He did not live long after that. I learned of his death recently. It's strange, however, that the circumstances of his end had some resemblance to the death of Pulkheria Ivanovna. One day Afanasy Ivanovich decided to take a little stroll in the garden. As he was slowly walking down the path with his usual unconcern, having no thoughts at all, a strange incident occurred with him. He suddenly heard someone behind him say in a rather distinct voice: "Afanasy Ivanovich!" He turned around, but there was absolutely no one there; he looked in all directions, peeked into the bushes- no one anywhere. It was a calm day and the sun was shining. He pondered for a moment; his face somehow livened up, and he finally said: "It's Pulkheria Ivanovna calling me!"
It has undoubtedly happened to you that you hear a voice call- ing you by name, something simple people explain by saying that a soul is longing for the person and calling him, and after that comes inevitable death. I confess I have always feared this mysterious call. I remember hearing it often in childhood: sometimes my name would suddenly be distinctly spoken behind me. Usually, at the moment, it was a most clear and sunny day; not a leaf stirred on any tree in the garden, there was a dead silence, even the grasshoppers would stop chirring at that moment; not a soul in the garden; yet I confess that if night, most furious and stormy, with all the inferno of the elements, had overtaken me alone amid an impenetrable forest, I would not have been as frightened of it as of this terrible silence amid a cloudless day. Usually I would flee from the garden then, breathless and in the greatest fear, and would calm down only when I happened to meet somebody whose look would drive away this terrible heart's desert.
He submitted wholly to his soul's conviction that Pulkheria Ivanovna was calling him; he submitted with the will of an obedient child; he wasted away, coughed, dwindled like a candle, and finally went out the way a candle does when there is nothing left to feed its poor flame. "Lay me next to Pulkheria Ivanovna" was all he said before he died.
His wish was fulfilled and he was buried near the church, beside Pulkheria Ivanovna's grave. There were fewer guests at the funeral, but just as many simple folk and beggars. The master's house was now completely empty. The enterprising steward, together with the village headman, dragged over to their own cottages all the remaining old things and junk that the housekeeper had not managed to steal. Soon some distant relation arrived from God knows where, the heir to the whole estate, who before that had served as a lieutenant in I don't remember which regiment, a terrible reformer. He noted at once the utter disorder and neglect in matters of management; he resolved to root it out, to correct it without fail, and to introduce order in everything. He bought six fine English sickles, nailed a special number on each cottage, and finally managed so well that in six months the estate was taken into custody. This wise custody (consisting of a former assessor and some staff captain in a faded uniform) did not take long putting an end to all the chickens and eggs. The cottages, which lay nearly on the ground, collapsed completely; the peasants took to drinking hard and were counted mostly as runaways. The actual owner himself, who incidentally lived quite peaceably with his custody and drank punch with it, rarely visited his estate and never stayed long. To this day he goes to all the fairs in Little Russia, inquires thoroughly into the prices of various major products that are sold wholesale, such as flour, hemp, honey and so on, but buys only small trifles such as little flints, a nail for cleaning his pipe, and generally anything that doesn't go beyond a wholesale price of one rouble.
Viy*
As soon as the booming seminary bell that hung by the gates of the Bratsky Monastery in Kiev rang out in the morning, crowds of schoolboys and seminarians 1 came hurrying from all over the city. Grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, and theologians, notebooks under their arms, trudged to class. The grammarians were still very small; as they walked they pushed each other and quarreled among themselves in the thinnest trebles; their clothes were almost all torn or dirty, and their pockets were eternally full of various sorts of trash, such as knucklebones, whistles made from feathers, unfinished pieces of pie, and occasionally even a little sparrow that, by chirping suddenly amidst the extraordinary silence of the classroom, would procure for its patron a decent beating on both hands, and sometimes the cherrywood rod. The rhetoricians walked more sedately: their clothes were often per-fecdy intact, but instead their faces were almost always adorned with some rhetorical trope: one eye completely closed, or a big *Viy is a colossal creation of folk imagination. This name is applied by people in Little Russia to the chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids reach to the ground. The whole story is a popular legend. I did not wish to change it in any way and tell it almost as simply as I heard it. (Author's note.) bubble instead of a lip, or some other mark; these swore by God and talked among themselves in tenors. The philosophers dropped a whole octave lower: there was nothing in their pockets except strong, coarse tobacco. They kept nothing stashed away and ate whatever came along on the spot; the smell of pipes and vodka sometimes spread so far around them that a passing artisan would stand for a long time sniffing the air like a hound.
The marketplace at that time was usually just beginning to stir, and women with bagels, rolls, watermelon seeds, and poppyseed cakes tugged those who had them by their coattails of thin broadcloth or some sort of cotton.
"Young sirs! Young sirs! Here! Here!" they said on all sides. "There are good bagels, poppyseed cakes, twists, rolls! Fine ones, by God! with honey! homemade!"
Another woman, holding up something long made of twisted dough, cried:
"Here's an icicle, young sirs! Buy an icicle!"
"Don't buy anything from that one! Look how foul she is-her nose is awful and her hands are dirty…"
But they were afraid to pester the philosophers and theologians, because the philosophers and theologians liked to sample things, and always by the handful.
On reaching the seminary, the whole crowd settled by classes in low-ceilinged but rather spacious rooms with small windows, wide doors, and dirty desks. The classroom would suddenly be filled with the hum of many voices: the monitors listened to their charges, the ringing treble of a grammarian would fall in tune with the jingling of the windowpanes in the small windows, the glass echoing with almost the same sound; from the corner came the low buzz of a rhetorician whose mouth and thick lips ought to have belonged to philosophy at the least. He buzzed in a bass, and from afar all you heard was: boo, boo, boo, boo… The monitors, as they heard the lessons, looked with one eye under the desk, where a roll or dumpling or pumpkin seeds stuck out of their subordinate's pocket.
If all this learned crowd managed to come a little earlier, or if they knew that the professors would be later than usual, then, with universal agreement, a battle would be planned, and in this battle everyone had to take part, even the censors, whose duty was to look after the order and morals of all the student estate. Usually two theologians decided how the battle would go: whether each class should stand separately for itself, or they should divide themselves into two halves, the boarders and the seminary. In any case, it was the grammarians who would begin it first, but as soon as the rhetoricians mixed in, they would flee and stand on higher ground to watch the battle. Then philosophy with long black mustaches would step forth, and finally theology in terrible ballooning trousers and with the thickest necks. The usual end was that theology would beat them all, and philosophy, rubbing its sides, would be hustled into class, where it settled down to rest at the desks. A professor who had once taken part in such battles himself, on entering the classroom, would know at once from his students' flushed faces that it had been a fine battle, and while he gave the rhetorics a knuckle-rapping, in another class another professor would be applying the wooden slats to the hands of philosophy. With the theologians it was done in a totally different way: each was allotted, as the professor of theology put it, a measure of "big peas," dealt out with a short leather whip.