The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

I went fishing with the boys for the gudgeons and loaches that abounded in our narrow but clear little river Gostomlia; but, because of the seriousness of my character, I kept company more with Grandpa Ilya, whose experienced mind opened to me a world full of mysterious delight that was completely unknown to a city boy like me. From Ilya I learned about the house demon, who slept on a counter, and the water demon, who had fine and important lodgings under the mill wheel, and the kikimora,¹ who was so skittish and changeable that she hid from any immodest gaze in various dusty corners—now in the threshing barn, now in the granary, now at the pounding mill, where hemp was pounded in the fall. Grandpa knew least of all about the wood demon, because he lived somewhere far away by Selivan’s place and only occasionally visited our thick willow grove, to make a new willow pipe and play on it in the shade by the soaking tubs. Anyhow, Grandpa Ilya saw the wood demon face-to-face only once in all his richly adventurous life, and that was on St. Nicholas’s day, which was the feast day of our church. The wood demon came up to Ilya pretending to be a perfectly quiet little muzhik and asked for a pinch of snuff. And when Grandpa said, “Here, devil take you!” and opened the snuffbox, the demon could no longer keep up his good behavior and played a prank: he hit the snuffbox from underneath, so that the good miller got an eyeful of snuff.

All these lively and interesting stories seemed fully probable to me then, and their dense imagery filled my fantasy to the point that I almost became a visionary myself. At least when I once peeked, at great risk, into the pounding shed, my eye proved so keen and sharp that I saw the kikimora, who was sitting there in the dust. She was unwashed, wearing a dusty headdress, and had scrofulous eyes. And when, frightened by this vision, I rushed out headlong, another of my senses—hearing—discovered the presence of the wood demon. I can’t say for sure exactly where he was sitting—probably on some tall willow—but when I fled from the kikimora, the wood demon blew into his green pipe with all his might and held my foot so fast to the ground that the heel of my boot tore off.

Nearly out of breath, I told about it all at home, and for my candor I was put in my room to read the Holy Scriptures, while a barefoot boy was sent to a soldier in the nearby village who could mend the damage the wood demon had done to my boot. But by then even reading the Holy Scriptures didn’t protect me from belief in the supernatural beings, to whom, it might be said, I had grown accustomed through Grandpa Ilya. I knew well and loved the Holy Scriptures—to this day I willingly read them over—and yet the dear, childish world of the fairy-tale creatures Grandpa Ilya told me about seemed indispensable to me. The forest springs would have been orphaned if they had been deprived of the spirits popular fantasy attached to them.

Among the unpleasant consequences of the wood demon’s pipe was that my mother reprimanded Grandpa Ilya for the course in demonology he had given me, and he avoided me for a while, as if unwilling to continue my education. He even pretended to drive me away.

“Get away from me, go to your nanny,” he said, turning me around and applying his broad, calloused palm to my seat.

But I could already pride myself on my age and considered such treatment incompatible with it. I was eight years old and by then had no need to go to my nanny. I let Ilya feel that by bringing him a basin of cherries left over from making liqueur.

Grandpa Ilya liked cherries. He took them, softened, stroked my head with his calloused hand, and very close and very good relations were restored between us.

“I tell you what,” Grandpa Ilya said to me. “Always respect the muzhik most of all, and listen to him, but don’t go telling everybody what you hear. Otherwise I’ll chase you away.”

After that I kept secret all that I heard from the miller, and I learned so many interesting things that I was now afraid not only at night, when all the house and forest demons and kikimoras become very bold and insolent, but even in the daytime. This fear seized me because it turned out that our house and our whole area were under the sway of a really scary brigand and bloodthirsty sorcerer named Selivan. He lived only four miles from us, “at the fork,” that is, where the big high road divided in two: one, the new road, went to Kiev, and the other, the old one, with hollow willows “of Catherine’s planting,”² led to Fatezh. That road was now abandoned and gone to waste.