The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

This was intelligent and excellent advice. In later years of my life I became close with Selivan and had the good fortune to see how he made himself a man loved and honored by everyone.

On the new estate which my aunt bought there was a good inn at a much-frequented point on the high road. She offered this inn to Selivan on good terms, and Selivan accepted and lived there until his death. Then my old childhood dreams came true: I not only became closely acquainted with Selivan, but we felt full confidence and friendship for each other. I saw his situation change for the better—how peace settled into his house and he eventually prospered; how instead of the former gloomy expressions on the faces of people who met Selivan, everyone now looked at him with pleasure. And indeed it happened that, once the eyes of the people around Selivan were enlightened, his own face also became bright.

Among my aunt’s servants, it was the footman Borisushka who disliked Selivan the most—the one whom Selivan had nearly strangled on that memorable Christmas Eve.

This story was sometimes joked about. That night’s incident could be explained by the fact that, as everyone suspected that Selivan might rob my aunt, so Selivan himself had strong suspicions that the coachman and the footman might have brought us to his inn on purpose in order to steal my aunt’s money during the night and then conveniently blame it all on the suspicious Selivan.

Mistrust and suspicion on one side provoked mistrust and suspicion on the other, and it seemed to everyone that they were all enemies of each other and they all had grounds for considering each other as people inclined towards evil.

Thus evil always generates more evil and is defeated only by the good, which, in the words of the Gospel, makes our eye and heart clean.

XXI

It remains, however, to see why, ever since Selivan left the baker, he became sullen and secretive. Had anyone back then wronged and spurned him?

My father, being well disposed towards this good man, nevertheless thought that Selivan had some secret, which he stubbornly kept to himself.

That was so, but Selivan revealed his secret only to my aunt, and that only after he had lived for several years on her estate and after his ever-ailing wife had died.

When I came to see my aunt once, already as a young man, and we started recalling Selivan, who had died himself not long before then, my aunt told me his secret.

The thing was that Selivan, in the tender goodness of his heart, had been touched by the woeful fate of the helpless daughter of the retired executioner, who had died in their town. No one had wanted to give this girl shelter, as the child of a despised man. Selivan was poor, and besides he didn’t dare to keep the executioner’s daughter with him in town, where everyone knew them both. He had to conceal her origin, which was not her fault, from everyone. Otherwise she could not avoid the harsh reproaches of people who were incapable of mercy and justice. Selivan concealed her, because he constantly feared she would be recognized and insulted, and this secretiveness and anxiety pervaded his whole being and partly left their mark on him.

Thus everyone who called Selivan a “spook” was in fact far more of a “spook” for him.

* Kuliga—a place where the trees have been cut down and burned, a clearing, a burn. Author.

† A “tavousi stone”—a light sapphire with peacock feather reflections, in olden times considered a lifesaving talisman. Ivan the Terrible had such a stone in a ring. “A gold finger-ring, and in it a tavousi stone, and in that a look of cloudiness and a sort of effervescence.” Author. (Tavousi is Persian for “peacock.” Trans.)

The Man on Watch

1839

I

The event an account of which is offered to the reader’s attention below is touching and terrible in its significance for the main heroic character of the piece, and the denouement of the affair is so original that its like is even hardly possible anywhere but in Russia.

It consists in part of a court, in part of a historical anecdote, which characterizes rather well the morals and tendencies of the very curious, though extremely poorly chronicled, epoch of the thirties of the current nineteenth century.

There is no trace of fiction in the following story.

II

In the winter of 1839, around Theophany, there was a big thaw in Petersburg. The weather was so sodden, it was as if spring were coming: the snow melted, drops fell from the roofs all day, and the ice on the rivers turned blue and watery. On the Neva, there were deep pools just in front of the Winter Palace. A warm but very strong wind was blowing from the west: it drove the water back from the sea, and warning cannon were fired.