When Sasha was thirteen or fourteen, she considered herself more serious than her absent-minded mother, and she began to take care of Olga.
K[lavdia] A[bramovna] was not a believer, but the decencies, as she thought, demanded of her that she cross herself and make her Easter devotions, and if the simple people didn’t believe, they’d all be killing one another in the street.
Nothing drugs one and makes one drunk like money; when there’s a lot of it, the world seems better than it is.
Ivan Makarich in every kind of weather went about with an umbrella and galoshes. [4]
“The ladies and gentlemen are decent people; they talk about loving their neighbor, about freedom, about helping the poor, but just the same they’re all owners of serfs, so that they can’t get along without servants, whom they’re humiliating every minute. They’ve been hiding something, they’ve been lying to the Holy Ghost.”
The lackey talks to himself aloud. He begs Sasha to tell him about the country. He is seventy-six now, but says he is only sixty.
The lackey despises the merchants and their ladies.
He likes to say clever things in conversation, and they respected him for this, though they did not always understand them.
Sasha’s sensibilities were offended by the smell of washing, by the filth, by the stinking stairs; they were offended by life itself; but she was persuaded that, in her position, such a life as this was inescapable.
Sasha: death is still a long way off, and while you’re alive, you need principles—and on that account she liked to listen to the phrases that the make-up man flung out.
They didn’t teach the children to pray or to think about God, they didn’t instill into them any principles: they just forbade them to eat meat in Lent.
Just as today we are astonished by the cruelties through which the Christian torturers distinguished themselves, so people will in time be astonished at the falsehood with which evil today is fought; for example, they talk about freedom while making general use of the services of slaves.
—TRANSLATED BY EDMUND WILSON
[1] A small park in Moscow.
[2] A cosmetic made of white lead.
[3] A popular patisserie in Moscow.
[4] This trait was later assigned to the classics teacher Belikov in the story called “The Man in the Case.”
THE NEW VILLA
1.
TWO MILES FROM the village of Obruchanovo a huge bridge was being built. From the village, which stood up high on the steep riverbank, its trellis-like skeleton could be seen, and in foggy weather and on still winter days, when its delicate iron girders and all the scaffolding around was covered with hoarfrost, it presented a picturesque and even fantastic spectacle. Kucherov, the engineer who was building the bridge, a stout, broad-shouldered, bearded man in a soft crumpled cap, drove through the village in his racing droshky or his open carriage. Now and then on holidays navvies working on the bridge would come to the village; they begged for alms, laughed at the women, and sometimes carried off something. But that was rare; as a rule the days passed quietly and peacefully as though no bridgebuilding were going on, and only in the evening, when campfires gleamed near the bridge, the wind faintly wafted the songs of the navvies. And by day there was sometimes the mournful clang of metal, don-don-don.
It happened that the engineer’s wife came to see him. She was pleased with the riverbanks and the gorgeous view over the green valley with trees, churches, flocks, and she began begging her husband to buy a small piece of ground and to build them a cottage on it. Her husband agreed. They bought sixty acres of land, and on the high bank in a field, where in earlier days the cows of Obruchanovo used to wander, they built a pretty house of two stories with a terrace and a veranda, with a tower and a flagstaff on which a flag fluttered on Sundays. They built it in about three months, and then all the winter they were planting big trees, and when spring came and everything began to be green there were already avenues to the new house—a gardener and two laborers in white aprons were digging near it—there was a little fountain, and a globe of looking glass flashed so brilliantly that it was painful to look at. The house had already been named the New Villa.
On a bright, warm morning at the end of May two horses were brought to Obruchanovo to the village blacksmith, Rodion Petrov. They came from the New Villa. The horses were sleek, graceful beasts, as white as snow, and strikingly alike.
“Perfect swans!” said Rodion, gazing at them with reverent admiration.
His wife Stepanida, his children, and grandchildren came out into the street to look at them. By degrees a crowd collected. The Lychkovs, father and son, both men with swollen faces and entirely beardless, came up bareheaded. Kozov, a tall, thin old man with a long, narrow beard, came up leaning on a stick with a crook handle: he kept winking with his crafty eyes and smiling ironically as though he knew something.
“It’s only that they are white; what is there in them?” he said. “Put mine on oats, and they will be just as sleek. They ought to be in a plow and with a whip, too. . . .”
The coachman simply looked at him with disdain but did not utter a word. And afterwards, while they were blowing up the fire at the forge, the coachman talked while he smoked cigarettes. The peasants learned from him various details: his employers were wealthy people; his mistress, Elena Ivanovna, had till her marriage lived in Moscow in a poor way as a governess; she was kindhearted, compassionate, and fond of helping the poor. On the new estate, he told them, they were not going to plow or to sow, but simply to live for their pleasure, live only to breathe the fresh air. When he had finished and led the horses back a crowd of boys followed him, the dogs barked, and Kozov, looking after him, winked sarcastically.
“Landowners, too-oo!” he said. “They have built a house and set up horses, but I bet they are nobodies—landowners, too-oo.”
Kozov for some reason took a dislike from the first to the new house, to the white horses, and to the handsome, well-fed coachman. Kozov was a solitary man, a widower; he had a dreary life (he was prevented from working by a disease which he sometimes called a rupture and sometimes worms); he was maintained by his son, who worked at a confectioner’s in Kharkov and sent him money; and from early morning till evening he sauntered at leisure about the river or about the village; if he saw, for instance, a peasant carting a log, or fishing, he would say: “That log’s dry wood—it is rotten,” or, “They won’t bite in weather like this.” In times of drought he would declare that there would not be a drop of rain till the frost came; and when the rains came he would say that everything would rot in the fields, that everything was ruined. And as he said these things he would wink as though he knew something.
At the New Villa they burned Bengal lights and sent up fireworks in the evenings, and a sailing boat with red lanterns floated by Obruchanovo. One morning the engineer’s wife, Elena Ivanovna, and her little daughter drove to the village in a carriage with yellow wheels and a pair of dark bay ponies; both mother and daughter were wearing broad-brimmed straw hats, bent down over their ears.
This was exactly at the time when they were carting manure, and the blacksmith Rodion, a tall, gaunt old man, bareheaded and barefooted, was standing near his dirty and repulsive-looking cart and, flustered, looked at the ponies, and it was evident by his face that he had never seen such little horses before.
“The Kucherov lady has come!” was whispered around. “Look, the Kucherov lady has come!”
Elena Ivanovna looked at the huts as though she were selecting one, and then stopped at the very poorest, at the windows of which there were so many children’s heads—flaxen, red, and dark. Stepanida, Rodion’s wife, a stout woman, came running out of the hut; her kerchief slipped off her gray head; she looked at the carriage facing the sun, and her face smiled and wrinkled up as though she were blind.