Chapter 13 "My Life - A Mainlander's Story" Thirteen

Thirteen Physician Bragovo arrived on his bicycle.My sister also started to come here often.We talked again of manual labor, of progress, of the mysterious unknowns that awaited man in the distant future.The Physician doesn't like our farm work because it prevents us from arguing, saying that plowing, harvesting, herding, etc., are not worth doing for free men, and that man will gradually leave all such crude struggles for existence to cattle and machines. , while they themselves devote themselves exclusively to scientific research.My sister is always asking for her to come home early, and if she stays late with us, or stays overnight, she's always in a tizzy.

"My God, what a child you are!" said Masha reproachfully. "Yeah, it's just ridiculous." "Yes, it is ridiculous," agreed the sister. "I admit it is ridiculous, but since I have no strength to restrain myself, what can I do? I always feel as if I have done something wrong. " When it came time to mow, I was sore from not getting used to it.In the evening, I sat on the terrace with my family and chatted, and suddenly fell asleep while talking, and everyone laughed at me loudly.They woke me up and put me at the table for dinner, but I was sleepy, as if in a coma, I saw the lights, faces, and dishes, and I couldn't understand anything when I heard people talking.I get up early in the morning and immediately pick up the scythe, or go to the construction site and work all day.

When I stayed at home during the holidays, I would find out that my wife and sister were hiding something from me, and even seemed to be avoiding me.My wife is still tender to me, but something has come to her mind and she won't tell me.No doubt her anger with the peasants was growing, and life was becoming more and more burdensome to her, yet she ceased to complain to me.Now she is more willing to talk to the doctor than to me.I don't understand why this is happening. There is a custom in our province, during the season of mowing grass and harvesting grain, the workers would always come to the master's yard every evening, and the master would treat them to a drink of white wine, even the young girl.We did not follow the custom.The lawnmower and the village women waited for the wine in our yard, stood until dark, and then walked out cursing.At such times Masha frowned sternly and said nothing, or whispered angrily to the doctor: "Savage! Becheneg!"

In the country, as in school, newcomers were treated with disrespect, even hostility.We were also treated this way.At first people thought we were simple-minded fools who thought we bought the estate because we had money and nothing to do with it.They laugh at us.Farmers put animals into our woods and even into our gardens.They drove our cows and horses to their villages, and then came and demanded compensation for trampling their crops.They came to our yard in groups and yelled that we had trespassed in the mowing of some Beseyevka or Seminyha territory that did not belong to us.We didn't quite know our boundaries, so we took them at their word and paid the fine; but it turned out we hadn't mowed the wrong lot.The little lime tree in our woods has been stripped of its bark.There was a rich farmer in Dubechnya who sold liquor without a license. He bribed our hired laborers, and together they cheated us in the most treacherous way. Get the yokes and resell them to us, etc.But the most irritating thing was what happened at the construction site in Kurilovka, where the village women stole boards, bricks, tiles, iron every night, and the village chief came to their homes with witnesses, and the village punished them Two rubles apiece, and afterwards all the fines went to the village council for drinking.

When Masha found out about this, she said indignantly to the doctor and my sister: "What a beast! It's terrible! Terrible!" I heard her say more than once that she regretted that she should not have started the school in the first place. "You have to understand," the doctor advised her, "you have to understand that when you run this school or do other good things, you are not doing it for the peasants, but for the culture, for the future. The worse the peasants are, the more reason they have to do it." School. You have to understand that!" But the tone of his voice betrayed his lack of confidence, and I thought he hated the peasants as much as Masha.

Masha used to go to the mill, and took my sister with her.They laughed and said that they went to see how handsome Stepan was.It turned out that Stepan was dull and uncommunicative only in the company of men, and he was easy and voluble with women.Once I came to the river to take a bath and overheard them talking.Masha and Kleopatra, both in white dresses, were sitting in the wide shadow of a willow tree on the bank, and Stepan stood by, putting his hands behind his back, and said: "Is the peasant a man? They're not people, and, excuse me, they're brutes, liars. What kind of life does a peasant live? All he eats, drinks, asks for cheap food, drinks in taverns, and hoots at the top of his lungs. They Can't say a good word to you, doesn't have a good look, doesn't know what manners are, and is utterly rude! He rolls in the mud, his wife rolls in the mud, his children roll in the mud. Wherever he goes, he falls Sleep, there are potatoes in the vegetable soup, he just stretched out his fingers to scoop them up, drank the kvass and even drank the cockroaches, and refused to even blow it away!"

"That's because of poverty!" interrupted my sister. "It's not because of poverty! Yes, they are miserable, but there are different kinds of suffering, madam. If a person is in prison, or blind or lame, for example, there is no way for such a person to go out." Go, pray God that no one should end up in such a state; but a free man, with brains, eyes, hands, strength, God's blessing, what else is he wanting? It's because of nonsense, madam, Because of ignorance, not because of poverty. For example, if a learned gentleman like you intends to help him out of good intentions, he will unconscionably take your money for drinking, or worse. , He simply opened a hotel and used your money to rob ordinary people.

You just mentioned being poor.But do rich peasants live better?Sorry, it's almost like a pig.Brutal, high-pitched yelling, stupid, broad-chested, fat-faced, red-cheeked, you'd want to throw your arm around and slap the bastard.La Leon of Dubechnya, for example, is a rich peasant, but I am afraid he barks in your woods as well as the poor peasant.He loves to swear, and so do his children. When he drank too much, he rolled in the mud and fell asleep.Miss, they are worthless things.Living in the village with them was like living in hell.I hate it, that village. Thank God, I have food and clothing, I have completed my military service in the Dragoons, I have been mayor for three years, and now I am a free Cossack who can live wherever I like.I don't want to live in the village, and no one has the right to force me to live there.People say, if you have a wife, you have to live in a small wooden house with your wife.Why must it be so?I'm not hired by her. "

"Tell me, Stepan, did you marry for love?" asked Masha. "Where is love in our village?" replied Stepan, smiling. "Madame, if you want to know, I will tell you the truth that I am married for the second time. I am not from the village of Kulilovka, but from the village of Zalegosh, and I was married to the village of Kurilovka. Lovka came here. It was because my parents refused to separate us. There were five brothers in total. I said goodbye to my family and went to another village to marry. My first wife died young gone." "How did you die?" "Because she's stupid. She keeps crying, crying and crying for no reason, making her weaker and weaker. In order to be beautiful, she always drinks the juice of a kind of herb, which probably hurt her internal organs. My second wife is from the village of Kurilovka, what's so good about her? She's a country woman, a village woman, nothing else. I'm moved to propose a marriage for her : I think she is young, fair-looking, and her house is clean. Her mother is like a flogger, she drinks coffee, and the main thing is that their house is clean. In this way, we are married. But the second One day when we sat down to eat, I asked my mother-in-law to bring me a spoon, and she went to get it, and I saw that she was wiping the spoon with her fingers. Man, I thought, this is called cleaning. I'm with them My son left after a year. Maybe I should marry someone from the city," he continued after being silent for a while. "It is said that a wife is a husband's helper. What do I need a helper for? I can help myself. A wife should talk to me, but don't chatter all the time. You should speak in a reasonable and moving way. Without this kind of smooth chat, What kind of life is that!"

Suddenly Stepan stopped talking, and at once I heard him humming his dull, monotonous "oo-loo-loo-loo."It means he saw me. Masha used to go to the mill, and she evidently found pleasure in talking with Stepan. Stepan hated the peasants wholeheartedly, scolded them plausibly, and this attracted her to him.Whenever she came back from the mill, the foolish farmer who kept the garden would call to her: "Little Balashika! Hello, little Balashika!" And he would bark at her like a dog: "Wow! Wang!" She stopped and looked at him attentively, as if she heard the echo of her thoughts in the fool's bark, which probably attracted her as much as Stepan's scolding.It was nothing but news of this kind that awaited her at home, that the geese from the village had come into our garden and damaged the cabbages, or that Larion had stolen the reins, and so on.She shrugged her shoulders, smiled coldly, and said, "What else can you expect from these people?"

She was angry and full of resentment; but I got to know the peasants more and more.Most of them are nervous, angry, insulted people; people whose imagination has been destroyed, they are ignorant, poorly informed and vague, thinking about gray land, gray days, The black bread set.These people play tricks, but hide their heads behind trees like birds—they don't know how to calculate.You ask them to mow your grass for twenty rubles, and they won't do it; but if you give them half a barrel of wine, they will come, and twenty rubles can actually buy four barrels of wine.They were dirty, drunk, stupid, and deceitful, but for all that one felt that, on the whole, peasant life had a solid and healthy fulcrum.No matter how much the peasant looks like a clumsy beast driving the plow, and no matter how drunk the peasant is with white wine; as long as you go up close and observe carefully, you will feel that there is something indispensable and very important in the peasant, And this is something that some people, for example, Masha and the doctor lack, that is, the farmer believes that the most important thing in the world is the truth, and that only the truth can save him and the whole people; I love nothing more than justice.I told my wife that she saw the spots on the glass but not the glass itself.Often she answered with silence, or, like Stepan, hummed: "U-lo-lo-lo." . . . Whenever this good and intelligent woman, pale with rage and trembling with rage, spoke to the doctor about drinking and cheating, I was always amazed and astonished at her forgetfulness.How could she forget that her father, the engineer, also drank, and drank a lot, and that the money with which he bought Dubechnya was obtained by all sorts of shameless and unconscionable deceptions?How could she forget this? "Notes" ① A Turkic tribe in the middle and lower reaches of the Volga River in the eighth to ninth centuries AD, and was later conquered by the Russians.Here is a metaphor for "savages". ②A denomination separated from the Russian Orthodox Church believes that people can communicate directly with the "Holy Spirit" without the intermediary of priests