Dead Souls

"He's a quick-stepper, that he is!" the muzhiks started saying, and even scratched their heads, because from long-standing womanish management they had turned into a rather lazy lot. But this did not last long. The Russian muzhik is clever and intelligent: they soon understood that though the master was quick and wanted to take many things in hand, yet precisely how, in what way to take them in hand—of this he still knew nothing, he spoke somehow too literately and fancifully, puzzling for a muzhik and beyond his ability. As a result, while there was not really a total lack of comprehension between master and muzhik, they simply sang to different tunes, never able to produce the same note. Tentetnikov began to notice that everything turned out somehow worse on the master's land than on the muzhik's: the sowing came earlier, the sprouting later. Yet it seemed they worked well: he himself was there and even ordered a reward of a noggin of vodka for diligent work. The muzhiks had long had rye in the ear, oats swelling, millet bushing out, while his grain was still in the shoot and the ears had not yet begun to form. In short, the master began to notice that the muzhiks were simply cheating him, despite all his good turns. He made an attempt to reproach them, but received the following answer: "How can it be, your honor, that we haven't been zealous for the master's profit? You yourself were pleased to see how diligently we ploughed and sowed: you ordered us given a noggin of vodka each." What objection could he make to that? "But why has it turned out so badly now?" the master persisted. "Who knows! Must be worms gnawed it from below, and just look at this summer: no rain at all." But the master could see that worms had not gnawed the muzhiks' crops from below, and it rained somehow oddly, in strips: the muzhiks got it, while the master's fields did not get so much as a single drop. It was harder still for him to get along with the women. They asked so often to be excused from work, complaining about the heaviness of the corvée. How strange! He had abolished outright all bringing in of linen, berries, mushrooms, and nuts, and reduced the other tasks by half, thinking that the women would spend this time on housework, sewing, making clothes for their husbands, improving their kitchen gardens. Not a bit of it! Such idleness, fights, gossip, and all sorts of quarrels set in among the fair sex that the husbands kept coming to him with such words as: "Master, quiet down this demon of a woman! Just like some devil! she won't let me live!" Several times, with heavy heart, he wanted to introduce severity. But how could he be severe? The woman would come as such a woman, get into such shrieking, was so sick, so ailing, would wrap herself up in such poor, vile rags—God only knows where she got them. "Go, just leave my sight, God be with you!" poor Tentetnikov would say, after which he would have the pleasure of seeing how the sick woman, coming out, would start squabbling with a neighbor over some turnip and give her such a drubbing as even a healthy man would not be capable of. He decided to try and start some sort of school among them, but such nonsense came out of it that he even hung his head—it would be better not to think about it! All this significantly chilled his enthusiasm both for management and for acting as judge, and generally for all activity. He was present at the field work almost without noticing it: his thoughts were far away, his eyes searched for extraneous objects. During the mowing he did not watch the quick raising of sixty scythes at once, followed by the measured fall, with a faint sound, of rows of tall grass; instead he looked off to the side at some bend of the river, on the bank of which walked some red-nosed, red-legged stalker—a stork, of course, not a man; he watched the stork catch a fish and hold it crosswise in its beak, as if considering whether to swallow it or not, and at the same time looking intently up the river, where, some distance away, another stork could be seen who had not yet caught a fish, but was looking intently at the one who already had. During the harvest, he did not look at how the sheaves were piled in shocks, in crosses, or sometimes simply in heaps. He hardly cared whether the piling and stacking was done lazily or briskly. Eyes closed, face lifted up to the spacious sky, he allowed his nose to imbibe the scent of the fields and his ears to be struck by the voices of the songful populace of the air, when it comes from everywhere, heaven and earth, to join in one harmonious chorus with no discord among themselves. The quail throbs, the corncrake crakes in the grass, linnets warble and twitter as they fly from place to place, the trilling of the lark spills down an invisible stairway of air, and the whooping of cranes rushing in a line off to one side—just like the sounding of silver trumpets—comes from the emptiness of the resoundingly vibrant airy desert. If the field work was close to him, he was far away from it; if it was far away, his eyes sought out things that were close. And he was like the distracted schoolboy who, while looking into his book, sees only the snook his comrade is cocking at him at the same time. In the end he stopped going out to the field work altogether, dropped entirely all administering of justice and punishments, firmly ensconced himself inside, and even stopped receiving the steward with his reports.