A Tale of 1852'I'm fond of them, very fond! … First-rate fellows! … Fine!' he kept repeating, and felt ready to cry. But why he wanted to cry, who were the first-rate fellows he was so fond of—was more than he quite knew. Now and then he looked round at some house and wondered why it was so curiously built; sometimes he began wondering why the post-boy and Vanyusha, who were so different from himself, sat so near, and together with him were being jerked about and swayed by the tugs the side-horses gave at the frozen traces, and again he repeated: 'First rate … very fond!' and once he even said: 'And how it seizes one … excellent!' and wondered what made him say it. 'Dear me, am I drunk?' he asked himself. He had had a couple of bottles of wine, but it was not the wine alone that was having this effect on Olenin. He remembered all the words of friendship heartily, bashfully, spontaneously (as he believed) addressed to him on his departure. He remembered the clas...
THE SNAKE'S HEAD AND TAIL The Snake's Tail had a quarrel with the Snake's Head about who was to walk in front. The Head said: "You cannot walk in front, because you have no eyes and no ears." The Tail said: "Yes, but I have strength, I move you; if I want to, I can wind myself around a tree, and you cannot get off the spot." The Head said: "Let us separate!" And the Tail tore himself loose from the Head, and crept on; but the moment he got away from the Head, he fell into a hole and was lost. FINE THREAD A Man ordered some fine thread from a Spinner. The Spinner spun it for him, but the Man said that the thread was not good, and that he wanted the finest thread he could get. The Spinner said: "If this is not fine enough, take this!" and she pointed to an empty space. He said that he did not see any. The Spinner said: "You do not see it, because it is so fine. I do not see it mys...
A Comedy in Four ActsThe entrance hall of a wealthy house in Moscow. There are three doors: the front door, the door of Leoníd Fyódoritch's study, and the door of Vasíly Leoníditch's room. A staircase leads up to the other rooms; behind it is another door leading to the servants' quarters. Scene 1. GREGORY [looks at himself in the glass and arranges his hair, &c.] I am sorry about those mustaches of mine! “Mustaches are not becoming to a footman,” she says! And why? Why, so that any one might see you're a footman,—else my looks might put her darling son to shame. He's a likely one! There's not much fear of his coming anywhere near me, mustaches or no mustaches! [Smiling into the glass] And what a lot of 'em swarm round me. And yet I don't care for any of them as much as for that Tánya. And she only a lady's-maid! Ah well, she's nicer than any young lady. [Smiles] She is a duck! [Liste...
It happened in the ‘seventies in winter, on the day after St. Nicholas’s Day. There was a fete in the parish and the innkeeper, Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov, a Second Guild merchant, being a church elder had to go to church, and had also to entertain his relatives and friends at home. But when the last of them had gone he at once began to prepare to drive over to see a neighboring proprietor about a grove which he had been bargaining over for a long time. He was now in a hurry to start, lest buyers from the town might forestall him in making a profitable purchase. The youthful landowner was asking ten thousand rubles for the grove simply because Vasili Andreevich was offering seven thousand. Seven thousand was, however, only a third of its real value. Vasili Andreevich might perhaps have got it down to his own price, for the woods were in his district and he had a long-standing agreement with the other village dealers that no one should run up the price...
Chapter III DISTURBING THOUGHTS LIFE went on. Each day brought new conflicting thoughts and emotions. The feature which affected me most was the inequality I witnessed in my immediate environment. I learned that the rations issued to the tenants of the First House of the Soviet (Astoria) were much superior to those received by the workers in the factories. To be sure, they were not sufficient to sustain life--but no one in the Astoria lived from these rations alone. The members of the Communist Party, quartered in the Astoria, worked in Smolny, and the rations in Smolny were the best in Petrograd. Moreover, trade was not entirely suppressed at that time. The markets were doing a lucrative business, though no one seemed able or willing to explain to me where the purchasing capacity came from. The workers could not afford to buy butter which was then 2,000 rubles a pound, sugar at 3,000, or meat at 1,000. The inequality was most apparent in th...