Peasants and Other Stories

  “The Zemstvo,” said Osip. “Who else?”

  “Of course it is the Zemstvo.”

  The Zemstvo was blamed for everything—for the arrears, and for the oppressions, and for the failure of the crops, though no one of them knew what was meant by the Zemstvo. And this dated from the time when well-to-do peasants who had factories, shops, and inns of their own were members of the Zemstvos, were dissatisfied with them, and took to swearing at the Zemstvos in their factories and inns.

  They talked of God’s not sending the snow; they had to bring in wood for fuel, and there was no driving nor walking in the frozen ruts. In old days fifteen to twenty years ago conversation was much more interesting in Zhukovo. In those days every old man looked as though he were treasuring some secret; as though he knew something and was expecting something. They used to talk about an edict in golden letters, about the division of lands, about new land, about treasures; they hinted at something. Now the people of Zhukovo had no mystery at all; their whole life was bare and open in the sight of all, and they could talk of nothing but poverty, food, there being no snow yet. . . .

  There was a pause. Then they thought again of the hens, of the sheep, and began discussing whose fault it was.

  “The Zemstvo,” said Osip wearily. “Who else?”

  8.

  The parish church was nearly five miles away at Kosogorovo, and the peasants only attended it when they had to do so for baptisms, weddings, or funerals; they went to the services at the church across the river. On holidays in fine weather the girls dressed up in their best and went in a crowd together to church, and it was a cheering sight to see them in their red, yellow, and green dresses cross the meadow; in bad weather they all stayed at home. They went for the sacrament to the parish church. From each of those who did not manage in Lent to go to confession in readiness for the sacrament the parish priest, going the round of the huts with the cross at Easter, took fifteen kopecks.

  The old father did not believe in God, for he hardly ever thought about Him; he recognized the supernatural, but considered it was entirely the women’s concern, and when religion or miracles were discussed before him, or a question were put to him, he would say reluctantly, scratching himself:

  “Who can tell!”

  Granny believed, but her faith was somewhat hazy; everything was mixed up in her memory, and she could scarcely begin to think of sins, of death, of the salvation of the soul, before poverty and her daily cares took possession of her mind, and she instantly forgot what she was thinking about. She did not remember the prayers, and usually in the evenings, before lying down to sleep, she would stand before the icons and whisper:

  “Holy Mother of Kazan, Holy Mother of Smolensk, Holy Mother of Troeruchitsy. . . .”

  Marya and Fyokla crossed themselves, fasted, and took the sacrament every year, but understood nothing. The children were not taught their prayers, nothing was told them about God, and no moral principles were instilled into them; they were only forbidden to eat meat or milk in Lent. In the other families it was much the same: there were few who believed, few who understood. At the same time everyone loved the Holy Scripture, loved it with a tender, reverent love; but they had no Bible, there was no one to read it and explain it, and because Olga sometimes read them the gospel, they respected her, and they all addressed her and Sasha as though they were superior to themselves.

  For church holidays and services Olga often went to neighboring villages, and to the district town, in which there were two monasteries and twenty-seven churches. She was dreamy, and when she was on these pilgrimages she quite forgot her family, and only when she got home again suddenly made the joyful discovery that she had a husband and daughter, and then would say, smiling and radiant:

  “God has sent me blessings!”

  What went on in the village worried her and seemed to her revolting. On Elijah’s Day they drank, at the Assumption they drank, at the Ascension they drank. The Feast of the Intercession was the parish holiday for Zhukovo, and the peasants used to drink then for three days; they squandered on drink fifty rubles of money belonging to the mir, and then collected more for vodka from all the households. On the first day of the feast the Chikildyeyevs killed a sheep and ate of it in the morning, at dinnertime, and in the evening; they ate it ravenously, and the children got up at night to eat more. Kiryak was fearfully drunk for three whole days; he drank up everything, even his boots and cap, and beat Marya so terribly that they had to pour water over her. And then they were all ashamed and sick.

  However, even in Zhukovo, in this “Slaveytown,” there was once an outburst of genuine religious enthusiasm. It was in August, when throughout the district they carried from village to village the Holy Mother, the giver of life. It was still and overcast on the day when they expected Her at Zhukovo. The girls set off in the morning to meet the icon, in their bright holiday dresses, and brought Her towards the evening, in procession with the cross and with singing, while the bells pealed in the church across the river. An immense crowd of villagers and strangers flooded the street; there was noise, dust, a great crush. . . . And the old father and Granny and Kiryak—all stretched out their hands to the icon, looked eagerly at it, and said, weeping:

  “Defender! Mother! Defender!”

  All seemed suddenly to realize that there was not an empty void between earth and heaven, that the rich and the powerful had not taken possession of everything, that there was still a refuge from injury, from slavish bondage, from crushing, unendurable poverty, from the terrible vodka.

  “Defender! Mother!” sobbed Marya. “Mother!”

  But the thanksgiving service ended and the icon was carried away and everything went on as before; and again there was a sound of coarse drunken oaths from the tavern.

  Only the well-to-do peasants were afraid of death; the richer they were the less they believed in God, and in the salvation of souls, and only through fear of the end of the world put up candles and had services said for them, to be on the safe side. The peasants who were rather poorer were not afraid of death. The old father and Granny were told to their faces that they had lived too long, that it was time they were dead, and they did not mind. They did not hinder Fyokla from saying in Nikolai’s presence that when Nikolai died her husband Denis would get exemption—to return home from the army. And Marya, far from fearing death, regretted that it was so slow in coming and was glad when her children died.

  Death they did not fear, but of every disease they had an exaggerated terror. The merest trifle was enough—a stomach upset, a slight chill, and Granny would be wrapped up on the stove, and would begin moaning loudly and incessantly:

  “I am dy-ing!”

  The old father hurried off for the priest, and Granny received the sacrament and extreme unction. They often talked of colds, of worms, of tumors which move in the stomach and coil round to the heart. Above all, they were afraid of catching cold, and so put on thick clothes even in the summer and warmed themselves at the stove. Granny was fond of being doctored and often went to the hospital, where she used to say she was not seventy, but fifty-eight; she supposed that if the doctor knew her real age he would not treat her, but would say it was time she died instead of taking medicine. She usually went to the hospital early in the morning, taking with her two or three of the little girls, and came back in the evening, hungry and ill-tempered—with drops for herself and ointments for the little girls. Once she took Nikolai, who swallowed drops for a fortnight afterwards and said he felt better.

  Granny knew all the doctors and their assistants and the wise men for twenty miles round, and not one of them she liked. At the Intercession, when the priest made the round of the huts with the cross, the deacon told her that in the town near the prison lived an old man who had been a medical orderly in the army, and who made wonderful cures, and advised her to try him. Granny took his advice. When the first snow fell she drove to the town and fetched an old man with a big beard, a converted Jew, in a long gown, whose face was cov
ered with blue veins. There were outsiders at work in the hut at the time: an old tailor, in terrible spectacles, was cutting a waistcoat out of some rags, and two young men were making felt boots out of wool; Kiryak, who had been dismissed from his place for drunkenness, and now lived at home, was sitting beside the tailor mending a bridle. And it was crowded, stifling, and noisome in the hut. The converted Jew examined Nikolai and said that it was necessary to try cupping.

  He put on the cups, and the old tailor, Kiryak, and the little girls stood round and looked on, and it seemed to them that they saw the disease being drawn out of Nikolai; and Nikolai, too, watched how the cups suckling at his breast gradually filled with dark blood, and felt as though there really were something coming out of him, and smiled with pleasure.

  “It’s a good thing,” said the tailor. “Please God, it will do you good.”

  The Jew put on twelve cups and then another twelve, drank some tea, and went away. Nikolai began shivering; his face looked drawn, and, as the women expressed it, shrank up like a fist; his fingers turned blue. He wrapped himself up in a quilt and in a sheepskin, but got colder and colder. Towards the evening he began to be in great distress; asked to be laid on the ground, asked the tailor not to smoke; then he subsided under the sheepskin and towards morning he died.

  9.

  Oh, what a grim, what a long winter!

  Their own grain did not last beyond Christmas, and they had to buy flour. Kiryak was noisy in the evenings, inspiring terror in everyone, and in the mornings he suffered from headache and was ashamed; and he was a pitiful sight. In the stall the starved cows bellowed day and night—a heartrending sound to Granny and Marya. And as ill luck would have it, there was a sharp frost all the winter, the snow drifted in high heaps, and the winter dragged on. At Annunciation there was a regular blizzard, and there was a fall of snow at Easter.

  But in spite of it all the winter did end. At the beginning of April there came warm days and frosty nights. Winter would not give way, but one warm day overpowered it at last, and the streams began to flow and the birds began to sing. The whole meadow and the bushes near the river were drowned in the spring floods, and all the space between Zhukovo and the further side was filled up with a vast sheet of water, from which wild ducks rose up in flocks here and there. The spring sunset, flaming among gorgeous clouds, gave every evening something new, extraordinary, incredible—just what one does not believe in afterwards, when one sees those very colors and those very clouds in a picture.

  The cranes flew swiftly, swiftly, with mournful cries, as though they were calling to people to come with them. Standing on the edge of the ravine, Olga looked a long time at the flooded meadow, at the sunshine, at the bright church, which looked as though it had grown younger; and her tears flowed and her breath came in gasps from her passionate longing to go away, to go far away to the end of the world. It was already settled that she should go back to Moscow to be a servant, and that Kiryak should set off with her to get a job as a porter or something. Oh, to get away quickly!

  As soon as it dried up and grew warm they got ready to set off. Olga and Sasha, with wallets on their backs and shoes of plaited bark on their feet, came out before daybreak: Marya came out, too, to see them on their way. Kiryak was not well and was kept at home for another week. For the last time Olga prayed at the church and thought of her husband, and though she did not shed tears, her face puckered up and looked ugly like an old woman’s. During the winter she had grown thinner and plainer, and her hair had gone a little gray, and instead of the old look of sweetness and the pleasant smile on her face, she had the resigned, mournful expression left by the sorrows she had been through, and there was something blank and irresponsive in her eyes, as though she did not hear what was said. She was sorry to part from the village and the peasants. She remembered how they had carried out Nikolai, and how a requiem had been ordered for him at almost every hut, and all had shed tears in sympathy with her grief. In the course of the summer and the winter there had been hours and days when it seemed as though these people lived worse than the beasts, and to live with them was terrible; they were coarse, dishonest, filthy, and drunken; they did not live in harmony, but quarreled continually, because they distrusted and feared and did not respect one another. Who keeps the tavern and makes the people drunken? A peasant. Who wastes and spends on drink the funds of the commune, of the schools, of the church? A peasant. Who stole from his neighbors, set fire to their property, gave false witness at the court for a bottle of vodka? At the meetings of the Zemstvo and other local bodies, who was the first to fall foul of the peasants? A peasant. Yes, to live with them was terrible; but yet, they were human beings, they suffered and wept like human beings, and there was nothing in their lives for which one could not find excuse. Hard labor that made the whole body ache at night, the cruel winters, the scanty harvests, the overcrowding; and they had no help and none to whom they could look for help. Those of them who were a little stronger and better off could be no help, as they were themselves coarse, dishonest, drunken, and abused one another just as revoltingly; the paltriest little clerk or official treated the peasants as though they were tramps, and addressed even the village elders and church wardens as inferiors, and considered they had a right to do so. And, indeed, can any sort of help or good example be given by mercenary, greedy, depraved, and idle persons who only visit the village in order to insult, to despoil, and to terrorize? Olga remembered the pitiful, humiliated look of the old people when in the winter Kiryak had been taken to be flogged. . . . And now she felt sorry for all these people, painfully so, and as she walked on she kept looking back at the huts.

  After walking two miles with them, Marya said good-bye, then kneeling, and falling forward with her face on the earth, she began wailing:

  “Again I am left alone. Alas, for poor me! Poor, unhappy! . . .”

  And she wailed like this for a long time, and for a long way Olga and Sasha could still see her on her knees, bowing down to someone at the side and clutching her head in her hands, while the rooks flew over her head.

  The sun rose high; it began to get hot. Zhukovo was left far behind. Walking was pleasant. Olga and Sasha soon forgot both the village and Marya; they were gay and everything entertained them. Now they came upon an ancient barrow, now upon a row of telegraph posts running one after another into the distance and disappearing into the horizon, and the wires hummed mysteriously. Then they saw a homestead, all wreathed in green foliage; there came a scent from it of dampness, of hemp, and it seemed for some reason that happy people lived there. Then they came upon a horse’s skeleton whitening in solitude in the open fields. And the larks trilled unceasingly, the corn crakes called to one another, and the land rail cried as though someone were really scraping at an old iron rail.

  At midday Olga and Sasha reached a big village. There in the broad street they met the little old man who was General Zhukov’s cook. He was hot, and his red, perspiring bald head shone in the sunshine. Olga and he did not recognize each other, then looked round at the same moment, recognized each other, and went their separate ways without saying a word. Stopping near the hut which looked newest and most prosperous, Olga bowed down before the open windows, and said in a loud, thin, chanting voice:

  “Good Christian folk, give alms, for Christ’s sake, that God’s blessing may be upon you, and that your parents may be in the Kingdom of Heaven in peace eternal.”

  “Good Christian folk,” Sasha began chanting, “give, for Christ’s sake, that God’s blessing, the Heavenly Kingdom . . .”

  Two further chapters of Peasants were found among Chekhov’s papers and have been published in Volume 9 of the Soviet edition of his works. He had evidently, as the Soviet editors say, “planned to present, side by side with the rural peasant life, the life of the ‘superfluous’ peasant population under metropolitan conditions.” That this was a part of his original intention and not an afterthought for a sequel is shown by the fact that his notes for it are found, in
his notebooks, mixed in with his notes for the earlier parts of the story. Those entries that relate to the incidents which were to follow these two later chapters (from Volume 12 of the Soviet edition) have been made to follow them here.

  It should also be mentioned that, in deference to the censor, a whole chapter from the story as written was omitted and has never been found. This contained, as Chekhov explains in a letter to F. D. Batyushkov of January 24, 1900, “a peasants’ conversation about religion and the authorities.”

  10.

  Olga’s sister-in-law, Klavdia Abramovna, lived in one of the little alleys near the Patriarch’s Ponds, [1] in an ancient two-storied house. On the bottom floor was a laundry, and the whole of the upper floor was rented by an elderly gentlewoman, a quiet retiring old maid, who in turn rented rooms to lodgers and supported herself in this way. Coming into the dark hallway, you found yourself facing two doors, one on the right and one on the left: behind the first of these, in a little room, lived Klavdia Abramovna and Sasha; behind the other lived a printer’s make-up man. Beyond was a parlor, with a divan, armchairs, a lamp with a shade, and pictures on the walls —everything quite as it should be; but there was a smell there of steam and the washing of clothes that penetrated from the laundry below, and all day the sound of singing was heard. This parlor, which was used by all the lodgers, gave access to three apartments; in one of these the landlady lived, in another an aged lackey, Ivan Makarich Matvyeichev, a native of Zhukovo, the man who had once put Nikolai in the way of finding a job; on his door, which was white and was always kept closed, hung a big stable lock on a chain; on the other side of the third door lived a scrawny young woman, with sharp eyes and thick lips, who had three children that were always crying. On holidays a monastery priest came to see her. She usually went about all day wearing nothing but a skirt, without washing herself or doing her hair, but on the days when she was expecting her monastery priest, she would put on a silk dress and curl her hair.