Produced by Nicole Apostola, Juliet Sutherland, Charles
Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
MUMU……………….Ivan Turgenev
THE SHOT……………Alexander Poushkin
ST. JOHN'S EVE………Nikolai Vasilievitch Gogol
AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE… Lyof N. Tolstoi
From "Torrents of Spring." Translated by Constance Garnett.
In one of the outlying streets of Moscow, in a gray house with whitecolumns and a balcony, warped all askew, there was once living a lady,a widow, surrounded by a numerous household of serfs. Her sons were inthe government service at Petersburg; her daughters were married; shewent out very little, and in solitude lived through the last years ofher miserly and dreary old age. Her day, a joyless and gloomy day, hadlong been over; but the evening of her life was blacker than night.
Of all her servants, the most remarkable personage was the porter,Gerasim, a man full twelve inches over the normal height, of heroicbuild, and deaf and dumb from his birth. The lady, his owner, hadbrought him up from the village where he lived alone in a little hut,apart from his brothers, and was reckoned about the most punctual ofher peasants in the payment of the seignorial dues. Endowed withextraordinary strength, he did the work of four men; work flew apaceunder his hands, and it was a pleasant sight to see him when he wasploughing, while, with his huge palms pressing hard upon the plough, heseemed alone, unaided by his poor horse, to cleave the yielding bosomof the earth, or when, about St. Peter's Day, he plied his scythe witha furious energy that might have mown a young birch copse up by theroots, or swiftly and untiringly wielded a flail over two yards long;while the hard oblong muscles of his shoulders rose and fell like alever. His perpetual silence lent a solemn dignity to his unwearyinglabor. He was a splendid peasant, and, except for his affliction, anygirl would have been glad to marry him. . . But now they had takenGerasim to Moscow, bought him boots, had him made a full-skirted coatfor summer, a sheepskin for winter, put into his hand a broom and aspade, and appointed him porter.
At first he intensely disliked his new mode of life. From hischildhood he had been used to field labor, to village life. Shut offby his affliction from the society of men, he had grown up, dumb andmighty, as a tree grows on a fruitful soil. When he was transported tothe town, he could not understand what was being done with him; he wasmiserable and stupefied, with the stupefaction of some strong youngbull, taken straight from the meadow, where the rich grass stood up tohis belly, taken and put in the truck of a railway train, and there,while smoke and sparks and gusts of steam puff out upon the sturdybeast, he is whirled onwards, whirled along with loud roar and whistle,whither—God knows! What Gerasim had to do in his new duties seemed amere trifle to him after his hard toil as a peasant; in half an hourall his work was done, and he would once more stand stock-still in themiddle of the courtyard, staring open-mouthed at all the passers-by, asthou