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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Viy*

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