All around there was the most profound evening stillness; suddenly, in the midst of it, the two large watch-dogs which lay at our feet leapt up, rushed towards the gate and started to attack someone viciously. I rose to my feet and went over to the gate in order to take a look at the object of their immoderate aggression. Leaning against the fence was Musk-Ox, brandishing his stick in an attempt to ward off the two dogs which had fallen on him with an animosity that was almost human.

‘They nearly ate me alive, the devils,’ he said to me, after I had called the dogs off.

‘Did you come on foot?’

‘On Shanks’s pony, as you see.’

Slung over Vasily Petrovich’s back was the knapsack with which he generally travelled.

‘Well, come on then.’

‘Where to?’

‘Why, back to the house, of course.’

‘Oh no, I’m not going there.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘There are young ladies there.’

‘Young ladies? There’s only my mother and my sister.’

‘All the same, I’m not coming.’

‘You and your whims! They’re ordinary, decent people.’

‘I’m not coming!’ Musk-Ox said, resolutely.

‘Where am I going to put you, then?’

‘Well, you’ll have to put me somewhere – I’ve nowhere else to go.’

I remembered the bath-house, which in summer was unused and quite frequently served as a guest bedroom. Our house was a small one – ‘szlachecki’ and not ‘pański’.1

Neither would Vasily Petrovich hear of walking through the yard, past the porch. It would have been possible to walk through the orchard, but I knew that the bath-house was locked, and that the key to it was in the possession of our old nurse, who was having her supper in the kitchen. I could not possibly leave Vasily Petrovich here on his own, as the dogs would have set upon him again – they had retreated only a few paces from us and were viciously barking. I leaned over the fence, behind which I was standing with Vasily Petrovich, and loudly hailed my sister. She came running, but stopped in bewilderment when she saw the eccentric figure of Musk-Ox in his peasant svitka and novice’s cap. I sent her to fetch the key from the nurse and then, with the desired object at last in my possession, led my unexpected guest through the orchard and into the bath-house.

Vasily Petrovich and I talked together the whole night through. He could not return to the monastery from which he had come, as they would have thrown him out because of the things he had said to the pilgrims there. He had no plans of going to any other monastery. His lack of success had not sapped his courage, but it had temporarily upset his calculations. He spoke a great deal about the novices, about the monastery, about the pilgrims who had come there from every part of the country – all with a fair degree of coherence. While he had been living in the monastery, Vasily Petrovich had put into execution a most original plan. He had sought among the ranks of ‘the insulted and the injured’ of the monastic family those ‘men whom passion has not made slaves’ of his, and had aimed to open his Sesame with them, using them to influence the masses of the common people who arrived on their pilgrimages.

‘No one will notice if I do it like that: it will catch them off their guard; the builders despise them, yet here there is something that deserves to be made the corner-stone,’ Musk-Ox had reasoned.

As I called to mind the life of monasteries, a life with which I was well acquainted, and the people there who belonged to the ranks of ‘the insulted and the injured’, I could quite see that Vasily Petrovich’s ideas were not without foundation.

My propagandist had, however, fallen on hard times. The first man he had discovered who, in his estimation, stood above his passions – this was none other than my old friend the novice Nevstruyev, who was presently known in his monk’s career as Deacon Luka and had become a familiar of Bogoslovsky’s – had hit upon the idea of doing something about his ‘insult and injury’: he had revealed to the monastic authorities ‘what manner of man’ Musk-Ox was, and Musk-Ox had been thrown out. At present he was homeless. In a week’s time I was due to travel to St Petersburg, and then Musk-Ox would have nowhere to lay his head, as it would be impossible for him to remain there alone with my mother – and in any case, he himself did not want this.

‘Find me a tutoring post again, I want to do some teaching,’ he said.

I should have to find him a post. I made Musk-Ox promise to accept the post solely for its own sake, not for any ulterior motive, and began to seek shelter for him.

9

Our province contains a very large number of villages owned by small landowners. To adopt the parlance of the St Petersburg politico-economic commission, there is in our part of the world ‘a rather widespread distribution of the separated farm economy’. The serf-owning odnodvortsy1 had, after their peasants had been taken away from them, remained small farmers, while the small landowners had squandered their resources and sold their peasants off for resettlement in remote provinces, and their land either to merchants or to the now-prosperous odnodvortsy. In our neighbourhood there were five or six such farms, which had passed into the hands of commoners. A few versts from our own was Barkov Farm; it bore the name of its former owner, of whom it was said that he had once lived in Moscow

Idly, gaily, richly

And by various mothers

Brought forty daughters to the world,

but who in his old age had embarked upon a legitimate marriage and had begun to sell off his estates, one by one. Barkov Farm, which had once been the private dacha on a large estate of an owner who had suffered financial ruin, now belonged to a man named Aleksandr Ivanovich Sviridov. Aleksandr Ivanovich had been born a peasant, had been taught to read and write and been given a musical education. From a young age he had played the violin in the landowner’s orchestra, and at the age of nineteen had bought his freedom for five hundred roubles and become a distiller. Gifted with a clear, practical mind, Aleksandr Ivanovich had plied his trade in masterly fashion. He had begun by establishing himself as the best distiller in the district; having amassed a thousand roubles or so of spare cash, he had gone to Northern Germany for a year, and had returned from there such a brilliant construction engineer that his fame quickly spread far and wide. Aleksandr Ivanovich was well known in the three adjoining provinces, and people there vied with one another in commissioning building projects from him. He carried out the work with an extraordinary degree of precision, carefully taking into account the aristocratic foibles of his clients.