Vasily Petrovich had not the slightest desire to get married. He had finished his course; his mother kept asking whether he had found a fiancée yet, but Vasily Petrovich would make no reply, and one fine morning he disappeared into nowhere. It was not until some six months later that he sent his mother twenty-five roubles and a letter in which he informed the impoverished old woman that he had reached Kazan and had enrolled at the ecclesiastical academy there. How he had reached Kazan, putting more than a thousand versts behind him, and by what means he had obtained the twenty-five roubles – all this remained a mystery. Musk-Ox said not a word about it in his letter. But hardly had the old woman had time to rejoice that her Vasya would one day be a bishop and that she would then be able to live with him in a little, light room with a little white stove and take tea and sultanas twice a day, then Vasya himself suddenly turned up, quite unexpectedly and mysteriously, out of the blue, in Kursk once again. Many times people asked him: ‘What’s this? How did you get back, and why have you come?’ But they received little information. ‘I didn’t get along with them,’ was all that Musk-Ox would say by way of reply, and more than that it was impossible to make him divulge. To only one person did he say slightly more: ‘I don’t want to be a monk,’ and after that he clammed up completely.

The person to whom Musk-Ox said more than he told the others was Yakov Chelnovsky, a kind, good-natured fellow who would never have harmed a fly and who was prepared to render any service to his neighbour. Chelnovsky was related to some distant branch of my family. It was at his house that I struck the acquaintance of the thick-set hero of my story.

The events I shall describe took place in the summer of 1854. At the time, I was busy with some work in connection with a lawsuit that was taking place in the Kursk government offices.

I arrived in Kursk at seven o’clock on a May morning, and went straight to Chelnovsky’s house. At this time Chelnovsky was working as a tutor, preparing young men for the university and giving lessons in Russian language and history in two boarding schools for girls, and making not a bad living out of it. He had a sizeable three-roomed flat with a vestibule, a rather good library, comfortable furniture, several exotic potted plants and a bulldog named Box which had grinning teeth, a thoroughly indecent posterior, and a walk that was slightly reminiscent of the cancan.

Chelnovsky was extremely glad to see me and made me promise I would stay with him for the whole of my time in Kursk. He was usually out all day, travelling around giving his lessons, while I would look in at the Civic Hall or wander aimlessly along the banks of the Tuskar or the Seym.3 There are many maps of Russia on which you will not find the first of these rivers, while the second is renowned for its particularly tasty crayfish, though it has acquired an even greater fame by virtue of the system of locks which has been constructed along it, a system that has swallowed up vast quantities of capital without freeing the Seym from its reputation of being a river ‘unsuitable for navigation’.

Some two weeks had passed since the day of my arrival in Kursk. There was never any mention of Musk-Ox in our conversation, and indeed I was unaware of the existence of such a strange creature within the bounds of our Black Earth region, so abundant in grain, beggars and thieves.

One day, at around two o’clock in the afternoon, I returned to Chelnovsky’s house tired and exhausted. I was greeted in the vestibule by Box, who guarded our dwelling far more zealously than did the eighteen-year-old boy who acted as our valet. On the table in the reception-room lay a cloth cap, impossibly worn; a single man’s suspender in the most filthy condition, with a little strap attached to it; a black, greasy kerchief which had been twisted into a plait; and a thin, hazelwood walking-stick. In the next room, which was stuffed with bookcases and rather showy study furniture, an impossibly dust-caked individual was sitting on the sofa. He was wearing a pink cotton shirt and a pair of bright yellow trousers which were worn through at the knees. The boots of this stranger were covered in a thick layer of white road-dust, and on his knees lay a fat tome which he was reading without lowering his head. When I entered the study, this dusty figure gave me a single cursory glance and once more fixed his gaze upon his book. In the bedroom everything seemed tidy enough. Chelnovsky’s linen smock, in which he attired himself immediately upon his return home, hung where it usually did, bearing witness to the fact that the master of the house was not at home. I could not for the life of me think who this strange visitor, who had so unceremoniously settled himself down, might be. The normally truculent Box was looking at him as at a familiar, and did not go to be fondled for the sole reason that the dalliance and petting that are common to dogs of the French breed are not among the characteristics of specimens of the Anglo-Saxon canine race. I went back into the vestibule with two aims in view: first, to find out something about the visitor from the servant boy and, second, to provoke, by my appearance and departure, some words from the visitor himself. In neither respect was I successful. The vestibule was as deserted as it had been before, and the visitor did not even raise his eyes to look at me, but continued to sit calmly in the same position in which I had found him five minutes previously. There was only one thing for it: to address the visitor directly.

‘I expect you’re waiting for Yakov Ivanych?’ I said, coming to a halt before the stranger.

The guest surveyed me lazily, then rose from the sofa, spat through his teeth, as only Great Russian petits bourgeois know how to spit, and said in a thick bass voice: ‘No.’

‘Who have you come to see, then?’ I inquired, surprised by the man’s strange reply.

‘I’ve just dropped in for a bit,’ the visitor replied, striding around the room and twirling his forelocks.

‘May I have the honour of learning to whom I address myself?’ I asked him, adding my name and informing him that I was a relative of Yakov Ivanych’s.

‘Oh, I’m just here,’ the visitor replied, returning to his book once more.

There the conversation ended.