Russian classics

St. John’s Eve A Story Told by the Sacristan of the Dikanka Church

Groholsky embraced Liza, kept kissing one after another all her little fingers with their bitten pink nails, and laid her on the couch covered with cheap velvet. Liza crossed one foot over the other, clasped her hands behind her head, and lay down.

Groholsky sat down in a chair beside her and bent over. He was entirely absorbed in contemplation of her.

How pretty she seemed to him, lighted up by the rays of the setting sun!

There was a complete view from the window of the setting sun, golden, lightly flecked with purple.

The whole drawing room, including Liza, was bathed by it with brilliant light that did not hurt the eyes, and for a little while covered with gold.

On the twelfth of July, Captain Hlopov entered the low door of my earth-hut. He was wearing epaulettes and carrying a sword, which I had never seen him do before since I had reached the Caucasus.

“I come straight from the colonel’s,” he said in answer to my questioning look. “Tomorrow our battalion is to march.”

“Where to?” I asked.

“To N⁠⸺ N⁠⸺. The forces are to assemble there.”

“And from there, I suppose, they will go into action?”

“I expect so.”

“In what direction? What do you think?”

I am a sick man.⁠ ⁠… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot “pay out” the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well⁠—let it get worse!

“Well, Piotr, not in sight yet?” was the question asked on May the 20th, 1859, by a gentleman of a little over forty, in a dusty coat and checked trousers, who came out without his hat on to the low steps of the posting station at S⁠⸺. He was addressing his servant, a chubby young fellow, with whitish down on his chin, and little, lacklustre eyes.

The servant, in whom everything⁠—the turquoise ring in his ear, the streaky hair plastered with grease, and the civility of his movements⁠—indicated a man of the new, improved generation, glanced with an air of indulgence along the road, and made answer:

“No, sir; not in sight.”

“Not in sight?” repeated his master.

“No, sir,” responded the man a second time.

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S⁠⸺ Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K⁠⸺ bridge.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner”⁠—for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate⁠—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else.