Road

Nothing remarkable happened on the road. They traveled for a little over two weeks. Ivan Fyodorovich might have arrived sooner, but the pious Jew kept his sabbath on Saturdays and, covering himself with his horse blanket, prayed all day long. However, Ivan Fyodorovich, as I have had occasion to observe before, was the sort of man who would not allow himself to be bored. During that time, he would open his suitcase, take out his linen, examine it well to see if it was properly laundered, properly folded, would carefully remove a piece of fluff from the new uniform, already made without epaulettes, and would put it all back in the best way. Generally speaking, he did not like reading books; and if he ever peeked into the fortune-telling book, it was because he liked meeting familiar things there, already read several times. So a townsman goes to his club every day, not in order to hear anything new there, but to meet those friends with whom from time immemorial he has been used to chatting in the club. So an official takes great pleasure in reading the directory several times a day, not for the sake of any diplomatic undertakings, but because he delights exceedingly in seeing names in print. "Ah! Ivan Gavril-ovich So-and-so!" he repeats to himself in a muted voice. "Ah! and here I am! Hm!…" And the next day he rereads it, again with the same exclamations.

After two weeks of traveling, Ivan Fyodorovich reached a village some seventy miles from Gadyach. It was a Friday. The sun had long set when, with kibitka and Jew, he drove into the inn.

This inn was in no way different from others built in small villages. The traveler is usually treated zealously to hay and oats there, as if he were a post-horse. But if he should wish to have a meal such as decent people ordinarily have, he must keep his appetite intact for the next occasion. Ivan Fyodorovich, knowing all that, had provided himself beforehand with two strings of bagels and a sausage, and, having ordered a glass of vodka, which is never lacking in any inn, began on his supper, sitting on a bench in front of an oak table planted permanently in the clay floor.

In the meantime there came the noise of a britzka. The gates creaked, but for a long time no britzka drove into the yard. A loud voice was quarreling with the old woman who ran the inn. "I'll drive in," Ivan Fyodorovich heard, "but if a single bedbug bites me in your house, I'll beat you, by God, I'll beat you, you old witch! And I'll pay you nothing for the hay!"

A minute later the door opened and in came, or, rather, heaved himself, a fat man in a green frock coat. His immobile head rested on a short neck that seemed fatter still because of his double chin. Even by the look of him, he seemed to be one of those people who never rack their brains over trifles and whose whole life goes swimmingly.

"Greetings to you, my dear sir!" he said, seeing Ivan Fyodorovich.

Ivan Fyodorovich made a wordless bow.

"And may I ask with whom I have the honor of speaking?" the fat arrival went on.

Under such interrogation, Ivan Fyodorovich involuntarily got up from his seat and stood at attention, something he ordinarily did when his colonel asked him a question.

"Retired Sub-lieutenant Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka," he replied.

"And dare I ask to what parts you are traveling?"

"To my own farmstead, sir-Vytrebenki."

"Vytrebenki!" the stern interrogator exclaimed. "Allow me, my dear, dear sir, allow me!" he kept repeating as he approached him, waving his arms as if someone were hindering him or as if he were pushing his way through a crowd, and, coming close, he took Ivan Fyodorovich into his embrace and planted a kiss first on his right cheek, then on the left, and then again on the right. Ivan Fyodorovich liked this kissing very much, because the stranger's big cheeks felt like soft pillows on his lips.

"Allow me, my dear sir, to introduce myself!" the fat man went on. "I am a landowner in the same Gadyach district and your neighbor. I live in the village of Khortyshche, no more than four miles from your farmstead of Vytrebenki. My name is Grigory Grigorievich Storchenko. Without fail, without fail, my dear sir, I don't even want to know you unless you come to visit the village of Khortyshche. I'm hurrying off on an errand now… And what is this?" he said in a mild voice to the entering lackey, a boy in a long Cossack blouse with patches on the elbows, who with a perplexed mien was placing bundles and boxes on the table. "What is this? What?" and Grigory Grigorievich's voice was imperceptibly becoming more and more menacing. "Did I tell you to put it here, my gentle? did I tell you to put it here, scoundrel? Didn't I tell you to heat the chicken up first, you cheat? Get out!" he cried, stamp- ing his foot. "Wait, you mug! where's the hamper with the bottles? Ivan Fyodorovich!" he said, pouring some liquor into a glass, "a little cordial if you please?"

"By God, sir, I can't… I've already had occasion…" Ivan Fyodorovich said, faltering.

"I won't hear of it, my dear sir!" the landowner raised his voice, "I won't hear of it! I'm not moving from this spot until you try…"

Ivan Fyodorovich, seeing it was impossible to refuse, drank it off, not without pleasure.

"This is a chicken, my dear sir," the fat Grigory Grigorievich went on, cutting it up in the wooden box with a knife. "I must tell you that my cook, Yavdokha, is fond of a nip now and then, and so it often comes out too dry. Hey, boy!" here he turned to the boy in the Cossack blouse, who was bringing in a featherbed and pillows, "make my bed up on the floor in the middle of the room! See that you pile the hay a bit higher under the pillow! And pull a tuft of hemp from the woman's spinning to stop my ears for the night! You should know, my dear sir, that I've been in the habit of stopping my ears for the night ever since that cursed time when a cockroach got into my left ear in a Russian tavern. The cursed Russians, as I found out later, even eat cabbage soup with cockroaches in it. It's impossible to describe what happened to me: such a tickling in my ear, such a tickling… you could just climb the wall! A simple old woman helped me when I got back to our parts. And how, do you think? Merely by whispering some spell on it. What do you say about these medical men, my dear sir? I think they simply fool and befuddle us. Some old woman knows twenty times better than all these medical men."

"Indeed, sir, what you say is perfectly true. In fact, some old…" Here he stopped, as if unable to find the appropriate word.

It will do no harm if I say that generally he was not lavish with words. Maybe the reason was his timidity, or maybe it was the wish to express himself more beautifully.

"Give that hay a real good shaking!" Grigory Grigorievich said to his lackey. "The hay here is so vile you have to keep watching for twigs. Allow me, my dear sir, to wish you a good night! We won't see each other tomorrow: I'll be setting out before dawn. Your Jew will keep his sabbath, because tomorrow's Saturday, and so there's no need for you to get up early. And don't forget my request. I don't even want to know you unless you come to the village of Khortyshche."

Here Grigory Grigorievich's valet pulled his frock coat and boots off him, replacing them with a dressing gown, and Grigory Grigorievich tumbled into bed, and it looked as if one huge featherbed were lying on another.

"Hey, boy! where are you off to, scoundrel! Come here, straighten my blanket! Hey, boy, pile up some hay under my head! and, say, have the horses been watered yet? More hay! here, under this side! and straighten the blanket nicely, scoundrel! Like that! more! ah!…"

Here Grigory Grigorievich sighed another time or two and sent a terrible nose-whistling all over the room, occasionally letting out such snores that the old woman snoozing on the stove bench 5 would wake up and suddenly look all around her, but, seeing nothing, would calm down and go back to sleep.

When Ivan Fyodorovich woke up the next day, the fat landowner was no longer there. This was the only remarkable event that befell him on the road. Three days later he was nearing his farmstead.

He felt his heart pound hard when the windmill peeked out, its sails turning, and when, as the Jew drove his nags up the hill, a row of pussy willows appeared down below. A pond gleamed vividly and brightly through them, breathing freshness. Here he once used to swim, in this very pond he used to wade with other boys, up to his neck in the water, hunting for crayfish. The kibitka rode up the dam, and Ivan Fyodorovich saw the same little thatch-roofed old house; the same apple and cherry trees he used to climb on the sly. As soon as he drove into the yard, dogs of all sorts came running from every side: brown, black, gray, spotted. Some threw themselves, barking, under the horses' hooves, others ran behind, noticing that the axle was greased with lard; one stood by the kitchen, covering a bone with his paw and howling at the top of his voice; another barked from a distance as he ran back and forth wagging his tail, as if to say: "Look, good Christian folk, what a wonderful young fellow I am!" Boys in dirty shirts came running to see. A sow, strolling in the yard with sixteen piglets, raised her snout with an inquisitive air and grunted louder than usual. In the yard there were many canvases with wheat, millet, and oats drying in the sun. On the roof there were also many varieties of herbs drying: chicory, hawkweed, and others.

Ivan Fyodorovich was so busy gazing at it all that he came to his senses only when the spotted dog bit the Jew on the calf as he was getting down from the box. The people of the household came running, including the cook, one woman, and two girls in woolen shirts, and after the first exclamations-"Why, it's our young master!"-announced that the aunt was in the kitchen garden planting sweet corn together with the girl Palashka and the coachman Omelko, who often carried out the duties of gardener and watchman. But the aunt, who had seen the bast-covered kibitka from far off, was already there. And Ivan Fyodorovich was amazed when she all but picked him up, as if he couldn't believe this was the aunt who had written to him about her illness and decrepitude.

III

The Aunt

Aunt Vasilisa Kashporovna was then about fifty years old. She had never been married, and she used to say that her maidenly life was dearer to her than anything. However, as far as I can recall, no one had ever offered to marry her. The reason for that was that all men felt some sort of timidity in her presence and simply could not get up the courage to propose to her. "Vasilisa Kashporovna has quite a character!" her wooers used to say, and they were per-fecdy right, because Vasilisa Kashporovna could make anyone feel lower than grass. The drunken miller, who had been good for absolutely nothing at all, she managed, through her own manly pulling of his topknot every day, without any extraneous remedies, to turn not into a man but into pure gold. She was of almost gigantic height and of corresponding build and strength. It seemed that nature had committed an unpardonable error in having arranged for her to wear a dark brown housecoat with little ruffles on weekdays and with a red cashmere shawl on Easter Sunday and her name day, whereas the most becoming things would have been a dragoon's mustache and jackboots. On the other hand, her occupations corresponded perfectly to her appearance: she rowed the boat herself, handling the oars more skillfully than any fisherman; she hunted game; she stood over the mowers all the while they worked; she knew the exact number of melons and watermelons in her patch; she took a toll of five kopecks per cart from those passing over her dam; she climbed the trees to shake down the pears; she gave beatings to her vassals with her terrible hand, and with the same awesome hand offered a glass of vodka to the deserving. Almost simultaneously she cursed, dyed yarn, ran the kitchen, made kvass, cooked jam with honey; she bustled all day and had time for everything. The result was that Ivan Fyodorovich's little estate, which, according to the latest census, consisted of eighteen souls, 6 flourished in the full sense of the word. Besides, she loved her nephew all too ardently and carefully saved every kopeck for him.

On his homecoming, Ivan Fyodorovich's life decidedly changed and took a totally different path. It seemed as if nature had created him precisely for managing an eighteen-soul estate. The aunt herself noticed that he was going to make a good proprietor, though, all the same, she did not yet allow him to enter into all branches of management. "He's still a young lad," she used to say, despite the fact that Ivan Fyodorovich was just shy of forty, "he can't know everything!"

However, he was constantly present in the fields beside the reapers and mowers, and this brought inexplicable delight to his meek soul. The swinging in unison of a dozen or more shining scythes; the swish of grass falling in orderly rows; the occasional pealing song of the women reapers, now merry as the welcoming of guests, now melancholy as parting; the calm, clear evenings- and what evenings! how free and fresh the air! how everything comes alive then: the steppe turns red and blue and glows with flowers; quails, bustards, gulls, grasshoppers, thousands of insects, and from them comes whistling, buzzing, chirring, crying, and suddenly a harmonious chorus; and it's all never silent for a moment! And the sun is going down and disappearing. Oh! how fresh and good! In the fields, now here, now there, cookfires are started, with cauldrons over them, and around the cauldrons mustached mowers sit; steam rises from the dumplings. The dusk turns gray… It's hard to say what went on inside Ivan Fyodorovich then. When he joined the mowers, he would forget to sample their dumplings, which he liked very much, and stand motionless in one spot, his eyes following a gull vanishing in the sky, or counting the shocks of harvested grain that studded the field.

Before too long there was talk everywhere of Ivan Fyodorovich being a great manager. The aunt was utterly overjoyed with her nephew and never missed an opportunity to boast about him. One day-this was after the harvest was over and, namely, at the end of July-Vasilisa Kashporovna, taking Ivan Fyodorovich by the hand, said with a mysterious air that she now wished to talk with him about a matter that had long occupied her.

"You know, gentle Ivan Fyodorovich," so she began, "that there are eighteen souls on your farmstead; that is according to the census, however, while without it one might count as many as twenty-four. But that's not the point. You know the woods behind our pasture, and you must know the wide meadow beyond that same woods: it measures a little less than fifty acres, and there's so much grass that you could sell more than a hundred roubles' worth a year, especially if, as people say, a cavalry regiment is to be stationed here."

"Of course I know it, Auntie-the grass is very good."

"I know myself that it's very good, but do you know that in reality all that land is yours? Why do you pop your eyes so? Listen, Ivan Fyodorovich! Do you remember Stepan Kuzmich? What am I saying-remember! How could you! You were so little then, you couldn't even say his name! I remember, when I came, just before St. Philip's, 7 I picked you up, and you almost ruined my whole dress. Fortunately, I handed you over to the nanny Matryona just in time. Such a nasty boy you were then!… But that's not the point. All the land beyond our farmstead, and the village of Khor-tyshche itself, belonged to Stepan Kuzmich. Even before you came into the world, I must tell you, he started visiting your mother- true, at times when your father wasn't home. Not that I say it in reproach of her! God rest her soul!-though the dear departed was always unfair to me. But that's not the point. Be that as it may, only Stepan Kuzmich left you a deed of gift for that very estate I've been talking about. But, just between us, your late mother was of a most whimsical character. The devil himself, Lord forgive me the vile word, wouldn't have been able to understand her. What she did with that deed, God alone knows. I simply think it's in the hands of that old bachelor Grigory Grigorievich Storchenko. That fat-bellied rogue got the whole estate. I'm ready to stake God knows what that he concealed the deed."

"Allow me to say, Auntie-isn't that the Storchenko I became acquainted with at the posting station?"

Here Ivan Fyodorovich told of his encounter.

"Who knows about him!" the aunt replied, after pondering a little. "Maybe he's not a scoundrel. True, it's only six months since he moved here to live, not long enough to get to know the man. The old woman, his mother, is a very sensible woman, I've heard, and a great expert at pickling cucumbers, they say. Her serf girls make excellent rugs. But since you say he was nice to you, go and see him! Maybe the old sinner will listen to his conscience and give back what doesn't belong to him. You're welcome to take the britzka, only those cursed children pulled all the nails out in the rear. The coachman Omelko must be told to tack the leather down all over."

"What for, Auntie? I'll take the dogcart you sometimes go hunting in."

At that the conversation ended.

IV The Dinner

At dinnertime Ivan Fyodorovich drove into the village of Khor-tyshche and turned a bit timid as he began to approach the master's house. This house was long and covered not with a thatched roof, such as many neighboring landowners had, but with wood. The two barns in the yard also had wooden roofs; the gates were of oak. Ivan Fyodorovich was like that dandy who, having come to a ball, looks around and sees that everyone is dressed more smartly than he is. Out of deference, he stopped his cart by the barn and went on foot to the porch.

"Ah! Ivan Fyodorovich!" cried the fat Grigory Grigorievich, who was walking about the yard in a frock coat but with no tie, waistcoat, or suspenders. However, even this outfit seemed to burden his corpulent girth, because he was sweating profusely. "Why, you said you'd just greet your aunt and come straight over, and then you didn't!" After which words, Ivan Fyodorovich's lips met with the same familiar pillows.

"It's mostly the cares of the estate… I've come for a moment, sir, on business, as a matter of fact…"

"For a moment? Now, that won't do. Hey, boy!" cried the fat host, and the same boy in the Cossack blouse ran out from the kitchen. "Tell Kasian to lock the gates at once, do you hear, lock them tight! And unharness the gentleman's horses this minute! Please go in, it's so hot here my shirt's soaking wet."

Ivan Fyodorovich, having gone in, resolved not to lose any time, and, despite his timidity, to attack resolutely.

"My aunt had the honor… she told me that a deed of gift from the late Stepan Kuzmich…"

It's hard to describe what a disagreeable look these words produced on the vast face of Grigory Grigorievich.

"By God, I can't hear a thing!" he replied. "I must tell you, I once had a cockroach sitting in my left ear. Those cursed Russians breed cockroaches everywhere in their cottages. No pen can describe what a torment it was. Tickle, tickle, tickle. An old woman helped me with the simplest remedy…"

"I wanted to say…" Ivan Fyodorovich ventured to interrupt, seeing that Grigory Grigorievich deliberately meant to divert their talk to other things, "that the late Stepan Kuzmich's will mentions, so to speak, a deed of gift… according to which, sir, there is owing to me…"

"I know, it's your aunt who's managed to talk you up. It's a lie, by God, a lie! My uncle never made any deed of gift. True, there's mention of some deed in the will, but where is it? No one has produced it. I'm telling you this because I sincerely wish you well. By God, it's a lie!"

Ivan Fyodorovich fell silent, considering that, indeed, it may only have been his aunt's imagination.

"And here comes mama with my sisters!" said Grigory Grigorievich, "which means dinner is ready. Come along!" Whereupon he dragged Ivan Fyodorovich by the arm to a room with a table on which vodka and appetizers stood.

At the same time a little old lady came in, short, a veritable coffee pot in a bonnet, with two young ladies, one fair and one dark. Ivan Fyodorovich, being a well-bred cavalier, went up to kiss the old lady's hand first, and then the hands of the two young ladies.

"This is our neighbor, mama, Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka!" said Grigory Grigorievich.

The old lady looked intently at Ivan Fyodorovich, or perhaps it only seemed that she did. Anyhow, she was kindness itself. It seemed all she wanted was to ask Ivan Fyodorovich how many cucumbers they had pickled for the winter.

"Did you drink some vodka?" the little old lady asked.

"Mama, you must not have had enough sleep," said Grigory Grigorievich. "Who asks a guest whether he's had a drink? Just keep offering, and whether we've drunk or not is our business. Ivan Fyodorovich, if you please, centaury or caraway flavored, which do you prefer? What are you doing standing there, Ivan Ivanovich?" Grigory Grigorievich said, turning around, and Ivan Fyodorovich saw Ivan Ivanovich approaching the vodka in a long-skirted frock coat with an enormous standing collar that covered the nape of his neck completely, so that his head sat in the collar as in a britzka.

Ivan Ivanovich approached the vodka, rubbed his hands, examined the glass well, filled it, held it up to the light, poured all the vodka from the glass into his mouth without swallowing it, rinsed his mouth well with it, after which he swallowed it and, downing some bread with salted mushrooms, turned to Ivan Fyo-dorovich:

"Do I have the honor of speaking with Mr. Shponka, Ivan Fyo-dorovich?"

"Yes, sir," answered Ivan Fyodorovich.

"You've changed considerably, if I may say so, since the time when I first knew you. Yes, indeed," Ivan Ivanovich went on, "I remember you just so high!" Saying which, he held his hand two feet from the floor. "Your late papa, God rest his soul, was a rare man. His melons and watermelons were such as you won't find anywhere nowadays. Here, for instance," he went on, drawing him aside, "they'll serve you melons at table. What sort of melons are they? You don't even want to look at them! Would you believe it, my dear sir, he had watermelons," he said with a mysterious look, spreading his arms as if he wanted to put them around a stout tree, "by God, like that!"

"Let's go to the table!" said Grigory Grigorievich, taking Ivan Fyodorovich by the arm.

Everyone went to the dining room. Grigory Grigorievich sat in his usual place at the head of the table, covering himself with an enormous napkin and looking like the heroes that barbers portray on their signboards. Ivan Fyodorovich, blushing, sat in the place assigned to him, across from the two young ladies; and Ivan Ivanovich did not fail to place himself next to him, heartily rejoicing that he had someone with whom to share his knowledge.

"You shouldn't have taken the pope's nose, Ivan Fyodorovich! It's a turkey!" said the little old lady, addressing Ivan Fyodorovich, who at that moment was being offered a platter by a rustic waiter in a gray tailcoat with a black patch. "Take the back!"

"Mama! no one asked you to interfere!" said Grigory Grig-orievich. "You may be sure our guest knows what to take himself! Take a wing, Ivan Fyodorovich, the other one, with the gizzard! Why did you take so little? Take the thigh! You with the platter, what are you gawking at? Beg! On your knees, scoundrel! Say at once: 'Ivan Fyodorovich! Take the thigh!'"

"Ivan Fyodorovich, take the thigh!" the waiter with the platter bellowed, kneeling down.

"Hm, what sort of turkey is this?" Ivan Ivanovich said in a low voice, with a disdainful look, turning to his neighbor. "This isn't how turkey ought to be! You should see my turkeys! I assure you, one of mine has more fat on it than a dozen of these. Would you believe it, my dear sir, when they walk in the yard it's even disgusting to look at them, they're so fat!…"

"You're lying, Ivan Ivanovich!" said Grigory Grigorievich, who had listened in on his speech.

"I'll tell you," Ivan Ivanovich went on talking to his neighbor in the same way, pretending not to have heard Grigory Grigorievich's words, "last year, when I sent them to Gadyach, I was paid fifty kopecks apiece. And even so I didn't want to sell."

"You're lying, I tell you, Ivan Ivanovich!" Grigory Grigorievich said more loudly, stressing each syllable for better clarity.

But Ivan Ivanovich, pretending it had nothing to do with him, went on in the same way, only much more softly.

"Precisely so, my dear sir, I didn't want to sell. Not a single landowner in Gadyach had…"

"Ivan Ivanovich! you're just stupid and nothing more," Grigory Grigorievich said loudly. "Ivan Fyodorovich knows it all better than you do and is surely not going to believe you."

Here Ivan Ivanovich became thoroughly offended, fell silent, and started packing away the turkey, even though it was not as fat as those that were disgusting to look at.

The noise of knives, spoons, and plates replaced the conversation for a time; but loudest of all was Grigory Grigorievich's sucking out of a lamb's marrowbone.

"Have you read," Ivan Ivanovich asked of Ivan Fyodorovich after a certain silence, sticking his head out of his britzka, " Korobeinikov's

Journey to the Holy Places? 8 A true delight for heart and soul! They don't publish such books anymore. Most regretful, I didn't notice the year."

Ivan Fyodorovich, hearing that the matter concerned a book, began assiduously serving himself sauce.

"It's truly surprising, my dear sir, when you think that a simple tradesman passed through all those places. Nearly two thousand miles, my dear sir! Nearly two thousand miles! Truly, the Lord himself granted him to visit Palestine and Jerusalem."

"So you say," said Ivan Fyodorovich, who had already heard a lot about Jerusalem from his orderly, "that he was also in Jerusalem?…"

"What are you talking about, Ivan Fyodorovich?" Grigory Grigorievich spoke from the other end of the table.

"I, that is, had occasion to observe that there are such remote countries in the world!" said Ivan Fyodorovich, heartily pleased to have uttered so long and difficult a sentence.

"Don't believe him, Ivan Fyodorovich!" said Grigory Grigorievich, not hearing very well. "It's all lies!"

Meanwhile dinner was over. Grigory Grigorievich went to his room, as usual, to have a little snooze; and the guests followed the old hostess and the young ladies to the living room, where the same table on which they had left the vodka when they went to dinner was, as if by some metamorphosis, covered with little dishes of various sorts of preserves and platters with watermelons, cherries, and melons.

Grigory Grigorievich's absence could be noticed in everything. The hostess became more talkative and revealed, on her own, without being asked, a lot of secrets about the making of fruit jellies and the drying of pears. Even the young ladies began to talk; but the fair one, who seemed six years younger than her sister and looked as if she was about twenty-five, was more taciturn.

But Ivan Ivanovich spoke and acted most of all. Being sure that no one would throw him off or confuse him now, he talked about cucumbers, and about planting potatoes, and about what sensible people there had been in olden times-a far cry from those of the present day!-and about how the further it went, the smarter it got, attaining to the invention of the most clever things. In short, this was one of those people who take the greatest pleasure in being occupied with soul-delighting conversation, and will talk about anything that can be talked about. If the conversation touched on important and pious subjects, Ivan Ivanovich sighed after every word, nodding his head slightly; if on estate management, he stuck his head out of his britzka and made such faces that, just looking at them, one could learn how to make pear kvass, how big were the melons he was talking about, and how fat the geese that ran in his yard.

Finally, in the evening, Ivan Fyodorovich managed with great difficulty to say good-bye; and, despite his tractability and their attempts to force him to stay the night, he held to his intention to leave, and left.

V

The Aunt's New Plot

"Well, so, did you coax the deed out of the old villain?" With this question Ivan Fyodorovich was met by his aunt, who had been waiting impatiently for him on the porch for several hours already and finally, unable to help herself, had run out the gate.

"No, auntie!" Ivan Fyodorovich said, getting out of the cart, "Grigory Grigorievich hasn't got any deed."

"And you believed him! He's lying, curse him! There'll come a day, really, when I go and beat him up with my own hands. Oh, I'll get him to lose some of his fat! However, I must talk with our court clerk first, to see whether we can't claim it through the court… But that's not the point now. Well, was the dinner good?"

"Very… yes, auntie, quite."

"Well, so, what were the courses, tell me? The old woman knows how to run her kitchen, I know that."

"Cottage cheese cakes with sour cream, auntie. Stuffed pigeons with sauce…"

"And turkey with plums?" asked the aunt, being herself a great expert at preparing that dish.

"Turkey, too!… Quite beautiful young ladies they are, Grigory Grigorievich's sisters, especially the fair one!"

"Ah!" the aunt said and looked intently at Ivan Fyodorovich, who blushed and dropped his eyes. A new thought quickly flashed in her head. "Well, so?" she asked curiously and keenly, "what kind of eyebrows does she have?"

It will do no harm to note that, in feminine beauty, the aunt always gave first place to the eyebrows.

"Her eyebrows, auntie, are absolutely like you described yourself as having when you were young. And little freckles all over her face."

"Ah!" said the aunt, pleased with Ivan Fyodorovich's observation, though he had had no intention of paying her a compliment by it. "And what kind of dress did she have on?-though in any case it's hard now to find such sturdy fabrics as, for instance, this housecoat I'm wearing is made of. But that's not the point. Well, so, did you talk with her about anything?"

"You mean, that is… me, auntie? Perhaps you're already thinking…"

"And why not? what's so remarkable? it's God's will! Maybe it's your destiny that you and she live as a couple."

"I don't know how you can say that, auntie. It proves that you don't know me at all…"

"Well, now he's offended!" said the aunt. "He's still a young lad," she thought to herself, "doesn't know a thing! They should be brought together, let them get acquainted!"

Here the aunt went to have a look in the kitchen and left Ivan Fyodorovich. But from then on she thought only of seeing her nephew married soon and of fussing over little grandchildren. Nothing but wedding preparations were piling up in her head, and it could be noticed that though she now bustled over everything much more than before, all the same things went rather worse than better. Often, while cooking some pastry, which she generally never entrusted to the cook, she would forget herself and, imagining a little grandson standing by her and asking for cake, would absentmindedly hold out the best piece to him in her hand, while the yard dog, taking advantage of it, would snatch the tasty morsel and bring her out of her reverie with his loud chomping, for which he would always get beaten with the poker. She even neglected her favorite occupations and stopped going hunting, especially after she shot a crow instead of a partridge, something that had never happened to her before.

Finally, some four days later, everyone saw the britzka rolled out of the shed into the yard. The coachman Omelko, also both gardener and watchman, had been banging with the hammer since early morning, tacking down the leather and constantly driving away the dogs that licked the wheels. I consider it my duty to warn readers that this was the same britzka in which Adam drove about; and therefore, if anybody tries to pass some other one off as Adam's britzka, it will be a downright lie, and the britzka will certainly be a false one. It is totally unknown how it was saved from the flood. It must be supposed that there was a special shed for it on Noah's ark. It's a pity readers cannot have a vivid description of its appearance. Suffice it to say that Vasilisa Kashporovna was very pleased with its architecture and always expressed regret over old vehicles becoming outmoded. She liked very much the way the britzka was constructed-that is, slightly lopsided, so that its right side was much higher than the left, because, as she used to say, a man of small stature could get in on one side, and on the other a man of great stature. In any case, some five people of small stature could fit into the britzka, or three of the aunt's size.

Around midday, Omelko, having finished with the britzka, led out of the stable three horses not much younger than the britzka and began tying them to the majestic vehicle with a rope. Ivan Fyodorovich and his aunt got in, one from the left side, the other from the right, and the britzka set off. The muzhiks who happened along their way, seeing such a rich vehicle (the aunt rarely drove out in it), stopped respectfully, doffed their hats, and made low bows. About two hours later the kibitka stopped before the porch-I think there's no need to say-before the porch of Stor-chenko's house. Grigory Grigorievich was not at home. The old lady and the young ladies came out to the living room to meet the guests. The aunt approached with majestic step, put one leg forward with great adroitness, and said loudly:

"I am very pleased, my dear madam, to have the honor of personally paying you my respects. And along with that, allow me to thank you for your hospitality to my nephew, Ivan Fyodorovich, who has given it much praise. Your buckwheat, madam, is excellent! I saw it as I was driving up to the village. And allow me to ask, how many stacks do you get per acre?"

After which followed a general planting of kisses. And once they were settled in the living room, the old hostess began:

"Regarding the buckwheat, I am unable to tell you: that is along Grigory Grigorievich's line. I haven't occupied myself with it for a long time, and I can't-I'm too old! In olden times, I remember, we used to have buckwheat up to the waist. God knows how it is now. Though, anyhow, they say everything's better these days!" Here the old lady sighed, and an observer might have heard in this sigh the sigh of the old eighteenth century.

"I've heard, my dear madam, that your own serf girls make excellent rugs," said Vasilisa Kashporovna, thereby touching the old lady's most sensitive string. At these words she became as if animated and talk poured from her about how yarn ought to be dyed and how to prepare thread for it. From rugs the conversation quickly slipped over to the pickling of cucumbers and the drying of pears. In short, before an hour went by, the two ladies were talking as if they had known each other forever. Vasilisa Kashporovna already began saying many things to her in such a soft voice that Ivan Fyodorovich was unable to make anything out.

"But wouldn't you like to have a look?" said the old hostess, rising.

After her the young ladies and Vasilisa Kashporovna also rose, and they all moved toward the serving-girls' room. The aunt, however, gave a sign to Ivan Fyodorovich to stay and said something softly to the old lady.

"Mashenka!" the old lady said, turning to the fair girl, "stay with our guest and talk with him, so that our guest doesn't get bored!"

The fair young lady stayed and sat down on the sofa. Ivan Fyo- dorovich sat on his chair as if on needles, blushing and looking down; but the young lady seemed not to notice it at all and sat indifferently on the sofa, studying the windows and walls diligently or following with her eyes a cat that timorously ran under the chairs.

Ivan Fyodorovich plucked up his courage a bit and was about to begin a conversation; but it seemed he had lost all his words on the road. Not a single thought occurred to him.

The silence lasted about a quarter of an hour. The young lady went on sitting in the same way.

Finally Ivan Fyodorovich took heart.

"There's quite a lot of flies in summer, miss!" he uttered in a half-trembling voice.

"An incredible lot!" replied the young lady. "My brother specially made a swatter out of mama's old shoe, but there's still quite a lot."

Here the conversation stopped. And in no way could Ivan Fyodorovich find his tongue again.

Finally the mistress, the aunt, and the dark young lady came back. After talking a little while longer, Vasilisa Kashporovna took her leave of the old lady and the young ones, in spite of invitations to stay the night. The old lady and the girls came out to the porch to see the guests off, and for a long time still they kept bowing to the aunt and nephew peeking out of the britzka.

"Well, Ivan Fyodorovich! what did you talk about with the young miss?" the aunt asked on their way.

"Marya Grigorievna is a very modest and well-behaved girl!" said Ivan Fyodorovich.

"Listen, Ivan Fyodorovich! I want to talk seriously with you. You are, thank God, in your thirty-eighth year. You already have a good rank. It's time to think about children! You absolutely must have a wife…"

"What, auntie?" Ivan Fyodorovich cried out, frightened. "What, a wife? No, auntie, for pity's sake… You make me completely ashamed… I've never been married before… I absolutely wouldn't know what to do with her!"

"You'll find out, Ivan Fyodorovich, you'll find out," the aunt said, smiling, and thought to herself: "My, oh, my. He's still quite a young lad, doesn't know a thing!" "Yes, Ivan Fyodorovich," she said aloud, "you won't find a better wife than Marya Grigorievna. Besides, you liked her very much. I've already discussed it at length with the old woman: she's very pleased to see you as her son-in-law. True, we don't know what that sinner of a Grigorievich is going to say. But we won't consider him, just let him try and withhold the dowry, we'll have him in court…"

At that moment the britzka drove into the yard and the ancient nags livened up, sensing their stalls nearby.

"Listen, Omelko! give the horses a good rest first, don't take them for water right after unharnessing, they're hot. Well, Ivan Fyodorovich," the aunt went on, climbing out, "I advise you to think it over well. I still have to run by the kitchen. I forgot to give Solokha orders for supper, and I suppose the worthless woman hasn't thought of it herself."

But Ivan Fyodorovich stood as if thunderstruck. True, Marya Grigorievna was a very nice young lady; but to get married!… that seemed to him so strange, so odd, that he was simply unable to think of it without fear. To live with a wife!… incomprehensible! He wouldn't be alone in his room, there'd be two of them everywhere!… Sweat broke out on his face as he fell to pondering more deeply.

He went to bed earlier than usual, but despite all efforts was unable to fall asleep. At last the longed-for sleep, that universal pacifier, visited him-but what sleep! He had never had more incoherent dreams. First he dreamed that everything around him was noisy, whirling, and he is running, running, not feeling the legs under him…he's already at the end of his strength… Suddenly somebody grabs him by the ear. "Aie! who's that?" "It's me, your wife!" some voice said noisily. And he suddenly woke up. Then he imagined that he was already married, that everything in their house was so odd, so strange: in his room, instead of a single bed, there stood a double bed. On a chair sits the wife. It's strange to him; he doesn't know how to approach her, what to say to her, and he notices that she has a goose face. Inadvertendy, he turns away and sees another wife, also with a goose face. He turns another way-there stands a third wife. Behind him, one more wife. Here anguish came over him. He rushed into the garden; but it was hot in the garden. He took his hat off and saw: a wife is sitting in the hat, too. Sweat broke out on his face. He went to his pocket to get a handkerchief-there's a wife in the pocket as well; he took a wad of cotton out of his ear-there sits another wife… Then suddenly he was hopping on one foot, and his aunt, looking at him, said with an imposing air, "Yes, you must hop, because you're a married man now." He turns to her, but the aunt is no longer an aunt but a belfry. And he feels that someone is pulling him on a rope up the belfry. "Who is pulling me?" Ivan Fyodorovich asks pitifully. "It's me, your wife pulling you, because you're a bell." "No, I'm not a bell, I'm Ivan Fyodorovich!" he cries. "Yes, you're a bell," says the colonel of the P infantry regiment, passing by. Then he suddenly dreamed that his wife was not a person at all but some sort of woolen fabric; that he was in Mogilev, going into a shop. "What kind of fabric would you like?" says the shopkeeper. "Take some wife, it's the most fashionable fabric! very good quality! everybody makes frock coats from it now." The shopkeeper measures and cuts the wife. Ivan Fyodorovich takes it under his arm and goes to a tailor, a Jew. "No," says the Jew, "this is poor fabric! Nobody makes frock coats from it…"

In fear and beside himself, Ivan Fyodorovich woke up. He was streaming with cold sweat.

As soon as he got up in the morning, he at once appealed to the fortune-telling book, at the end of which one virtuous bookseller, in his rare kindness and disinterestedness, had placed an abbreviated interpretation of dreams. But there was absolutely nothing in it even faintly resembling such an incoherent dream.

Meanwhile, in the aunt's head a totally new plot was hatching, which you will hear about in the next chapter.

Old World Landowners

I like very much the modest life of those solitary proprietors of remote estates who in Little Russia are usually known as the old world and who, like decrepit, picturesque little houses, are so nicely mottled and so completely the opposite of a new, smooth building whose walls have not yet been washed by rain, whose roof is not yet covered with green mold, and whose porch does not yet show its red bricks through missing plaster. I like sometimes to descend for a moment into the realm of this remarkably solitary life, where not one desire flies over the paling that surrounds the small yard, over the wattle fence that encloses the garden filled with apple and plum trees, over the village cottages surrounding it, slumped to one side, in the shade of pussy willows, elders, and pear trees. The life of their modest owners is quiet, so quiet that for a moment you forget yourself and think that the passions, desires, and restlessness produced by the evil spirit who troubles the world do not exist at all, and that you saw them only in a splendid, shining dream. From here I can see a low house with a gallery of small, blackened wooden posts running all the way round it, so that it would be possible in time of hail and thunder to close the shutters without getting wet by rain. Behind it, a fragrant bird cherry, whole rows of low fruit trees drowning in the purple of cherries and the ruby sea of plums covered with a leaden bloom; a branching maple in the shadow of which a rug has been spread for resting on; in front of the house, a vast yard of low, fresh grass, with a beaten path from the barn to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the master's quarters; a long-necked goose drinking water with her young, downy-soft goslings; the paling hung with strings of dried pears and apples and with rugs airing out; a cart full of melons standing by the barn; an unharnessed ox lying lazily beside it-all this has an inexplicable charm for me, perhaps because I no longer see it, and because everything we are parted from is dear to us. Be that as it may, even as my britzka drove up to the porch of this little house, my soul would assume a remarkably pleasant and calm state; the horses would trot merrily to the porch, the coachman would most calmly climb down from the box and fill his pipe as if he had come to his own house; the very barking set up by the phlegmatic Rustys, Rovers, and Fidos was pleasant to my ears. But most of all I liked the owners of these modest corners themselves, the little old men, the little old women who came solicitously to meet me. Their faces come back to me even now, in the noise and crowd, amid fashionable tailcoats, and then suddenly I am overcome by reverie and have vision^ of the past. On their faces there was always written such kindness, such cordiality and pure-heartedness, that you would unwittingly renounce all your bold dreams, at least for a short while, and pass imperceptibly into lowly bucolic life.

To this day I cannot forget an old couple from times past, who, alas, are no more, yet my soul is still filled with pity and my feelings are strangely wrung when I imagine myself coming again some day to their former, now-deserted dwelling and seeing a cluster of tumbledown cottages, an untended pond, an overgrown ditch in the place where the little low house used to stand-and nothing more. Sad! I feel sad beforehand! But let us turn to the story.

Afanasy Ivanovich Tovstogub and Pulkheria Ivanovna, the Tov-stogub wife, as the neighboring peasants called her, were the old folk I was beginning to tell about. If I were a painter and wanted to portray Philemon and Baucis 1 on canvas, I would never choose any other original than them. Afanasy Ivanovich was sixty years old, Pulkheria Ivanovna fifty-five. Afanasy Ivanovich was tall, always went about in a sheepskin coat covered with camlet, sat hunched over, and almost always smiled, whether talking or merely listening. Pulkheria Ivanovna was rather serious, she hardly ever laughed, but there was so much kindness written in her face and eyes, so much readiness to treat you to the best of everything they had, that you would surely have found a smile much too sugary on her kind face. The pattern of light wrinkles on their faces was so pleasant that an artist would surely have stolen it. By it one seemed able to read their whole life, the serene, calm life led by old, native-born, simple-hearted and yet wealthy families, who are always such a contrast to those low Little Russians who push their way up from tar-makers and dealers, fill the courts and government offices like locusts, rip the last kopeck out of their own compatriots, flood Petersburg with pettifoggers, finally make some fortune, and to their last name, which ends in o, solemnly add the letter v. 2 No, like all the ancient and native-born families of Little Russia, they bore no resemblance to these despicable and pathetic creatures.

It was impossible to look at their mutual love without sympathy. They never spoke to each other informally but always with respect, as Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna. "Was it you who went through the seat of the chair, Afanasy Ivanovich?" "No matter, don't be angry, Pulkheria Ivanovna, it was me." They never had children, and therefore all their affection was focused on themselves. Once, when he was young, Afanasy Ivanovich had served in the volunteer cavalry, later he became a staff major, but that was very long ago, a bygone thing, Afanasy Ivanovich himself hardly ever recalled it. Afanasy Ivanovich had married at the age of thirty, when he was a fine fellow and wore an embroidered uniform; he had even abducted Pulkheria Ivanovna rather adroitly when her relations refused to give her to him; but of that, too, he remembered very little, or at least never spoke.

All these long-past, extraordinary events were replaced by a quiet and solitary life, by those drowsy and at the same time harmonious reveries which you experience sitting on a village bal- cony overlooking the garden, when a wonderful rain makes a luxuriant splashing on the leaves, pouring down in bubbling streams and casting a drowsy spell over your limbs, and meanwhile a rainbow steals from behind the trees and like a half-ruined arch shines with its seven muted colors in the sky. Or when you are rocked by a carriage bobbing between green shrubs, and a steppe quail throbs, and fragrant grass together with wildflowers and ears of wheat poke through the doors of the carriage, striking you pleasantly on the hands and face.

He always listened with a pleasant smile to the guests who came to see him, and sometimes spoke himself, but mainly to ask questions. He was not one of those old people who make a nuisance of themselves, eternally praising the old days or denouncing the new. On the contrary, in questioning you, he showed great curiosity and concern for the circumstances of your own life, its successes and failures, which always interest all kindly old men, though it somewhat resembled the curiosity of a child who, while talking to you, studies your watch fob. In those moments his face, one might say, breathed kindness.

The rooms of the house in which our old folk lived were small, low, such as one meets among old world people. In each room there was an enormous stove that took up almost a third of it. These rooms were terribly warm, because Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna were both very fond of warmth. The fireboxes were all in the front hall, which was always filled nearly to the ceiling with the straw customarily used instead of wood in Little Russia. The crackling of this burning straw and its light made the front hall very pleasant on a winter evening, when ardent youths, chilled in the pursuit of some swarthy beauty, came running in clapping their hands. The walls of the rooms were adorned with several paintings, big and small, in old-fashioned narrow frames. I'm certain that the hosts themselves had long forgotten their content, and if some had been taken away, they surely would not have noticed it. There were two large oil portraits. One of them represented some bishop, the other Peter III. 3 The Duchess of La Valliиre, 4 stained by flies, looked out from a narrow frame.

Around the windows and over the door there were many small pictures, such as one somehow gets used to regarding as spots on the wall and therefore simply does not look at. The floors in almost all the rooms were of clay, but it was beaten down so neatly and kept so clean, as surely no parquet is kept in any rich house where a drowsy gendeman in livery lazily does the sweeping.

Pulkheria Ivanovna's room was all filled with chests, boxes, little boxes, and little chests. A multitude of little bundles and bags with flower, vegetable, and watermelon seeds hung on the walls. A multitude of balls of yarn of various colors, of scraps from old dresses made in the course of half a century, was tucked into the corners of the chests and between them. Pulkheria Ivanovna was a great manager and collected everything, sometimes without knowing of what use it would be later.

But the most remarkable thing in the house was the singing doors. As soon as morning came, the singing of the doors sounded throughout the house. I'm unable to say why they sang-whether it was the fault of rusty hinges, or the workman who made them concealed some secret in them-but the remarkable thing was that each door had its own special voice: the door to the bedroom sang in the highest treble, the dining room door in a hoarse bass, while the one in the front hall produced some strange cracked and at the same time moaning sound, so that, listening attentively, one could finally hear quite clearly: "My, oh, my, how cold I am!" I know that many people dislike this sound very much; but I have a great love for it, and if I happen now to hear the occasional creaking of a door, it immediately smells of the village to me, of the low little room lit by a candle in an old-fashioned candlestick, of supper already set on the table, of the dark May night gazing at the laid table through the open window from the garden, of the nightingale showering the garden, the house, and the distant river with his trills, of the fright and rustling of the branches… and, God, what a long string of memories comes to me then!

The chairs in the room were wooden, massive, as is usual with old-time things; they all had high, carved backs, natural, with no varnish or paint; they were not even upholstered, and somewhat resembled the chairs on which bishops sit to this day. Triangular tables in the corners, a rectangular one in front of the sofa, and a mirror in a narrow gilt frame with carved leaves, which flies had covered with black specks, a rug in front of the sofa with birds looking like flowers and flowers looking like birds-these were about all the furnishings in the unpretentious house where my old couple lived.

The female serfs' quarters were crowded with young and not-so-young girls in striped shirts, whom Pulkheria Ivanovna sometimes gave some trifles to sew or set to sorting out berries, but who mostly slept and raided the kitchen. Pulkheria Ivanovna considered it necessary to keep them in the house and stricdy supervised their morals. But, to her great astonishment, before a few months went by, one of her girls would grow much plumper at the waist, and this would seem the more astonishing since there were almost no bachelors in the place, except perhaps for the houseboy, who went around barefoot in a gray short-tailed coat and whenever he wasn't eating was sure to be asleep. Pulkheria Ivanovna usually reprimanded the guilty girl and gave strict orders that no such thing should happen again. On the windowpanes a terrible number of flies pinged, overwhelmed completely by the heavy basso of a bumblebee, occasionally accompanied by the piercing shrieks of wasps; but as soon as the candles were brought in, the whole throng would go to sleep and cover the ceiling like a black cloud.

Afanasy Ivanovich took very little care of the management, though all the same he did sometimes go out to the mowers and reapers and watched their work quite closely; the whole burden of government lay on Pulkheria Ivanovna. Pulkheria Ivanovna's management consisted in a ceaseless locking and unlocking of the storehouse, in pickling, drying, and stewing a numberless multitude of fruits and plants. Her house was the perfect likeness of a chemical laboratory. Under the apple tree a fire was forever burning, and the iron tripod was never without a cauldron or copper pot on it, for preserves, jellies, fruit pastes made with honey, sugar, and I don't remember what else. Under another tree the coachman was forever distilling vodka in a copper still, with peach leaves, bird-cherry flowers, centaury, cherry pits, and by the end of the process was quite unable to move his tongue, pouring out such nonsense that Pulkheria Ivanovna could not understand a thing and would send him to the kitchen to sleep. So much of this stuff was cooked, pickled, and dried that Pulkheria Ivanovna would finally have drowned the yard in it-because she liked to prepare things for laying away beyond what she counted on using-if a good half of it hadn't been eaten by the household serf girls, who would get into the storehouse and gorge themselves so terribly that they would spend whole days afterwards groaning and complaining about their stomachs.

As for the tillage and other aspects of management that lay outside the household, Pulkheria Ivanovna had little opportunity of entering into them. The steward, together with the village headman, stole unmercifully. They made a custom of entering their master's forests as if they were their own; they built a lot of sleds and sold them at the local fair; besides that, they sold all the big oak trees to the neighboring Cossacks to be cut down for their mills. Only once did Pulkheria Ivanovna have a wish to inspect her forests. For that purpose a droshky was harnessed with enormous leather aprons which, as soon as the coachman snapped the reins and the horses, veterans of the old militia, 5 started from their place, filled the air with strange noises, so that one could suddenly hear a flute, a tambourine, and a drum; every little nail and iron staple set up such a clangor that even out at the mills one could hear the mistress leaving her yard, though it was nearly a mile and a half away. Pulkheria Ivanovna could not fail to notice the terrible devastation in the forest and the loss of the oaks, which she knew to have been hundreds of years old when she was a child.

"Why is it, Nichipor," she said, addressing her steward, who was right there, "that with you the oaks have grown so sparse? Look out that the hair on your head doesn't grow sparse, too."

"Why sparse?" the steward replied. "They perished! Perished just like that-thunder beat them down, worms gnawed at them- they perished, ma'am, perished."

Pulkheria Ivanovna, thoroughly satisfied with that answer, went home and gave instructions to double the watch in the garden on her Spanish cherries and the big winter bergamots.

Those worthy rulers, the steward and the headman, thought it quite unnecessary to bring all the flour into the master's own barn and that half was enough; in the end, even the half that was delivered was either moldy or damp and had been rejected at the fair. But however much the steward and the headman stole, however much everyone in the household stuffed his face, from the housekeeper to the pigs, who consumed a terrible quantity of plums and apples, and often shoved the trees with their snouts to shake down a whole rain of fruit; however much the sparrows and crows pecked up; however much all the household people took as presents to their kin in other villages, even stealing old linen and yarn from the storerooms, all of which returned to the universal source, that is, the tavern; however much visitors, their phlegmatic coachmen and lackeys stole-the blessed earth produced everything in such abundance, and Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna needed so little, that all this terrible plundering seemed to go entirely unnoticed in their management.

The two old folk, as was the ancient custom of old world landowners, liked very much to eat. As soon as day broke (they always rose early) and the doors started their discordant concert, they would be at the table having coffee. After having his coffee, Afanasy Ivanovich would go out to the front door and, shaking his handkerchief, say, "Shoo, shoo! Off the porch, geese!" In the yard he would usually run into the steward. He would enter into his usual conversation with him, ask in great detail about the work, and come out with such observations and instructions as would astonish anyone with his extraordinary knowledge of management; and a newcomer would not even dare think it possible to steal from such a keen-sighted master. But his steward was not gun-shy, he knew how to answer and, even more so, how to handle his job.

After that, Afanasy Ivanovich would go back in and, approaching Pulkheria Ivanovna, would say:

"Well, now, Pulkheria Ivanovna, isn't it time we had a little bite of something?"

"What could we have now, Afanasy Ivanovich?-unless it was shortcake with lard, or poppyseed pirozhki, 6 or maybe some pickled mushrooms?"

"Why not the mushrooms, or else the pirozhki?" Afanasy Ivanovich would reply, and a tablecloth with pirozhki and mushrooms would suddenly appear.

An hour before dinner, Afanasy Ivanovich would have another snack, drink an old-fashioned silver cup of vodka, followed by mushrooms, various dried fish, and so on. Dinner was served at twelve noon. Besides platters and sauce boats, there stood on the table a multitude of pots with sealed lids to keep some savory dishes of old-fashioned cookery from losing their flavor. At dinner the conversation was about subjects most closely related to dining.

"It seems to me," Afanasy Ivanovich would say, "that this kasha 7 is a wee bit burnt-don't you think so, Pulkheria Ivanovna?"

"No, Afanasy Ivanovich, put more butter on it, then it won't seem burnt, or else pour some mushroom sauce on it."

"Why not?" Afanasy Ivanovich would say, holding out his plate, "let's try it and see."

After dinner Afanasy Ivanovich would have a little hour of rest, after which Pulkheria Ivanovna would bring a sliced watermelon and say:

"Here, Afanasy Ivanovich, taste what a good watermelon it is."

"Never mind that it's red inside, Pulkheria Ivanovna," Afanasy Ivanovich would say, accepting a none-too-small slice, "sometimes it's no good even when it's red."

But the watermelon would immediately disappear. After that Afanasy Ivanovich would also eat a few pears and go for a walk in the garden with Pulkheria Ivanovna. On returning home, Pulkheria Ivanovna would go about her duties, and he would sit under the gallery roof facing the yard and watch the storehouse ceaselessly revealing and covering its insides, and the serf girls jostling each other, bringing heaps of all sorts of stuff in and out in wooden boxes, sieves, trays, and other containers for fruit. A little later he would send for Pulkheria Ivanovna or go to her himself and say:

"What is there that I might eat, Pulkheria Ivanovna?"

"What is there?" Pulkheria Ivanovna would say, "unless I go and tell them to bring you some berry dumplings that I asked them to keep specially for you?"

"That's nice," Afanasy Ivanovich would answer.

"Or maybe you'd like some custard?"

"That's good," Afanasy Ivanovich would answer. After which it would all be brought at once and duly eaten up.

Before supper Afanasy Ivanovich would again snack on something or other. At nine-thirty supper was served. After supper they would all go to bed again, and a general silence would settle over this active yet quiet little corner. The room in which Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna slept was so hot that it was a rare person who could spend any length of time in it. But on top of that, for even greater warmth, Afanasy Ivanovich slept on the stove, 8 though the intense heat often made him get up several times during the night and pace the room. Sometimes Afanasy Ivanovich groaned as he walked. Then Pulkheria Ivanovna would ask:

"Why are you groaning, Afanasy Ivanovich?"

"God knows, Pulkheria Ivanovna, feels like I've got a bit of a stomachache," Afanasy Ivanovich would say.

"Hadn't you better eat something, Afanasy Ivanovich?"

"I don't know if that would be good, Pulkheria Ivanovna! Anyhow, what might I eat?"

"Some buttermilk, or stewed dried pears?"

"Why not, just so as to try it?" Afanasy Ivanovich would say.

A sleepy serf girl would go and rummage in the cupboards, and Afanasy Ivanovich would eat a little plateful, after which he usually said:

"There, that feels better."

Sometimes, when the weather was clear and the rooms were well heated, Afanasy Ivanovich got merry and liked to poke fun at Pulkheria Ivanovna and talk about something different.

"And if our house suddenly caught fire, Pulkheria Ivanovna," he would say, "what would we do then?"

"God preserve us from that!" Pulkheria Ivanovna would say, crossing herself.

"Well, but supposing our house caught fire, where would we go then?"

"God knows what you're saying, Afanasy Ivanovich! How could our house burn down? God won't let it."

"Well, but what if it did burn down?"

"Well, then we'd move into the kitchen wing. You could take the housekeeper's little room for a while."

"And if the kitchen wing burned down, too?"

"Now, really! God wouldn't permit such a thing as both house and kitchen burning down at once! Well, then we'd have the storehouse till the new house was built."

"And if the storehouse burns down as well?"

"God knows what you're saying! I don't even want to listen to you! It's a sin to say it, and God punishes that sort of talk."

But Afanasy Ivanovich, pleased at having poked fun at Pulkheria Ivanovna, would smile, sitting on his chair.

But for me the old folk seemed most interesting when they were having guests. Then everything in their house acquired a different air. These good people, one might say, lived for their guests. The very best they had was all brought out. They vied with each other in trying to treat you to everything their farm had produced. But the most pleasant thing for me was that they were obliging without being cloying. This ready cordiality was so meekly expressed on their faces, was so becoming in them, that willy-nilly you would agree to their requests. It proceeded from the clear, serene simplicity of their kind and artless souls. This cordiality was a far cry from what you're treated to by a clerk in a government office who owes his success to you, calls you his benefactor, and cowers at your feet. A guest was never allowed to leave the same day: he absolutely had to spend the night.

"You can't set out so late on such a long journey!" Pulkheria Ivanovna always said (the guest usually lived two or three miles away).

"Of course not," Afanasy Ivanovich would say, "who knows what may happen: robbers may fall upon you, or some other bad men."

"God preserve us from robbers!" Pulkheria Ivanovna would say.

"Why talk of such things before going to bed at night? Robbers or no robbers, it's dark, it's not good at all to go. And your coachman, I know your coachman, he's so weak and small, any nag can beat him; and besides, he's surely tipsy by now and sleeping somewhere."

And the guest absolutely had to stay. However, evening in a low, warm room, cordial, warming, and lulling conversation, steaming hot food served on the table, always nourishing and expertly cooked, would be his reward. I can see Afanasy Ivanovich as if it were right now, sitting hunched on a chair, smiling his usual smile and listening to the guest with attention and even pleasure! Often the talk ran to politics. The guest, who also very rarely left his estate, frequently offered his surmises with an important look and a mysterious expression on his face, saying that the French had secretly agreed with the English to turn Bonaparte loose on Russia again, or else simply talked of war being imminent, and then Afanasy Ivanovich often said, as if not looking at Pulkheria Ivanovna:

"I'm thinking of going to war myself. Why shouldn't I go to war?

"He's off again!" Pulkheria Ivanovna would interrupt. "Don't believe him," she would say, addressing the guest. "How can he go to war, old as he is? The first soldier will shoot him down! By God, he will! He'll just take aim and shoot him down."

"So what," Afanasy Ivanovich would say, "I'll shoot him down, too.

"Just hear him talk!" Pulkheria Ivanovna would pick up. "How can he go to war? His pistols got rusty long ago sitting in the closet. You should see them: the way they are, the powder will blow them up before they do any shooting. He'll hurt his hands, and disfigure his face, and stay crippled forever."

"So what," Afanasy Ivanovich would say, "I'll buy myself a new weapon. I'll take a saber or a Cossack lance."

"He makes it all up. It just comes into his head and he starts talking," Pulkheria Ivanovna would pick up vexedly "I know he's joking, but even so, it's unpleasant to listen. He always says something like that, sometimes you listen and listen, and then you get scared."

But Afanasy Ivanovich, pleased to have given Pulkheria Ivanovna a little fright, would be laughing as he sat hunched on his chair.

To me Pulkheria Ivanovna was most entertaining at the moments when she was treating a guest to hors d'ceuvres.

"This," she would say, unstopping a decanter, "is vodka infused with yarrow and sage. If someone has an ache in the shoulder blades or the lower back, it's a great help. This one is with centaury: if you have a ringing in the ears or blotches on your face, it's a great help. And this one's distilled with peach stones; here, take a glass, what a wonderful smell! If someone bumps the corner of a cupboard or a table as he's getting out of bed and gets a lump on his forehead, it's enough just to drink one little glass before dinner and it will go away as if by magic, that same minute, as if he'd never had it."

This was followed by the same kind of report on other decanters, that almost all of them had some healing properties. Having loaded the guest with all this pharmacy, she would lead him to a multitude of plates.

"These are mushrooms with thyme! These are with cloves and walnuts! A Turkish woman taught me how to pickle them, back when we still had Turkish prisoners. 9 She was such a nice woman, it didn't even show that she confessed the Turkish faith. She went about just as we do, only she didn't eat pork, said it was somehow forbidden by their law. These are mushrooms with black currant leaves and nutmeg! And these are big gourds done in vinegar: it's the first time I've tried it, I don't know how they came out, it's Father Ivan's secret. First you spread some oak leaves in a small barrel, then put in some pepper and saltpeter, and some hawkweed flowers, too-you just take the flowers and spread them stems up. And these are pirozhki! cheese pirozhki! with poppyseed juice! And these are the ones Afanasy Ivanovich likes best, with cabbage and buckwheat."

"Yes," added Afanasy Ivanovich, "I like them very much. They're tender and slightly tart."

Generally, Pulkheria Ivanovna was in exceptionally good spirits whenever they had guests. A kindly old woman! She belonged entirely to her guests. I loved visiting them, and though I overate terribly, as all their visitors did, and though it was very bad for me, nevertheless I was always glad to go there. However, I think that the very air of Little Russia may possess some special quality that aids digestion, because if anyone here tried to eat like that, he would undoubtedly wind up lying not in his bed but on the table. 10

Kindly old folk! But my narrative is approaching a very sad event which changed the life of this peaceful corner forever. This event will seem the more striking because it proceeded from a quite unimportant incident. But, in the strange order of things, it is always insignificant causes that give birth to great events, and, vice versa, great undertakings have ended in insignificant consequences. Some conqueror gathers all the forces of his state, spends several years making war, his generals cover themselves with glory, and finally it all ends with the acquisition of a scrap of land on which there isn't even room enough to plant potatoes; while, on the other hand, two sausage makers from two towns start fighting over nothing, other towns get involved in the quarrel, then villages and hamlets, then the whole country. But let's drop this reasoning: it's out of place here. Besides, I don't like reasoning that remains mere reasoning.

Pulkheria Ivanovna had a little gray cat that almost always lay curled up at her feet. Pulkheria Ivanovna sometimes patted her and tickled her neck with her finger, which the pampered cat arched as high as she could. It cannot be said that Pulkheria Ivanovna loved her all that much, she was simply attached to her, being used to seeing her all the time. Afanasy Ivanovich, however, often poked fun at this attachment:

"I don't know what you find in a cat, Pulkheria Ivanovna. What good is it? If you had a dog, it would be a different matter: a dog you can take hunting, but what good is a cat?"

"Be quiet, Afanasy Ivanovich," Pulkheria Ivanovna would say, "you just like to talk, that's all. Dogs are untidy, dogs make a mess, dogs break everything, but cats are gentle creatures, they won't do anyone any harm."

However, cats and dogs were all the same for Afanasy Ivanovich; he just said it to poke a little fun at Pulkheria Ivanovna.

Behind their garden was a big woods that had been wholly spared by their enterprising steward-perhaps because the sound of the ax would have come to Pulkheria Ivanovna's ears. It was dense, overgrown, the old tree trunks were covered with rampant hazel bushes and looked like shaggy pigeon legs. This woods was inhabited by wild cats. Wild forest cats should not be confused with those dashing fellows who run over the rooftops of houses. City dwellers, despite their tough character, are far more civilized than the inhabitants of the forests. The latter, on the contrary, are grim and savage folk; they always go about thin, scrawny, meowing in coarse, untrained voices. They sometimes dig subterranean passages under barns and steal lard; they even come right into the kitchen, suddenly jumping through an open window when they notice that the cook has gone out to the bushes. Lofty feelings are generally unknown to them; they live by plunder and kill young sparrows right in their nests. These cats spent a long time sniffing at Pulkheria Ivanovna's meek little cat through a hole under the barn and finally lured her away, as a troop of soldiers lures away a foolish peasant girl. Pulkheria Ivanovna noticed the cat's disappearance and sent people to look for her, but the cat was not to be found. Three days passed; Pulkheria Ivanovna felt sorry, then finally forgot all about it. One day when, after inspecting her kitchen garden, she was coming back with fresh cucumbers she had picked for Afanasy Ivanovich with her own hand, her hearing was struck by a most pitiful meowing. She said, as if instinctively: "Kitty, kitty!" and suddenly out of the weeds came her gray cat, thin, scrawny; it was clear that she had had nothing in her mouth for several days. Pulkheria Ivanovna kept calling her, but the cat stood in front of her, meowing and not daring to come near; it was clear that she had grown quite wild in the meantime. Pulkheria Ivanovna went on ahead of her, still calling the cat, who timorously followed her as far as the fence. Finally, seeing old familiar places, she went inside. Pulkheria Ivanovna at once ordered that she be given milk and meat, and, sitting before her, delighted in the greed with which her poor favorite ate piece after piece and lapped up the milk. The gray fugitive got fat before her eyes and no longer ate so greedily. Pulkheria Ivanovna reached out to pat her, but the ungrateful thing must have grown too used to the predatory cats, or picked up romantic ideas about love in poverty being better than any mansion, since the wild cats were dirt poor; be that as it may, she jumped out the window, and none of the servants could catch her.

The old woman fell to pondering. "It's my death come for me!" she said to herself, and nothing would distract her. All day she was sad. In vain did Afanasy Ivanovich joke and try to find out why she was suddenly so sorrowful: Pulkheria Ivanovna either would not reply or her replies failed totally to satisfy Afanasy Ivanovich. The next day she looked noticeably thinner.

"What's wrong, Pulkheria Ivanovna? You're not sick?"

"No, I'm not sick, Afanasy Ivanovich! I want to announce a special event to you: I know that I will die this summer; my death has already come for me!"

Afanasy Ivanovich's mouth twisted somehow painfully. He tried, however, to overcome the sad feeling in his soul, and said with a smile:

"God knows what you're saying, Pulkheria Ivanovna! You must have drunk peach vodka instead of your usual decoction of herbs."

"No, Afanasy Ivanovich, I didn't drink peach vodka," said Pulkheria Ivanovna.

And Afanasy Ivanovich felt sorry that he had poked fun at Pulkheria Ivanovna, and he looked at her and a tear hung on his eyelash.

"I ask you to carry out my will, Afanasy Ivanovich," said Pulkheria Ivanovna. "When I die, bury me by the church fence. Put my gray dress on me, the one with little flowers on a brown background. Don't put the satin dress on me, the one with the raspberry stripes: a dead woman doesn't need such a dress. What's the good of it? And you could use it: make a fancy dressing gown out of it for when guests come, so that you can look decent when you receive them."

"God knows what you're saying, Pulkheria Ivanovna!" said Afanasy Ivanovich. "Death's a long way off, and you're already frightening us with such talk."

"No, Afanasy Ivanovich, I know now when my death will be.

But don't grieve over me: I'm already an old woman and have lived enough. You're old, too, we'll soon see each other in the next world."

But Afanasy Ivanovich wept like a baby.

"It's sinful to cry, Afanasy Ivanovich! Don't sin and make God angry with your sorrow. I'm not sorry to die. One thing I'm sorry about," a deep sigh interrupted her speech for a moment, "I'm sorry I don't know who to leave you with, who will take care of you when I die. You're like a little child: whoever looks after you must love you."

Here such deep, such devastating heart's pity showed on her face that I think no one could have looked on her at that moment with indifference.

"Watch out, Yavdokha," she said, addressing the housekeeper, whom she had sent for on purpose, "when I die, you must look after the master, cherish him like your own eye, like your own child. See that they cook what he likes in the kitchen. Always give him clean linen and clothes; dress him decently when there happen to be guests, or else he may come out in an old dressing gown, because even now he often forgets which are feast days and which are ordinary. Don't take your eyes off him, Yavdokha, I'll pray for you in the other world, and God will reward you. So don't forget, Yavdokha. You're old now, you don't have long to live, you mustn't heap sin on your soul. If you don't look after him, you won't be happy in this life. I'll ask God personally not to give you a good end. You'll be unhappy yourself, and your children will be unhappy, and none of your posterity will have God's blessing in anything."

The poor old woman! At that moment she was thinking neither of the great moment ahead of her, nor of her soul, nor of her future life; she was thinking only of her poor companion with whom she had spent her life and whom she was leaving orphaned and unprotected. With extraordinary efficiency, she arranged everything in such a way that afterwards Afanasy Ivanovich would not notice her absence. Her certainty of imminent death was so strong and her state of mind was so set on it that, in fact, a few days later she lay down and could no longer take any food. Afanasy

Ivanovich turned all attention and never left her bedside. "Maybe you'll eat something, Pulkheria Ivanovna?" he would say, looking anxiously in her eyes. But Pulkheria Ivanovna would not say anything. Finally, after a long silence, she made as if to say something, moved her lips-and her breath flew away.

Afanasy Ivanovich was completely amazed. The thing seemed so wild to him that he did not even weep. With dull eyes he gazed at her as if not understanding what this corpse could mean.

The dead woman was laid on the table, dressed in the dress she herself had appointed, with her hands crossed and a candle placed in them-he looked at it all insensibly. Many people of various ranks filled the yard, many guests came to the funeral, long tables were set up in the yard; kutya, 11 liqueurs, pies covered them in heaps; the guests talked, wept, gazed at the deceased, discussed her qualities, looked at him-but he viewed it all strangely. The deceased was finally taken up and borne away, people flocked behind, and he, too, followed her. The priests were in full vestments, the sun shone, nursing infants wept in their mothers' arms, larks sang, children in smocks ran and frolicked on the road. Finally the coffin was placed over the hole, he was told to go up and kiss the dead woman for the last time; he went up, kissed her, tears came to his eyes, but some sort of insensible tears. The coffin was lowered down, the priest took the spade and threw in the first handful of earth, in a deep, drawn-out chorus the reader and two sextons sang "Memory Eternal" 12 under the clear, cloudless sky, the workmen took up their spades, and earth now covered the hole smoothly-at that moment he made his way to the front; everyone parted, allowing him to pass, wishing to know his intentions. He raised his eyes, looked around dully, and said: "Well, so you've buried her already! What for?!" He stopped and did not finish his speech.

But when he returned home, when he saw that his room was empty, that even the chair on which Pulkheria Ivanovna used to sit had been taken away-he wept, wept hard, wept inconsolably, and tears poured in streams from his lusterless eyes.

That was five years ago. What grief is not taken away by time? What passion will survive an unequal battle with it? I knew a man in the bloom of his still youthful powers, filled with true nobility and virtue, I knew him when he was in love, tenderly, passionately, furiously, boldly, modestly, and before me, almost before my eyes, the object of his passion-tender, beautiful as an angel-was struck down by insatiable death. I never saw such terrible fits of inner suffering, such furious, scorching anguish, such devouring despair as shook the unfortunate lover. I never thought a man could create such a hell for himself, in which there would be no shadow, no image, nothing in the least resembling hope… They tried to keep an eye on him; they hid all instruments he might have used to take his own life. Two weeks later he suddenly mastered himself: he began to laugh, to joke; freedom was granted him, and the first thing he did with it was buy a pistol. One day his family was terribly frightened by the sudden sound of a shot. They ran into the room and saw him lying with his brains blown out. A doctor who happened to be there, whose skill was on everyone's lips, saw signs of life in him, found that the wound was not quite mortal, and the man, to everybody's amazement, was healed. The watch on him was increased still more. Even at table they did not give him a knife and tried to take away from him anything that he might strike himself with; but a short while later he found a new occasion and threw himself under the wheels of a passing carriage. His arm and leg were crushed; but again they saved him. A year later I saw him in a crowded room; he sat at the card table gaily saying "Petite ouverte," 13 keeping one card turned down, and behind him, leaning on the back of his chair, stood his young wife, who was sorting through his chips.

As I said, five years had passed since Pulkheria Ivanovna's death when I visited those parts and stopped at Afanasy Ivanovich's farmstead to call on my old neighbor, with whom I once used to spend the days pleasantly and always ate too much of the excellent food prepared by the cordial hostess. As I drove up to the place, the house seemed twice as old to me, the peasant cottages lay completely on their sides-no doubt just like their owners; the paling and wattle fence were completely destroyed, and I myself saw the cook pulling sticks out of it for kindling the stove, when she had only to go two extra steps to get to the brushwood piled right there. With sadness I drove up to the porch; the same Rustys and Rovers, blind now or with lame legs, began barking, raising their wavy tails stuck with burrs. An old man came out to meet me. It was he! I recognized him at once; but he was now twice as hunched as before. He recognized me and greeted me with the same familiar smile. I followed him inside; everything there seemed as before, but I noticed a strange disorder in it all, some tangible absence of something or other; in short, I sensed in myself those strange feelings that come over us when for the first time we enter the dwelling of a widower whom we had known before inseparable from his lifelong companion. These feelings are like seeing before us a man we had always known in good health, now lacking a leg. The absence of the solicitous Pulkheria Ivanovna could be seen in everything: at the table one of the knives was lacking a handle; the dishes were no longer prepared with the same artfulness. I did not want to ask about the management and was even afraid to look at the farm works.

When we sat down to eat, a serf girl covered Afanasy Ivanovich with a napkin-and it was very well she did, because otherwise he would have spilled sauce all over his dressing gown. I tried to entertain him by telling him various bits of news; he listened with the same smile, but at times his look was completely insensible, and thoughts did not wander but vanished into it. Often he would raise a spoonful of kasha and, instead of putting it into his mouth, put it to his nose; instead of stabbing a piece of chicken with his fork, he stabbed the decanter, and then the serf girl would take his hand and guide it to the chicken. Sometimes we had to wait several minutes for the next dish. Afanasy Ivanovich would notice it himself and say, "Why are they so long in bringing the food?" But I could see through the chink of the door that the boy who served the food gave no thought to it at all and was asleep with his head on the bench.

"This is the dish," Afanasy Ivanovich said when we were served mnishki 14 with sour cream, "this is the dish," he went on, and I noticed that his voice was beginning to tremble and a tear was about to come from his leaden eyes, while he made every effort to hold it back, "this is the dish that the la-, the la-, the late…" and all at once the tears poured down. His hand fell on the plate, the plate overturned, fell off and broke, sauce got all over him; he sat insensibly, insensibly holding his spoon, and like a stream, like a ceaselessly flowing fountain, the tears poured down in torrents onto the napkin covering him.

"God!" I thought, looking at him, "five years of all-destroying time-already an insensible old man, an old man whose life seems never to have been disturbed by a single strong feeling of the soul, whose whole life seems to have consisted entirely of sitting on a high-backed chair, of eating little dried fish and pears, and of good-natured storytelling-and such a long, burning sorrow! And which is stronger in us-passion or habit? Or do all our strong impulses, all the whirlwind of our desires and boiling passions, come merely from our bright youth and seem deep and devastating only because of that?" Be it as it may, just then all our passions seemed childish to me compared with this long, slow, almost insensible habit. Several times he attempted to pronounce the dead woman's name, but halfway through it his calm and ordinary face became convulsively disfigured, and I was struck to the heart by his childlike weeping. No, these were not the tears usually shed so generously by old folk describing their pitiful situation and misfortunes to you; neither were they the tears they weep over a glass of punch-no! these were tears that flowed without the asking, of themselves, stored up in the bitter pain of an already cold heart.

He did not live long after that. I learned of his death recently. It's strange, however, that the circumstances of his end had some resemblance to the death of Pulkheria Ivanovna. One day Afanasy Ivanovich decided to take a little stroll in the garden. As he was slowly walking down the path with his usual unconcern, having no thoughts at all, a strange incident occurred with him. He suddenly heard someone behind him say in a rather distinct voice: "Afanasy Ivanovich!" He turned around, but there was absolutely no one there; he looked in all directions, peeked into the bushes- no one anywhere. It was a calm day and the sun was shining. He pondered for a moment; his face somehow livened up, and he finally said: "It's Pulkheria Ivanovna calling me!"

It has undoubtedly happened to you that you hear a voice call- ing you by name, something simple people explain by saying that a soul is longing for the person and calling him, and after that comes inevitable death. I confess I have always feared this mysterious call. I remember hearing it often in childhood: sometimes my name would suddenly be distinctly spoken behind me. Usually, at the moment, it was a most clear and sunny day; not a leaf stirred on any tree in the garden, there was a dead silence, even the grasshoppers would stop chirring at that moment; not a soul in the garden; yet I confess that if night, most furious and stormy, with all the inferno of the elements, had overtaken me alone amid an impenetrable forest, I would not have been as frightened of it as of this terrible silence amid a cloudless day. Usually I would flee from the garden then, breathless and in the greatest fear, and would calm down only when I happened to meet somebody whose look would drive away this terrible heart's desert.

He submitted wholly to his soul's conviction that Pulkheria Ivanovna was calling him; he submitted with the will of an obedient child; he wasted away, coughed, dwindled like a candle, and finally went out the way a candle does when there is nothing left to feed its poor flame. "Lay me next to Pulkheria Ivanovna" was all he said before he died.

His wish was fulfilled and he was buried near the church, beside Pulkheria Ivanovna's grave. There were fewer guests at the funeral, but just as many simple folk and beggars. The master's house was now completely empty. The enterprising steward, together with the village headman, dragged over to their own cottages all the remaining old things and junk that the housekeeper had not managed to steal. Soon some distant relation arrived from God knows where, the heir to the whole estate, who before that had served as a lieutenant in I don't remember which regiment, a terrible reformer. He noted at once the utter disorder and neglect in matters of management; he resolved to root it out, to correct it without fail, and to introduce order in everything. He bought six fine English sickles, nailed a special number on each cottage, and finally managed so well that in six months the estate was taken into custody. This wise custody (consisting of a former assessor and some staff captain in a faded uniform) did not take long putting an end to all the chickens and eggs. The cottages, which lay nearly on the ground, collapsed completely; the peasants took to drinking hard and were counted mostly as runaways. The actual owner himself, who incidentally lived quite peaceably with his custody and drank punch with it, rarely visited his estate and never stayed long. To this day he goes to all the fairs in Little Russia, inquires thoroughly into the prices of various major products that are sold wholesale, such as flour, hemp, honey and so on, but buys only small trifles such as little flints, a nail for cleaning his pipe, and generally anything that doesn't go beyond a wholesale price of one rouble.

Viy*

As soon as the booming seminary bell that hung by the gates of the Bratsky Monastery in Kiev rang out in the morning, crowds of schoolboys and seminarians 1 came hurrying from all over the city. Grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, and theologians, notebooks under their arms, trudged to class. The grammarians were still very small; as they walked they pushed each other and quarreled among themselves in the thinnest trebles; their clothes were almost all torn or dirty, and their pockets were eternally full of various sorts of trash, such as knucklebones, whistles made from feathers, unfinished pieces of pie, and occasionally even a little sparrow that, by chirping suddenly amidst the extraordinary silence of the classroom, would procure for its patron a decent beating on both hands, and sometimes the cherrywood rod. The rhetoricians walked more sedately: their clothes were often per-fecdy intact, but instead their faces were almost always adorned with some rhetorical trope: one eye completely closed, or a big *Viy is a colossal creation of folk imagination. This name is applied by people in Little Russia to the chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids reach to the ground. The whole story is a popular legend. I did not wish to change it in any way and tell it almost as simply as I heard it. (Author's note.) bubble instead of a lip, or some other mark; these swore by God and talked among themselves in tenors. The philosophers dropped a whole octave lower: there was nothing in their pockets except strong, coarse tobacco. They kept nothing stashed away and ate whatever came along on the spot; the smell of pipes and vodka sometimes spread so far around them that a passing artisan would stand for a long time sniffing the air like a hound.

The marketplace at that time was usually just beginning to stir, and women with bagels, rolls, watermelon seeds, and poppyseed cakes tugged those who had them by their coattails of thin broadcloth or some sort of cotton.

"Young sirs! Young sirs! Here! Here!" they said on all sides. "There are good bagels, poppyseed cakes, twists, rolls! Fine ones, by God! with honey! homemade!"

Another woman, holding up something long made of twisted dough, cried:

"Here's an icicle, young sirs! Buy an icicle!"

"Don't buy anything from that one! Look how foul she is-her nose is awful and her hands are dirty…"

But they were afraid to pester the philosophers and theologians, because the philosophers and theologians liked to sample things, and always by the handful.

On reaching the seminary, the whole crowd settled by classes in low-ceilinged but rather spacious rooms with small windows, wide doors, and dirty desks. The classroom would suddenly be filled with the hum of many voices: the monitors listened to their charges, the ringing treble of a grammarian would fall in tune with the jingling of the windowpanes in the small windows, the glass echoing with almost the same sound; from the corner came the low buzz of a rhetorician whose mouth and thick lips ought to have belonged to philosophy at the least. He buzzed in a bass, and from afar all you heard was: boo, boo, boo, boo… The monitors, as they heard the lessons, looked with one eye under the desk, where a roll or dumpling or pumpkin seeds stuck out of their subordinate's pocket.

If all this learned crowd managed to come a little earlier, or if they knew that the professors would be later than usual, then, with universal agreement, a battle would be planned, and in this battle everyone had to take part, even the censors, whose duty was to look after the order and morals of all the student estate. Usually two theologians decided how the battle would go: whether each class should stand separately for itself, or they should divide themselves into two halves, the boarders and the seminary. In any case, it was the grammarians who would begin it first, but as soon as the rhetoricians mixed in, they would flee and stand on higher ground to watch the battle. Then philosophy with long black mustaches would step forth, and finally theology in terrible ballooning trousers and with the thickest necks. The usual end was that theology would beat them all, and philosophy, rubbing its sides, would be hustled into class, where it settled down to rest at the desks. A professor who had once taken part in such battles himself, on entering the classroom, would know at once from his students' flushed faces that it had been a fine battle, and while he gave the rhetorics a knuckle-rapping, in another class another professor would be applying the wooden slats to the hands of philosophy. With the theologians it was done in a totally different way: each was allotted, as the professor of theology put it, a measure of "big peas," dealt out with a short leather whip.

For feast days and solemnities, the boarders and seminarians went around visiting houses with miracle plays. Sometimes they performed a comedy, and on such occasions some theologian, nearly as tall as the Kiev belfry, would always distinguish himself playing Herodias or the wife of the Egyptian courtier Potiphar. 2 As a reward they might get a length of linen, or a sack of millet, or half a boiled goose, or the like.

All these learned folk, both seminary and boarders, while living in some sort of hereditary hostility among themselves, had extremely poor means of obtaining food and were at the same time extraordinarily voracious; so that to count how many dumplings each of them gobbled up at supper would have been a quite impossible task; and therefore the voluntary donations of wealthy citizens were never enough. Then a senate comprised of philoso- phers and theologians would send out the grammarians and rhetoricians, under the leadership of one philosopher-and would sometimes join them itself-sacks over their shoulders, to lay waste people's kitchen gardens. And pumpkin gruel would appear in the school. The senators ate so much melon and watermelon that the monitors would hear two lessons instead of one from them the next day: one proceeding from the mouth, the other growling in the senatorial stomach. Boarders and seminary wore what looked like some sort of long frock coats which reached heretofore, a technical term meaning below the heels.

The most solemn event for the seminary was vacation, beginning with the month of June, when the boarders used to be sent home. Then the whole high road would be covered with grammarians, philosophers, and theologians. Whoever did not have his own refuge would go to one of his friends. Philosophers and theologians would go on conditions -that is, they would undertake to teach or prepare the children of wealthy people for school, and would earn a new pair of boots by it and occasionally enough for a frock coat. This whole crowd would string along together like a Gypsy camp, cook kasha 3 for themselves, and sleep in the fields. Each dragged a sack on his back with a shirt and a pair of foot-rags. The theologians were especially thrifty and neat: to avoid wearing out their boots, they would take them off, hang them on a stick, and carry them over their shoulder, especially when there was mud. Then, rolling their trousers to the knee, they would go splashing fearlessly through the puddles. As soon as they caught sight of a farmstead, they would turn off the high road and, approaching a cottage that looked better kept than the others, would line up in front of the windows and begin a full-throated hymn. The cottager, some old Cossack peasant, would listen to them for a long time, leaning on both arms, then weep very bitterly and say, turning to his wife: "Wife! what these students are singing must be something very intelligent; bring out some lard for them and whatever else we've got!" And a whole bowl of dumplings would be poured into a sack. A decent hunk of lard, a few white loaves, and sometimes even a trussed-up chicken would go in as well. Fortified with these supplies, the grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, and theologians would continue on their way. However, the further they went, the smaller the crowd became. Almost all of them would have reached home, leaving only those whose parental nests were further away than the others.

Once during such a journey three students turned off the high road in order to provide themselves with victuals at the first farmstead they happened upon, because their sack had long been empty. These were: the theologian Khalyava, the philosopher Khoma Brut, and the rhetorician Tiberiy Gorobets.

The theologian was a tall, broad-shouldered man, and of an extremely strange character: whatever lay near him he was sure to steal. On other occasions his character was extremely glum, and when he got drunk he would hide in the weeds, and it would cost the seminary enormous efforts to find him there.

The philosopher Khoma Brut was of a merry disposition. He liked very much to lie about and smoke his pipe. When he drank, he was sure to hire musicians and dance the trepak. He often got a taste of the "big peas," but with perfectly philosophical indifference, saying what will be, will be.

The rhetorician Tiberiy Gorobets did not yet have the right to grow a mustache, drink vodka, and smoke a pipe. All he had was his topknot, 4 and therefore his character was not much developed at that time; but judging by the big bumps on the forehead with which he often came to class, one could suppose he would make a fine warrior. The theologian Khalyava and the philosopher Khoma often pulled him by the topknot as a sign of their patronage and employed him as their deputy.

It was already evening when they turned off the high road. The sun had just gone down and the warmth of the day was still in the air. The theologian and the philosopher walked along silently smoking their pipes; the rhetorician Tiberiy Gorobets knocked the heads off burdocks growing on the roadside with a stick. The road went among stands of oak and hazel bushes that dotted the meadows. The plain was occasionally disrupted by slopes and small hills, green and round as cupolas. A field of ripening grain showed in two places, making it known that some village must soon appear. But it was more than an hour since they had passed the strips of grain and no dwelling had come along yet. Twilight was already darkening the sky, and only in the west was there a pale remnant of vermilion radiance.

"What the devil!" said the philosopher Khoma Brut. "It certainly looked as if there'd be a farmstead."

The theologian said nothing; he looked around, then put his pipe back in his mouth, and they all went on their way.

"By God!" the philosopher said, stopping again. "It's as dark as the devil's fist."

"Maybe there'll be some farm further on," said the theologian, without releasing his pipe.

Meanwhile, however, it was already night, and a rather dark night at that. Clouds made it gloomier still, and by all tokens neither stars nor moon were to be expected. The students noticed that they had lost their way and for a long while had not been walking on the road.

The philosopher, after feeling in all directions with his feet, at last said abruptly:

"But where's the road?"

The theologian pondered silently and observed:

"Yes, it's a dark night."

The rhetorician stepped to one side and tried to feel for the road on all fours, but his hands kept ending up in fox holes. Everywhere there was nothing but steppe where it seemed no one passed. The travelers made another effort to move forward a bit, but everywhere was the same wilderness. The philosopher tried shouting, but his voice was completely muffled on all sides and met no response. Only a little later came a faint wailing that resembled the howling of a wolf.

"Well, what do we do now?" said the philosopher.

"Why, we stay and spend the night in the fields!" said the theologian, and he went to his pocket to get his tinderbox and light up his pipe again. But the philosopher could not agree to that. He had always been in the habit of packing away a ten-pound hunk of bread and some four pounds of lard before going to bed and this time felt a sort of unbearable solitude in his stomach. Besides, for all his merry disposition, the philosopher was somewhat afraid of wolves.

"No, Khalyava, we can't," he said. "What, lie down and stretch out like some dog without fortifying ourselves? Let's try again, maybe we'll happen onto some dwelling and manage to get at least a glass of vodka for the night."

At the word vodka the theologian spat to one side and observed:

"Sure, there's no point staying in the fields."

The students went on and, to their greatest joy, fancied they heard a distant barking. Figuring out the direction, they listened, set off more cheerfully and, after going a little further, saw a light.

"A farmstead! By God, a farmstead!" said the philosopher.

His anticipation did not disappoint him: in a short while they indeed saw a small farmstead that consisted of just two cottages sharing the same yard. There was light in the windows. A dozen plum trees stuck up by the paling. Peeking through cracks in the boards of the gates, the students saw a yard filled with ox carts. Just then stars appeared here and there in the sky.

"Watch out, brothers, don't hang back! We must get a night's lodging at all costs!"

The three learned men knocked at the gate with one accord and shouted:

"Open up!"

The door of one cottage creaked, and a minute later the students saw before them an old woman in a sheepskin coat.

"Who's there?" she cried with a muffled cough.

"Let us in for the night, granny. We've lost our way. It's as bad out in the fields as it is in a hungry belly."

"And what sort of folk are you?"

"We're harmless folk: the theologian Khalyava, the philosopher Brut, and the rhetorician Gorobets."

"Can't do it," the old woman grumbled. "I've got a yard full of people, and every corner of the cottage is taken. Where will I put you? And such big and hefty folk at that! My cottage will fall apart if I take in the likes of you. I know these philosophers and theologians. Once you start taking in those drunkards, there soon won't be any house. Away! Away with you! There's no room for you here!"

"Have mercy, granny! Can it be that Christian souls must perish for no reason at all? Put us up wherever you like. And if we somehow do something or other-let our arms wither, and whatever else God only knows. There!"

The old woman seemed to soften a little.

"Very well," she said, as if considering, "I'll let you in. Only I'll make you all sleep in different places, for my heart won't be at peace if you lie together."

"That's as you will, we won't object," replied the students.

The gates creaked and they went into the yard.

"Well, granny," said the philosopher, following the old woman, "and what if, as they say… by God, it's as if wheels are turning in my stomach. We haven't had a sliver in our mouths since morning."

"See what he's after!" the old woman said. "I've got nothing, nothing like that, and I didn't start the stove all day."

"And tomorrow," the philosopher went on, "we'll pay for it all, well and good, in cash. Yes," he went on softly, "the devil of a cent you'll get!"

"Go on, go on! and be content with what you've got. Such tender young sirs the devil's brought us!"

The philosopher Khoma became utterly despondent at these words. But suddenly his nose caught the scent of dried fish. He glanced at the trousers of the theologian walking beside him and saw an enormous fish tail sticking out of his pocket: the theologian had already managed to snatch a whole carp off a wagon. And since he had done it not for any profit but simply from habit, and, having forgotten his carp completely, was looking around for something else to filch, not intending to overlook even a broken wheel, the philosopher Khoma put his hand into his pocket as if it were his very own and pulled out the carp.

The old woman got the students installed: the rhetorician was put in the cottage, the theologian was shut up in an empty closet, the philosopher was assigned to the sheep pen, also empty.

The philosopher, left alone, ate the carp in one minute, exam- ined the wattled sides of the pen, shoved his foot into the curious snout that a pig had poked through from the next pen, and rolled over on his other side in order to fall into a dead sleep. Suddenly the low door opened and the old woman, stooping down, came into the pen.

"Well, granny, what do you want?" said the philosopher.

But the old woman came toward him with outspread arms.

"Oh-ho!" thought the philosopher. "Only no, dearie, you're obsolete!" He moved slightly further off, but again the old woman unceremoniously came toward him.

"Listen, granny," said the philosopher, "it's a fast period, 5 and I'm the sort of man who won't break his fast even for a thousand gold roubles."

But the old woman kept spreading her arms and grasping for him without saying a word.

The philosopher became frightened, especially when he noticed that her eyes flashed with some extraordinary light.

"Granny! what is it? Go, go with God!" he cried.

But the old woman did not say a word and kept grabbing for him with her arms.

He jumped to his feet, intending to flee, but the old woman stood in the doorway, fixing her flashing eyes on him, and again began to come toward him.

The philosopher wanted to push her away with his hands, but noticed to his astonishment that his arms would not rise, nor would his legs move; with horror he discovered that the sound of his voice would not even come from his mouth: the words stirred soundlessly on his lips. He heard only how his own heart was beating; he saw how the old woman came up to him, folded his arms, bent his neck, jumped with catlike quickness onto his back, struck him on the side with a broom, and he, leaping like a saddle horse, carried her on his back. All this happened so quickly that the philosopher barely managed to recover his senses and seize both his knees with his hands in an effort to stop his legs; but, to his great amazement, they kept moving against his will and performed leaps quicker than a Circassian racer. When they passed the farmstead, and a smooth hollow opened out before them, and the coal-black forest spread out to one side, only then did he say to himself: "Oh-oh, this is a witch!"

A reverse crescent moon shone in the sky. The timid midnight radiance lay lightly as a transparent blanket and steamed over the earth. Forest, meadows, sky, valleys-all seemed to be sleeping with open eyes. Not a flutter of wind anywhere. There was something damply warm in the night's freshness. The shadows of trees and bushes, like comets, fell in sharp wedges over the sloping plain. Such was the night when the philosopher Khoma Brut galloped with an incomprehensible rider on his back. He felt some languid, unpleasant, and at the same time sweet feeling coming into his heart. He lowered his head and saw that the grass, which was almost under his feet, seemed to be growing deep and distant and that over it was water as transparent as a mountain spring, and the grass seemed to be at the deep bottom of some bright, transparent sea; at least he clearly saw his own reflection in it, together with the old woman sitting on his back. He saw some sun shining there instead of the moon; he heard bluebells tinkle, bending their heads. He saw a water nymph swim from behind the sedge; her back and leg flashed, round, lithe, made all of a shining and quivering. She turned toward him, and her face, with its light, sharp, shining eyes, with its soul-invading song, now approached him, was already at the surface, then, shaking with sparkling laughter, withdrew-and then she turned over on her back, and the sun shone through her nebulous breasts, matte as unglazed porcelain, at the edges of their white, tenderly elastic roundness. Water covered them in tiny bubbles like beads. She trembles all over and laughs in the water…

Is he seeing it, or is he not? Is he awake or asleep? But what now? Wind or music: ringing, ringing, and whirling, and approaching, and piercing the soul with some unbearable trill…

"What is it?" thought the philosopher Khoma Brut, looking down, as he raced on at top speed. Sweat streamed from him. He felt a demonically sweet feeling, he felt some piercing, some languidly terrible pleasure. It often seemed to him as if his heart were no longer there at all, and in fear he would clutch at it with his hand. Exhausted, bewildered, he began to recall all the prayers he ever knew. He ran through all the exorcisms against spirits-and suddenly felt some relief; he felt his step beginning to become lazier, the witch held somehow more weakly to his back. Thick grass touched him, and he no longer saw anything extraordinary in it. The bright crescent shone in the sky.

"All right, then!" thought the philosopher Khoma, and he began saying exorcisms almost aloud. Finally, quick as lightning, he jumped from under the old woman and in his turn leaped on her back. With her small, quick step the old woman ran so fast that the rider could hardly catch his breath. The earth just flashed beneath him. Everything was clear in the moonlight, though the moon was not full. The valleys were smooth, but owing to the speed everything flashed vaguely and confusedly in his eyes. He snatched up a billet lying in the road and started beating the old woman as hard as he could with it. She let out wild screams; first they were angry and threatening, then they turned weaker, more pleasant, pure, and then soft, barely ringing, like fine silver bells, penetrating his soul. A thought flashed inadvertently in his head: Is this really an old woman? "Oh, I can't take any more!" she said in exhaustion and fell to the ground.

He got to his feet and looked into her eyes: dawn was breaking and the golden domes of the Kievan churches shone in the distance. Before him lay a beauty with a disheveled, luxurious braid and long, pointy eyelashes. Insensibly, she spread her bare white arms and moaned, looking up with tear-filled eyes.

Khoma trembled like a leaf on a tree: pity and some strange excitement and timidity, incomprehensible to himself, came over him; he broke into a headlong run. His heart beat uneasily on the way, and he was quite unable to explain to himself this strange new feeling that had come over him. He no longer wanted to go around to the farmsteads and hastened back to Kiev, pondering this incomprehensible incident as he went.

There were almost no students in the city: they had all gone to the farmsteads, either on conditions, or simply without any conditions, because on Little Russian farmsteads one can eat dumplings, cheese, sour cream, fritters as big as a hat, without paying a penny. The big, sprawling house where the boarders lodged was decid- edly empty, and thoroughly as the philosopher searched in all the corners, even feeling in all the holes and crannies under the roof, nowhere did he find a piece of bacon or at least an old knish- things usually stashed away by the boarders.

However, the philosopher soon found a solution to his troubles: he strolled, whistling, through the marketplace three times or so, exchanged winks at the very end with some young widow in a yellow cap who sold ribbons, lead shot, and wheels-and that same day was fed wheat dumplings, chicken… in a word, there was no counting what lay before him on the table, set in a small clay house amid cherry trees. That same evening the philosopher was seen in the tavern: he was lying on a bench smoking his pipe, as was his custom, and in front of everybody tossed a gold piece to the Jew tavern keeper. Before him stood a mug. He looked at people coming and going with coolly contented eyes and no longer gave any thought to his extraordinary incident.

Meanwhile, the rumor spread everywhere that the daughter of one of the richest Cossack chiefs, whose farmstead was some thirty-five miles from Kiev, had come home from a walk one day all beaten up, had barely managed to reach her father's house, was now lying near death, and before her dying hour had expressed the wish that the prayers at her deathbed and for three days after her death be read by one of the Kievan seminarians: Khoma Brut. The philosopher learned it from the rector himself, who summoned him specially to his room and announced that he must hasten on his way without delay, that the eminent chief had specially sent people and a cart for him.

The philosopher gave a start from some unaccountable feeling which he could not explain to himself. A dark foreboding told him that something bad lay in store for him. Not knowing why himself, he announced directly that he would not go.

"Listen, domine Khoma!" 6 said the rector (on certain occasions he spoke very courteously with his subordinates), "the devil if anyone's asking you whether you want to go or not. I'm telling you only this, that if you keep standing on your mettle and being clever, I'll order you whipped with young birch rods on the back and other parts-so well that you won't need to go to the steam-baths."

The philosopher, scratching lightly behind his ear, walked out without saying a word; intending to trust to his legs at the first opportunity. Deep in thought, he was going down the steep steps to the poplar-ringed courtyard when he stopped for a minute, hearing quite clearly the voice of the rector giving orders to his housekeeper and someone else, probably one of those the chief had sent to fetch him.

"Thank your master for the grain and eggs," the rector was saying, "and tell him that as soon as the books he wrote about are ready, I'll send them at once. I've already given them to the scribe for copying. And don't forget, dear heart, to tell the master that I know there are good fish to be had on his farmstead, especially sturgeon, which he can send whenever there's a chance: at the markets here it's expensive and no good. And you, Yavtukh, give the lads a glass of vodka. And tie up the philosopher, otherwise he'll take off."

"Why, that devil's son!" the philosopher thought to himself, "he's got wind of it, the long-legged slicker!"

He went down the steps and saw a kibitka, which at first he took for a granary on wheels. Indeed, it was as deep as a brick kiln. This was an ordinary Krakow vehicle such as Jews hire, fifty of them squeezing in along with their goods, to carry them to every town where their noses smell a fair. He was awaited by some six stalwart and sturdy Cossacks, no longer young men. Jackets of fine flannel with fringe showed that they belonged to a considerable and wealthy owner. Small scars bespoke their having once been to war, not without glory.

"No help for it! What will be, will be!" the philosopher thought to himself and, addressing the Cossacks, said loudly:

"Greetings, friends and comrades!"

"Greetings to you, master philosopher!" some of the Cossacks replied.

"So I'm supposed to get in there with you? A fine wagon!" he went on, climbing in. "Just hire some musicians and you could dance in it!"

"Yes, a commensurate vehicle!" said one of the Cossacks, getting up on the box along with the coachman, who had a rag wrapped around his head instead of his hat, which he had already left in the tavern. The other five, together with the philosopher, climbed deep inside and settled on sacks filled with various purchases made in town.

"I'd be curious to know," said the philosopher, "if this wagon were to be loaded, for example, with certain goods-salt, say, or iron wedges-how many horses would it need?"

"Yes," the Cossack on the box said after some silence, "it would need a sufficient number of horses."

After which satisfactory answer, the Cossack considered he had the right to keep silent the rest of the way.

The philosopher had a great desire to find out in more detail who this chief was, what sort of character he had, what this rumor was about his daughter, who had come home in such an extraordinary fashion and was now dying, and whose story was now connected with his own, how it was with them and what went on in the house? He addressed them with questions; but the Cossacks must also have been philosophers, because they said nothing in reply, lay on the sacks and smoked their pipes. Only one of them addressed the coachman sitting on the box with a brief order: "Keep an eye out, Overko, you old gawk. When you get near the tavern, the one on the Chukhrailovsky road, don't forget to stop, and wake me and the other lads up if we happen to fall asleep." After that he fell rather loudly asleep. However, these admonitions were quite superfluous, because as soon as the gigantic wagon approached the tavern on the Chukhrailovsky road, everybody shouted with one voice: "Stop!" Besides, Overko's horses were already so used to it that they themselves stopped in front of every tavern. Despite the hot July day, everybody got out of the wagon and went into the low, dingy room where the Jew tavern keeper rushed with signs of joy to welcome his old acquaintances. Under his coat skirts the Jew brought several pork sausages and, having placed them on the table, immediately turned away from this Talmud-forbidden fruit. They all settled around the table. A clay mug appeared in front of each guest. The philosopher Khoma had to take part in the general feasting. And since people in Little Russia, once they get a bit merry, are sure to start kissing each other or weeping, the whole place was soon filled with kissing: "Well, now, Spirid, give us a smack!" "Come here, Dorosh, till I embrace you!"

One Cossack who was a bit older than the others, with a gray mustache, rested his cheek on his hand and began sobbing his heart out over his having no father or mother and being left all alone in the world. Another was a great reasoner and kept comforting him, saying: "Don't cry, by God, don't cry! What's this now… God, He knows how and what it is." The one named Dorosh became extremely inquisitive and, addressing himself to the philosopher Khoma, kept asking him:

"I'd like to know what they teach you at the seminary-the same as what the deacon reads in church, or something else?"

"Don't ask!" drawled the reasoner. "Let it all be as it has been. God, He knows how it should be; God knows everything."

"No," Dorosh went on, "I want to know what's written in those books. Maybe something completely different from the deacon's."

"Oh, my God, my God!" the esteemed mentor said to that. "What on earth are you talking about? God's will decided it so. It's all as God gave it, they can't go changing it."

"I want to know all what's written there. I'll go to the seminary, by God, I will! What do you think, that I can't learn? I'll learn all of it, all of it!"

"Oh, my God, my goddy God!…" the comforter said and lowered his head to the table, because he was quite unable to hold it up on his shoulders any longer.

The other Cossacks talked about landowners and why the moon shines in the sky.

The philosopher Khoma, seeing such a disposition of minds, decided to take advantage of it and slip away. First he addressed the gray-haired Cossack who was grieving over his father and mother:

"What's there to cry about, uncle," he said, "I'm an orphan myself! Let me go free, lads! What do you need me for?"

"Let's set him free!" some replied. "He's an orphan. Let him go where he likes."

"Oh, my God, my goddy God!" the comforter said, raising his head. "Free him! Let him go!"

And the Cossacks were going to take him to the open fields themselves, but the one who showed his curiosity stopped them, saying:

"Hands off! I want to talk to him about the seminary. I'm going to the seminary myself…"

Anyhow, this escape could hardly have been accomplished, because when the philosopher decided to get up from the table, his legs turned as if to wood, and he began to see so many doors in the room that it was unlikely he could have found the real one.

Only in the evening did this company all remember that they had to be on their way. Scrambling into the wagon, they drove off, urging their horses on and singing a song, the words and meaning of which could hardly be made out. After spending the better half of the night rambling about, constantly losing the way, which they knew by heart, they finally descended a steep hill into a valley, and the philosopher noticed a palisade or wattle fence stretching along the sides, low trees and roofs peeking from behind them. This was the big settlement belonging to the chief. It was long past midnight; the sky was dark and small stars flashed here and there. There was no light in any of the huts. Accompanied by the barking of a dog, they drove into the yard. On both sides thatch-roofed sheds and cottages could be seen. One of them, in the middle, direcdy facing the gates, was bigger than the rest and seemed to be the owner's dwelling. The wagon stopped before something like a small shed, and our travelers went to sleep. The philosopher, however, wanted to look the master's mansion over a little; but however wide he opened his eyes, he could see nothing clearly: instead of the house, he saw a bear; the chimney turned into a rector. The philosopher waved his hand and went to sleep.

When the philosopher woke up, the whole house was astir: during the night the master's daughter had died. Servants ran to and fro in a flurry. Some old woman cried. A crowd of the curious looked through the fence into the master's yard, as if there was anything to be seen there.

The philosopher began leisurely to examine the places he had been unable to make out at night. The master's house was a small, low building such as was commonly built in Little Russia in the old days. It had a thatched roof. The sharp and high little pediment, with a small window resembling an upturned eye, was painted all over with blue and yellow flowers and red crescents. It was held up by oak posts, the upper half rounded and the lower hexagonal, with fancy turning at the tops. Under this pediment was a small porch with benches on both sides. At the ends of the house were shed roofs on the same sort of posts, some of them twisted. A tall pear tree with a pyramidal top and trembling leaves greened in front of the house. Several barns stood in two rows in the yard, forming a sort of wide street leading to the house. Beyond the barns, toward the gates, the triangles of two cellars stood facing each other, also roofed with thatch. The triangular wall of each was furnished with a door and painted over with various images. On one of them a Cossack was portrayed sitting on a barrel, holding a mug over his head with the inscription: "I'll Drink It All." On the other, a flask, bottles, and around them, for the beauty of it, an upside-down horse, a pipe, tambourines, and the inscription: "Drink-the Cossack's Delight." From the loft of one of the barns, through an enormous dormer window, peeked a drum and some brass trumpets. By the gates stood two cannon. Everything showed that the master of the house liked to make merry and that the yard often resounded with the noise of feasting. Outside the gates were two windmills. Behind the house ran the gardens; and through the treetops one could see only the dark caps of chimneys hiding in the green mass of cottages. The entire settlement was situated on a wide and level mountain ledge. To the north everything was screened off by a steep mountain, the foot of which came right down to the yard. Looked at from below, it seemed steeper still, and on its high top the irregular stems of skimpy weeds stuck out here and there, black against the bright sky. Its bare and clayey appearance evoked a certain despondency. It was all furrowed with gullies and grooves left by rain. In two places, cottages were stuck to its steep slope; over one of them an apple tree, propped by small stakes and a mound of dirt at its roots, spread its branches broadly. Windfallen apples rolled right down into the master's yard. From the top a road wound down all over the mountain and in its descent went past the yard into the settlement. When the philosopher measured its terrible steepness and remembered the previous day's journey, he decided that either the master's horses were very smart or the Cossacks' heads were very strong to have managed, even in drunken fumes, not to tumble down head first along with the boundless wagon and the baggage. The philosopher stood on the highest point of the yard, and when he turned and looked in the opposite direction, he was presented with a totally different sight. The settlement, together with the slope, rolled down onto a plain. Vast meadows opened out beyond the reach of sight; their bright greenery became darker in the distance, and whole rows of villages blued far off, though they were more than a dozen miles away. To the right of these meadows, mountains stretched and the distant, barely noticeable strip of the Dnieper burned and darkled.

"Ah, a fine spot!" said the philosopher. "To live here, to fish in the Dnieper and the ponds, to take a net or a gun and go hunting for snipe and curlew! Though I suppose there's also no lack of bustards in these meadows. Quantities of fruit can be dried and sold in town or, even better, distilled into vodka-because no liquor can touch vodka made from fruit. And it also wouldn't hurt to consider how to slip away from here."

He noticed a small path beyond the wattle fence, completely overgrown with weeds. He mechanically stepped onto it, thinking at first only of taking a stroll, and then of quietly blowing out between the cottages into the meadows, when he felt a rather strong hand on his shoulder.

Behind him stood the same old Cossack who had grieved so bitterly yesterday over the death of his mother and father and his own loneliness.

"You oughtn't to be thinking, master philosopher, about skipping from the farmstead!" he said. "It's not set up here so as you can run away; and the roads are bad for walking. Better go to the master: he's been waiting for you a long time in his room."

"Let's go! Why not?… It's my pleasure," said the philosopher, and he followed after the Cossack.

The chief, an elderly man with a gray mustache and an expression of gloomy sorrow, was sitting at a table in his room, his head propped in both hands. He was about fifty years old; but the deep despondency on his face and a sort of wasted pallor showed that his soul had been crushed and destroyed all of a sudden, in a single moment, and all the old gaiety and noisy life had disappeared forever. When Khoma came in together with the old Cossack, he took away one of his hands and nodded slightly to their low bow.

Khoma and the Cossack stopped respectfully by the door.

"Who are you, and where from, and of what estate, good man?" the chief said, neither kindly nor sternly.

"I'm the philosopher Khoma Brut, a student."

"And who was your father?" "I don't know, noble sir." "And your mother?"

"I don't know my mother, either. Reasonably considering, of course, there was a mother; but who she was, and where from, and when she lived-by God, your honor, I don't know."

The chief paused and seemed to sit pondering for a moment.

"And how did you become acquainted with my daughter?"

"I didn't become acquainted, noble sir, by God, I didn't. I've never had any dealings with young ladies in all my born days. Deuce take them, not to say something improper."

"Then why was it none other than you, precisely, that she appointed to read?"

The philosopher shrugged his shoulders:

"God knows how to explain that. It's a known fact that masters sometimes want something that even the most literate man can't figure out. And as the saying goes: 'Hop faster, mind the master!'"

"And you wouldn't happen to be lying, mister philosopher?"

"May lightning strike me right here if I'm lying."

"If you'd lived only one little minute longer," the chief said sadly, "I'd surely have learned everything. 'Don't let anybody read over me, daddy, but send to the Kiev seminary at once and bring the student Khoma Brut. Let him pray three nights for my sinful soul. He knows…' But what he knows, I didn't hear. She, dear soul, could only say that, and then she died. Surely, good man, you must be known for your holy life and God-pleasing deeds, and maybe she heard about you."

"Who, me?" the student said, stepping back in amazement. "Me, a holy life?" he said, looking the chief straight in the eye. "God help you, sir! Indecent though it is to say, I went calling on the baker's wife on Holy Thursday itself."

"Well… surely you were appointed for some reason. You'll have to start the business this same day."

"To that, your honor, I'd reply… of course, anybody versed in Holy Scripture could commensurably… only here it would call for a deacon, or at least a subdeacon. They're smart folk and know how it's done, while I… And I haven't got the voice for it, and myself I'm-devil knows what. Nothing to look at."

"That's all very well, only I'll do everything my little dove told me to do, I won't leave anything out. And once you've prayed over her properly for three nights, starting today, I'll reward you. Otherwise-I wouldn't advise even the devil himself to make me angry."

The chief uttered these last words with such force that the philosopher fully understood their meaning.

"Follow me!" said the chief.

They stepped out to the front hall. The chief opened the door to another room opposite the first. The philosopher stopped in the hall for a moment to blow his nose and then with some unaccountable fear crossed the threshold. The whole floor was covered with red cotton cloth. In the corner, under the icons, on a high table, lay the body of the dead girl, on a cover of blue velvet adorned with gold fringe and tassels. Tall wax candles twined with guelder rose stood at her head and feet, shedding their dim light, lost in the brightness of day. The face of the dead girl was screened from him by the disconsolate father, who sat before her, his back to the door. The philosopher was struck by the words he heard:

"I'm not sorry, my darling daughter, that you, to my sorrow and grief, have left the earth in the flower of your youth, without living out your allotted term. I'm sorry, my little dove, that I do not know who it was, what wicked enemy of mine, that caused your death. And if I knew of anyone who might only think of insulting you or just of saying something unpleasant about you, I swear to

God he would never see his children again, if he happened to be as old as I am, or his father and mother, if he was still a young man; and his body would be thrown to the birds and beasts of the steppe. But woe is me, my wild marigold, my little quail, my bright star, that I must live out the rest of my life with no delight, wiping the tears with my coattails as they flow from my aged eyes, while my enemy rejoices and laughs secretly at the feeble old man…"

He stopped, and the reason for it was the rending grief that resolved itself in a whole flood of tears.