Dead Souls

While Chichikov thought and chuckled inwardly over the nickname the muzhiks had bestowed upon Plyushkin, he failed to notice that he had driven into the middle of a vast settlement with a multitude of cottages and lanes. Soon, however, it was brought to his notice by a quite decent jolt, produced by the log pavement, to which town cobblestones are nothing in comparison. These logs, like piano keys, kept rising up and down, and the unwary traveler would acquire a bump on his head, or a bruise on his brow, or might chance to give a painful bite with his own teeth to the tip of his own tongue. He noticed a sort of special dilapidation in all the village buildings: the logs of the cottages were dark and old; many of the roofs were riddled like sieves; some had just a ridge pole on top and rafters like ribs on the sides. It seemed as if the owners themselves had torn off the shingles and laths, considering—correctly, of course—that one does not roof cottages in the rain, and in fair weather there is no dripping anyway, so why sit around women's skirts inside, when there is free space enough in the pot-house and on the high road—in short, anywhere you like. The windows of the cottages had no glass, some were stopped up with a rag or a jacket; the little roofed balconies with railings, which for unknown reasons are built onto some Russian cottages, were lopsided and blackened, not even picturesquely. Behind the cottages in many places stretched rows of huge stacks of wheat, which had evidently been standing there for a long time; in color they resembled old, poorly baked brick, trash of all kinds was growing on top of them, and bushes even clung to their sides. The wheat evidently belonged to the master. From behind the wheat stacks and dilapidated roofs there soared and flashed in the clear air, now right, now left, according to the turns the britzka made, two village churches, one next to the other: an abandoned wooden one, and a stone one, its yellowed walls all stains and cracks. Parts of the master's house came into view and finally the whole of it appeared in a gap where the chain of cottages broke off and in their place was left a vacant lot, formerly a kitchen garden or cabbage patch, surrounded by a low, in places broken, fence. Long, immeasurably long, the strange castle looked like some decrepit invalid. In places it had one story, in places two; on the dark roof, which did not everywhere reliably shield its old age, two belvederes had been stuck, facing each other, both of them shaky now, deprived of the paint that had once covered them. The walls of the house showed bare lath in places and had evidently suffered much from all sorts of bad weather, rains, gales, and autumnal changes. Of the windows, only two were open, the rest being either shuttered or even boarded up. These two windows, for their part, were also weak-sighted; one of them had a dark triangle of blue sugar paper glued to it.