The Complete Short Novels

Table of Contents

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

THE STEPPE - The Story of a Journey

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

THE DUEL

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

THE STORY OF AN UNKNOWN MAN

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

THREE YEARS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

MY LIFE - A Provincial’s Story

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

NOTES

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

TITLES IN EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY

Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION

God’s world is good. One thing is not good: us.

– Chekhov to Suvorin, 1891

A good man’s indifference is as good as any religion.

– Chekhov’s diary, 1897

Chekhov wrote his first and only novel when he was twenty-four. Its title is Drama na okhote, or Drama at the Hunt, known in English as A Shooting Party. It is 170 pages long, was serialized in thirty-two issues of the scandal sheet Daily News (which Chekhov renamed Daily Spews) from August 1884 to April 1885, and was never reprinted in his lifetime. It is by far his longest work of fiction. As Donald Rayfield wrote in Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art, ‘‘It reflects almost everything he had ever read, from The Sorrows of Young Werther to The Old Age of Lecoq. It also contains embryonically everything he was to write.’’ It is part detective story, part psychological study, and very cleverly plotted – a broad parody with a fine sense of the absurd, filled with stock Russian characters and situations, set on a decaying estate that would reappear time and again in Chekhov’s subsequent work. One of the characters is a naïve and sympathetic doctor, not unlike Dr. Samoilenko in The Duel and some of the other doctors who inhabit Dr. Chekhov’s fictional world.

Drama at the Hunt gave fullest expression to Chekhov’s early humorous manner, which was otherwise mainly confined to the brief sketches he produced to pay his way through medical school. The five works collected here belong to the period following his entry into serious literature. The first of them, The Steppe, published in 1888, the same year in which he won half of the Russian Academy’s prestigious Pushkin Prize, was in fact the work which marked that entry. Through the mid-1890s, before the period of the last great plays, the idea of writing a novel continued to entice him. In February 1894 he took a sizeable advance from the Petersburg publisher Adolf Marx (‘‘I’ve become a Marxist,’’ he would joke later) for a novel to be serialized in the magazine Niva (‘‘The Cornfield’’). Meanwhile, he was working on what he described to his brother Mikhail as ‘‘a novel about Moscow life.’’ This was Three Years, a story set in Moscow merchant circles, which he had been mulling over since 1891. It was published early in 1895 in the liberal journal Russian Thought. In the spring of 1896, to fulfill his contract with Marx, he set to work on another ‘‘novel,’’ eventually entitled My Life, his last extended prose work and, in the opinion of D. S. Mirsky, his masterpiece.

Chekhov’s genius defined its formal limits in these works of 90 to 120 pages. It balked at anything longer. Literary genres are notoriously elusive of definition (Chekhov called his last play, The Cherry Orchard, a comedy; its first director, Konstantin Stanislavsky, considered it a tragedy), but it seems justifiable to call the five works collected here short novels, and to distinguish them from Chekhov’s other works, which are at most half their length. The question is metrical, not mechanical. A hundred-page narrative, whatever generic name we give it, moves to a different measure than a narrative of five, or fifteen, or even fifty pages. It includes the effective time and space of a full-bodied novel, but treats them with the short story’s economy of means. The interest in bringing Chekhov’s five short novels together in one volume is precisely to focus on that distinction of form.

The Steppe was a pivotal work in Chekhov’s artistic development. It opened the door to ‘‘serious literature’’ for him, but it also closed the door on the world of his childhood in southern Russia, in the area around Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, with its unique landscape, wildlife, and culture. He never wrote anything like it again. The prose is lyrical, musically constructed, full of alliterations and internal rhymes, its sentences shaped after what they describe, rendering the movement of the carriage, the mysteriously alive nights and immobile, stifling noondays of the steppe, the flashing and rumbling of what is one of the most famous thunderstorms in Russian literature. While he was working on it, he wrote to a friend that Gogol, ‘‘the tsar of the steppe,’’ might be envious. Indeed, Gogol’s influence is more marked in The Steppe than in anything else Chekhov wrote. Gogol’s Dead Souls begins with the description of a rather handsome spring britzka driving into the district town of N. The Steppe begins with a shabby, springless britzka rolling out of another district town of N. The nod to the master is unmistakable. Like Dead Souls, The Steppe is virtually plotless, recounting a string of adventures that have no internal connection, a series of encounters with characters who are then left behind. Also like its predecessor, it combines an abundance of natural description with a sense of human flimsiness. Chekhov allows himself the devices of Romantic prose that Gogol reveled in: apostrophes, anthropomorphisms, addresses to the reader. But the similarities end there, because the hero of The Steppe is not that middling, middle-aged apotheosis of banality, Chichikov, but a nine-year-old boy, whose innocent eye takes in the wonders and terrors of his thousand-mile journey with fear and curiosity.

Chekhov never ventured into anything like Gogol’s cosmic satire, wild humor, or formal inventiveness. Gogol once boasted of Dead Souls : ‘‘All Russia will appear in it,’’ but later confessed that he had made it all up. The writer who did know and portray ‘‘all Russia’’ was Nikolai Leskov, a slightly younger contemporary of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. Leskov had traveled throughout Russia as an agent for the stewards of a rich Russian landowner, sending back reports that delighted his employers and marked his beginnings as a writer. Chekhov never met Dostoevsky or Turgenev; he was invited to Tolstoy’s estate only in 1895, when he was already an established writer; but he ran into Leskov at a decisive moment, in the summer of 1883, when he was twenty-three and Leskov fifty-two. After some low-life carousing in Moscow, he and Leskov ended up in a cab together, where, as Chekhov recounted in a letter to his brother, the following exchange took place: ‘‘[Leskov] turns to me half drunk and asks: ‘Do you know what I am?’ ‘I do.’ ‘No, you don’t. I’m a mystic.’ ‘I know.’ He stares at me with his old man’s popping eyes and prophesies: ‘You will die before your brother.’ ‘Perhaps.’ ‘I shall anoint you with oil as Samuel did David . . . Write.’ ’’

The consecration was more meaningful than the circumstances might suggest. Chekhov was indeed Leskov’s successor in important ways, not least in his knowledge of Russia. The critic Boris Eichenbaum wrote: ‘‘One of the basic principles of Chekhov’s artistic work is the endeavor to embrace all of Russian life in its various manifestations, and not to describe selected spheres, as was customary before him.’’ Dostoevsky was an urban intellectual in excelsis, Turgenev and Tolstoy belonged to the landed gentry, but Chekhov was the son of a former serf, and not only saw things differently but also saw different things than his aristocratic elders. In its breadth of experience and closeness to life, in its linguistic resources – particularly the use of Church Slavonicisms and the rendering of peasant speech – Chekhov’s work continues Leskov’s. Chekhov also has a paradoxical, Leskovian vision of the harshness and beauty of the world that goes beyond correct moral or ideological attitudes, and he has something of Leskov’s deep comic sense. Leskov was an Orthodox Christian, though of a somewhat unorthodox kind, for whom the evil and sin of the world could suddenly be pierced by holiness, and the ‘‘desperate injustice of earthly happening’’ (the words are Erich Auerbach’s, in Dante, Poet of the Secular World) was open to ‘‘the otherworldly character of justice.’’ Chekhov was an agnostic and a man of science; reason imposed greater restraints on him than on Leskov; but there are moments of transcendence, or near-transcendence, in his stories, understated, hedged round with irony, but nevertheless there, when contradiction becomes so intense and unresolvable that the ‘‘veil’’ is almost torn. Donald Rayfield speaks of this ‘‘mystic side of Chekhov – his irrational intuition that there is meaning and beauty in the cosmos,’’ and rightly says that it ‘‘aligns him more to Leskov than to Tolstoy in the Russian literary tradition.’’ It is also what distinguishes him from Maupassant and Zola, whom he greatly admired.

One quality of The Steppe was to prove a constant of Chekhov’s art: his method of composition by means of shifting impressions, the deceptive play of appearances – especially heightened in effect by the naïve incomprehension of the boy Egorushka. The world appears now enticing, now menacing; now good, now evil; now beautiful, now terrible. The picture keeps changing like the weather, and it is the weather that finally predominates: human beings are at its mercy morally as well as physically. Chekhov’s predilection for the pathetic fallacy (surprising in a man whose ideal was scientific objectivity) brings about a peculiar interchange in his work: as nature rises towards spirit, human beings sink into matter.

The Steppe contains all the emotion of Chekhov’s childhood, but hardly recollected in tranquillity. In 1886 he had begun to publish in the most prominent Petersburg newspaper, the conservative New Times, owned and edited by Alexei Suvorin, who was twenty-six years his senior. A close bond developed between the two men, based partly on their similar origins, and, despite stormy disagreements, it lasted for the rest of Chekhov’s life. In 1887, Chekhov felt a need for fresh impressions after eight years of medical study and Grub Street hackwork. He took an advance from Suvorin and headed south to revisit his birthplace and travel around the Donets region. He was away for six weeks. Experiencing again the vast freedom and beauty of the steppe was important for him, but the trip also had its painful effects. He was sickened by the provincial narrowness of his native town, as he wrote in his letters: ‘‘60,000 inhabitants busy only with eating, drinking and reproducing . . . How dirty, empty, idle, illiterate, and boring is Taganrog.’’ (We will hear almost the same lament from the narrator of My Life ten years later.) He was also alarmed by the rapid industrialization of the Donets valley. In fact, though he professed a belief in progress, he portrayed only its negative consequences in his work, its natural and human waste, and when he bought the small estate of Melikhovo, near Moscow, he became a dedicated planter of trees, an activity he continued in his last years when he moved to Yalta.

Chekhov produced The Steppe only eight months after his return from the south. Its lyricism was born of a sense of irrevocable loss. His youth was finished, as he wrote to his brother, and he looked back enviously at his nine-year-old hero. But a more profound change had also taken place in him. It is clearly marked by the distance that separates The Steppe from his next major work, ‘‘A Boring Story,’’ written in 1889, which looks ahead to the spiritual problematics of the twentieth century. Here there is no trace of Gogolian Romanticism, nor of the ‘‘hypnosis’’ (Chekhov’s word) of Tolstoy’s moral influence. The story is quintessential Chekhov, and laid the foundation for all that came after it. ‘‘Perhaps in the future it will be revealed to us in the fullest detail who Chekhov’s tailor was,’’ wrote the philosopher Lev Shestov, ‘‘but we will never know what happened to Chekhov in the time that elapsed between the completion of The Steppe and the appearance of ‘A Boring Story.’ ’’

In 1884, a year after his anointing by Leskov, Chekhov had suffered a first hemorrhage of the lungs, revealing the illness that would bear out Leskov’s prophecy. He never acknowledged that he was consumptive, though as a doctor he could hardly have mistaken the symptoms. They recurred intermittently but more and more alarmingly in the remaining twenty years of his life. His younger brother Nikolai, a gifted artist, was also consumptive. His death in June 1889 deeply shocked Chekhov. Two months later, he began writing ‘‘A Boring Story,’’ the first-person account of a famous professor of medicine faced with the knowledge of his imminent death and an absolute solitude, detached from everything and everyone around him. Shestov considers it ‘‘the most autobiographical of all his works.’’ But Shestov is right to insist that the change in Chekhov reflected something more profound than the shock of his brother’s death and the awareness that the same fate awaited him. We can only learn what it was from the works that followed, among them the four short novels he wrote between 1891 and 1896. In them his impressionism goes from the meteorological to the metaphysical.

By December 1889, Chekhov had decided to make another Russian journey, this time not to the south but across the entire breadth of the continent to Sakhalin Island, off the far eastern coast of Siberia. Given the state of his health, the trip was extremely foolhardy, but he refused to be put off. He was disappointed by the failure of his play The Wood Demon, the first version of Uncle Vanya, which had opened to boos and catcalls on November 27 and closed immediately; he was generally disgusted with literary life and the role of the fashionable writer; he longed to escape his entanglements with women, editors, theater people, and also to answer his critics, who reproached him with social indifference. He wanted, finally, to do something real. Sakhalin Island was the location of the most notorious penal colony in Russia. He planned to make a detailed survey of conditions on the island and write a report that might help to bring about reforms in the penal system.

After a few months of preparation, reading all he could find about Sakhalin and Siberia, obtaining the necessary permissions, as well as tickets for a return by sea to Odessa, he left on April 21, 1890, traveling by train, riverboat, and covered wagon. Eighty-one days later, on July 11, he set foot on the island, where he spent the next three months gathering information about the prisoners, the guards, their families, the native peoples, the climate, the flora and fauna. He interviewed hundreds of men, women, and children, inspected the mines, the farms, the schools and hospitals (he was especially indignant at the treatment of children and the conditions in the hospitals, and later sent shipments of books and medical supplies to the island). On December 2, 1890, having crossed the China Sea, circumnavigated India, and passed through the Suez Canal and the Bosphorus, he landed back in Odessa, bringing with him a pet mongoose and thousands of indexed notecards.

In January he began what would be his longest published work, Sakhalin Island, an intentionally dry sociological dissertation, which was completed and appeared serially in Russian Thought only in 1893–94. After his look into the inner abyss in ‘‘A Boring Story,’’ he had turned and gone to the worst place on earth, as if to stifle his own metaphysical anguish by plunging into the physical sufferings of others. ‘‘Sakhalin,’’ writes Donald Rayfield, ‘‘gave Chekhov the first of his experiences of real, irremediable evil . . . in Sakhalin he sensed that social evils and individual unhappiness were inextricably involved; his ethics lost their sharp edge of blame and discrimination.’’

That experience is reflected, though only indirectly, in The Duel, which Chekhov worked on alternately with Sakhalin Island during the summer of 1891. It is his longest work of fiction. The duel it dramatizes, before it becomes literal, is a conflict of ideas between the two main phases of the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century, the liberal idealism of the 1840s and the rational egoism of the 1860s, in the persons of Laevsky, a self-styled ‘‘superfluous man’’ (a type christened by Ivan Turgenev in 1850), and von Koren, a zoologist and Social Darwinian with an appropriately German name. The one talks like a book (or a small library); the other is so dedicated to science that he decides to participate actively in the process of natural selection. Laevsky and von Koren demolish each other in words behind each other’s backs, before they face each other with loaded pistols. But it is rather late in the day for dueling, the clash of ideas has grown weary, the situation has degenerated, and the whole thing is displaced from the capitals to a seedy resort town on the Caucasian coast, where the Russians appear as precarious interlopers among the native peoples.

The Duel verges on satire, even farce, but pulls back; it verges on tragedy but turns comical; it ends by deceiving all our expectations. The closing refrain – ‘‘No one knows the real truth’’ – is first spoken by von Koren, then repeated by Laevsky. Chekhov enters all his characters’ minds in turn. No single point of view prevails.

In The Duel, Chekhov’s art becomes ‘‘polyphonic,’’ though not in the Dostoevskian sense. It does not maintain the independence of conflicting ‘‘idea-images’’ or ‘‘idea-voices’’ in ‘‘a dialogic communion between consciousnesses,’’ to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. As Bakhtin writes:

The idea [in Dostoevsky] lives not in one person’s isolated individual consciousness – if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others. Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else’s voice, that is, in someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of contact between voice-consciousnesses the idea is born and lives. In Chekhov it is exactly the opposite: the idea enters into no relationship with the ideas of others; each consciousness is isolated and impenetrable; there is a polyphony of voices but no dialogue; there is compassion but no communion. Chekhov became the master of this protean, quizzical form of narrative, with its radical undercutting of all intellectual positions. The Duel begins and ends at sea.

The Story of an Unknown Man is one of the less well-known of Chekhov’s works. The title has been mistranslated into English as An Anonymous Story . In fact, the first-person narrator, far from being anonymous, has not just one name but two. But though he began with commitment to a revolutionary cause, and ends saying: ‘‘One would like to play a prominent, independent, noble role; one would like to make history,’’ he knows he is fated to do nothing, to pass from this world without leaving a trace, to remain ‘‘unknown.’’ Chekhov began work on the story in 1888, at the same time as The Steppe, but gave it up as too political. In the version he finished four years later, the politics have thinned out to almost nothing. The narrator, based on an actual person, is a former naval officer turned radical, who gets himself hired as a servant in the house of a rich young man named Orlov in order to spy on his father, a well-known elder statesman. At one point he even has a chance to assassinate the old man, but nothing comes of it. The result of all his spying is not action but total inaction. The ideas and ideals that are mentioned never get defined and play no part in the story. There is talk of freedom, of Turgenev’s heroes, but it all borders on absurdity, as do Orlov’s feasts of irony with his cronies. What interested Chekhov was the ambiguous position of the ‘‘servant,’’ who lives as if invisibly with Orlov and his mistress, is there but not there, overhears their most intimate conversations and quarrels, becomes involved in their lives to the point of falling in love with the rejected lady, and all the while is not what he seems.

Central to the story is the passionate and transgressive letter in which the ‘‘servant’’ exposes himself to Orlov, denouncing his own life as well as his unsuspecting master’s. He knows that he himself is terminally ill, and this ineluctable fact has altered his radical ideas or simply done away with them. His letter ends as a plea for life:

Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?

Chekhov’s depiction of the dissolution of society goes beyond and even against the political: it is an exploration of human deception and betrayal, of human insubstantiality. The dying man cries out: ‘‘I want terribly to live, I want our life to be holy, high, and solemn, like the heavenly vault.’’ But his life turns out to be tawdry, mean, empty. In his final conversation with Orlov, he poses an unanswerable question: ‘‘I do believe in the purposefulness and necessity of what happens around us, but what does that necessity have to do with me? Why should my ‘I’ perish?’’ At which point the unhearing Orlov shows him to the door.

Though he denied it, Chekhov constantly drew on his own life for his fiction. That is especially true in his portraits of women. They were sometimes quite vindictive and brought pained or angry protests from their real-life counterparts. Others are more complex and compassionate, as in the last two short novels in this collection, which, like so many of his briefer works, are love stories, or stories about the failure to love. The two heroines of Three Years, the young beauty Yulia Sergeevna and the edgy, unattractive intellectual ‘‘new woman’’ Rassudina (her name comes from the Russian rassudok, ‘‘reason’’), were drawn in part from two women, Lika Mizinova and Olga Kundasova, who loved Chekhov all their lives. There are other autobiographical elements in the story. The mercantile milieu of the hero’s childhood, the strictly religious father, the beatings, the gloom of the warehouse, are Chekhov’s experience. Minor characters and incidents also come from Chekhov’s circle and his life in Moscow.

The hero, Alexei Laptev, thirty-five years old like his author, a merchant’s son declassed by university education but, as certain scenes make clear, not educated enough, is caught between worlds. His story is a variation on the theme of Beauty and the Beast, as Vladimir Kataev has said. It begins with the lovelorn Laptev recalling

long Moscow conversations in which he himself had taken part still so recently – conversations about how it was possible to live without love, how passionate love was a psychosis, how there was finally no such thing as love, but only physical attraction between the sexes – all in the same vein; he remembered and thought sadly that if he were now asked what love was, he would be at a loss to answer.

Other definitions of nonlove are given as the story unfolds: the brother-in-law Panaurov’s (‘‘In every person’s skin sit microscopic iron strips which contain currents. If you meet an individual whose currents are parallel to your own, there’s love for you’’); Yulia Sergeevna’s (‘‘You know, I didn’t marry Alexei for love. Before, I used to be stupid, I suffered, I kept thinking I’d ruined his life and mine, but now I see there’s no need for any love, it’s all nonsense’’); Yartsev’s (‘‘Of course, we’re not in love with each other, but I think that . . . that makes no difference. I’m glad I can give her shelter and peace and the possibility of not working, in case she gets sick, and it seems to her that if she lives with me, there will be more order in my life, and that under her influence, I’ll become a great scholar’’). But Laptev finds that he has simply fallen in love, passionately and absurdly, sitting all night in ecstasy under a forgotten parasol.

The decay of the Moscow merchant class, which some critics take to be the real subject of the story, is a secondary theme, sketched in broad strokes; extensive sociological documentary in the manner of Zola was not Chekhov’s way. At the center of the story is Yulia Sergeevna. She is a provincial girl, she rarely speaks, she has no fashionable ideas, and she can hardly even explain why she accepted Laptev’s proposal without loving him. Chekhov follows this exchange of love and nonlove and its surprising reversals over the three years of the story.

Three Years is filled with striking details, a complex interweaving of impressions, including visionary moments such as Yartsev’s dream of a barbarian invasion and an all-engulfing fire (Russia’s past or her future?), and Laptev’s meditations in the lunar solitude of the garden, when he recalls his far-off, cheerless boyhood in that same garden, hears lovers whispering and kissing in the next yard, and is strangely stirred:

He went out to the middle of the yard and, unbuttoning his shirt on his chest, looked at the moon, and he fancied that he would now order the gate to be opened, go out and never come back there again; his heart was sweetly wrung by the foretaste of freedom, he laughed joyfully and imagined what a wonderful, poetic, and maybe even holy life it could be . . .

But the final moment of near-revelation is not an imaginary one. It is the last image Chekhov grants us of Yulia Sergeevna, as Laptev watches her walking by herself: ‘‘She was thinking about something, and on her face there was a sad, charming expression, and tears glistened in her eyes. She was no longer the slender, fragile, pale-faced girl she once had been, but a mature, beautiful, strong woman.’’ This image of all that eludes possession hangs suspended without commentary at the end of the story.

During 1896, which was to be his last full year at Melikhovo, Chekhov wrote only two works of fiction: ‘‘The House with the Mezzanine: An Artist’s Story’’ and My Life: A Provincial’s Story. The provisional titles he gave them – ‘‘My Fiancée’’ and ‘‘My Marriage’’ – suggest the closeness of their themes in his mind. Both are ironic. My Life is the most saturated of these five short novels in the realia of Chekhov’s life, from his childhood in Taganrog and from his four years on the estate. Taganrog gave him the provincial town, the business of snaring songbirds, the housepainter Radish, the butcher Prokofy, and the nickname ‘‘Small Profit,’’ which had been pinned on his brother Alexander. Melikhovo gave him the derelict estate of Dubechnya, the incursion of the railways, the thousand details of the building trades, the trials of farming and village life, a close knowledge of peasants, the construction and consecration of the schoolhouse. And life gave him the three women, three variations on failed love, who are central to the narrator’s story. It is a summa of Chekhov’s world.

He described My Life as a portrayal of the provincial intelligentsia. The social ideas it embodies had been in the air for two decades in Russia: the Populists’ idea of going to the land, and the Tolstoyan ideas of radical simplification, the virtues of honest labor, and the rejection of class distinctions. Misail Poloznev, the narrator, is a young man who rebels against the deadly dullness of provincial life by putting some of those ideas into practice. His story tests them against the complexities of human reality: the uprooting force of modernization embodied in the successful railway constructor Dolzhikov; the collapsing aristocracy represented by Mrs. Cheprakov and her degenerate son; the actualities of the peasants’ life and their relations with the ‘‘masters,’’ which are far from Populist and Tolstoyan idealization.

Chekhov had been ‘‘deeply moved’’ and ‘‘possessed’’ by Tolstoy’s ideas in the 1880s, as he wrote to Suvorin in 1894. But after his trip to Sakhalin, he gradually abandoned them. He told Suvorin:

Maybe it’s because I’ve given up smoking, but Tolstoy’s moral philosophy has ceased to move me; down deep I’m hostile to it, which is of course unfair. I have peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I’m not the one to be impressed with peasant virtues . . . War is an evil and the court system is an evil, but it doesn’t follow that I should wear bast shoes and sleep on a stove alongside the hired hand and his wife . . .

My Life has been seen as both an advocacy and a send-up of Tolstoyan ‘‘simplification.’’ It is neither. ‘‘Chekhov does not debunk Tolstoy,’’ writes Donald Rayfield, ‘‘but strips his ideas of sanctimony.’’ Misail, who is the instrument of that process, is an unlikely hero – slow, passive, not very articulate, tolerant except in his revolt against philistine deadness and his search for an alternative way of life. He persists, but in solitude, not in some ‘‘rural Eden’’ of saved humanity. He accepts the consequences of his choice, which Count Tolstoy never had to consider.

The story is symmetrically structured, ending with a final confrontation between Misail and his father that matches the opening scene. It is preceded by another of those uncanny moments in Chekhov. The housepainter Radish has just told Misail’s friend, the young Dr. Blagovo (his name means ‘‘goodness’’), that he will not find the Kingdom of Heaven. ‘‘No help for it,’’ the doctor jokes, ‘‘somebody has to be in hell as well.’’ At those words, something suddenly happens to the consciousness of Misail, who has been listening; he has a waking dream, the recapitulation of an earlier episode, but this time verging on the recognition that hell is exactly where they are.

In 1899, Chekhov wrote to his friend Dr. Orlov, a colleague from the district of Melikhovo: ‘‘I have no faith in our intelligentsia . . . I have faith in individuals, I see salvation in individuals scattered here and there, all over Russia, be they intellectuals or peasants, for they’re the ones who really matter, though they are few.’’ Misail’s victory is personal and solitary. The ambiguity of his nickname, ‘‘Small Profit’’ – is it ironic or not? – is characteristic of Chekhov’s mature vision. In his refusal to force the contradictions of his stories to a resolution, Chekhov seems to come to an impasse. Interestingly, of these five short novels, the last three end with a man left with an orphaned girl on his hands, a being who, beyond all intellectual disputes and human betrayals, simply needs to be cared for. And we may remember the moment in The Duel when the deacon, in a comical reverie, imagines himself as a bishop, intoning the bishop’s liturgical prayer: ‘‘Look down from heaven, O God, and behold and visit this vineyard which Thy right hand hath planted.’’ The quality of Chekhov’s attention is akin to prayer. Though he was often accused of being indifferent, and sometimes claimed it himself, that is the last thing he was.

Richard Pevear

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

PHILLIP CALLOW, Chekhov: The Hidden Ground: A Biography, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1998.

JULIE W. DE SHERBININ, Chekhov and Russian Religious Culture, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1997. An excellent study of an essential and often ignored aspect of Chekhov’s artistic vision.

MICHAEL FINKE, Metapoesis: The Russian Tradition from Pushkin to Chekhov, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1995.

VERA GOTTLIEB and PAUL ALLEN, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2000. Essays by various hands on Chekhov’s fiction and plays.

ROBERT LOUIS JACKSON, ed., Reading Chekhov’s Text, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1993. An interesting collection of recent critical studies.

SIMON KARLINSKY, ed., Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, translated by Michael Henry Heim, commentary by Simon Karlinsky, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1997.

VLADIMIR KATAEV, If Only We Could Know: An Interpretation of Chekhov , translated by Harvey Pitcher, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2002. An important new work by a leading Russian Chekhov scholar.

AILEEN M. KELLY, Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1999. Studies by a reputed intellectual historian.

CATHY POPKIN, The Pragmatics of Insignificance, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1993.

V. S. PRITCHETT, Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, Random House, New York, 1988. A critical biography by an English master of the short story and longtime admirer of Chekhov.

DONALD RAYFIELD, Chekhov: A Life, Henry Holt, New York, 1997.

The most complete and detailed biography of Chekhov in English to date.

———, Understanding Chekhov, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1999. An update of Rayfield’s Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art, Elek Books Ltd., London, 1975.

SAVELY SENDEROVICH and MUNIR SENDICH, eds., Anton Chekhov Rediscovered , Russian Language Journal, East Lansing, MI, 1988. A collection including some fine recent studies and a comprehensive bibliography.

LEV SHESTOV, Chekhov and Other Essays, translation anonymous, new introduction by Sidney Monas, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1966. Essays by a major Russian thinker of the twentieth century, including ‘‘Creation from the Void,’’ written on the occasion of Chekhov’s death in 1904 and still one of the most penetrating interpretations of his art.

CHRONOLOGY

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Alexander II (tsar since 1855) following a reformist policy, in complete opposition to his predecessor, the reactionary Nicholas I. Port of Vladivostok founded to serve Russia’s recent annexations (from China). Huge investment in railway building begins.

Emancipation of the serfs (February), the climax of the tsar’s program of reform. While his achievement had great moral and symbolic significance, many peasants felt themselves cheated by the terms of the complex emancipation statute. Outbreak of American Civil War. Unification of Italy. Bismarck prime minister of Prussia. 1860s and 1870s: ‘‘Nihilism’’ – rationalist philosophy skeptical of all forms of established authority – becomes widespread among young radical intelligentsia in Russia.

Polish rebellion. Poland incorporated into Russia. Itinerant movement formed by young artists, led by Ivan Kramskoi and later joined by Ivan Shishkin: drawing inspiration from the Russian countryside and peasant life, they are also concerned with taking art to the people.

The first International. Establishment of the Zemstva, organs of self-government and a significant liberal influence in tsarist Russia. Legal reforms do much towards removing class bias from the administration of justice. Trial by jury instituted and a Russian bar established. Russian colonial expansion in Central Asia (to 1868).

Slavery formally abolished in U.S.A.

Young nobleman Dmitry Karakozov tries to assassinate the tsar. Radical journals The Contemporary and The Russian Word suppressed. Austro-Prussian war.

St. Petersburg section of Moscow Slavonic Benevolent Committee founded (expansion of Pan-Slav movement). Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic poem Sadko .

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Chemist D. I. Mendeleyev wins international fame for his periodic table of chemical elements based on atomic weight.

Lenin born. Franco-Prussian war. End of Second Empire in France and establishment of Third Republic. Repin paints The Volga Boatmen (to 1873).

Paris Commune set up and suppressed. Fall of Paris ends war. German Empire established.

Three Emperors’ League (Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary) formed in Berlin. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, Narodnik (Populist) ‘‘going to the people’’ campaign gathers momentum: young intellectuals incite peasantry to rebel against autocracy.

First performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s first opera, The Maid of Pskov.

Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition; first performance of Boris Godunov.

Bulgarian Atrocities (Bulgarians massacred by Turks). Founding of Land and Freedom, first Russian political party openly to advocate revolution. Death of anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Official statute for Women’s Higher Courses, whereby women are able to study at the universities of St. Petersburg,

Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Kazan. By 1881 there are two thousand female students. Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India.

Russia declares war on Turkey (conflict inspired by Pan-Slav movement). Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake.

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Congress of Berlin ends Russo-Turkish war; other European powers compel Russia to give up many of her territorial gains; partition of Bulgaria between Russia and Turkey. Mass trial of Populist agitators in Russia (‘‘the trial of the 193’’). Shishkin, pioneer of the plein-air study in the 1870s, paints Rye, a classic evocation of Russian countryside.

Birth of Stalin. The People’s Will, terrorist offshoot of Land and Freedom, founded. Assassination of Prince Kropotkin, governor of Kharkov. Tchaikovsky: Evgeny Onegin. Death of historian S. M. Solovyov, whose history of Russia had been appearing one volume per year since 1851.

Oil drilling begins in Azerbaidzhan; big program of railway building commences. Borodin: In Central Asia. During 1870s and 1880s the Abramtsevo Colony, drawn together by railway tycoon Mamontov, includes Repin, Serov, Vrubel, and Chekhov’s friend Levitan. Nationalist in outlook, they draw inspiration from Russian folk art and the Russo-Byzantine tradition. Assassination of Alexander II by Ignatius Grinevitsky, a member of the People’s Will, following which the terrorist movement is crushed by the authorities. Revolutionary opposition goes underground until 1900. ‘‘Epoch of small deeds’’: intelligentsia work for reform through existing institutions. The new tsar, Alexander III, is much influenced by his former tutor, the extreme conservative Pobedonostsev, who becomes chief procurator of the Holy Synod. Resignation of Loris-Melikov, architect of the reforms of Alexander II’s reign. Jewish pogroms.

Censorship laws tightened. Student riots in Kazan and St. Petersburg. Reactionary regime of Alexander III characterized by stagnation in agriculture, retrogression in education, russification of non-Russian section of the population, and narrow bureaucratic paternalism.

First Russian Marxist revolutionary organization, the Liberation of Labor, founded in Geneva by Georgi Plekhanov. Increased persecution of religious minorities.

New education minister Delyanov increases powers of inspectors; university appointments made directly by the ministry rather than academic councils; fees increased. Fatherland Notes, edited by Saltykov-Shchedrin, suppressed. During 1880s organizations such as the Moscow Law Society and the Committee for the Advancement of Literacy become centers for the discussion of political and social ideas among the intelligentsia.

DATE AUTHOR’S LIFE LITERARY CONTEXT

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Students hold a demonstration to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Dobrolyubov. Several of them, disgusted by the brutal way in which the demonstration is suppressed, resolve to assassinate the tsar; the plot is discovered, and among those executed is Lenin’s brother Alexander Ulyanov, whose death he swears to avenge.

During the late 1880s Russia begins her industrial revolution.

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade.

Introduction of land captains, powerful administrator magnates who increase control of the gentry over the peasants, undermining previous judicial and local government reforms. Shishkin: Morning in a Pine Forest.

First performance of Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades and first (posthumous) performance of Borodin’s Prince Igor. Peasant representation on Zemstva reduced. Bismarck dismissed. During the 1890s growth rate for industrial output averages about 8 percent per annum. Important development of coal mines in southern European Russia. Industrial expansion sustained by growth of banking and joint stock companies, which begin to attract foreign, later native, investment.

Harvest failure in central Russia causes famine and starvation: up to a million peasants die by the end of the winter. Work commences on Trans-Siberian Railway. Twenty thousand Jews brutally evicted from Moscow. Rigorously enforced residence restrictions, quotas limiting entry of Jews into high schools and universities, and other anti-Jewish measures drive more than a million Russian Jews to emigrate, mainly to North America.

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker. Property qualification for franchise raised, reducing number of voters in St. Petersburg from 21,176 to 7,152.

Armenian massacres begin. As part of the russification of the Balkans, the German University of Dorpat is reopened as the University of Yuryev, with a majority of Russian students. Death of Tchaikovsky.

Death of Alexander II; accession of Nicholas II. Growth in popularity of Marxist ideas among university students encouraged by appearance of Struve’s Critical Notes and Beltov’s Monistic View.

A. S. Popov, pioneer of wireless telegraphy, gives demonstration and publishes article on his discoveries, coinciding with Marconi’s independent discoveries in this field. Establishment of Marxist newspaper Samarskii Vestnik . In May, two thousand people crushed to death on Klondynka field when a stand collapses during the coronation ceremony.

Tsar Nicholas II visits President Faure of France: Russo-French alliance. Lenin deported for three years to Siberia. Only systematic census carried out in Imperial Russia reports a population of 128 million, an increase of three and a half times over the century. The industrial labor force of three million (3 percent) is small compared with the West but shows a fifteen-fold increase over the century. Thirteen percent of the population now urban as opposed to only 4 percent a century earlier.

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Russian Social Democratic Labor Party founded. Between 1898 and 1901 Caucasian oil production is higher than that of the rest of the world together. Finns begin to lose their rights as a separate nation within the Empire. Sergey Diaghilev and others found the World of Art society, prominent members of which are Benois and Bakst; its most notable production is Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. The magazine, to which ‘‘decadent’’ writers such as Balmont frequently contribute, opposes the ‘‘provincial naturalism’’ of the Itinerant school, and advocates a philosophy of art for art’s sake.

Student riots. All universities in Russia temporarily closed. Moscow Law Society also closed. Reactionary Sipyagin becomes minister of the interior. During 1890s the so-called Third Element, consisting of doctors, teachers, statisticians, engineers, and other professionals employed by the Zemstva, becomes a recognized focus of liberal opposition to the tsarist regime. Russian industry enters a period of depression.

Lenin allowed to leave Russia. Founds paper Iskra in Germany. Russia ends nineteenth century with a total of 17,000 students spread over nine universities: a hundred years before, the Empire had only one university – Moscow. Nevertheless, the proportion of illiterates in the Empire was recorded at this time as 75 percent of persons aged between nine and forty-nine.

Murder of minister of education Bogolepov by a student marks beginning of wave of political assassinations. For the authorities, the principal menace is the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which looks for support from the peasantry, rather than the Social Democrats, who hope to rouse the urban proletariat. First performance of Rachmaninov’s piano concerto No. 2, with the composer as soloist. Death of Queen Victoria.

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? provides blueprint for future Bolshevik party. Sipyagin assassinated by Socialist Revolutionaries.

Conflict between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at second Congress of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Assassination of King Alexander and Queen Draga of Serbia.

Russo-Japanese war (to 1905), both unpopular and unsuccessful from the Russian point of view. Assassination of V. K. Pleve, minister of the interior, and notorious oppressor of minority peoples within the Empire.

First Russian Revolution.

THE STEPPE

The Story of a Journey

I

ON AN EARLY July morning a battered, springless britzka— one of those antediluvian britzkas now driven in Russia only by merchants’ agents, herdsmen, and poor priests—rolled out of the district town of N., in Z—— province, and went thundering down the post road. It rattled and shrieked at the slightest movement, glumly seconded by the bucket tied to its rear—and from these sounds alone, and the pitiful leather tatters hanging from its shabby body, one could tell how decrepit it was and ready for the scrap heap.

In the britzka sat two residents of N.: the merchant Ivan Ivanych Kuzmichov, clean-shaven, in spectacles and a straw hat, looking more like an official than a merchant; and the other, Father Khristofor Siriysky, rector of the church of St. Nicholas in N., a small, long-haired old man in a gray canvas caftan, a broad-brimmed top hat, and a colorfully embroidered belt. The first was thinking intently about something and kept tossing his head to drive away drowsiness; on his face a habitual, businesslike dryness struggled with the good cheer of a man who has just bid farewell to his family and had a stiff drink; the second gazed at God’s world with moist, astonished little eyes and smiled so broadly that his smile even seemed to reach his hat brim; his face was red and had a chilled look. Both of them, Father Khristofor as well as Kuzmichov, were on their way now to sell wool. Taking leave of their households, they had just had a filling snack of doughnuts with sour cream and, despite the early hour, had drunk a little...They were both in excellent spirits.

Besides the two men just described and the coachman Deniska, who tirelessly whipped up the pair of frisky bay horses, there was one more passenger in the britzka—a boy of about nine whose face was dark with tan and stained with tears. This was Egorushka, Kuzmichov’s nephew. With his uncle’s permission and Father Khristofor’s blessing, he was going somewhere to enroll in school. His mama, Olga Ivanovna, widow of a collegiate secretary ¹ and Kuzmichov’s sister, who liked educated people and wellborn society, had entreated her brother, who was going to sell wool, to take Egorushka with him and enroll him in school; and now the boy, not knowing where or why he was going, was sitting on the box beside Deniska, holding on to his elbow so as not to fall off, and bobbing up and down like a kettle on the stove. The quick pace made his red shirt balloon on his back, and his new coachman’s hat with a peacock feather kept slipping down on his neck. He felt himself an unhappy person in the highest degree and wanted to cry.

When the britzka drove past the prison, Egorushka looked at the sentries quietly pacing by the high white wall, at the small barred windows, at the cross gleaming on the roof, and remembered how, a week ago, on the day of the Kazan Mother of God,² he had gone with his mama to the prison church for the feast; and earlier still, for Easter, he had gone to the prison with the cook Liudmila and Deniska and brought kulichi, ³ eggs, pies, and roasted beef; the prisoners had thanked them and crossed themselves, and one of them had given Egorushka some tin shirt studs of his own making.

The boy peered at the familiar places, and the hateful britzka raced past and left it all behind. After the prison flashed the black, sooty smithies, after them the cozy green cemetery surrounded by a stone wall; the white crosses and tombstones hiding among the green of the cherry trees and showing like white blotches from a distance, peeped merrily from behind the wall. Egorushka remembered that when the cherry trees were in bloom, these white spots blended with the blossoms into a white sea; and when the cherries were ripe, the white tombstones and crosses were strewn with blood-red spots. Behind the wall, under the cherries, Egorushka’s father and his grandmother Zinaida Danilovna slept day and night. When the grandmother died, they laid her in a long, narrow coffin and covered her eyes, which refused to close, with two five-kopeck pieces. Before her death she had been alive and had brought soft poppy-seed bagels from the market, but now she sleeps and sleeps...

And beyond the cemetery the brickworks smoked. Thick black smoke came in big puffs from under the long, thatched roofs flattened to the ground, and lazily rose upwards. The sky above the brickworks and cemetery was swarthy, and big shadows from the puffs of smoke crept over the fields and across the road. In the smoke near the roofs moved people and horses covered with red dust...

Beyond the brickworks the town ended and the fields began. Egorushka turned to look at the town for the last time, pressed his face against Deniska’s elbow, and wept bitterly...

‘‘So you’re not done crying, crybaby!’’ said Kuzmichov. ‘‘Mama’s boy, sniveling again! If you don’t want to go, stay then. Nobody’s forcing you!’’

‘‘Never mind, never mind, Egor old boy, never mind...’’ Father Khristofor murmured quickly. ‘‘Never mind, old boy...Call upon God...It’s nothing bad you’re going to, but something good. Learning is light, as they say, and ignorance is darkness...It’s truly so.’’

‘‘You want to turn back?’’ asked Kuzmichov.

‘‘Ye...yes...’’ answered Egorushka with a sob.

‘‘And you should. Anyhow, there’s no point in going, it’s a long way for nothing.’’

‘‘Never mind, never mind, old boy...’’ Father Khristofor went on. ‘‘Call upon God... Lomonosov⁴ traveled the same way with fishermen, yet from him came a man for all Europe. Intelligence, received with faith, yields fruit that is pleasing to God. How does the prayer go? ‘For the glory of the Creator, for the comfort of our parents, for the benefit of the Church and the fatherland’... That’s it.’’

‘‘Benefits vary...’’ said Kuzmichov, lighting up a cheap cigar. ‘‘There are some that study for twenty years and nothing comes of it.’’

‘‘It happens.’’

‘‘Some benefit from learning, but some just have their brains addled. My sister’s a woman of no understanding, tries to have it all in a wellborn way, and wants to turn Egorka into a scholar, and she doesn’t understand that with my affairs I could make Egorka happy forever. I explain this to you because, if everybody becomes scholars and gentlemen, there’ll be nobody to trade or sow grain. We’ll all starve to death.’’

‘‘But if everybody trades and sows grain, then nobody will comprehend learning.’’

And, thinking that they had both said something convincing and weighty, Kuzmichov and Father Khristofor put on serious faces and coughed simultaneously. Deniska, who was listening to their conversation and understood nothing, tossed his head and, rising a little, whipped up the two bays. Silence ensued.

Meanwhile, before the eyes of the travelers there now spread a wide, endless plain cut across by a chain of hills. Crowding and peeking from behind each other, these hills merge into an elevation that stretches to the right from the road all the way to the horizon and disappears in the purple distance; you go on and on and there is no way to tell where it begins and where it ends...The sun has already peeped out from behind the town and quietly, without fuss, set about its work. At first, far ahead, where the sky meets the earth, near the barrows and a windmill that, from afar, looks like a little man waving his arms, a broad, bright yellow strip crept over the ground; a moment later the same sort of strip lit up somewhat closer, crept to the right, and enveloped the hills; something warm touched Egorushka’s back, a strip of light, sneaking up from behind, darted across the britzka and the horses, raced to meet the other strips, and suddenly the whole wide steppe shook off the half-shade of morning, smiled, and sparkled with dew.

Mowed rye, tall weeds, milkwort, wild hemp—all of it brown from the heat, reddish and half dead, now washed by the dew and caressed by the sun—were reviving to flower again. Martins skimmed over the road with merry cries, gophers called to each other in the grass, somewhere far to the left peewits wept. A covey of partridges, frightened by the britzka, fluttered up and, with its soft ‘‘trrr,’’ flew off towards the hills. Grasshoppers, crickets, capricorn beetles, mole crickets struck up their monotonous chirring music in the grass.

But a little time passed, the dew evaporated, the air congealed, and the deceived steppe assumed its dismal July look. The grass wilted, life stood still. The sunburnt hills, brown-green, purple in the distance, with their peaceful, shadowy tones, the plain with its distant mistiness, and above them the overturned sky, which, in the steppe, where there are no forests or high mountains, seems terribly deep and transparent, now looked endless, transfixed with anguish ...

How stifling and dismal! The britzka runs on, but Egorushka sees one and the same thing—the sky, the plain, the hills ... The music in the grass has grown still. The martins have flown away, there are no partridges to be seen. Rooks flit over the faded grass, having nothing else to do; they all look the same and make the steppe still more monotonous.

A kite flies just above the ground, smoothly flapping its wings, and suddenly stops in the air, as if pondering life’s boredom, then shakes its wings and sweeps away across the steppe like an arrow, and there is no telling why it flies and what it wants. And in the distance the windmill beats its wings ...

For the sake of diversity, a white skull or a boulder flashes among the weeds; a gray stone idol or a parched willow with a blue roller on its topmost branch rises up for a moment, a gopher scampers across the road, and—again weeds, hills, rooks run past your eyes ...

Then, thank God, a cart laden with sheaves comes the opposite way. On the very top lies a peasant girl. Sleepy, exhausted by the heat, she raises her head and looks at the passersby. Deniska gapes at her, the bays stretch their muzzles out to the sheaves, the britzka, shrieking, kisses the cart, and prickly ears of wheat brush like a besom over Father Khristofor’s top hat.

‘‘Running people down, eh, pudgy!’’ shouts Deniska. ‘‘See, her mug’s all swollen like a bee stung it!’’

The girl smiles sleepily, moves her lips, and lies down again ... But now a solitary poplar appears on a hill; who planted it and why it is here—God only knows. It is hard to tear your eyes from its slender figure and green garments. Is the handsome fellow happy? Heat in summer, frost and blizzards in winter, terrible autumn nights when you see only darkness and hear nothing but the wayward, furiously howling wind, and above all—you are alone, alone your whole life ... Beyond the poplar, fields of wheat stretch in a bright yellow carpet from the top of the hill right down to the road. On the hill the grain has already been cut and gathered into stacks, but below they are still mowing ... Six mowers stand in a row and swing their scythes, and the scythes flash merrily and in rhythm, all together making a sound like ‘‘vzzhi, vzzhi!’’ By the movements of the women binding the sheaves, by the faces of the mowers, by the gleaming of the scythes, you can see that the heat is burning and stifling. A black dog, its tongue hanging out, comes running from the mowers to meet the britzka, probably intending to bark, but stops halfway and gazes indifferently at Deniska, who threatens it with his whip: it is too hot to bark! One woman straightens up and, pressing both hands to her weary back, follows Egorushka’s red shirt with her eyes. The red color may have pleased her, or she may have been remembering her own children, but she stands for a long time motionless and looks after him ...

But now the wheat, too, has flashed by. Again the scorched plain, the sunburnt hills, the torrid sky stretch out, again a kite skims over the ground. The windmill beats its wings in the distance, as before, and still looks like a little man waving his arms. You get sick of looking at it, and it seems you will never reach it, that it is running away from the britzka.

Father Khristofor and Kuzmichov were silent. Deniska kept whipping up the bays and making little cries, and Egorushka no longer wept but gazed indifferently on all sides. The heat and the boredom of the steppe wearied him. It seemed to him that he had already been riding and bobbing about for a long time, that the sun had already been baking his back for a long time. They had not yet gone ten miles, but he was already thinking: ‘‘Time for a rest!’’ The good cheer gradually left his uncle’s face, and only the businesslike dryness remained, and to a gaunt, clean-shaven face, especially when it is in spectacles, when its nose and temples are covered with dust, this dryness lends an implacable, inquisitorial expression. Father Khristofor, however, went on gazing in astonishment at God’s world and smiled. He was silently thinking of something good and cheerful, and a kindly, good-natured smile congealed on his face. It seemed that the good, cheerful thought also congealed in his brain from the heat ...

‘‘What do you say, Deniska, will we catch up with the wagon train today?’’ asked Kuzmichov.

Deniska glanced at the sky, rose a little, whipped up the horses, and only then replied:

‘‘By nightfall, God willing.’’

The barking of dogs was heard. Some six huge steppe sheepdogs suddenly rushed at the britzka, as if leaping from ambush, with a fierce, howling barking. Extraordinarily vicious, with shaggy, spiderlike muzzles, their eyes red with malice, they all surrounded the britzka and, shoving each other jealously, set up a hoarse growling. Their hatred was passionate, and they seemed ready to tear to pieces the horses, and the britzka, and the people ... Deniska, who liked teasing and whipping, was glad of the opportunity and, giving his face an expression of malicious glee, bent over and lashed one of the sheepdogs with his whip. The dogs growled still more, the horses bolted; and Egorushka, barely clinging to the box, looked at the dogs’ eyes and teeth and understood that if he were to fall off, he would instantly be torn to pieces, but he felt no fear and looked on with the same malicious glee as Deniska, regretting that he had no whip in his hands.

The britzka overtook a flock of sheep.

‘‘Stop!’’ cried Kuzmichov. ‘‘Hold up! Whoa ...’’

Deniska threw his whole body back and reined in the bays. The britzka stopped.

‘‘Come here!’’ Kuzmichov shouted to the shepherd. ‘‘Calm those dogs down, curse them!’’

The old shepherd, ragged and barefoot, in a warm hat, with a dirty bag on his hip and a long staff with a crook— a perfect Old Testament figure—calmed the dogs down and, removing his hat, came up to the britzka. Exactly the same Old Testament figure stood motionless at the other end of the flock and gazed indifferently at the passersby.

‘‘Whose flock is this?’’ asked Kuzmichov.

‘‘Varlamov’s!’’ the old man replied loudly.

‘‘Varlamov’s!’’ repeated the shepherd standing at the other end of the flock.

‘‘Say, did Varlamov pass by here yesterday or not?’’

‘‘No, sir...His agent passed by, that’s a fact ...’’

‘‘Gee-up!’’

The britzka drove on, and the shepherds with their vicious dogs were left behind. Egorushka reluctantly looked ahead into the purple distance, and it was beginning to seem to him that the windmill beating its wings was coming nearer. It was getting bigger and bigger, it really grew, and you could now distinctly make out its two wings. One wing was old, patched up; the other had just recently been made of new wood and gleamed in the sun.

The britzka drove straight on, but the mill for some reason began moving to the left. They drove and drove, but it kept moving to the left and would not disappear from sight.

‘‘A fine windmill Boltva built for his son!’’ observed Deniska.

‘‘But his farmstead’s nowhere to be seen.’’

‘‘It’s over there, beyond that little gully.’’

Soon Boltva’s farmstead appeared as well, but the windmill still would not drop back, would not fall behind, looking at Egorushka with its gleaming wing and beating away. What a sorcerer!

II

AROUND MIDDAY THE britzka turned off the road to the right, drove slowly for a while, and stopped. Egorushka heard a soft, very gentle burbling and felt on his face the cool velvet touch of some different air. Out of a hill that nature had glued together from huge ugly stones, through a little hemlock pipe put in by some unknown benefactor, ran a thin stream of water. It fell to the ground, gay, transparent, sparkling in the sun, and, murmuring quietly, as if imagining itself a strong and swift torrent, quickly flowed off somewhere to the left. Not far from the hill, the little rivulet broadened into a pool; the hot rays and scorching soil drank it up greedily, diminishing its strength; but a bit further on, it probably merged with another such little rivulet, because some hundred paces from the hill, along its course, dense, lush green sedge was growing, from which, as the britzka approached, three snipe flew up with a cry.

The travelers settled by the brook to rest and feed the horses. Kuzmichov, Father Khristofor, and Egorushka sat down in the thin shade of the britzka and the unharnessed horses, on a spread piece of felt, and began to eat. Once he had drunk his fill of water and eaten a baked egg, the good, cheerful thought congealed by the heat in Father Khristofor’s brain asked to be let out. He looked at Egorushka affectionately, munched his lips, and began:

‘‘I myself studied a bit, old boy. From a very early age, God put sense and comprehension into me, so that unlike others, being still as you are now, I comforted my parents and preceptors with my understanding. I was not yet fifteen, and I already spoke and wrote verses in Latin as if it was Russian. I remember when I was a staff-bearer for Bishop Khristofor. Once after the liturgy, I remember it like today, on the name day of the most pious sovereign Alexander Pavlovich the Blessed,⁵ while he was taking off his vestments in the sanctuary, he looked at me affectionately and asked: ‘Puer bone, quam appellaris?’¹ And I answered: ‘Christophorus sum.’²And he: ‘Ergo connominati summus,’^3; meaning that we were namesakes...Then he asks in Latin: ‘Whose child are you?’ I answered, also in Latin, that I was the son of the deacon Siriysky in the village of Lebedinskoe. Seeing such promptness and clarity in my answers, his grace blessed me and said: ‘Write to your father that I will not forget him and will keep an eye on you.’ The archpriests and priests who were in the sanctuary, listening to the Latin exchange, were also not a little surprised, and each showed his pleasure by praising me. I didn’t have whiskers yet, old boy, and was already reading Latin, and Greek, and French, knew philosophy, mathematics, civic history, and all subjects. God gave me an amazing memory. It happened that I would read something twice and learn it by heart. My preceptors and benefactors were amazed and supposed I would become a man of great learning, a Church luminary. And I myself thought of going to Kiev to continue my studies, but my parents would not give me their blessing. ‘You’ll go on studying for ages,’ said my father, ‘when will we be done waiting for you?’ On hearing these words, I abandoned my studies and took a post. True, no scholar came of me, but I obeyed my parents instead, brought peace to their old age, and buried them honorably. Obedience is greater than fasting and prayer!’’

‘‘You must have forgotten all your learning by now!’’ observed Kuzmichov.

‘‘How could I not? Praise God, I’m in my seventies! I still remember something of philosophy and rhetoric, but languages and mathematics I’ve quite forgotten.’’

Father Khristofor closed his eyes, thought, and said in a low voice:

‘‘What is a being? A being is a self-sufficient thing that requires nothing for its completion.’’

He wagged his head and laughed with sweet emotion.

‘‘Spiritual food!’’ he said. ‘‘Truly, matter nourishes the flesh, and spiritual food for the soul!’’

‘‘Learning’s learning,’’ sighed Kuzmichov, ‘‘but if we don’t catch up with Varlamov, that’ll learn us all.’’

‘‘A man’s not a needle, we’ll find him. He’s circling around in these parts now.’’

The three familiar snipe flew over the sedge, and in their squawks, anxiety and vexation could be heard at having been driven away from the brook. The horses munched sedately and snorted; Deniska walked around them, trying to show that he was totally indifferent to the cucumbers, pies, and eggs his masters were eating, immersing himself completely in slaughtering the flies and horseflies that covered the horses’ bellies and backs. Apathetically, his throat producing some sort of special, sarcastically triumphant sound, he swatted his victims, but in case of failure, he grunted vexedly, his eyes following each of the lucky ones that had escaped death.

‘‘Deniska, where are you? Come and eat!’’ said Kuzmichov, sighing deeply and thereby letting it be known that he had already had enough.

Deniska timorously approached the felt and chose for himself five big and yellow cucumbers, so-called ‘‘yallers’’ (he was ashamed to choose the smaller and fresher ones), took two baked eggs, blackened and cracked, then irresolutely, as if afraid of being struck on his outstretched hand, touched a little pie with his finger.

‘‘Take it, take it!’’ Kuzmichov urged him.

Deniska resolutely took the pie and, walking far off to one side, sat down on the ground, his back to the britzka. At once such loud chomping was heard that even the horses turned around and looked at Deniska suspiciously.

Having had a bite to eat, Kuzmichov took a sack with something in it out of the britzka and said to Egorushka:

‘‘I’m going to sleep, and you watch out that nobody pulls this sack from under my head.’’

Father Khristofor took off his cassock, belt, and caftan, and Egorushka, looking at him, froze in astonishment. He had never supposed that priests wore trousers, but Father Khristofor had on a pair of real canvas trousers tucked into his high boots, and a short buckram jacket. Looking at him, Egorushka found that in this costume so unsuited to his dignity, with his long hair and beard, he looked very much like Robinson Crusoe. After they undressed, Father Khristofor and Kuzmichov lay down face-to-face in the shade under the britzka and closed their eyes. Deniska, having finished chomping, stretched out belly-up in the sun and also closed his eyes.

‘‘Watch out that nobody steals the horses!’’ he said to Egorushka and fell asleep at once.

Quiet ensued. All that could be heard was the horses snorting and munching and the sleepers snoring; somewhere not close by a peewit wept, and from time to time there came a squawk from the three snipe, who kept coming to check whether the uninvited guests had left; the brook burbled with a soft burr, yet all these sounds did not disturb the quiet or awaken the congealed air, but, on the contrary, drove nature into slumber.

Egorushka, suffocating from the heat, which was especially felt now, after eating, ran to the sedge and from there surveyed the countryside. He saw the same thing he had seen before noon: the plain, the hills, the sky, the purple distance; only the hills stood nearer and there was no windmill, which had been left far behind. Beyond the rocky hill where the brook flowed rose another hill, smoother and wider; to it clung a small hamlet of five or six farmyards. There were no people, or trees, or shadows to be seen by the huts, as if the hamlet had suffocated in the hot air and dried up. Having nothing to do, Egorushka caught a capricorn beetle in the grass, held it to his ear in his fist, and listened to it playing its fiddle for a long time. When he got tired of the music, he chased after a crowd of yellow butterflies that had come to the sedge to drink, and did not notice himself how he wound up by the britzka again. His uncle and Father Khristofor were fast asleep; their sleep was bound to go on for another two or three hours, till the horses were rested... How to kill that long time and where to hide from the heat? A tricky problem ... Mechanically, Egorushka put his mouth to the stream running from the pipe; his mouth felt cold and tasted of hemlock; first he drank eagerly, then forcing himself, until the sharp cold had spread from his mouth to his whole body and the water flowed down his shirt. Then he went over to the britzka and began to look at the sleepers. His uncle’s face, as before, showed a businesslike dryness. A fanatic for his business, Kuzmichov always thought about his affairs, even in his sleep, even while praying in church, when they sang the ‘‘Cherubic Hymn,’’⁶ unable to forget them even for a moment, and was now probably dreaming of bales of wool, carts, prices, Varlamov ... But Father Khristofor was a gentle man, light-minded and given to laughter, who never in all his life had known a single such affair, which could bind his soul like a boa constrictor. In all the numerous affairs he had undertaken in his life, he had never been tempted by the affair itself so much as by the bustle and intercourse with people proper to every undertaking. Thus, in the present journey, he was interested not so much in wool, Varlamov, and prices as in the long route, the conversation on the way, sleeping under the britzka, eating at odd times ... And now, judging by his face, he must have been dreaming of Bishop Khristofor, the Latin discussion, his wife, doughnuts with sour cream, and all that Kuzmichov never could have dreamed of.

While Egorushka was looking at the sleeping faces, he suddenly heard a soft singing. Somewhere not close by, a woman was singing, but precisely where and in which direction was hard to make out. The song, soft, drawn out, and mournful, like weeping, and barely audible, came now from the right, now from the left, now from above, now from under the ground, as if some invisible spirit was hovering over the steppe and singing. Egorushka looked around and could not tell where this strange song was coming from; then, when he listened better, it began to seem to him that it was the grass singing; in its song, half dead, already perished, wordless, but plaintive and sincere, it was trying to persuade someone that it was not to blame for anything, that the sun was scorching it for nothing; it insisted that it wanted passionately to live, that it was still young and would be beautiful if it were not for the heat and drought; it was not to blame, but even so, it asked forgiveness of someone, swearing that it was suffering unbearably, felt sad and sorry for itself ...

Egorushka listened a little, and it began to seem to him that this mournful, drawn-out song made the air still more sultry, hot, and immobile ... To stifle the song, he ran to the sedge, humming and trying to stamp his feet. From there he looked in all directions and found the one who was singing. Near the last hut in the hamlet, a peasant woman in a short shift, long-legged and lanky as a heron, stood sifting something. White dust drifted lazily down the knoll from under her sieve. It was now obvious that it was she who was singing. A few feet from her, a little boy stood motionless in nothing but a shirt, and with no hat. As if enchanted by the song, he did not stir and looked down somewhere, probably at Egorushka’s red shirt.

The song ceased. Egorushka trudged back to the britzka and again, having nothing to do, occupied himself with the stream of water.

And again he heard the drawn-out song. The same long-legged woman in the hamlet behind the knoll was singing. Egorushka’s boredom suddenly came back to him. He abandoned the pipe and raised his eyes. What he saw was so unexpected that he was slightly frightened. Above his head, on one of the big clumsy stones, stood a little boy in nothing but a shirt, pudgy, with a big protruding belly and skinny legs, the same one who had been standing by the woman earlier. With dull astonishment and not without fear, as if seeing otherworldly beings before him, unblinking and openmouthed, he studied Egorushka’s red shirt and the britzka. The red color of the shirt lured and caressed him, and the britzka and the people sleeping under it aroused his curiosity; perhaps he himself had not noticed how the pleasing red color and curiosity had drawn him down from the hamlet, and probably he was now astonished at his own boldness. Egorushka studied him for a long time, and he Egorushka. Both were silent and felt a certain awkwardness. After a long silence, Egorushka asked:

‘‘What’s your name?’’

The stranger’s cheeks swelled still more; he pressed his back against the stone, goggled his eyes, moved his lips, and answered in a husky bass:

‘‘Titus.’’

The boys said not one word more to each other. After a short silence, and not tearing his eyes from Egorushka, the mysterious Titus raised one leg, felt for a foothold behind him with his heel, and climbed up the stone; from there, backing up and staring point-blank at Egorushka, as if afraid he might hit him from behind, he got up onto the next stone and so kept climbing until he vanished altogether over the top of the knoll.

Having followed him with his eyes, Egorushka put his arms around his knees and bowed his head ... The hot rays burned his nape, his neck, his back ... The mournful song now died down, now drifted again through the stagnant, stifling air, the brook burbled monotonously, the horses munched, and time dragged on endlessly, as if it, too, had congealed and stopped. It seemed that a hundred years had passed since morning ... Did God want Egorushka, the britzka, and the horses to stand stock-still in this air and, like the hills, turn to stone and stay forever in one place?

Egorushka raised his head and, with bleary eyes, looked in front of him; the purple distance, which till then had been motionless, swayed and, along with the sky, sped off somewhere still further away ... It pulled the brown grass and the sedge with it, and Egorushka, with extraordinary swiftness, sped after the fleeing distance. Some force was noiselessly drawing him somewhere, and in his wake raced the heat and the wearisome song. Egorushka bowed his head and closed his eyes ...

Deniska was the first to wake up. Something had stung him, because he jumped up, quickly scratched his shoulder, and said:

‘‘Heathenish anathema, the plague’s too good for you!’’

Then he went to the brook, drank, and washed for a long time. His snorting and splashing brought Egorushka out of oblivion. The boy looked at his wet face, covered with drops and large freckles, which made it look like marble, and asked:

‘‘Will we go soon?’’

Deniska looked to see how high the sun was and answered:

‘‘Ought to be soon.’’

He dried himself with his shirttail and, making a very serious face, began hopping on one leg.

‘‘Hey, let’s see who’ll reach the sedge first!’’ he said.

Egorushka was weary with heat and drowsiness, but all the same he went hopping after him. Deniska was already about twenty, he served as a coachman and was going to get married, but he had not yet stopped being a child. He loved flying kites, chasing pigeons, playing knucklebones, playing tag, and always mixed into children’s games and quarrels. The masters had only to leave or fall asleep for him to start something like hopping on one leg or throwing stones. It was hard for any adult, seeing the genuine enthusiasm with which he frolicked in the company of the young ones, to keep from saying: ‘‘What a dolt!’’ But children saw nothing strange in the big coachman’s invasion of their domain: let him play, so long as he doesn’t fight! Just as little dogs see nothing strange when a big, sincere dog mixes into their company and starts playing with them.

Deniska beat Egorushka and apparently remained very pleased with that. He winked and, to show that he could hop on one leg any distance you like, proposed that Egorushka hop down the road with him and from there back to the britzka without resting. Egorushka rejected the proposal, because he was quite breathless and faint.

Suddenly Deniska made a very serious face, such as he never made, even when Kuzmichov reprimanded him or raised his stick to him; listening, he quietly lowered himself on one knee, and an expression of sternness and fear appeared on his face, as happens with people listening to heresy. He aimed his eyes at one point, slowly raised his hand with the palm cupped, and suddenly fell belly-down on the ground, hitting the grass with his hand.

‘‘Got it!’’ he croaked triumphantly and, getting up, brought to Egorushka’s eyes a big grasshopper.

Thinking it was pleasant for the grasshopper, Egorushka and Deniska stroked its broad green back with their fingers and touched its feelers. Then Deniska caught a fat bloodfilled fly and offered it to the grasshopper. Very indifferently, as if it had known Deniska for a long time, the latter moved its big visorlike jaws and bit off the fly’s stomach. Released, it flashed its pink underwings and, landing in the grass, at once chirped out its song. The fly was also released; it spread its wings and flew off to the horses minus its stomach.

A deep sigh came from under the britzka. This was Kuzmichov waking up. He quickly raised his head, gazed uneasily into the distance, and it was evident from this look, which slipped insensibly past Egorushka and Deniska, that on waking up, he had thought of wool and Varlamov.

‘‘Father Khristofor, get up, it’s time!’’ he began in alarm. ‘‘Enough sleeping, we’ve slept through business as it is! Deniska, harness up!’’

Father Khristofor woke up with the same smile he had fallen asleep with. His face was crumpled and wrinkled from sleep and seemed to have become twice smaller. After washing and dressing, he unhurriedly took a small, greasy Psalter from his pocket and, turning his face to the east, began reading in a whisper and crossing himself.

‘‘Father Khristofor!’’ Kuzmichov said reproachfully. ‘‘It’s time to go, the horses are ready, and you, by God ...’’

‘‘Right away, right away ...’’ Father Khristofor murmured. ‘‘I must read the kathismas⁷ ... I haven’t read any today.’’

‘‘The kathismas can wait till later.’’

‘‘Ivan Ivanych, I have a rule for each day ... I can’t.’’

‘‘God’s not a stickler.’’

For a whole quarter of an hour Father Khristofor stood motionless, facing the east and moving his lips, while Kuzmichov looked at him almost with hatred and impatiently shrugged his shoulders. He was especially angry when, after each ‘‘Glory,’’ Father Khristofor drew his breath, quickly crossed himself, and, deliberately raising his voice so that the others would cross themselves, said three times:

‘‘Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, glory to Thee, O God!’’

At last he smiled, looked up into the sky, and, putting the Psalter into his pocket, said:

‘‘Finis!’’

A minute later the britzka started on its way. As if it was driving backwards and not forwards, the travelers saw the same things as before noon. The hills were still sinking into the purple distance, and there was no end of them in sight; tall weeds flashed past, boulders, mowed fields rushed by, and the same rooks, and the kite, sedately flapping its wings, flew over the steppe. The air congealed still more from the heat and the stillness, obedient nature grew torpid in the silence. No wind, no brisk, fresh sound, no clouds.

But then, finally, as the sun began to sink in the west, the steppe, the hills, and the air could bear no more oppression, and, worn out, their patience exhausted, they attempted to throw off the yoke. An ash-gray curly cloud unexpectedly appeared from behind the hills. It exchanged glances with the steppe—I’m ready, it seemed to say—and frowned. Suddenly something broke in the stagnant air, a strong gust of wind came and, whistling noisily, went wheeling around the steppe. At once the grass and last year’s weeds raised a murmur, the dust of the road whirled into a spiral, ran across the steppe, and, drawing straw, dragonflies, and feathers with it, rose up into the sky in a black, spinning pillar and obscured the sun. Tumbleweed rolled hither and thither, stumbling and leaping, over the steppe, and one bush got into the whirl, spun like a bird, flew up into the sky, and, turning into a black speck there, disappeared from sight. After it swept another, then a third, and Egorushka saw two tumbleweeds collide in the blue height and clutch at each other as if in combat.

A kestrel took flight just by the roadside. Flashing its wings and tail, bathed in sunlight, it looked like an angler’s fly or a pond moth whose wings merge with its feelers as it flashes over the water, and it seems to have feelers growing on it in front, and behind, and on the sides ... Quivering in the air like an insect, sporting its motley colors, the kestrel rose high up in a straight line, then, probably frightened by the cloud of dust, veered off to one side, and its flashing could be seen for a long time ...

And now, alarmed by the wind and not understanding what it was about, a corncrake flew up from the grass. It flew with the wind, not against it as all birds do; this ruffled its feathers, puffing it up to the size of a hen, and it looked very angry and imposing. Only the rooks, grown old on the steppe and used to its turmoil, calmly raced over the grass or else, paying no attention to anything, indifferently pecked the tough ground with their fat beaks.

From beyond the hills came a dull rumble of thunder; there was a breath of coolness. Deniska whistled merrily and whipped up the horses. Father Khristofor and Kuzmichov, holding on to their hats, turned their eyes to the hills ... It would be nice if it spat some rain!

A little more, it seemed, the smallest effort, a single push, and the steppe would gain the upper hand. But the invisible oppressive force gradually fettered the wind and the air, settled the dust, and again came stillness, as if nothing had happened. The cloud hid, the sunburnt hills frowned, the air obediently congealed, and only the alarmed peewits wept somewhere and bemoaned their fate ...

Soon after that, evening came.

III

IN THE EVENING twilight a big, one-story house appeared, with a rusty iron roof and dark windows. This house was called an innyard, though there was no yard around it, and it stood in the midst of the steppe not fenced by anything. Slightly to one side of it, a pathetic little cherry orchard with a wattle fence could be seen, and under its windows, their heavy heads bowed, sunflowers stood sleeping. In the orchard a tiny little windmill rattled away, set there so that the noise would frighten the hares. Besides that, there was nothing to be seen or heard near the house but the steppe.

The britzka had barely stopped by the covered porch when joyful voices were heard inside the house—one male, the other female. The sliding door shrieked on its pulley, and in an instant a tall, skinny figure rose up by the britzka, flapping its arms and coattails. This was the innkeeper Moisei Moiseich, a middle-aged man with a very pale face and a handsome ink-black beard. He was dressed in a worn black frock coat that hung on his narrow shoulders as if on a hanger, and its tails flapped like wings each time Moisei Moiseich clasped his hands in joy or horror. Besides the frock coat, the landlord was wearing wide white untucked trousers and a velvet vest with orange flowers resembling gigantic bedbugs.

Moisei Moiseich, recognizing the visitors, first stopped dead from the flood of emotion, then clasped his hands and groaned. His frock coat flapped its tails, his back bent into a curve, and his pale face twisted into such a smile as if the sight of the britzka was not only pleasant for him but also painfully sweet.

‘‘Ah, my God, my God!’’ he began in a high singsong voice, breathless and bustling, his movements hindering the passengers from getting out of the britzka. ‘‘And what a happy day it is for me! Ah, and what am I to do now! Ivan Ivanych! Father Khristofor! What a pretty little sir is sitting on the box, God punish me! Ah my God, what am I doing standing here and not inviting the guests in? Please, I humbly beg you ... come in! Give me all your things ... Ah, my God!’’

While rummaging in the britzka and helping the visitors to get out, Moisei Moiseich suddenly turned around and shouted in such a wild, strangled voice, as if he were drowning and calling for help:

‘‘Solomon! Solomon!’’

‘‘Solomon, Solomon!’’ the woman’s voice repeated in the house.

The door shrieked on its pulley, and a young Jew appeared on the threshold, of medium height, red-haired, with a big bird’s nose and a bald spot in the midst of his stiff, curly hair; he was dressed in a short, very worn jacket with rounded tails and too short sleeves, and tricot trousers, also too short, as a result of which he himself looked short and skimpy, like a plucked bird. This was Solomon, Moisei Moiseich’s brother. Silently, not offering any greeting but only smiling somehow strangely, he approached the britzka.

‘‘Ivan Ivanych and Father Khristofor have come!’’ Moisei Moiseich said to him in such a tone as if he was afraid his brother might not believe him. ‘‘Oi, weh, amazing business, such good people up and came! Well, take the things, Solomon. Come in, dear guests!’’

A little later Kuzmichov, Father Khristofor, and Egorushka were sitting in a big, gloomy, and empty room at an old oak table. This table was almost solitary, because apart from it, a wide sofa covered with torn oilcloth, and three chairs, there was no other furniture in the room. And not everyone would have ventured to call those chairs chairs. They were some pitiful semblance of furniture, with oilcloth that had outlived its time, and a highly unnatural bend to their backs, which gave them a great likeness to a child’s sled. It was hard to see what comfort the unknown cabinetmaker had in mind in bending the backs so mercilessly, and one would rather have thought that it was the fault not of the cabinetmaker but of some itinerant strongman who, wishing to boast of his strength, had bent the chairs’ backs, then tried to set them straight and bent them still more. The room looked gloomy. The walls were gray, the ceiling and cornices were covered with soot, the floor was cracked and had holes of unknown origin gaping in it (one might have thought the same strongman had broken through it with his heel), and it seemed that if a dozen lamps were hung up in the room, it would not stop being dark. There was nothing resembling decoration either on the walls or on the windows. However, on one wall, in a gray wooden frame, hung a list of rules of some sort with a double-headed eagle, and on another, in the same sort of frame, some lithograph with the caption: ‘‘Men’s Indifference.’’ What it was that men were indifferent to was impossible to tell, because the lithograph was badly faded with time and generously flyblown. The room smelled of something musty and sour.

Having led the guests into the room, Moisei Moiseich went on writhing, clasping his hands, squirming, and making joyful exclamations—he considered it necessary to perform all this in order to appear extremely polite and amiable.

‘‘When did our carts pass by here?’’ Kuzmichov asked him.

‘‘One party passed this morning, and another, Ivan Ivanych, rested here at dinnertime and left before evening.’’

‘‘Ah ... Did Varlamov pass this way or not?’’

‘‘No, Ivan Ivanych. Yesterday morning his agent, Grigory Egorych, passed by and said he must now be at the Molokan’s⁸ farmstead.’’

‘‘Excellent. That means we’ll catch up with the train now, and then go to the Molokan’s.’’

‘‘God help you, Ivan Ivanych!’’ Moisei Moiseich clasped his hands, horrified. ‘‘Where are you going to go with night falling? Have a nice little bite of supper, spend the night, and tomorrow morning, with God’s help, you can go and catch up with anybody you want!’’

‘‘No time, no time ... Sorry, Moisei Moiseich, some other occasion, but now is not the time. We’ll stay for a quarter of an hour and then go, and we can spend the night at the Molokan’s.’’

‘‘A quarter of an hour!’’ shrieked Moisei Moiseich. ‘‘You have no fear of God, Ivan Ivanych! You’ll force me to hide your hats and lock the door! At least have a bite to eat and some tea!’’

‘‘We have no time for any teas and sugars,’’ said Kuzmichov.

Moisei Moiseich inclined his head, bent his knees, and held his palms up in front of him as if defending himself from blows, and with a painfully sweet smile began to implore:

‘‘Ivan Ivanych! Father Khristofor! Be so kind, have some tea with me! Am I such a bad man that you can’t even have tea with me? Ivan Ivanych!’’

‘‘Why, we might just have a drop of tea,’’ Father Khristofor sighed sympathetically. ‘‘It won’t keep us long.’’

‘‘Well, all right!’’ Kuzmichov agreed.

Moisei Moiseich roused himself, gasped joyfully, and, squirming as if he had just jumped out of cold water into the warmth, ran to the door and shouted in a wild, strangled voice, the same with which he had called Solomon earlier:

‘‘Rosa! Rosa! Bring the samovar!’’

A minute later, the door opened and Solomon came into the room with a big tray in his hands. Setting the tray on the table, he looked mockingly somewhere to the side and smiled strangely, as before. Now, in the light of the lamp, it was possible to examine his smile; it was very complex and expressed many feelings, but one thing was predominant in it—an obvious contempt. It was as if he was thinking of something funny and stupid, could not stand someone and was contemptuous of him, was glad of something and waiting for the appropriate moment to sting someone with his mockery and roll with laughter. His long nose, fat lips, and sly, protruding eyes seemed to be straining with the wish to burst out laughing. Looking at his face, Kuzmichov smiled mockingly and asked:

‘‘Solomon, why didn’t you come to the fair this summer in N. to play the Yid for us?’’

Two years ago, as Egorushka also remembered perfectly well, in one of the show booths at the fair in N., Solomon had narrated some scenes from Jewish everyday life and had been a great success. The reminder of it did not make any impression on Solomon. He went out without answering and a little later came back with the samovar.

After doing what was to be done at the table, he went to one side and, crossing his arms on his chest, thrusting one foot forward, fixed his mocking eyes on Father Khristofor. There was something defiant, haughty, and contemptuous in his pose, and at the same time something pathetic and comical in the highest degree, because the more imposing it became, the more conspicuous were his short trousers, his skimpy jacket, his caricature of a nose, and his whole plucked-bird-like little figure.

Moisei Moiseich brought a stool from another room and sat down at some distance from the table.

‘‘Good appetite! Tea and sugar!’’ he began to entertain his guests. ‘‘Good health to you. Such rare guests, rare guests, and Father Khristofor I haven’t seen for five years already. And does nobody want to tell me whose nice little boy this is?’’ he asked, looking affectionately at Egorushka.

‘‘He’s the son of my sister Olga Ivanovna,’’ answered Kuzmichov.

‘‘And where is he going?’’

‘‘To study. We’re taking him to school.’’

Moisei Moiseich, for the sake of politeness, gave his face a look of astonishment and wagged his head meaningfully.

‘‘Oh, this is good!’’ he said, shaking his finger at the samovar. ‘‘This is good! You’ll come out of school such a gentleman we’ll all take our hats off. You’ll be intelligent, rich, ambitious, and your mama will rejoice. Oh, this is good!’’

He paused for a while, stroked his knees, and began to speak in a respectfully jocular tone:

‘‘You forgive me now, Father Khristofor, but I’m going to write a letter to the bishop that you’re cutting into the merchants’ bread. I’ll take official paper and write that it means Father Khristofor hasn’t got enough money, if he’s gone into trade and started selling wool.’’

‘‘Yes, I’ve taken a notion in my old age . . .’’ Father Khristofor said and laughed. ‘‘I’ve gone over from the priests to the merchants, old boy. Instead of staying home and praying to God, I gallop around like pharaoh in his chariot ... Vanity!’’

‘‘But you’ll get a lot of moneys!’’

‘‘Oh, yes! A fig⁹ under my nose, not moneys! The goods aren’t mine, they’re my son-in-law Mikhailo’s!’’

‘‘Why didn’t he go himself ?’’

‘‘Because ... The mother’s milk still hasn’t dried on his lips. Buy the wool he did, but sell it—no, he’s not clever enough, he’s still young. He spent all his money, meaning to gain by it and kick up the dust, but he tried here and there, and nobody would even give him what he paid. So the lad knocked about for a year, then came to me and— ‘Papa, do me a favor, sell the wool! I don’t understand anything about these things!’ There you have it. So now I’m papa, but before, he could do without papa. When he bought the wool, he didn’t ask, but now he’s in a pinch, and so I’m papa. And what about papa? If it weren’t for Ivan Ivanych, papa wouldn’t be able to do a thing. What a bother they are!’’

‘‘Yes, children are a bother, I can tell you!’’ sighed Moisei Moiseich. ‘‘I myself have six of them. One to be taught, another to be doctored, the third to be carried in your arms, and when they grow up, there’s still more bother. Not only now, it was so even in Holy Scripture. When Jacob had little children, he wept, and when they grew up, he wept still worse!’’¹⁰

‘‘Mm, yes . . .’’ agreed Father Khristofor, gazing pensively at his glass of tea. ‘‘Personally, as a matter of fact, I’ve got no business angering God, I’ve reached the limit of my life, as God grant everybody ... I’ve married my daughters to good men, I’ve set my sons up, now I’m free, I’ve done my duty, and I can go any which way. I live quietly with my wife, eat, drink, and sleep, rejoice in my grandchildren, and pray to God, and I don’t need anything else. I’m rolling in clover and I answer to no one. In all my born days, I’ve never known any grief, and if, say, the tsar now asked me: ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ Well, there’s nothing I’m in need of! I have everything and thank God. There’s no happier man than I in the whole town. Only I have many sins, but then they say only God is without sin. Isn’t that right?’’

‘‘Must be right.’’

‘‘Well, of course, I’ve got no teeth, my back aches from old age, this and that ... shortness of breath and so forth ... Illnesses, the flesh is weak, but you must agree I’ve lived enough! I’m in my seventies! You can’t go on forever, enough’s enough!’’

Father Khristofor suddenly recalled something, burst out laughing into his glass, and got into a coughing fit from laughter. Moisei Moiseich, out of politeness, also laughed and coughed.

‘‘So funny!’’ said Father Khristofor and waved his hand. ‘‘My older son Gavrila comes to visit me. He works in the medical line and serves in Chernigov province as a zemstvo¹¹ doctor . . . Very well, sir ... I say to him: ‘See here,’ I say, ‘I’m short of breath, this and that ... You’re a doctor, treat your father!’ He got me undressed at once, tapped, listened, various other things ... kneaded my stomach, and then says: ‘Papa,’ he says, ‘you need treatment with compressed air.’ ’ ’

Father Khristofor laughed convulsively, to tears, and stood up.

‘‘And I say to him: ‘God help it, this compressed air!’ ’’ he brought out through his laughter and waved both hands. ‘‘God help it, this compressed air!’’

Moisei Moiseich also stood up and, clutching his stomach, also dissolved in high-pitched laughter, resembling the yelping of a lapdog.

‘‘God help it, this compressed air!’’ Father Khristofor repeated, laughing loudly.

Moisei Moiseich rose two notes higher and rocked with such convulsive laughter that he barely kept his feet.

‘‘Oh, my God ...’’ he moaned amid his laughter. ‘‘Let me catch my breath ... You’ve made me laugh so much that ... oh! ... it’s the death of me.’’

He laughed and talked and meanwhile kept glancing timorously and suspiciously at Solomon. The latter stood in the same pose and smiled. Judging by his eyes and smile, his contempt and hatred were serious, but they were so unsuited to his plucked little figure that it seemed to Egorushka that he assumed this defiant pose and sarcastic, contemptuous expression on purpose in order to play the buffoon and make the dear guests laugh.

Having silently drunk some six glasses, Kuzmichov cleared a space before him on the table, took his sack, the same one that lay under his head while he slept under the britzka, untied the string on it, and shook it. Stacks of banknotes spilled from the sack onto the table.

‘‘Come, Father Khristofor, let’s count it while there’s time,’’ said Kuzmichov.

Seeing the money, Moisei Moiseich became embarrassed, got up, and, as a tactful man who does not want to know other people’s secrets, left the room on tiptoe, balancing himself with his arms. Solomon stayed where he was.

‘‘How many are there in the one-rouble stacks?’’ Father Khristofor began.

‘‘Fifty in each ... In the three-rouble stacks, ninety . . . The twenty-fives and hundreds are by the thousands ... You count out seven thousand eight hundred for Varlamov, and I’ll count out for Gusevich. And see that you don’t miscount ...’’

Never since the day he was born had Egorushka seen such a pile of money as now lay on the table. It was probably a great deal of money, because the stack of seven thousand eight hundred that Father Khristofor set aside for Varlamov seemed very small compared to the whole pile. Another time such a mass of money might have struck Egorushka and prompted him to reflect on how many bagels, babas, and poppy-seed rolls could be bought with this pile; but now he looked at it impassibly and sensed only the smell of rotten apples and kerosene that the pile gave off. He was worn out from the jolting ride on the britzka, was tired and wanted to sleep. His head was heavy, his eyes kept closing, and his thoughts were tangled like threads. If it had been possible, he would gladly have lowered his head to the table, closed his eyes so as not to see the lamp and the fingers moving over the pile, and let his sluggish, sleepy thoughts tangle still more. When he made an effort not to doze off, the flame of the lamp, the cups, and the fingers went double, the samovar swayed, and the smell of rotten apples seemed still sharper and more repellent.

‘‘Ah, money, money!’’ sighed Father Khristofor, smiling. ‘‘Nothing but woe! Now my Mikhailo is surely sleeping and dreaming of me bringing him such a pile.’’

‘‘Your Mikhailo Timofeich is a man of no understanding,’’ Kuzmichov said in a low voice, ‘‘he took up a business that’s not right for him, but you understand and can reason. Why don’t you give me your wool, as I said, and go back home, and I—very well—I’ll give you fifty kopecks over your asking price, and that only out of respect . . .’’

‘‘No, Ivan Ivanovich,’’ sighed Father Khristofor. ‘‘Thank you for the offer ... Of course, if it were up to me, there’d be no discussion, but as you know, the goods aren’t mine . . .’’

Moisei Moiseich came in on tiptoe. Trying out of delicacy not to look at the pile of money, he crept up to Egorushka and tugged him by the shirt from behind.

‘‘Come along, little lad,’’ he said in a low voice, ‘‘I’ve got a bear cub to show you! Such a terrible, angry one! Ohh!’’

Sleepy Egorushka got up and lazily plodded after Moisei Moiseich to look at the bear. He went into a small room where, before he saw anything, his breath was taken away by the smell of something sour and musty, which was much more dense here than in the big room and had probably spread from here all over the house. One half of the room was occupied by a big bed covered with a greasy quilted blanket, and the other by a chest of drawers and heaps of all possible rags, beginning with stiffly starched petticoats and ending with children’s trousers and suspenders. A tallow candle was burning on the chest of drawers.

Instead of the promised bear, Egorushka saw a large, very fat Jewess with loose hair and in a red flannel dress with black specks; she was turning heavily in the narrow passage between the bed and the chest of drawers and letting out long, moaning sighs, as if she had a toothache. Seeing Egorushka, she made a tearful face, heaved a long sigh, and, before he had time to look around, brought to his mouth a chunk of bread smeared with honey.

‘‘Eat, child, eat!’’ she said. ‘‘You’re here without your mama, and there’s nobody to feed you. Eat.’’

Egorushka began to eat, though after the fruit drops and poppy-seed rolls he ate every day at home, he found nothing good in honey half mixed with wax and bees’ wings. He ate, and Moisei Moiseich and the Jewess watched and sighed.

‘‘Where are you going, child?’’ asked the Jewess.

‘‘To study,’’ replied Egorushka.

‘‘And how many of you does your mama have?’’

‘‘I’m the only one. There’s nobody else.’’

‘‘Och!’’ sighed the Jewess, and she raised her eyes. ‘‘Poor mama, poor mama! How she’s going to weep and miss you! In a year we, too, will take our Nahum to study! Och!’’

‘‘Ah, Nahum, Nahum!’’ sighed Moisei Moiseich, and the skin twitched nervously on his pale face. ‘‘And he’s so sickly.’’

The greasy blanket stirred, and from under it appeared a child’s curly head on a very thin neck; two black eyes flashed and stared at Egorushka with curiosity. Moisei Moiseich and the Jewess, without ceasing to sigh, went over to the chest of drawers and began talking about something in Yiddish. Moisei Moiseich talked softly in a low bass, and generally his Yiddish resembled a ceaseless ‘‘gal-gal-gal-gal . . .’’ and his wife answered him in a thin hen-turkey’s voice, and with her it came out something like ‘‘tu-tu-tu-tu . . .’’ While they were conferring, another curly head on a thin neck peeked from under the greasy blanket, then a third, then a fourth ... If Egorushka had possessed a rich fantasy, he might have thought a hundred-headed hydra was lying under the blanket.

‘‘Gal-gal-gal-gal . . .’’ said Moisei Moiseich.

‘‘Tu-tu-tu-tu ...’’ the Jewess replied.

The conference ended with the Jewess sighing deeply, going to the chest of drawers, unfolding some sort of green rag there, and taking out a big rye gingerbread shaped like a heart.

‘‘Take, child,’’ she said, handing Egorushka the gingerbread. ‘‘You’ve got no mama now, there’s nobody to give you a treat.’’

Egorushka put the gingerbread in his pocket and backed towards the door, no longer able to breathe the musty and sour air in which his hosts lived. Returning to the big room, he snuggled up comfortably on the sofa and let his thoughts run freely.

Kuzmichov had just finished counting the money and was putting it back in the sack. He treated it with no particular respect and shoved it into the dirty sack unceremoniously, with such indifference as if it was not money but wastepaper.

Father Khristofor was conversing with Solomon.

‘‘Well, then, my wise Solomon?’’ he asked, yawning and crossing his mouth.¹² ‘‘How’s things?’’

‘‘What things are you talking about?’’ asked Solomon and looked at him with great sarcasm, as if he was hinting at some sort of crime.

‘‘Generally ... What are you doing?’’

‘‘What am I doing?’’ Solomon repeated and shrugged his shoulders. ‘‘The same as everybody ... You see, I’m a lackey. I’m my brother’s lackey, my brother is the travelers’ lackey, the travelers are Varlamov’s lackeys, and if I had ten million, Varlamov would be my lackey.’’

‘‘Why would he be your lackey?’’

‘‘Why? Because there’s no such gentleman or millionaire as wouldn’t lick the hands of a scruffy Yid for an extra kopeck. I’m now a scruffy and beggarly Yid, and everybody looks at me like a dog, but if I had money, Varlamov would mince before me like a fool, the way Moisei does before you.’’

Father Khristofor and Kuzmichov exchanged glances. Neither of them understood Solomon. Kuzmichov looked at him sternly and drily and asked:

‘‘How can a fool like you put yourself on a par with Varlamov?’’

‘‘I’m not such a fool as to put myself on a par with Varlamov,’’ Solomon replied, looking his interlocutors over mockingly. ‘‘Varlamov may be a Russian, but in his soul he’s a scruffy Yid; his whole life is money and gain, but I burned up my money in the stove. I don’t need money, or land, or sheep, and I don’t need to be feared and have people take their hats off when I drive by. Meaning I’m smarter than your Varlamov and more like a human being!’’

A little later, Egorushka, through half-sleep, heard Solomon speaking about the Jews in a voice hollow and hoarse from the hatred that choked him, hurrying and swallowing his R’s; at first he spoke correctly, in Russian, then he lapsed into the tone of raconteurs of Jewish life and began speaking with an exaggerated Jewish accent, as he used to in the show booth.

‘‘Wait . . .’’ Father Khristofor interrupted him. ‘‘If you don’t like your faith, change it, but it’s a sin to laugh at it; he’s the lowest of men who derides his own faith.’’

‘‘You don’t understand anything!’’ Solomon rudely cut him short. ‘‘I’m talking to you about one thing, and you’re talking about another ...’’

‘‘It’s obvious at once that you’re a stupid man,’’ Father Khristofor sighed. ‘‘I admonish you the best I can, and you get angry. I talk to you as an old man, quietly, but you’re like a turkey: blah-blah-blah! An odd fellow, really ...’’

Moisei Moiseich came in. He looked in alarm at Solomon and his guests, and again the skin on his face twitched nervously. Egorushka shook his head and looked around him; he caught a fleeting glimpse of Solomon’s face just at the moment when it was turned three-quarters towards him and the shadow of his long nose crossed his whole left cheek; his contemptuous smile, mingled with this shadow, his glittering, mocking eyes, his haughty expression, and his whole plucked little figure, doubling and flashing in Egorushka’s eyes, now made him resemble not a buffoon but something one occasionally dreams of, probably an unclean spirit.

‘‘Some kind of demoniac you’ve got here, Moisei Moiseich, God help him!’’ Father Khristofor said with a smile. ‘‘You’d better set him up somewhere, get him married or something ... He’s not like a human being ...’’

Kuzmichov frowned angrily. Moisei Moiseich again gave his brother and his guests an alarmed and quizzical look.

‘‘Solomon, get out of here!’’ he said sternly. ‘‘Get out.’’

And he added something else in Yiddish. Solomon laughed abruptly and went out.

‘‘But what is it?’’ Moisei Moiseich fearfully asked Father Khristofor.

‘‘He forgets himself,’’ replied Kuzmichov. ‘‘He’s a rude one and thinks a lot of himself.’’

‘‘I just knew it!’’ Moisei Moiseich was horrified and clasped his hands. ‘‘Ah, my God! My God!’’ he murmured in a low voice. ‘‘Be so kind, forgive and don’t be angry. He’s such a man, such a man! Ah, my God! My God! He’s my own brother, but I’ve never had anything but grief from him. You know, he’s ...’’

Moisei Moiseich twirled his finger near his forehead and went on:

‘‘Not in his right mind ... a lost man. And what I’m to do with him, I don’t know! He doesn’t love anybody, he doesn’t esteem anybody, he’s not afraid of anybody ... You know, he laughs at everybody, says stupid things, throws it in everybody’s face. You won’t believe it, but once Varlamov came here, and Solomon said such things to him that the man struck both him and me with his whip ... But why me? Is it my fault? God took away his reason, that means it’s God’s will, and is it my fault?’’

Some ten minutes passed, and Moisei Moiseich still went on murmuring in a low voice and sighing.

‘‘He doesn’t sleep nights and keeps thinking, thinking, thinking, and what he thinks about, God knows. You come to him at night, and he’s angry and he laughs. He doesn’t love me, either ... And he doesn’t want anything! Father, when he was dying, left us six thousand roubles each. I bought myself an inn, got married, and now have children, but he burned up his money in the stove. Such a pity, such a pity! Why burn it? If you don’t need it, give it to me, why burn it?’’

Suddenly the door shrieked on its pulley, and the floor trembled from someone’s footsteps. A light wind blew at Egorushka, and it seemed to him that a big black bird swept past him and flapped its wings just by his face. He opened his eyes ... His uncle, the sack in his hands, ready for the road, was standing by the sofa. Father Khristofor, holding his broad-brimmed top hat, was bowing and smiling to someone, not gently and tenderly, as always, but with a strained deference that was very unsuited to his face. And Moisei Moiseich, as if his body had broken into three parts, was balancing and trying all he could not to fall apart. Only Solomon stood in the corner as if nothing had happened, his arms crossed, and smiling as contemptuously as before.

‘‘Your Excellency, forgive us, it’s not clean here!’’ moaned Moisei Moiseich with a painfully sweet smile, no longer noticing Kuzmichov or Father Khristofor, but only balancing his whole body so as not to fall apart. ‘‘We’re simple people, Your Excellency!’’

Egorushka rubbed his eyes. Indeed, in the middle of the room stood an excellency in the guise of a young, very beautiful and shapely woman in a black dress and a straw hat. Before Egorushka had time to make out her features, he recalled for some reason the solitary slender poplar he had seen that day on a hill.

‘‘Did Varlamov pass here today?’’ asked a woman’s voice.

‘‘No, Your Excellency!’’ replied Moisei Moiseich.

‘‘If you see him tomorrow, ask him to stop at my place for a minute.’’

Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, an inch from his eyes, Egorushka saw black velvety eyebrows, big brown eyes, and pampered woman’s cheeks with dimples, from which a smile spread all over her face like rays from the sun. There was a scent of something magnificent.

‘‘What a pretty boy!’’ said the lady. ‘‘Whose boy is he? Kazimir Mikhailovich, look, how lovely! My God, he’s asleep! My dear little chubsy . . .’’

And the lady kissed Egorushka hard on both cheeks, and he smiled and, thinking he was asleep, closed his eyes. The door pulley shrieked, and hurried steps were heard: someone was going in and out.

‘‘Egorushka! Egorushka!’’ came the thick whisper of two voices. ‘‘Get up, we’re leaving!’’

Someone, probably Deniska, stood Egorushka on his feet and led him by the arm; on the way he half opened his eyes and once more saw the beautiful woman in the black dress who had kissed him. She was standing in the middle of the room and, seeing him leave, smiled and nodded to him amiably. When he reached the door, he saw some handsome and thickset dark-haired man in a bowler hat and leggings. This must have been the lady’s escort.

‘‘Whoa!’’ came from the yard.

By the porch Egorushka saw a new luxurious carriage and a pair of black horses. On the box sat a lackey in livery with a long whip in his hand. Only Solomon came out to see the departing guests off. His face was tense with the desire to burst out laughing; he looked as if he was waiting with great impatience for their departure in order to laugh at them all he wanted.

‘‘Countess Dranitsky,’’ whispered Father Khristofor, getting into the britzka.

‘‘Yes, Countess Dranitsky,’’ Kuzmichov repeated, also in a whisper.

The impression produced by the countess’s arrival was probably very strong, because even Deniska spoke in a whisper and only dared to shout and whip up the bays when the britzka had gone about a quarter of a mile and instead of the inn nothing but a dim little light could be seen far behind them.

IV

WHO, FINALLY, WAS this elusive, mysterious Varlamov, of whom there was so much talk, whom Solomon held in contempt, and whom even the beautiful countess needed? Sitting on the box beside Deniska, the half-sleepy Egorushka was thinking precisely about this man. He had never seen him, but he had heard about him very often and had frequently pictured him in his imagination. It was known to him that Varlamov owned several thousand-score acres of land, about a hundred thousand sheep, and a lot of money; of his way of life and activities Egorushka knew only that he was always ‘‘circling around in these parts’’ and was always sought after.

Egorushka had also heard much at home about the countess Dranitsky. She, too, had several thousand-score acres, many sheep, a stud farm, and a lot of money, but she did not ‘‘circle around,’’ but lived on her rich estate, about which their acquaintances and Ivan Ivanych, who had visited the countess more than once on business, told many wonders. For instance, they said that in the countess’s drawing room, where portraits of all the Polish kings hung, there was a big table clock in the form of a crag, and on the crag stood a rearing golden steed with diamond eyes, and on the steed sat a golden rider who swung his saber right and left each time the clock struck the hour. They also told how twice a year the countess gave a ball to which the nobility and officials of the whole province were invited, and even Varlamov came, the guests all drank tea from silver samovars, ate all sorts of extraordinary things (for instance, raspberries and strawberries were served in winter, for Christmas), and danced to music that played day and night ...

‘‘And she’s so beautiful!’’ thought Egorushka, remembering her face and smile.

Kuzmichov was probably also thinking about the countess, because when the britzka had gone some two miles, he said:

‘‘This Kazimir Mikhailych robs her good and proper! Two years ago, remember, when I bought wool from her, he made about three thousand on my purchase alone.’’

‘‘You’d expect nothing else from a Polack,’’ said Father Khristofor.

‘‘And she doesn’t care a whit. As they say, young and stupid. Wind blowing around in her head!’’

Egorushka, for some reason, wanted to think only about Varlamov and the countess, especially the latter. His sleepy brain totally rejected ordinary thoughts, it was clouded and retained only fantastic fairy-tale images, which have the convenience of emerging in the brain somehow of themselves, without any bother on the thinker’s part, and also of themselves—you need only give a good shake of the head— of vanishing without a trace. And besides, nothing around disposed him to ordinary thoughts. To the right were dark hills, which seemed to screen off something unknown and terrible; to the left, the whole sky above the horizon was covered with a crimson glow, and it was hard to tell whether there was a fire somewhere or the moon was about to rise. The distance was visible, as in the daytime, but now its delicate purple color, shaded by the dusk of evening, disappeared, and the whole steppe was hiding in the dusk, like Moisei Moiseich’s children under the blanket.

On July evenings and nights, the quails and corncrakes no longer cry, the nightingales do not sing in the wooded gullies, the flowers give off no scent, but the steppe is still beautiful and filled with life. As soon as the sun sets and the earth is enveloped in dusk, the day’s anguish is forgotten, all is forgiven, and the steppe breathes easily with its broad chest. As if because the grass does not see its old age in the darkness, a merry, youthful chirring arises in it, such as does not happen in the daytime; chirping, whistling, scratching, steppe basses, tenors, and trebles—everything blends into a ceaseless, monotonous hum, a good background for remembrance and sorrow. The monotonous chirring lulls you like a cradle song; you ride along and feel you are falling asleep, but then from somewhere comes the abrupt, alarmed cry of a sleepless bird or some indefinite noise resembling someone’s voice, like an astonished ‘‘Ahh!’’ and the drowsiness lets go of your eyelids. And then it happens that you drive past a little gully thick with brush, and you hear a bird that the steppe people call a ‘‘sleepik,’’ crying ‘‘Sleep! Sleep! Sleep!’’ to someone, and another guffaws or dissolves in hysterical sobbing—that is an owl. Whom they cry to and who listens to them on this plain, God only knows, but there is much sorrow and plaintiveness in their cries ... There is a scent of hay, dried grass, and late flowers, but the scent is thick, sweetly cloying, and tender.

Everything is visible in the dusk, but it is hard to make out the colors and outlines of objects. Everything appears to be not what it is. You ride along and suddenly, ahead of you, you see a silhouette like a monk’s standing just by the road; he does not move, waits, and is holding something in his hands ... Is it a robber? The figure draws near, grows, now it comes even with the britzka, and you see that it is not a man but a solitary bush or a big stone. Such motionless figures, waiting for someone, stand on the hills, hide behind the barrows, peek from amidst the tall weeds, and they all look like people and arouse suspicion.

But when the moon rises, the night becomes pale and dark. It is as if the dusk had never been. The air is transparent, fresh, and warm, everything is clearly visible, and you can even make out the separate stalks of the weeds by the roadside. In the far distance, skulls and stones can be seen. The suspicious monklike figures seem blacker and look more sullen against the bright background of the night. More and more often, amidst the monotonous chirring, someone’s astonished ‘‘Ah!’’ is heard, and the cry of a sleepless or delirious bird rings out, troubling the motionless air. Broad shadows drift across the plain like clouds across the sky, and in the incomprehensible distance, if you look at it for a long time, misty, whimsical images loom and heap upon each other ... It is a little eerie. And once you gaze at the pale green sky spangled with stars, with not a cloud, not a spot on it, you understand why the warm air is motionless, why nature is on the alert and afraid to stir: she feels eerie and sorry to lose even one moment of life. The boundless depth and infinity of the sky can be judged only on the sea or on the steppe at night, when the moon is shining. It is frightening, beautiful, and caressing, it looks at you languorously and beckons, and its caress makes your head spin.

You ride for an hour, two hours ... On the way you come upon a silent old barrow or a stone idol set up God knows when or by whom, a night bird noiselessly flies over the ground, and steppe legends gradually come to your mind, stories of passing strangers, tales of some old nanny of the steppe, and all that you yourself have managed to see and grasp with your soul. And then, in the chirring of the insects, in the suspicious figures and barrows, in the blue sky, in the moonlight, in the flight of a night bird, in everything you see and hear, you begin to perceive the triumph of beauty, youth, flourishing strength, and a passionate thirst for life; your soul responds to the beautiful, stern motherland, and you want to fly over the steppe with the night bird. And in the triumph of beauty, in the excess of happiness, you feel a tension and anguish, as if the steppe were aware that it is lonely, that its riches and inspiration go for naught in the world, unsung by anyone, unneeded by anyone, and through the joyful hum you hear its anguished, hopeless call: a singer! a singer!

‘‘Who-oa! Greetings, Pantelei! Is all well?’’

‘‘Thank God, it is, Ivan Ivanych!’’

‘‘Have you boys seen Varlamov?’’

‘‘No, haven’t seen him.’’

Egorushka woke up and opened his eyes. The britzka had stopped. Down the road to the right, a wagon train stretched far ahead, with some people scurrying up and down by it. The wagons, because of the big bales of wool piled on them, all seemed very tall and plump, and the horses small and short-legged.

‘‘Well, so that means now we go to the Molokan’s!’’ Kuzmichov was saying loudly. ‘‘The Yid said Varlamov would spend the night at the Molokan’s. In that case, good-bye, brothers! God be with you!’’

‘‘Good-bye, Ivan Ivanych!’’ several voices anwered.

‘‘Tell you what, boys,’’ Kuzmichov said briskly, ‘‘why don’t you take my little lad with you! So he doesn’t hang about uselessly with us? Put him on a bale, Pantelei, and let him ride slowly, and we’ll catch up with you. Go on, Egor! Go, it’s all right! ...’’

Egorushka got down from the box. Several hands picked him up, lifted him high, and he found himself on something big, soft, and slightly moist with dew. The sky now seemed close to him and the earth far away.

‘‘Hey, take your coat!’’ Deniska shouted somewhere far below.

The coat and little bundle, tossed up from below, fell next to Egorushka. Quickly, not wanting to think about anything, he put the bundle under his head, covered himself with his coat, stretched his legs out all the way, squirming from the dew, and laughed with pleasure.

‘‘Sleep, sleep, sleep ...’’ he thought.

‘‘Don’t rough him up, you devils!’’ Deniska’s voice came from below.

‘‘Good-bye, brothers, God be with you!’’ shouted Kuzmichov. ‘‘I’m counting on you!’’

‘‘Don’t worry, Ivan Ivanych!’’

Deniska hupped the horses, the britzka squealed and started rolling, no longer down the road but somewhere to one side. For two minutes it was silent, as if the wagon train had fallen asleep, and you could hear only the clanking of the bucket tied to the rear of the britzka gradually dying away in the distance. But then at the head of the train someone shouted:

‘‘Gee-up, Kiriukha!’’

The wagon at the very front creaked, after it the second, the third ... Egorushka felt the wagon he was lying on sway and also creak. The train got moving. Egorushka took a tight grip on the rope with which the bundle was tied, laughed again with pleasure, straightened the gingerbread in his pocket, and began to fall asleep the way he used to fall asleep at home in his bed ...

When he woke up, the sun was already rising; it was screened by a barrow, but in an effort to spray light over the world, it spread its rays tensely in all directions and flooded the horizon with gold. It seemed to Egorushka that it was not where it belonged, because the day before it had risen behind his back, while today it was much more to the left ... And the whole place was nothing like yesterday. There were no more hills, and wherever you looked, the endless, brown, bleak plain stretched away; here and there small barrows rose up on it, and yesterday’s rooks were flying about. Far ahead the belfries and cottages of some village showed white; on account of Sunday, the khokhly¹³ stayed home, baking and cooking—that could be seen by the smoke that came from all the chimneys and hung in a transparent dove-gray veil over the village. In the spaces between cottages and behind the church a blue river appeared, and beyond it the misty distance. But there was nothing that so little resembled yesterday as the road. Something extraordinarily broad, sweeping, and mighty stretched across the steppe instead of a road; it was a gray strip, well trodden and covered with dust, like all roads, but it was several dozen yards wide. Its vastness aroused perplexity in Egorushka and suggested folktale thoughts to him. Who drives on it? Who needs such vastness? Incomprehensible and strange. You might really think there were still enormous, long-striding people in Russia, like Ilya Muromets and Nightingale the Robber,¹⁴ and that mighty steeds had not died out yet. Looking at the road, Egorushka imagined some six tall chariots galloping in a row, as he had seen in pictures from sacred history; harnessed to these chariots are six wild, furious horses, and they raise clouds of dust in the sky with their high wheels, and the horses are driven by people such as might appear in dreams or grow in folktale thoughts. And how those figures would suit the steppe and the road, if they existed!

On the right side of the road, for the whole of its length, stood telegraph poles with two wires. Getting smaller and smaller, they disappeared near the village behind the cottages and greenery, and then appeared again in the purple distance, in the guise of very small, thin sticks, like pencils stuck in the ground. On the wires sat hawks, merlins, and crows, looking indifferently at the moving train.

Egorushka lay on the very last wagon and could therefore see the whole train. There were about twenty wagons in the train, and one wagoner for every three wagons. By the last wagon, where Egorushka was, walked an old man with a gray beard, as skinny and short as Father Khristofor, but with a face dirty brown from sunburn, stern and pensive. It might very well have been that this old man was neither stern nor pensive, but his red eyelids and long, sharp nose gave his face the stern, dry expression that occurs in people who are accustomed to always thinking of serious things, and in solitude. Like Father Khristofor, he was wearing a broad-brimmed top hat, though not a gentleman’s, but made of felt and of a dirty brown color, more like a truncated cone than a cylinder. He was barefoot. Probably from a habit acquired during the cold winters, when more than once he must have frozen beside the wagons, he kept slapping his thighs and stamping his feet as he walked. Noticing that Egorushka was awake, he looked at him and said, squirming as if from cold:

‘‘Ah, you’re awake, my fine lad! Are you Ivan Ivanovich’s son?’’

‘‘No, his nephew ...’’

‘‘Ivan Ivanych’s? And here I’ve taken my boots off and go hopping around barefoot. My feet hurt, they got frostbit, and it feels freer without boots ... Freer, my fine lad ... Without boots, that is ... So, you’re his nephew? He’s a good man, all right ... God grant him health ... He’s all right ... Ivan Ivanych, I mean ... He’s gone to the Molokan’s ... Lord have mercy!’’

The old man also spoke as if it was very cold, with pauses, and not opening his mouth properly; and he articulated labial consonants poorly, faltering over them as if his lips were frozen. Addressing Egorushka, he never once smiled and appeared stern.

Two wagons ahead walked a man in a long reddish coat, a visored cap, and boots with crumpled tops, holding a whip. This one was not old, about forty. When he turned around, Egorushka saw a long red face with a thin goatee and a spongy bump under the right eye. Besides this very unattractive bump, he had another special mark that struck the eye sharply: he held the whip in his left hand, and his right hand he waved in such fashion as if he was conducting an invisible choir; occasionally he put the whip under his arm, and then he conducted with both hands and hummed something under his nose.

The next wagoner after this one presented a tall, rectilinear figure with extremely sloping shoulders and a back flat as a board. He held himself erect, as if he was marching or had swallowed a yardstick; his arms did not swing, but hung down like straight sticks, and he strode somehow woodenly, in the manner of toy soldiers, almost without bending his knees, and trying to take the longest stride possible. Where the old man or the owner of the spongy bump took two strides, he managed to take only one, and this made it look as if he was walking more slowly than everyone else and lagging behind. His face was bound in a rag, and something like a monk’s skullcap was stuck on his head; he was dressed in a short Ukrainian caftan all sprinkled with patches, and dark blue balloon trousers over his bast shoes.

Those who were further ahead, Egorushka did not examine. He lay belly-down, poked a little hole in the bale, and, having nothing to do, began twisting the wool into threads. The old man striding along below turned out to be not as stern and serious as one might have judged by his face. Once he had started the conversation, he kept it up.

‘‘Where are you going, then?’’ he asked, stamping his feet.

‘‘To study,’’ answered Egorushka.

‘‘To study? Aha ... Well, may the Queen of Heaven help you. So. Two heads are better than one. To one man God gives one brain, to another two brains, and to some even three ... To some even three, that’s for sure ... One brain you’re born with, another you get from studies, the third from a good life. So you see, little brother, it’s good if somebody has three brains. It’s easier for such a man not only to live but even to die. To die, yes ... And die we all will.’’

The old man scratched his forehead, glanced up at Egorushka with his red eyes, and went on:

‘‘Last year Maxim Nikolaich, a master from near Slavyanoserbsk, also took his lad to study. I don’t know how he is regards to learning, but he’s an all right lad, a good one ... God grant them health, they’re nice masters. Yes, he also took him to study ... In Slavyanoserbsk there is no such institution so as to finish your learning ... None ... But it’s an all right town, a good one ... There’s an ordinary school, for simple folk, but as for greater learning, there’s nonesuch ... None, that’s for sure. What’s your name?’’

‘‘Egorushka.’’

‘‘Meaning Egory ... The great and holy martyr Saint Egory the Dragonslayer, ¹⁵ whose feast day is the twenty-third of April. And my saint’s name is Pantelei ... Pantelei Zakharovich Kholodov ... We’re Kholodovs . . . I myself was born, you might have heard, in Tim, in Kursk province. My brothers registered themselves as tradesmen and work in town as craftsmen, but I’m a peasant ... I stayed a peasant. Some seven years ago I went there ... home, that is. And I was in the village and in the town ... I was in Tim, I’m saying. Back then, thank God, everybody was alive and well, but I don’t know about now ... Maybe some have died ... It’s time to die now, because everybody’s old, there’s some are older than me. Death’s all right, it’s good, only, of course, so long as you don’t die unrepentant. There’s no greater evil than an impudent death. An impudent death is the devil’s joy. And if you want to die repentant, so that the mansions of God aren’t barred to you, pray to the great martyr Varvara.¹⁶ She’s our intercessor ... She is, that’s for sure ... Because that’s the position God set up for her in heaven, meaning everyone has the full right to pray to her as regards repentance.’’

Pantelei was muttering and apparently did not care whether Egorushka heard him or not. He spoke listlessly, under his nose, not raising or lowering his voice, but in a short space he managed to tell of many things. Everything he told consisted of fragments that had very little connection with each other and were totally uninteresting to Egorushka. Perhaps he talked only because now, in the morning, after a night spent in silence, he wanted to check his thoughts aloud: were they all at home? Having finished with repentance, he again began speaking about some Maxim Nikolaevich from near Slavyanoserbsk:

‘‘Yes, he took his lad ... Took him, that’s for sure ...’’

One of the wagoners who was walking far ahead tore from his place, ran to the side, and began lashing the ground with his whip. He was a strapping, broad-shouldered man of about thirty, blond, curly-headed, and apparently very strong and healthy. Judging by the movements of his shoulders and whip, by the eagerness his posture expressed, he was beating something live. Another wagoner ran over to him, a short and stocky man with a black spade beard, dressed in a waistcoat and an untucked shirt. This one burst into bass-voiced, coughing laughter and shouted:

‘‘Brothers, Dymov’s killed a viper! By God!’’

There are people whose intelligence can be judged correctly by their voice and laughter. The black-bearded fellow belonged precisely to such fortunates: in his voice and laughter you could sense an unmitigated stupidity. Having finished whipping, the blond Dymov lifted something resembling a rope from the ground with his whip and flung it towards the wagons with a laugh.

‘‘That’s no viper, it’s a grass snake,’’ somebody shouted.

The man with the wooden stride and the bound-up face quickly went over to the dead snake, glanced at it, and clasped his sticklike hands.

‘‘Jailbird!’’ he cried in a hollow, tearful voice. ‘‘Why’d you kill a grass snake? What did it do to you, curse you! Look, he’s killed a grass snake! And what if somebody did the same to you?’’

‘‘You shouldn’t kill grass snakes, that’s for sure . . .’’ Pantelei muttered placidly. ‘‘You shouldn’t ... It’s not an asp. It has the looks of a viper, but it’s a quiet, innocent beast ... It loves man ... Your grass snake . . .’’

Dymov and the black-bearded fellow probably felt ashamed, because they laughed loudly and, without answering the protests, trudged lazily to their wagons. When the last wagon came even with the place where the dead snake lay, the man with the bound-up face, standing over the snake, turned to Pantelei and asked in a tearful voice:

‘‘Why’d he kill the grass snake, grandpa?’’

His eyes, as Egorushka now made out, were small, lackluster, his face was gray, sickly, and also as if lackluster, and his chin was red and appeared badly swollen.

‘‘Why’d he kill it, grandpa?’’ he repeated, striding beside Pantelei.

‘‘A stupid man, got an itch in his hands, that’s why he killed it,’’ the old man replied. ‘‘And you shouldn’t kill a grass snake ... That’s for sure ... We all know Dymov, he’s a prankster, he’ll kill anything he gets his hands on, and Kiriukha didn’t interfere. He ought to have interfered, but it was just ha-ha-ha and ho-ho-ho ... But don’t you get angry, Vasya ... Why get angry? They killed it, and God help them ... Dymov’s a prankster, and Kiriukha does it from his stupid wits ... Never mind ... They’re stupid people, with no understanding, and God help them. Emelyan here will never touch what he oughtn’t. Never, that’s for sure ... Because he’s an educated man, and they’re stupid ... Your Emelyan ... He won’t ...’’

The wagoner in the reddish coat and with the spongy bump, who conducted the invisible choir, stopped on hearing his name, waited until Pantelei and Vasya came even with him, and walked beside them.

‘‘What’s the talk about?’’ he said in a wheezing, stifled voice.

‘‘Vasya here’s getting angry,’’ said Pantelei. ‘‘I use various words, so he won’t get angry, I mean ... Eh, my ailing, frostbitten little feet! Ehh! They got itchy for the sake of Sunday, the Lord’s feast day!’’

‘‘It’s from walking,’’ observed Vasya.

‘‘No, lad, no . . . Not from walking. When I walk, it seems easier, but when I lie down and get warm—it’s the death of me. Walking’s freer for me.’’

Emelyan in his reddish coat stood between Pantelei and Vasya and waved his hand as if they were going to sing. After waving it for a while, he lowered his hand and grunted hopelessly.

‘‘I’ve got no voice!’’ he said. ‘‘Sheer disaster! All night and all morning I’ve been imagining the triple ‘Lord have mercy!’ that we sang at Marinovsky’s wedding; it’s sitting in my head and throat ... so it seems I could just up and sing it, but I can’t! I’ve got no voice!’’

He fell silent for a moment, thinking about something, then went on:

‘‘For fifteen years I was in the choir, in the whole Lugansk factory, maybe, there was no such voice, but then, deuce take it, I went swimming in the Donets two years ago, and ever since I’ve been unable to hit a single note clearly. I caught a chill in my throat. And me without a voice is the same as a workman without a hand.’’

‘‘That’s for sure,’’ agreed Pantelei.

‘‘The way I look at myself is, I’m a lost man and nothing more.’’

At that moment Vasya happened to catch sight of Egorushka. His eyes became unctuous and grew still smaller.

‘‘And there’s a young master coming with us!’’ he said and covered his nose with his sleeve, as if abashed. ‘‘What a grand coachman! Stay with us, you can go around with the wagons carting wool.’’

The notion of combining a young master and a coachman in one body probably seemed very curious and witty to him, because he tittered loudly and went on developing the thought. Emelyan also glanced up at Egorushka, but fleetingly and coldly. He was occupied with his thoughts, and if it had not been for Vasya, he would not have noticed Egorushka’s presence. Before five minutes had passed, he again began waving his hand, then, describing to his companions the beauties of the wedding ‘‘Lord have mercy,’’ which had come to his mind during the night, he put the whip under his arm and waved both hands.

A mile from the village, the train stopped by a well with a sweep. Lowering his bucket into the well, the black-bearded Kiriukha leaned his belly on the rail and thrust his shaggy head, shoulders, and part of his chest into the dark hole, so that Egorushka could see only his short legs, which barely touched the ground; seeing the reflection of his head far away at the bottom of the well, he rejoiced and dissolved into stupid bass laughter, and the well’s echo answered him the same way; when he stood up, his face and neck were crimson red. Dymov was the first to run over and drink. He drank laughing, often tearing himself away from the bucket and telling Kiriukha about something funny, then he turned and, loudly, for the whole steppe to hear, uttered five bad words. Egorushka did not understand the meaning of these words, but he knew very well that they were bad. He knew the repugnance his family and acquaintances silently nursed for them, shared this feeling, not knowing why himself, and was accustomed to think that only drunk and riotous people had the privilege of uttering these words aloud. He remembered the killing of the grass snake, listened to Dymov’s laughter, and felt something like hatred for this man. And, as if on purpose, just then Dymov caught sight of Egorushka, who got off the wagon and was walking towards the well. He laughed loudly and shouted:

‘‘Brothers, the old man gave birth to a boy last night!’’

Kiriukha coughed from his bass laughter. Someone else laughed, too, and Egorushka blushed and decided finally that Dymov was a very wicked man.

Blond, curly-headed, hatless, and with the shirt unbuttoned on his chest, Dymov seemed handsome and extraordinarily strong; his every movement revealed the prankster and strongman who knows his own worth. He rolled his shoulders, set his arms akimbo, talked and laughed louder than anybody else, and looked as if he were about to lift something very heavy with one hand and astonish the whole world by it. His mischievous, mocking gaze glided over the road, the wagon train, and the sky, did not pause on anything, and, from having nothing to do, seemed to be looking for some creature to kill or something to make fun of. Evidently he was not afraid of anyone, knew no restraint, and probably had no interest at all in Egorushka’s opinion ... But with all his soul, Egorushka now hated his blond head, clear face, and strength, listened with fear and repugnance to his laughter, and tried to think of some abusive word to say to him in revenge.

Pantelei also went over to the bucket. He took a green icon-lamp glass from his pocket, wiped it with a rag, dipped from the bucket and drank, then dipped again, wrapped the glass in the rag, and put it back in his pocket.

‘‘Grandpa, why do you drink from an icon lamp?’’ Egorushka was surprised.

‘‘Some drink from a bucket, some from an icon lamp,’’ the old man answered evasively. ‘‘To each his own . . . You drink from a bucket, well, so drink in good health . . .’’

‘‘My dear little heart, my sweet little beauty,’’ Vasya suddenly started speaking in a tender, tearful voice. ‘‘My dear little heart!’

His eyes were aimed off into the distance, they became unctuous, smiled, and his face acquired the same expression as when he had looked at Egorushka earlier.

‘‘Who are you talking to?’’ asked Kiriukha.

‘‘A sweet little fox ... it’s lying on its back and playing like a puppy ...’’

They all began looking into the distance, seeking the fox with their eyes, but found nothing. Vasya alone saw something with his gray, lackluster little eyes, and admired. As Egorushka later became convinced, he had strikingly keen eyesight. He saw so well that, for him, the dirty brown, empty steppe was always filled with life and content. He had only to peer into the distance to see a fox, a hare, a bustard, or some other animal that keeps away from people. It is not hard to see a fleeing hare or a flying bustard—anyone crossing the steppe has seen that—but it is not given to everyone to see wild animals in their home life, when they are not fleeing, not hiding or looking around in alarm. But Vasya could see foxes frolicking, hares washing themselves with their forepaws, bustards spreading their wings, kestrels beating their wings ‘‘in place.’’ Thanks to such keen eyesight, besides the world that everyone could see, Vasya had another world of his own, inaccessible to anyone else, and probably a very nice one, because when he looked and admired, it was hard not to envy him.

As the wagon train moved on, the bells were ringing for the liturgy.

V

THE WAGON TRAIN settled down to the side of the village on the riverbank. The sun burned like the day before, the air was motionless and dismal. Several pussywillows stood on the bank, but their shade fell not on the land but on the water, where it was wasted, and in the shade under the wagons it was stifling and dull. The water, blue from the sky’s reflection in it, was passionately alluring.

The wagoner Styopka, to whom Egorushka only now paid attention, an eighteen-year-old Ukrainian boy in a long, belt-less shirt and wide, loose balloon trousers that fluttered like flags as he walked, quickly undressed, ran down the steep bank, and plopped into the water. He dove three times, then turned on his back and closed his eyes with pleasure. His face smiled and wrinkled, as if it felt tickly, painful, and funny to him.

On a hot day, when there is no getting away from the torrid and stifling heat, the splashing of water and the loud breathing of a bather affect the hearing like good music. Dymov and Kiriukha, looking at Styopka, quickly undressed and, with loud laughter and anticipating pleasure, plunged one after the other into the water. And the quiet, modest river resounded with snorting, splashing, and shouting. Kiriukha coughed, laughed, and shouted as if someone was trying to drown him, and Dymov chased after him, trying to grab him by the leg.

‘‘Hey, hey, hey!’’ he shouted. ‘‘Catch him, hold him!’’

Kiriukha guffawed and enjoyed himself, but the expression on his face was the same as on dry land: stupid, stunned, as if someone had crept up behind him unseen and whacked him on the head with the butt of an axe. Egorushka also undressed, but he did not go down the bank, but ran up and went flying off the ten-foot height. Describing an arc in the air, he fell into the water, went deep down, but did not reach the bottom; some force, cold and pleasant to the touch, picked him up and carried him back to the surface. He emerged, snorting and blowing bubbles, and opened his eyes; but the sun was reflected in the river just by his face. First blinding sparks, then rainbows and dark spots moved before his eyes; he hastened to dive again, opened his eyes underwater, and saw something muddy green, like the sky on a moonlit night. Again the same force, not letting him touch bottom and stay in the cool, carried him upwards. He emerged and breathed so deeply that he felt vast and refreshed not only in his chest but even in his stomach. Then, to take from the water all that could be taken, he allowed himself every luxury: he lay on his back, basked, splashed, turned somersaults, swam on his stomach, and on his side, and on his back, and upright—however he liked, until he got tired. The opposite bank was thickly overgrown with rushes, shining golden in the sun, and the rush flowers bent their beautiful tufts to the water. In one place the rushes trembled, bent their flowers down, and gave a crunch—this was Styopka and Kiriukha ‘‘snatching’’ crayfish.

‘‘A crayfish! Look, brothers, a crayfish!’’ Kiriukha shouted triumphantly and indeed held up a crayfish.

Egorushka swam towards the rushes, dove down, and began feeling around near the roots. Digging into the liquid, slimy silt, he felt something sharp and disgusting, maybe really a crayfish, but just then somebody seized him by the leg and pulled him to the surface. Spluttering and coughing, Egorushka opened his eyes and saw before him the wet, laughing face of the prankster Dymov. The prankster was breathing heavily and, judging by his eyes, wanted to go on with his mischief. He held Egorushka tightly by the leg, and was already raising his other hand to seize him by the neck, but Egorushka, with repugnance and fear, as if scornful and afraid that the stalwart fellow would drown him, tore himself free and said:

‘‘Fool! I’ll give it to you in the mug!’’

Feeling that this was not enough to express his hatred, he thought a moment and added:

‘‘Scoundrel! Son of a bitch!’’

But Dymov, as if nothing had happened, no longer paid any attention to Egorushka, but went swimming towards Kiriukha, shouting:

‘‘Hey, hey, hey! Let’s do some fishing! Boys, let’s go fishing!’’

‘‘Why not?’’ agreed Kiriukha. ‘‘There must be lots of fish here . . .’’

‘‘Styopka, run to the village, ask the muzhiks for a net.’’

‘‘They won’t give us one!’’

‘‘They will! You just ask! Tell them it’s like it’s for Christ’s sake, because we’re the same as wanderers.’’

‘‘That’s for sure!’’

Styopka got out of the water, dressed quickly, and, hatless, his wide balloon trousers flapping, ran to the village. After the clash with Dymov, the water lost all its charm for Egorushka. He got out and began to dress. Pantelei and Vasya were sitting on the steep bank, their legs hanging down, and watching the bathers. Emelyan, naked, stood up to his knees in the water just by the bank, holding on to the grass with one hand, so as not to fall, and stroking his body with the other. With his bony shoulder blades, with the bump under his eye, bent over and obviously afraid of the water, he presented a ridiculous figure. His face was serious, stern; he looked at the water crossly, as if about to reprimand it for getting him chilled once in the Donets and taking his voice away.

‘‘And why don’t you go for a swim?’’ Egorushka asked Vasya.

‘‘Just so . . . I don’t like it ...’’ Vasya replied.

‘‘Why’s your chin swollen?’’

‘‘It hurts ... I used to work at a match factory, young master ... The doctor told me that’s why my jore got swollen. The air there’s unhealthy. And besides me, another three boys got bulging jores, and one had it completely rotted away.’’

Styopka soon came back with a net. Dymov and Kiriukha turned purple and hoarse from staying so long in the water, but they eagerly started fishing. First they walked into a deep place by the rushes; the water there came up to Dymov’s neck and over the short Kiriukha’s head; the latter spluttered and blew bubbles, while Dymov, stumbling over the prickly roots, kept falling and getting tangled in the net; they both floundered and made noise, and their fishing was nothing but mischief.

‘‘It’s too deep,’’ Kiriukha said hoarsely. ‘‘You can’t catch anything!’’

‘‘Don’t pull, you devil!’’ shouted Dymov, trying to set the net in the proper position. ‘‘Hold it with your hands!’’

‘‘You won’t catch anything there!’’ Pantelei shouted to them from the bank. ‘‘You’re just frightening the fish, you fools! Head further to the left! It’s shallower there!’’

Once a bigger fish flashed over the net; everybody gasped, and Dymov brought his fist down on the place where it had disappeared, and his face showed vexation.

‘‘Eh!’’ Pantelei grunted and stamped his feet. ‘‘Missed a perch! Got away!’’

Heading to the left, Dymov and Kiriukha gradually came out to the shallows, and here the fishing became real. They wandered some three hundred paces from the wagons; they could be seen barely and silently moving their legs, trying to get to deeper places, closer to the rushes, dragging the net, beating their fists on the water, and rustling the rushes to frighten the fish and drive them into the net. From the rushes they waded to the other bank, dragged the net there, then, with a disappointed air, lifting their knees high, waded back to the rushes. They were talking about something, but what it was, nobody could hear. And the sun burned their backs, flies bit them, and their bodies went from purple to crimson. Styopka waded after them with a bucket in his hand, his shirt tucked up right under his armpits and the hem of it clamped in his teeth. After each successful catch, he held up the fish and, letting it shine in the sun, shouted:

‘‘See what a perch! There are already five like that!’’

You could see how Dymov, Kiriukha, and Styopka, each time they pulled out the net, spent a long time digging in the silt, put something into the bucket, threw something out; occasionally they took something caught in the net, handed it to each other, examined it curiously, then also threw it out ...

‘‘What’d you have there?’’ the others shouted from the bank.

Styopka answered something, but it was hard to make out his words. Then he got out of the water and, holding the bucket with both hands, forgetting to let down his shirt, ran to the wagons.

‘‘Already full!’’ he shouted, breathing heavily. ‘‘Give me another!’’

Egorushka looked into the bucket; it was full; a young pike stuck its ugly snout from the water, and around it swarmed smaller fish and crayfish. Egorushka thrust his hand to the bottom and stirred up the water; the pike disappeared under the crayfish, and in its place a perch and a tench floated up. Vasya also looked in the bucket. His eyes became unctuous, and his face became tender, as before, when he saw the fox. He took something out of the bucket, put it in his mouth, and began to chew. A crunching was heard.

‘‘Brothers,’’ Styopka was astonished, ‘‘Vasya’s eating a live gudgeon! Pah!’’

‘‘It’s not a gudgeon, it’s a goby,’’ Vasya replied calmly, continuing to chew.

He took the fish’s tail from his mouth, looked at it tenderly, and put it back in his mouth. As he chewed and crunched with his teeth, it seemed to Egorushka that it was not a man he saw before him. Vasya’s swollen chin, his lackluster eyes, his extraordinarily keen sight, the fish tail in his mouth, and the tenderness with which he chewed the gudgeon made him look like an animal.

Egorushka got bored being around him. And the fishing was over. He strolled by the wagons, pondered, and, out of boredom, trudged off to the village.

A little later, he was standing in the church and listening as the choir sang, leaning his head against someone’s back, which smelled of hemp. The liturgy was coming to an end. Egorushka understood nothing about church singing and was indifferent to it. He listened for a while, yawned, and began examining napes and backs. In one nape, red-haired and wet from recent bathing, he recognized Emelyan. The hair on his neck was cut square and higher than usual; his temples were also cut higher than they should have been, and Emelyan’s red ears stuck out like two burdock leaves and seemed to feel they were not in the right place. Looking at his nape and neck, Egorushka thought for some reason that Emelyan was probably very unhappy. He remembered his conducting, his wheezing voice, his timid look while bathing, and felt an intense pity for him. He wanted to say something affectionate to him.

‘‘I’m here, too!’’ he said, tugging at his sleeve.

People who sing tenor or bass in a choir, especially those who happen to have conducted at least once in their life, are accustomed to looking sternly and unsociably at little boys. Nor do they drop this habit later, when they stop being singers. Turning to Egorushka, Emelyan looked at him from under his eyebrows and said:

‘‘Don’t misbehave in church!’’

After that Egorushka made his way to the front, closer to the iconostasis. ¹⁷ Here he saw interesting people. In front of everyone else, to the right side on a carpet, stood a gentleman and a lady. Behind each of them stood a chair. The gentleman was dressed in a freshly ironed two-piece tussore suit, stood motionless like a soldier at the salute, and held his blue, clean-shaven chin high. His standing collar, the blueness of his chin, his small bald spot, and his cane expressed a great deal of dignity. His neck was tense with an excess of dignity, and his chin stretched upwards with such force that his head seemed ready at any moment to tear free and fly upwards. But the lady, corpulent and elderly, in a white silk shawl, bent her head sideways and looked as if she had just done someone a favor and wanted to say: ‘‘Ah, don’t bother thanking me! I don’t like it . . .’’ Around the carpet, Ukrainian men stood in a dense wall.

Egorushka went up to the iconostasis and began to kiss the local icons. He prostrated unhurriedly before each icon, looked back at the people without getting up, then got up and kissed the icon. Touching the cold floor with his forehead gave him great pleasure. When the caretaker came out of the sanctuary with long tongs to extinguish the candles, Egorushka quickly rose from the ground and ran to him.

‘‘Have they already handed out the prosphoras?’’¹⁸ he asked.

‘‘All gone, all gone,’’ the sexton muttered sullenly. ‘‘You’ve no business here . . .’’

The liturgy was over. Egorushka unhurriedly left the church and started wandering around the square. He had seen not a few villages, squares, and muzhiks in his life, and all that now met his eye was quite uninteresting to him. Having nothing to do, so as to kill time with at least something, he went into a shop that had a strip of scarlet cotton hanging over the door. The shop consisted of two spacious, poorly lit halves: in one groceries and dry goods were sold, and in the other stood barrels of tar, and horse collars hung from the ceiling; from that one came a delicious smell of leather and tar. The floor of the shop had been sprinkled with water; it had probably been sprinkled by a great fantast and freethinker, because it was all covered with patterns and cabbalistic signs. Behind the counter, leaning his belly on a desk, stood a well-nourished shopkeeper with a broad face and a round beard, apparently a Russian. He was sipping tea through a lump of sugar, letting out a deep sigh after each sip. His face showed perfect indifference, but in each sigh you could hear: ‘‘Just wait, you’re going to get it from me!’’

‘‘Give me a kopeck’s worth of sunflower seeds!’’ Egorushka addressed him.

The shopkeeper raised his eyebrows, came from behind the counter, and poured a kopeck’s worth of sunflower seeds into Egorushka’s pocket, the measure being an empty pomade jar. Egorushka did not want to leave. For a long time he studied the boxes of gingerbreads, pondered and asked, pointing to some small Vyazma gingerbreads that had acquired a rusty film with old age:

‘‘How much are these gingerbreads?’’

‘‘Two for a kopeck.’’

Egorushka took from his pocket the gingerbread that the Jewess had give him the day before, and asked:

‘‘And how much do you sell this kind for?’’

The shopkeeper took the gingerbread in his hands, examined it on all sides, and raised one eyebrow:

‘‘This kind?’’ he asked.

Then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a moment, and replied:

‘‘Two for three kopecks . . .’’

Silence ensued.

‘‘Whose boy are you?’’ asked the shopkeeper, pouring himself some tea from a red copper kettle.

‘‘I’m Ivan Ivanych’s nephew.’’

‘‘There are all sorts of Ivan Ivanyches,’’ sighed the shopkeeper; he looked over Egorushka’s head at the door, paused, and asked: ‘‘Would you like a drop of tea?’’

‘‘Maybe . . .’’ Egorushka accepted with some reluctance, though he had a great longing for his morning tea.

The shopkeeper poured a glass and gave it to him with a nibbled-over piece of sugar. Egorushka sat down on a folding chair and began to drink. He also wanted to ask how much a pound of sugared almonds cost, and had just started the conversation when a customer came in, and the owner, setting his glass aside, got involved in business. He led the customer to the half that smelled of tar and talked for a long time with him about something. The customer, apparently a very stubborn man and with a mind of his own, wagged his head all the time as a sign of disagreement and kept backing towards the door. The shopkeeper convinced him of something and began pouring oats for him into a big sack.

‘‘You call that oats?’’ the customer said mournfully. ‘‘That’s not oats, it’s chaff, it’d make a chicken grin ... No, I’ll go to Bondarenko!’’

When Egorushka went back to the river, a small fire was smoking on the bank. It was the wagoners cooking their dinner. Styopka stood amidst the smoke and stirred a cauldron with a big nicked spoon. A little to one side, their eyes red from the smoke, Kiriukha and Vasya sat cleaning the fish. Before them lay the silt- and weed-covered net, on which fish glistened and crayfish crawled.

Emelyan, recently come back from church, sat next to Pantelei, waved his hand, and sang barely audibly in a hoarse little voice: ‘‘We praise Thee . . .’’ Dymov wandered about by the horses.

When they finished cleaning the fish, Kiriukha and Vasya put them and the live crayfish in the bucket, rinsed them, and poured them all from the bucket into the boiling water.

‘‘Shall I put in some lard?’’ asked Styopka, skimming the froth with his spoon.

‘‘Why? The fish’ll give off their own juice,’’ replied Kiriukha.

Before removing the cauldron from the fire, Styopka poured three handfuls of millet and a spoonful of salt into the broth; in conclusion, he tried it, smacked his lips, licked the spoon, and grunted with self-satisfaction—this meant that the kasha¹⁹ was ready.

Everybody except Pantelei sat down around the cauldron and went to work with their spoons.

‘‘You! Give the boy a spoon!’’ Pantelei observed sternly. ‘‘I s’pose he must be hungry, too!’’

‘‘Ours is peasant fare . . .’’ sighed Kiriukha.

‘‘And peasant fare may be all to your health, if you’ve got a liking for it.’’

They gave Egorushka a spoon. He started to eat, not sitting down, but standing just by the cauldron and looking into it as if into a hole. The kasha smelled of a fishy dampness, and fish scales kept turning up among the millet; the crayfish could not be picked up with a spoon, and the eaters took them straight from the cauldron with their hands; Vasya was especially unconstrained in this respect, wetting not only his hands but his sleeves in the kasha. But all the same the kasha seemed very tasty to Egorushka and reminded him of the crayfish soup his mother cooked at home on fast days. Pantelei sat to one side and chewed bread.

‘‘Why don’t you eat, grandpa?’’ Emelyan asked.

‘‘I don’t eat crayfish . . . Dash ’em!’’ the old man said and turned away squeamishly.

While they ate, a general conversation went on. From this conversation Egorushka understood that all his new acquaintances, despite their differences in age and character, had one thing in common, which made them resemble one another: they were all people with a beautiful past and a very bad present; all of them to a man spoke with rapture about their past, while they greeted the present almost with scorn. The Russian man likes to remember, but does not like to live; Egorushka still did not know that, and, before the kasha was eaten, he was already deeply convinced that the people sitting around the cauldron had been insulted and offended by fate. Pantelei told how, in the old days, when there were no railroads, he went with wagon trains to Moscow and Nizhny and made so much that he didn’t know what to do with the money. And what merchants there were in those days, what fish, how cheap everything was! Now the roads had become shorter, the merchants stingier, the people poorer, bread more expensive, everything had become petty and narrow in the extreme. Emelyan told how he used to work in the church choir at the Lugansk factory, had a remarkable voice, and read music very well, but now he had turned into a peasant and ate on the charity of his brother, who sent him out with his horses and took half his earnings for it. Vasya had once worked in a match factory; Kiriukha had served as a coachman for some good people and had been considered the best troika driver in the whole region. Dymov, the son of a well-to-do peasant, had lived for his pleasure, caroused, and known no grief, but as soon as he turned twenty, his strict, stern father, wishing to get him used to work and fearing he would be spoiled at home, began sending him off as a wagoner, like a poor peasant, a hired hand. Styopka alone said nothing, but you could see by his beardless face that before he used to live much better than now.

Remembering his father, Dymov stopped eating and frowned. He looked at his comrades from under his eyebrows and rested his gaze on Egorushka.

‘‘You, heathen, take your hat off !’’ he said rudely. ‘‘You don’t eat with your hat on! Some master you are!’’

Egorushka took off his hat and did not say a word, but he no longer tasted the kasha and did not hear how Pantelei and Vasya interceded for him. Anger against the prankster stirred heavily in his breast, and he decided at all costs to do him some bad turn.

After dinner they all plodded to the wagons and collapsed in the shade.

‘‘Will we go soon, grandpa?’’ Egorushka asked Pantelei.

‘‘When God grants, then we’ll go ... We can’t go now, it’s hot ... Oh, Lord, as Thou wilt, Holy Mother ... Lie down, lad!’’

Soon, snoring came from under the wagons. Egorushka was about to go to the village again, then thought a little, yawned, and lay down beside the old man.

VI

THE WAGON TRAIN stood by the river all day and set off at sundown.

Again Egorushka lay on a bale, the wagon softly creaked and rocked, Pantelei walked down below, stamped his feet, slapped his thighs, and muttered; in the air the steppe music trilled as the day before.

Egorushka lay on his back, his hands behind his head, and looked up into the sky. He saw how the evening glow lit up, how it then went out; guardian angels, covering the horizon with their golden wings, settled down for the night; the day had passed untroubled, quiet, untroubled night came, and they could peacefully stay at home in the heavens ... Egorushka saw how the sky gradually darkened and dusk descended on the earth, how the stars lit up one after another.

When you look for a long time into the deep sky, without taking your eyes away, your thoughts and soul merge for some reason in an awareness of loneliness. You begin to feel yourself irremediably alone, and all that you once considered close and dear becomes infinitely distant and devoid of value. The stars that have gazed down from the sky for thousands of years, the incomprehensible sky itself and the dusk, indifferent to the short life of man, once you remain face-to-face with them and try to perceive their meaning, oppress your soul with their silence; you start thinking about the loneliness that awaits each of us in the grave, and the essence of life seems desperate, terrible ...

Egorushka thought of his grandmother, who now slept in the cemetery under the cherry trees; he remembered how she lay in the coffin with copper coins on her eyes, how she was then covered with the lid and lowered into the grave; the dull thud of the lumps of earth against the lid also came back to him ... He imagined his grandmother in the narrow and dark coffin, abandoned by everyone and helpless. His imagination pictured his grandmother suddenly waking up and unable to understand where she was, knocking on the lid, calling for help, and, in the end, faint with terror, dying again. He imagined his mother, Father Khristofor, Countess Dranitsky, Solomon dead. But however hard he tried to imagine himself in the dark grave, far from home, abandoned, helpless, and dead, he did not succeed, he could not allow the possibility of death for himself personally, and he felt he would never die ...

And Pantelei, for whom it was already time to die, walked below and took a roll call of his thoughts.

‘‘It’s all right ... nice masters . . .’’ he muttered. ‘‘They took the lad to study, but how he’s doing there, nobody hears ... In Slavyanoserbsk, I say, there’s no such institution as gives bigger learning . . . None, that’s for sure ... And he’s a good lad, he’s all right ... He’ll grow up and help his father. You’re small now, Egory, but when you’re big, you’ll feed your father and mother. That’s set up by God ... Honor your father and mother ... I had children, too, but they got burned up ... My wife got burned up and my children ... That’s for sure, on the eve of the Baptism,²⁰ the cottage caught fire ... Me, I wasn’t home, I’d gone to Orel. To Orel ... Marya jumped outside, then remembered the children were asleep in the cottage, ran back in, and got burned up with the children ... Yes ... The next day they found nothing but bones.’’

Around midnight the wagoners and Egorushka were again sitting around a small campfire. While the weeds were catching fire, Kiriukha and Vasya went to fetch water somewhere in a little gully; they disappeared into the darkness, but could be heard all the while clanging the buckets and talking; that meant the gully was not far away. The light from the campfire lay in a big, flickering patch on the ground; though the moon was shining, everything outside the red patch seemed impenetrably black. The light struck the wagoners’ eyes, and they could see only a part of the high road; in the darkness, the horses and the wagons with their bales were outlined in barely visible mounds of an indefinite shape. Twenty paces from the campfire, on the boundary between the road and the fields, stood a wooden grave cross sunk to one side. When the campfire had not yet been lit and it was possible to see far, Egorushka had noticed exactly the same old sunken cross standing on the other side of the high road.

Coming back with water, Kiriukha and Vasya filled the cauldron and fixed it over the fire. Styopka, with the nicked spoon in his hand, took his place in the smoke by the cauldron and, watching the water pensively, began to wait till froth appeared. Pantelei and Emelyan sat next to each other, kept silent, and thought about something. Dymov lay on his stomach, his head propped on his fists, and looked at the fire; Styopka’s shadow leaped across him, so that his handsome face was now covered with darkness, now suddenly blazed up ... Kiriukha and Vasya wandered a little way off, gathering weeds and birch bark for the fire. Egorushka, his hands in his pockets, stood beside Pantelei and watched how the fire ate the grass.

Everyone rested, thought about something, glanced fleetingly at the cross, over which red patches leaped. There is something sad, dreamy, and in the highest degree poetic in a lonely grave ... You can hear its silence, and in this silence you sense the presence of the soul of the unknown person who lies under the cross. Is it good for this soul in the steppe? Does it languish on a moonlit night? And the steppe near the grave seems sad, dismal, and pensive, the grass is sorrowful, and the grasshoppers seem to call with more restraint ... And there is no passerby who would not give thought to the lonely soul and turn to look back at the grave until it was left far behind and covered in dusk ...

‘‘Grandpa, why’s that cross standing here?’’ asked Egorushka.

Pantelei looked at the cross, then at Dymov, and asked:

‘‘Mikolka, mightn’t this be the place where the mowers killed the merchants?’’

Dymov reluctantly raised himself on his elbow, looked at the road, and replied:

‘‘The very same . . .’’

Silence ensued. Kiriukha made a crackling noise as he crumpled the dry grass into a ball and put it under the cauldron. The fire blazed up more brightly; Styopka was engulfed in black smoke, and the shadow of the cross raced through the darkness over the road by the wagons.

‘‘Yes, killed them . . .’’ Dymov said reluctantly. ‘‘The merchants, a father and son, were on their way to sell icons. They stopped at an inn nearby, the one that Ignat Fomin keeps now. The old man drank a bit too much and started boasting that he had a lot of money with him. Merchants are known to be boastful folk, God forbid ... They can’t help showing off at their best before the likes of us. But just then there were some mowers spending the night at the inn. So they heard the merchant boast and made note of it.’’

‘‘Oh, Lord ... Our Lady!’’ sighed Pantelei.

‘‘The next day, at first light,’’ Dymov went on, ‘‘the merchants got ready for the road, and the mowers mixed in with them. ‘Let’s go together, Your Honor. It’s more fun, and less dangerous, because it’s a godforsaken place here ...’ The merchants drove at a slow pace so as not to damage the icons, and that played into the mowers’ hands . . .’’

Dymov got up on his knees and stretched himself.

‘‘Yes,’’ he went on, yawning. ‘‘Everything went all right, but when the merchants reached this place, the mowers started cleaning them up with their scythes. The son was a fine fellow, he snatched the scythe from one of them and also did some cleaning ... Well, of course, those fellows overpowered them, because there were about eight of them. They cut the merchants up so there wasn’t a live spot left on their bodies; they finished their business and dragged the two of them off the road, the father to one side, the son to the other. Opposite here, on the other side of the road, there’s another cross ... I don’t know if it’s still there . . . You can’t see it from here.’’

‘‘It’s there,’’ said Kiriukha.

‘‘They say afterwards they didn’t find much money.’’

‘‘Not much,’’ Pantelei confirmed. ‘‘About a hundred roubles.’’

‘‘Yes, and three of them died afterwards, because the merchant also cut them badly with the scythe ... They bled to death. One of them had his arm lopped off, and they say he ran about four miles without his arm, and they found him on a little knoll near Kurikovo. He was crouched there with his head resting on his knees, as if he was deep in thought, but when they took a look, there was no soul in him, he was dead . . .’’

‘‘They found him by the trail of blood . . .’’ said Pantelei.

Everyone looked at the cross, and again silence ensued. From somewhere, probably the little gully, came the mournful cry of a bird: ‘‘Sleep! Sleep! Sleep! ...’’

‘‘There’s lots of wicked people in the world,’’ said Emelyan.

‘‘Lots, lots!’’ Pantelei agreed and moved closer to the fire, looking as if he felt eerie. ‘‘Lots,’’ he went on in a low voice. ‘‘I’ve seen no end of ’em in my life ... Wicked people, that is ... I’ve seen lots of saintly and righteous people, but the sinful ones there’s no counting ... Queen of Heaven, save us and have mercy . . . I remember once, thirty years ago, maybe more, I was driving a merchant from Morshansk. He was a nice man, fine-looking, and with money . . . the merchant, that is . . . a good man, all right . . . So then we drove on and stopped to spend the night at an inn. And the inns in Russia are not like in these parts. They’ve got covered yards like cowsheds, or, say, like threshing barns in good farmsteads. Only threshing barns are higher. Well, we stopped, and everything was all right. My merchant was in a little room, I was with the horses, and all was as it should be. So then, brothers, I prayed to God—before sleep, I mean—and went for a stroll in the yard. The night was pitch dark, you couldn’t see a thing, no use looking at all. I strolled a little, about as far as from here to the wagons, and I see a light glimmering. What’s the story? It seemed the landlords went to bed long ago, and there were no other lodgers besides me and the merchant ... Where was the light coming from? Suspicion took hold of me ... .. I went closer . . . to the light, that is ... Lord have mercy and save me, Queen of Heaven! I looked, and right on the ground there was a little window with bars ... in the house, that is ... I lay on the ground and looked; and the moment I looked, a chill ran through my whole body . . .’’

Kiriukha, trying not to make noise, stuck a bunch of weeds into the fire. The old man waited till the weeds stopped crackling and hissing, and went on:

‘‘I looked inside, and there’s a cellar there, a big one, dark and suspicious ... A lantern is burning on a barrel. In the middle of the cellar stand some ten men in red shirts, their sleeves rolled up, sharpening long knives . . . Aha! Well, so we’d fallen in with a band of robbers ... What to do? I ran to the merchant, woke him up quietly, and said: ‘Don’t you get frightened, merchant,’ I say, ‘but things look bad for us ... We’ve fallen,’ I say, ‘into a den of robbers.’ His face changed, and he asked: ‘What do we do now, Pantelei? I have a lot of orphans’ money with me ... As regards my life,’ he says, ‘it’s as God wills, I’m not afraid to die,’ he says, ‘but it’s terrible to lose orphans’ money ...’ What’s to be done? The gate’s locked, there’s no getting out by foot or carriage ... If there was a fence, you could climb over the fence, but it’s a covered yard! ... ‘Well, merchant,’ I say, ‘don’t you get frightened, but pray to God. Maybe the Lord won’t want to hurt the orphans. Stay here,’ I say, ‘and don’t give any sign, and meanwhile maybe I’ll think up something ...’ All right ... I prayed to God, and God put reason into me ... I climbed onto my tarantass and quietly ... quietly, so that nobody could hear, I started pulling thatch from the eaves, made a hole, and got out. Outside, that is ... Then I jumped off the roof and ran down the road as fast as I could. I ran and ran, got dead tired ... Ran maybe five miles at one go, maybe more ... Thank God, I see—there’s a village standing there. I ran up to a cottage and started knocking on the window. ‘Good Orthodox people,’ I say, ‘thus and so, don’t let a Christian soul perish ...’ I woke them all up ... The muzhiks assembled and went with me ... Some with ropes, some with sticks, some with pitchforks ... We broke down the gates of the inn and went straight to the cellar ... And the robbers had finished sharpening their knives and were about to stick the merchant. The muzhiks took every last one of them, tied them up, and brought them to the authorities. The merchant was so glad, he donated three hundred roubles to them, and gave me a fiver, and wrote down my name to be prayed for. People say afterwards they found no end of human bones in the cellar. Bones, that is ... So it means they robbed folk, and then buried them so there’d be no traces . . . Well, afterwards they were punished in Morshansk by the executioners.’’

Pantelei finished the story and glanced around at his listeners. They were silent and looked at him. The water was already boiling, and Styopka was skimming the froth.

‘‘Is the lard ready?’’ Kiriukha asked in a whisper.

‘‘Wait a little ... Just a minute.’’

Styopka, not taking his eyes off Pantelei, and as if fearing he would start a story without him, ran to the wagons; he soon came back with a small wooden bowl and started mashing lard in it.

‘‘Another time I also drove with a merchant . . .’’ Pantelei went on in a low voice as before, and without blinking his eyes. ‘‘His name, I remember as if it were now, was Pyotr Grigoryich. A good man he was ... the merchant, that is ... We stopped at an inn the same way . . . He was in a room, and I was with the horses . . . The landlords, a husband and wife, seemed to be good people, kindly, gentle, the workers also looked all right, and yet, brothers, I couldn’t sleep, my heart senses something! Senses it, that’s all. The gates were open, and there were many people around, and yet I was afraid, not myself. Everyone had long gone to sleep, it was deep night, soon it would be time to get up, and I alone was lying in my kibitka with my eyes open, like some sort of owl. Only this is what I hear, brothers: tup! tup! tup! Somebody’s stealing up to the kibitka. I poke my head out, look—a woman’s standing there in nothing but her shift, barefoot ... ‘What do you want, woman?’ I say. And she trembles all over, that one, she looks awful ... ‘Get up, good man!’ she says. ‘Trouble ... The landlords have decided on an evil thing . . . They want to do your merchant in. I heard the master and mistress whispering about it,’ she says ... Well, it was not for nothing my heart ached! ‘And who are you?’ I ask. ‘I’m their cook,’ she says ... All right ... I got out of the kibitka and went to the merchant. I woke him up and said: ‘Thus and so,’ I say, ‘Pyotr Grigoryich, there’s dirty business afoot ... You can sleep some other time, Your Honor, but now, while there’s still time, get dressed,’ I say, ‘and run for all you’re worth out of harm’s way ...’ He’d just started to get dressed when the door opened, and hello! ... I look—Mother of God!—the master, the mistress, and three workers come walking into the room on us ... Meaning they’d put the workers up to it ... The merchant had a lot of money, so they thought, we’ll divide it up ... . . Each of the five is holding a long knife . . . a knife, that is ... The master locked the door and said: ‘Pray to God, travelers . . . And if you start shouting, we won’t let you pray before you die ...’ As if we could shout! We had our throats stopped up with fear, we were beyond shouting ... The merchant weeps and says: ‘Good Orthodox people!’ he says. ‘You’ve decided to kill me, because my money has seduced you. So be it, I’m neither the first nor the last; there have been many merchants killed at inns. But why,’ he says, ‘Orthodox brothers, why kill my driver? What’s the need of him suffering because of my money?’ And he says it so pitifully! And the master answers: ‘If we let him live,’ he says, ‘he’ll be the first witness against us. It’s all the same,’ he says, ‘to kill one man or two. In for a penny, in for a pound ... Pray to God, and that’s it, there’s no point talking!’ The merchant and I knelt beside each other, wept, and started praying to God. He remembered his little children, but I was young then, I wanted to live ... We look at the icons and pray so pitifully, even now the tears pour from my eyes ... But the mistress, she’s a woman, she looks at us and says: ‘Good people,’ she says, ‘don’t remember evil of us in the other world, and don’t heap prayers on our heads, because we do it out of need.’ We prayed and prayed, wept and wept, and God heard us. Took pity on us, I mean ... Just as the master seized the merchant by the beard to slash his throat with the knife, somebody suddenly knocked so-o-o hard on the window from the yard outside! We all just jumped, and the master lowered his hands ... Somebody knocked on the window and shouted: ‘Pyotr Grigoryich, are you here? Get ready, we’re going!’ The landlords saw that somebody had come to fetch the merchant, they got frightened, and off they ran ... And we rushed out to the yard, harnessed up—and that was the last they saw of us . . .’’

‘‘Who was it knocked on the window?’’ asked Dymov.

‘‘On the window? Must have been a saint or an angel. Because there was nobody else ... When we drove out of the yard, there wasn’t a single person in the street ... It was God’s doing!’’

Pantelei told some other stories, and in all of them ‘‘long knives’’ played the same role, and there was the same made-up feeling. Had he heard these stories from someone else, or had he invented them himself in the distant past and then, when his memory weakened, mixed his experience with fiction and become unable to distinguish one from the other? That all may have been so, but the strange thing was that now and throughout the entire journey, whenever he happened to tell stories, he gave clear preference to the made up and never spoke of what he had experienced. Egorushka took everything at face value now and believed every word, but afterwards it seemed strange to him that a man who had traveled all over Russia in his lifetime, who had seen and known so much, whose wife and children had burned up, devalued his rich life so much that, whenever he sat by the campfire, he either kept silent or spoke of something that had never been.

Over the kasha they were all silent and thought about what they had just heard. Life is fearful and wondrous, and therefore, however fearful a tale you tell in Russia, however you adorn it with robbers’ dens, long knives, and miracles, it will always find a real response in the listener’s soul, and only a man of well-tried literacy will look askance in mistrust, and even he will say nothing. The cross by the roadside, the dark bales, the vastness, and the destiny of the people gathered around the campfire—all this was so wondrous and fearful in itself that the fantasticality of tall tales and stories paled and merged with life.

They all ate from the cauldron, while Pantelei sat separately to one side and ate from a wooden bowl. His spoon was not like everyone else’s, but was made of cypress wood and with a little cross. Egorushka, looking at him, remembered the icon-lamp glass and quietly asked Styopka:

‘‘Why does grandpa sit separately?’’

‘‘He’s an Old Believer,’’²¹ Styopka and Vasya answered in a whisper, looking as if they were speaking of a weakness or a secret vice.

They were all silent and thinking. After such fearful tales, no one wanted to speak of ordinary things. Suddenly, in the midst of the silence, Vasya straightened up and, aiming his lackluster eyes at one spot, pricked up his ears.

‘‘What is it?’’ Dymov asked him.

‘‘There’s a man walking,’’ Vasya answered.

‘‘Where do you see him?’’

‘‘There he is! A patch of white . . .’’

Where Vasya was looking, nothing could be seen except darkness; they all listened, but no footsteps could be heard.

‘‘Is he walking down the road?’’ asked Dymov.

‘‘No, across the field ... He’s coming here.’’

A minute passed in silence.

‘‘Maybe it’s the merchant buried here, wandering over the steppe,’’ said Dymov.

They all glanced sidelong at the cross and suddenly laughed; they became ashamed of their fear.

‘‘Why would he wander?’’ said Pantelei. ‘‘The only ones that walk about at night are the ones the earth won’t receive. But the merchants are all right . . . The merchants received martyrs’ crowns.’’

Now footsteps were heard. Someone was walking hurriedly.

‘‘He’s carrying something,’’ said Vasya.

The swish of grass and the crackling of weeds under the walker’s feet became audible, but because of the firelight no one could be seen. Finally there was a sound of footsteps close by, someone coughed, the dancing light seemed to part, the scales fell from their eyes, and the wagoners suddenly saw a man before them.

Either because of the way the fire flickered, or because they wanted before all to make out the face of this man, it turned out, oddly enough, that with the first glance at him, everyone saw before all not his face, not his clothes, but his smile. It was an extraordinarily kind, broad, and soft smile, as of an awakened child, one of those infectious smiles that it is hard not to respond to with a smile. The stranger, once they had made him out, proved to be a man of about thirty, not handsome and in no way remarkable. He was a tall Ukrainian, long-nosed, long-armed, and long-legged; in general, everything about him seemed long, and only his neck was short, so much so that it made him look stooped. He was dressed in a clean white shirt with an embroidered collar, white balloon trousers, and new boots, and, compared with the wagoners, looked like a dandy. In his hands he was holding something big, white, and, at first glance, strange, and from behind his shoulder the barrel of a gun appeared, also long.

Emerging from the darkness into the circle of light, he stopped as if rooted to the spot and looked at the wagoners for about half a minute, as if he wanted to say: ‘‘See what a smile I’ve got!’’ Then he stepped towards the campfire, smiled still more brightly, and said:

‘‘Good health to you all!’’

‘‘We bid you welcome!’’ Pantelei answered for everyone.

The stranger set down what he was holding—it was a dead bustard—and greeted them once more.

They all went over to the bustard and started examining it.

‘‘A grand bird! What did you shoot it with?’’ asked Dymov.

‘‘Buckshot ... Birdshot’s not enough, it won’t reach ... Buy it, brothers! I’ll let you have it for twenty kopecks.’’

‘‘What do we need it for? It’s good roasted, but it’s tough boiled—hard to chaw . . .’’

‘‘Eh, too bad! I could take it to the head office on the estate, they’d pay fifty kopecks for it, but it’s too far—fifteen miles!’’

The unknown man sat down, unslung his gun, and placed it beside him. He looked sleepy, languid; he smiled, squinted from the fire, and was apparently thinking about something very pleasant. They gave him a spoon. He began to eat.

‘‘Who might you be?’’ Dymov asked him.

The stranger did not hear the question; he did not reply and did not even look at Dymov. Most likely this smiling man did not taste the kasha, either, because he chewed somehow mechanically, lazily, bringing to his mouth now a full spoon, now a quite empty one. He was not drunk, but there was something loony wandering in his head.

‘‘I’m asking you: who are you?’’ Dymov repeated.

‘‘Me?’’ the unknown man roused himself. ‘‘Konstantin Zvonyk, from Rovnoe. About four miles from here.’’

And, wishing to show first off that he was not a peasant like all the others but a better sort, Konstantin hastened to add:

‘‘We keep bees and raise pigs.’’

‘‘Do you live with your father or on your own?’’

‘‘No, now I live on my own. Separately. Got married this month after Saint Peter’s.²² A married man now! ... It’s eighteen days I’ve been under the law.’’

‘‘That’s a good thing!’’ said Pantelei. ‘‘A wife’s all right ... God’s blessing . . .’’

‘‘A young wife asleep at home, and he goes traipsing about the steppe,’’ Kiriukha laughed. ‘‘An odd fellow!’’

Konstantin, as if pinched on his tenderest spot, roused himself, laughed, turned red ...

‘‘But, Lord, she’s not at home!’’ he said, quickly taking the spoon out of his mouth and looking around at them all with joy and surprise. ‘‘She’s not! She went to her mother for two days! By God, she did, and it’s as if I’m not married . . .’’

Konstantin waved his hand and wagged his head; he wanted to go on thinking, but the joy that radiated from his face prevented him. He assumed a different posture, as if he had been sitting uncomfortably, laughed, and again waved his hand. It was embarrassing to give his pleasant thoughts away to strangers, but at the same time he had an irrepressible wish to share his joy.