The Schoolmistress, and Other Stories: reference groups

A village schoolmistress of thirteen years rides back from town with her monthly pay; the spring morning means nothing to her, and she can imagine no future but the same school and the same road.

She reviews her comfortless life: no firewood without begging a coarse overseer, headaches, fear of every official, no affection and no friends.

She took the post from necessity, never felt a vocation, and endures it like a patient cart-horse while livelier people give up; the cart keeps being turned back by fences and ditches.

The narrator recalls his youth as the official at a remote steppe station, with no woman or company for miles, drinking bad vodka and staring at women's faces in passing train windows.

Walking along the line he tells himself nothing worse can happen: orphaned, expelled, friendless and fit for nothing, his youth has been thrown away.

Stuck for the night, both men brood on how far this is from the city life they once dreamed of; the doctor leaves to spend the evening with a nearby landowner, and the magistrate stays.

The kindly old constable settles the magistrate in the kitchen with tea and hay, fretting about walking miles through the storm to fetch the village elder.

The constable says he has walked his rounds every day for thirty years, even on holy days, carrying forms nobody needs, and has been beaten, robbed and taken to court.

He says he will never be promoted, lacking education, manners and a decent name, and that even fleeing the office would only take him back to a greyer lodging.

Flustered by the traffic and cursed at from all sides, the driver tries to tell his passenger that his son died this week; the man asks what of, then everyone shouts at him to watch the road.

The young men curse and hit him and he laughs along, their abuse easing his loneliness; when he says his son has died, one replies that we shall all die and tells him to hurry.

He begins to tell them how his son died but they arrive and leave; alone again, his misery returns worse, and a doorman he speaks to only tells him to move on.

Giving up, he goes back to the crowded lodging early without enough earned for oats; he tells a young man drinking water that his son is dead.

The young man is already asleep; aching to tell the whole story properly, the old man goes out to the stable and tells it all to his horse.

The young exile tells the old man he is a dead stone and the gentleman is truly alive; everyone laughs, the others lie down in the cold hut, and the youth weeps outside.

The host grieves for the young man and for his own dead wife; the magistrate can only say suicide is undesirable, and lies awake wondering if he too will end up like this.

The priest confronts him over his written request for prayers for 'the harlot Mariya', his own dead daughter, and demands how he dared write such a word.

He explains he only meant to name her calling, accepts a penance of ten bows, then with recovered dignity asks for a requiem for her, which the priest approves.

Soaked and with her supplies ruined, she waits at the railway crossing; a lady on the passing train looks like her mother, and for a moment her whole lost childhood returns.

Weeping, she imagines happiness and greets the passing neighbour as an equal, as if the years had been a dream, until her driver calls her and it all vanishes.

Lying in the storm-battered hut, he thinks none of this is real life, only 'according to regulation', and dreams of making his name in the capital while he is still young.

He sees the daughter's face and is struck by the most beautiful girl he has ever seen; even his gruff grandfather gazes at her tenderly.

Her beauty fills him not with desire but a vague sadness, as if they had all lost something; outside, a labourer drives horses round a threshing floor, jeering at them.

Each time she passes his sadness deepens, for her, himself and the labourer; the hours vanish, and they drive off in silence until the driver remarks on the fine girl.

Years later on a train journey, he sees passengers crowding to look at a girl on a station platform, and feels the same overwhelming sense of beauty.

The worn-out guard watches her with tender sadness, as though she stood for all the happiness he will never have; the train pulls away into the melancholy spring dusk.

They reach a warm, bright manor where children dance to the piano; the fat, widowed host welcomes the magistrate as a former colleague.

The host's four daughters and a cousin sing, the children skip, and the doctor prances about while everyone laughs.

He dances and flirts but feels it is all a fragment of life, pities the girls for living in the wilds, and hears the doctor say that nervous people should be forbidden to marry.

Hearing the crowds go to church, he complains that he sits here every year; the doorman says he hired himself out for greed, and he answers that it is poverty, dreaming of a festive supper.

In a coach-house at night, a coachman, his small grandson visiting from the village, a doorman and an old pedlar play cards by a lantern, facing the lit windows of a rented lodge.

On Christmas Eve a poor shoemaker works late, drinking to stay awake, finishing boots a customer abused him over, and grumbles that others enjoy themselves because they have money.

Jolting along a ruined road, she broods on the officials who ignore her complaints about a violent, rude caretaker, and on how nobody will hear her.

The doctor asks endless questions about heredity and vices while stroking his knees; the patient grows annoyed at being treated as a case.

The old man finds his vans uncoupled from the troop train; the strange guards ignore him and a surly official turns indignant at his complaint.

The official storms out before he can be paid; the dealer wires a complaint to the head of traffic and finds two gentlemen talking in the office.

He earns a pittance; the gentry insult him, one calling him 'Administration' for years, while peasants are kinder, and the frightened witnesses paid him kopecks to watch the body.

At dawn, when the storm has passed, they find the constable waiting at the door, bareheaded and soaked, pleading that the villagers are anxious; a footman curses him and they drive off without a word.

On Easter night a poor clerk, on duty in a dingy office, drafts a flattering holiday letter to a patron he hates, pities even the cockroach on his desk, and hears the bells begin.

After mass, a self-important village shopkeeper stands waiting, disdainful of the peasants filing out, until he realises the angry priest is beckoning him.

He argues that God forgave harlots; the priest tells him he is slandering his own daughter and should not be over-subtle, and the deacon sneers that she was a famous actress.

Delivering the boots through the snow, he is jeered at by rich passers-by and taunted by a prosperous rival who married money; he finds the customer pounding in his mortar again.

Her driver repeats gossip that officials pocketed money for a school; she denies it, but sees that he, the villagers and the overseer all believe she steals the firewood money too.

He complains that thirty-four hours have been lost and his stock may die; reading the officials' silent hint, he hands the guard a ten-rouble note without a word.

The train keeps jolting without moving; the old man guesses the guard did not share with the driver and sends his son with three roubles, after which they set off.

The son fetches boiling water by force from a bar-keeper who wants more money, and the father records every bribe from the day before in his notebook.

Charmed by the young official's courtesy, the old dealer slips him twelve roubles, and the official finds a way to send the cattle on the faster troop train.

The oiler claims two vans are unsafe; the dealer, seeing a demand for money, pays him and his mate without protest, then drinks cheerfully at every stop.

He boasts of his studying sons and blames the railways; the inspector says graft is so universal nobody is indignant any more, and the official charges him fourteen roubles in fees.

He was once tried for fraud alongside a clerk who cheated a buyer, merely because a poor man looked untrustworthy; at home he must also wait on the clerk like a servant.

He aches for a better life, a family table, a smart coat, a medal; he considers stealing or writing a secret denunciation to get promoted.

The inspiration fades; the scale of the problem crushes him, and he remembers he is timid, unpersuasive and insignificant.

He recounts a lifetime of distinguished work, bridges, treatises and discoveries, then tests his fame by asking if his companion knows his name; he does not.

He complains that worthless, idle people win renown while he did not, and begins a story about taking up, out of boredom, with a talentless singer in a dull town.

At the opening of his magnificent bridge nobody notices him; the crowd whispers only about his mistress, and he is pointed out merely as her lover.

A bystander knows who the singer lives with but not who built the bridge; next day the paper mentions her beauty and not him, and he cries with vexation.

His work wins first prize in the capital, but the papers fuss over his mistress's arrival and give his prize one tiny line with his name misspelt.

Years later, called to do an important work in another city and giving public lectures, he is ignored by every paper; he tries to start talk about himself on a crowded tram, and nobody knows.

The whole tram rushes to see a famous runner; he rants that talented men die unknown while entertainers are household names, and a notorious cardsharp walks past.

At a plant sale on a spring morning, the narrator and two other buyers chat while a dignified, well-read old gardener, who dislikes contradiction, listens in hoping to hear something new.

He and his adoring wife, whom he torments when drunk, wait to see the New Year in with two bottles of real champagne he won in a bet.

He drops the first bottle at midnight; his wife, pale, says it is a bad omen, and after scoffing at her he walks out into the moonlit frost.

He admits he does not love his wife, whom he married as a boy, and wallows in his misery with a vain, defiant pleasure.

The chatter hides his shock: after a lifetime of drunken indifference, his wife looked at him sternly as she never had before, and sorrow has woken him.

Years slipped by unvalued; her father is dead, she has aged, and he, now a tired, ailing, disillusioned man, sits silently by her fire with nothing to tell her.

She breaks down weeping that her life is wasted; he understands, says nothing, kisses her hand at the door, and leaves without the words he longs to say.

He begs her to deny to the doctor that he beat her and promises never to again; her face turns waxen, and he feels her cold hand and realises she is dead.

He cries, more annoyed than sorry that she died just as he began to pity her; forty years passed in a fog of drink and quarrels, and he turns the sledge back toward home.

He remembers her young and merry, sees he has been drunk since the wedding, longs to live it over again, and loses hold of the reins as his hands freeze.

He dozes in the snow and wakes in hospital; the doctor tells him his frozen limbs are gone and he has lived long enough, and he begs for five more years to bury his wife and return the horse.

At the near-empty requiem, the mournful singing softens him; he remembers his daughter growing up unnoticed among the gentry, listening wide-eyed to his scripture stories.

The neighbour is a handsome, idle, hard-drinking bachelor who gave her pupils only top marks; she found him attractive and was embarrassed sitting beside him.

Smelling drink on him, she pities his slow ruin and imagines saving him as his wife, then feels how absurd it is that they could ever be equals; he drives off.

A woman recalls riding home with a young official years ago as a thunderstorm broke; his high spirits infected her and they raced the storm laughing.

Sheltering in the stable doorway, he tells her he loves her though he knows she can never be his wife, and asks only that she let him look at her; she is spellbound and happy.

They run in laughing; he is boisterous all evening, and that night she feels free, beloved and glad above all of her rank and wealth, unsure whether she loves him.

Nothing came of it: in town, the gulf of rank between them felt like a thick wall, and he only criticised society with a forced smile instead of trying to break through.

On the hot steps he listens for her footsteps; she runs to the kitchen and out to the threshing floor with bread, and the labourer stops to watch her, then curses his horses in disappointment.

Her fragile beauty seems as though a gust of wind could scatter it; back aboard, a fellow traveller imagines the lonely station clerk hopelessly in love with her, or married to someone as plain as himself.

The old exile tells him he will get used to it: he has worked the same crossing for twenty-two years and wants nothing, and urges the youth to stop wanting his wife and freedom.

The old man boasts that he was once a gentleman's son who wore a frock-coat, and has made himself free by wanting nothing; whoever listens to longing even once is lost.

The old man predicts the father will ruin himself chasing doctors and end in prison; the young exile answers that even three years with a wife were a gift, better than nothing.

The letter says that through books he has lived every life and learned every wisdom, and now despises it all as a mirage that death will wipe out.

Beggars mob him, and his new wife calls him a lout for trying to slap her back; the devil drags him to hell, and he wakes at his bench with the customer shouting that the boots are late.

The customer turns out to make fireworks; the shoemaker hands over the boots, goes to church, and no longer envies the rich, since the same grave awaits all.

The gentleman's wife joined him with their baby, he spent lavishly to keep her happy among the local officials, and she, spoilt and bored, pined in the hardship.

The gentleman spent eight years petitioning to go home, then found new joy in his grown daughter; but the girl, young and with no life there, pined and is now dying of consumption.

They row the clumsy barge unhurriedly across; on the far bank the exiled gentleman waits, grim and distracted, hurrying to a new doctor for his sick daughter.

A skilled but drunken craftsman drives his sick old wife twenty miles through a blizzard to the hospital, lashing his feeble horse.

He mutters to his wife that the doctor will scold him for coming late but will do his best, rehearsing the telling-off he expects.

He rehearses grovelling and protesting to the doctor, promising to make him fine things for free, and boasts he knows how to handle the gentry.

In the dark, freezing van the father grumbles that his son brought this on himself by refusing to study like his brothers, who are asleep in warm beds.

Drink makes him fussy and busy, counting money and lamenting his thirsty cattle; his son rebukes him for drinking and is told not to teach his father.

The father invites the actors, excluding the actresses; the dinners are dull and the guests shabby and fawning, but his daughter is enchanted and goes to the theatre every night.

She elopes with the tragedian, who married her for her father's money; the father disowns her, and the husband beats her and writes begging letters.

She begs on her knees not to be abandoned, is taken on in small parts, freezes onstage whispering that she is miserable, and again writes to her father for money.

He recalls her last visit: he was scandalised that she was an actress and they barely spoke for two weeks; on a walk by the river she wept over her home, which he could not understand.

He prays for her again, the forbidden word slipping out unnoticed, while incense rises into the sunlight like her soul.

Walking home alone he is seized by terror, knows a breakdown is coming, and lies imagining himself the brother or father of such a woman.

Remembering meeting the dead man once, he feels a moment of fright; the constable disturbs him to ask again about fetching the elder, and is sent away irritably.

The coachman and his grandson look in at the window where the dead man's parents are laying out the body; back in the coach-house the terrified boy runs weeping to his grandfather.

The men start another card game; comforted by their voices, the boy sleeps, and by morning the coach-house no longer seems terrible.

Descending into a valley above a sleeping village, he sees a flickering light in the top of a belfry turret where he knows there is nothing that could burn.

Unable to explain the light, he is gradually overcome by lonely horror; the boy yawns at first, then says he is frightened too.

He whips the horse on, lingers an hour at the station reading papers, never learns the cause; the second fright begins as he walks home happy from a tryst along a railway at night.

Feeling young and happy, he hears a roar behind him and a lone goods truck with no engine flies past in the dark; he cannot account for it.

Suddenly alone and afraid, he runs until he meets a signalman who explains a truck broke loose from a train; the third fright comes as he walks home exhausted from a spring shoot.

A strange black spaniel he cannot place follows him deep in the forest and stares at him; exhausted, he thinks of the devil-dog in Faust and grows uneasy.

The friendly dog frolics around him as he shouts at it, and in panic he runs home, where a visiting friend complains he lost his valuable dog in the forest.

She has nearly forgotten her childhood family, and her brother has stopped writing; on the road a wealthy neighbour who once examined her pupils overtakes her cart and greets her.

By a campfire on a bleak river-bank, a drunk old exile hides his bottle from his mates while a sick young newcomer mourns the home and wife he was sent away from.

He tells of a gentleman exiled for forgery who meant to live by his own labour but kept riding for money from home, while the old man warned him that wanting leads to ruin.

Alone by the fire, he longs for his wife to come even for a day, then realises he could not feed her; his mates cheat him of his share of tips, and soon he will be begging.

Towards dawn he dreams he is home and the exile was a nightmare, then wakes to shouts and gunshots from the far bank calling the ferrymen out into the cold.

The boy begs to be taken home to his mother; his grandfather threatens then comforts him, admitting he is frightened too, and the doorman reports the mother's grief.

A young examining magistrate and a doctor, delayed by a blizzard, arrive at night at a village hut to hold an inquest on an insurance agent who shot himself there; the old constable says the witnesses have gone to tea.

In the room with the covered body, the doctor complains that the dead man was tactless and egotistical to shoot himself where he would cause everyone the most trouble.

The magistrate yawns that people now kill themselves from weariness rather than theft; the constable says the whole village is frightened and cannot sleep.

The doorman reports that a lodger shot himself in the head that morning and the doctors have given up; the man's parents have arrived wailing, and the doorman must go to the police.

They gossip that he loved another man's wife; the boy remembers the man stroking his head yesterday; the lodger dies, and the pedlar says such a soul cannot be prayed for.

A respectable married official, threatened by a former maid he seduced who swore to leave their baby at his door, finds a bundled infant on his doorstep one night.

Terrified of his wife, his colleagues and scandal, he hurries off with the baby to leave it at a rich merchant's house before anyone sees.

Carrying the child through dark lanes, he realises how cruel it is to pass an innocent baby from door to door and imagines its bleak future among strangers.

He looks at the baby, sees his own nose, imagines confessing and adopting it, then fears his colleagues' mockery and leaves it on the step, begging its forgiveness.

He turns back, carries the baby home and confesses to his wife on his knees, then learns from the doorman that the baby was a washerwoman's, not his.

The doorman apologises for having women visitors; the man curses him and tells his furious, tearful wife it was all a joke.

The pedlar tells how a rich lady bribed officials to give her son a proper church burial after he shot himself, until watchmen said they heard him howling under the church.

She secretly paid to have her son dug up and reburied outside the cemetery, then fed birds for his soul until a black dog appeared and drove her half-mad.

He renounces the millions by leaving five hours early; the banker kisses him and weeps in self-contempt, then next morning locks the renunciation away in his safe to avoid talk.

She cannot understand why a rich man would choose to live in this mud; he laughs at the road, says he is bored at home, and thinks his small gifts make him useful.

At a noisy tavern a drunk swears in front of her, is rebuked, apologises, and the others call her a good young lady; she drinks her tea content.

Her driver insists on fording the swollen river rather than taking the bridge the rich neighbour uses, and the horse wades in up to its belly.

Two friends persuade a scrupulous law student to come with them to a street of brothels; he knows fallen women only from books and pious stories, and goes reluctantly.

Walking out in the first snow, the three stop for vodka; he peers at a bit of cork in his glass and his friend tells him to stop philosophising and live like a human being for one evening.

Warmed by drink, he envies his friends' easy, balanced cheerfulness and resolves to let himself go for one evening, whatever it costs him.

Humming a song with his friends, he enjoys the snowy night and imagines a dark, secret, dreadful encounter with a guilty, frightened woman.

The street turns out brightly lit and noisy, with everyone indifferent to it; his friends clown their way into the first house.

His friends bow and joke their way into the parlour; he hangs back smiling awkwardly as young women arrive one by one.

He finds everything tawdry and ordinary, politely buys a girl a drink he will not share, and is scolded by a friend for being fleeced.

In house after house he fixates on the doormen, wondering what lives brought them there; one friend gets drunk and demands they go on to 'the best one'.

His friends dance; he decides the ugliness is a deliberate style, sneers inwardly at how clumsily the women sell themselves, and tells one he is dull because it is dull.

He wants to ask a woman about her life and family but cannot find words; she jokes, says something coarse aloud, and keeps asking him to buy wine.

Repelled, he moves away and stares at the musicians, unable to understand how respectable-looking men can sit there unashamed; the place seems another world.

Disgusted, he leaves and announces he is going home, but his tearful, affectionate friend hugs him and drags him into one more house.

Ignored in a grander house, he is ashamed to be there and tormented that he feels only hatred for the women, and resolves to try to understand them.

Finding only boredom on every face, he sits beside a tired, thoughtful-looking woman and tries to draw her out; she says she is bored but has nowhere else to go.

He tells her begging would be freer; she only asks for porter. Then a man slaps a girl, he rushes to the weeping girl in pity, and recoils when he sees she is drunk.

Frightened, he flees the house and waits in the falling snow, exhausted and wanting to go home but wanting still more to vent his feelings on his friends.

He concludes the women are not falling but already ruined and that everyone shares the blame; a drunk passer-by claps him on the shoulder as one of the crowd, and he hears his friend fighting inside.

One friend is thrown downstairs after defending a woman from being hit; they calm him and walk home singing, while the student walks behind, judging them.

He decides his friends are as bad as slave-owners and murderers who keep a religious fast, their art and science a hypocrite's pretence.

He accuses his friends of murdering the women; one calls him a fool whose look of hatred is worse than the whole street, and both leave him.

Treating it as his own problem, he sits up methodically recalling every method his acquaintances have tried to save such women.

He sorts past rescue attempts into three kinds, finds the first two always failed, and concludes only marriage has ever worked.

He admits he could never marry one, sees the problem is endless, decides the buyers must be saved, and dreams of preaching on the street corner.

He imagines rebuking passers-by, and in an ecstasy of feeling for others' pain writes letters and makes vows through the night.

By daylight he lies motionless in a nameless anguish that makes everything, good or evil, equally loathsome; only the thought that he could kill himself, or that it will pass in three days, soothes him.

He paces, sees his haggard face, hides when a friend knocks, weeps, and at dusk runs out into the street dreading the night.

He wanders the city, drinks vodka, bares his chest to the wet snow and nearly throws himself off a bridge to trade one pain for another, then goes home and paces till morning.

His friends find him in torment, begging to be saved; they take him to a polite, cold specialist who begins questioning him.

Hearing them discuss the street coolly, he protests that he is praised for trivial work but called mad for caring about the women, then weeps in pity for everyone.

The doctor sedates and examines him; calmer and ashamed, he leaves with prescriptions he has had before and drags himself back to his studies.

An old sledge-driver sits motionless in the falling snow, bent double, having had no fare all day, until an officer hails him.

The officer shuts his eyes and won't listen; later three rowdy young men haggle him down, squabble over the seats and mock his cap.

Back at the door, his wife joyfully tells him an aunt by marriage has arrived by train, fleeing a tyrannical husband, and begs him to be kind to her.

The 'aunt' is young, beautiful, perfumed and plainly dissolute; the dreary room brightens, and he flirts with her at once.

They drink the second bottle; he falls headlong into a passion that sweeps away his wife, the visitor and himself, and has left him ruined on a dark street.

Back from the opera, a sixteen-year-old girl who loves no one yet writes a romantic letter to one of her two admirers, pretending not to believe his love and pitying herself to tears.

She imagines renouncing the world, then dwells fondly on her shy suitor's hidden passion for music and on how he declared his love in a draughty hallway.

She mentions her other admirer in the letter, wonders whether he deserves it more, and is overcome by causeless laughter at a funny story he told about a poodle.

She tears up the letter, decides to love the other admirer, and imagines a summer of both men courting her, full of joy she does not know what to do with.

Three years later the wife fled across the river with a young official; the husband chased them for five days and then beat his head on the ferry boards, while the old man laughed at him.

The young exile weeps that he is innocent, punished in place of a rich uncle by an unfair verdict; the old man only repeats that he will get used to it and goes to sleep.

The old man taunts the silent gentleman with his own words that people can live even here and tells him his search is useless; he pays and drives off without a word.

A goods train carrying cattle has stood for hours at a small station at night; an old dealer and his big, dreamy son sit in the crowded van among eight unfed bullocks.

The old man goes to stir up the crew, finds the driver asleep at the engine, and walks into the steaming station where two officials are arguing over a fur cap.

He joins their squabble over whether the cap is real beaver, then remembers his errand; the guard says there is no hurry, as they are too late to avoid delays anyway.

His son strums an accordion contentedly; the train starts with such a violent jolt that the cattle fall on each other and the old man curses the driver.

At dawn the old man wakes cold and cross, scolds his son for a tangled rope, then the two say their morning prayers side by side.

At the big station the guard sighs that their slot is gone; a fresh, eager young official asks cheerfully what is to be done now.

He treats the guard to drinks to secure a smooth journey, telling his son that one gets nothing without bestirring oneself; a filthy oiler appears at the door.

The son wanders about the station and engine staring at things, neither bored nor eager, indifferent to where he is.

At a big station at evening the son fetches water, imagines the unseen town is dull, and the train is shunted back and forth.

An inspector tells a tale of one railway stealing another's trucks; the dealer, flattered to talk with educated men, joins in with his own grievance about overcharging.

His complaint wins precedence, and pleased with himself he has a policeman write a long, vindictive protocol of his whole journey, including the official who disliked his face.

Next morning he rages at his thirsty, exhausted cattle, who will not drink the icy water given them; after two more days they reach the city and stagger off the train.

In a filthy lodging the father hunts buyers while the son idles, uninterested in the city; the cattle are sold and driven off by bored drovers who beat them.

Before leaving, the dealer insists on treating the indifferent hotel-keeper, recounting how late arrival and bribes cost him heavily, yet plainly not minding as long as someone listens.

Seen off by the staff, he tips everyone, blesses them and crosses himself; his son sits beside him, neither glad to go home nor sorry to leave.

He tells how the dead man's father burnt his sister's will to seize land meant for the peasants, died disgraced, and left his son ruined, reduced to a lowly job he felt was beneath him.

The constable's own drunkard sons ruined him; the magistrate, bored, reflects that he will go back to the city while the old man walks forever, and lies down restless at half past seven.

The doctor returns with a landowner's horses to fetch him for supper and a proper bed; they drive through a village where no one has gone to sleep for fear of the dead man.

Leaving the village they pass the constable standing in the snow, apparently smiling; the coachman loses the road in the blizzard and circles to find it.

He dreams of the dead man and the constable walking together through the storm, singing that they bear all life's burden while others sit in warmth.

Waking, he realises the suicide, the constable and his host are all bound together, and that nothing in life is accidental for one who sees himself as part of the whole.

He feels the suicide and the old man's suffering on his own conscience, since wanting a bright, easy life means accepting that others will carry the worst of it; next morning the storm keeps them in.

Their host refuses to let them go out in the storm; the doctor lectures on the climate, and they spend the day eating, playing cards and dancing while the body and witnesses wait.

A well-fed, slightly drunk first-class traveller asks his companion to chat, and raises the question of what fame really is and how anyone gets it.

He consoles himself that the provinces are stupid and real recognition waits in the capital, where a competition entry of his is about to be judged.

Someone recognises the cardsharp at once; then his companion shyly asks if he knows his name, a professor and academician of thirty-five years, and he doesn't; they both laugh.

At a touring company's benefit night, a sheltered official's daughter, at the theatre for the first time, is overwhelmed by the bombastic leading man and begs her father to invite the actors to dinner.

He knows he is too timid to invent slanders, remembers he has begged his hated patron for a two-rouble raise for ten years, and kills the cockroach, feeling better.

A landowner recalls the first of three times he was truly terrified: idly driving to the station one sultry July evening with a small boy asleep behind him.

An old banker paces at night recalling a party fifteen years ago where guests argued about the death penalty and a young lawyer said life in prison was better than death.

He had impulsively bet two millions that the young man could not stand solitary confinement; the lawyer offered fifteen years; now the banker sees the bet was his caprice and the other's greed.

The terms: fifteen years alone in a garden lodge, no visitors, voices or news, only books, music and wine through a small window, and any breach forfeits the money.

The prisoner suffers loneliness, refuses wine, reads novels, then classics, sinks into idle despair in the fifth year, then studies languages and history with fervour.

He writes in six languages asking for a shot to confirm his success, later reads only the Gospel, then everything at random; the banker realises paying tomorrow will ruin him.

Wild speculation has reduced the banker to middling rank; dreading envy and pity, he decides the prisoner must die and creeps out in the rain to the lodge.

Planning to let the absent watchman take the blame, he breaks the seals and enters; the prisoner, seated at the table, does not stir.

He finds a skeletal, prematurely aged man asleep beside a letter, and considers smothering him before reading what he has written.

A landowner complains that acquittals of obvious criminals corrupt the public; the gardener says he rejoices at every acquittal, because faith in a person is higher than evidence.

Gratified to be asked, he tells a legend from his grandmother about a solitary, silent, learned doctor who settled in a small town and was revered for his skill.

The doctor loved the townsfolk like children, treated them for nothing despite his own illness, and was so beloved that he never locked his door.

Even robbers honoured him, yet one morning he was found murdered with an amazed look on his face; the judges ruled it an accident because nobody could have killed him.

A notorious vagrant was caught with the doctor's belongings and a bloodstained shirt; the townsfolk still doubted, and the judges agonised over overwhelming evidence.

The chief judge could not pronounce sentence and the court freed the man; the gardener says God forgave the town for its faith in humanity, then walks off before anyone can object.

The narrator recalls a stifling August journey as a schoolboy with his grandfather, stopping to rest the horses at a rich villager's house whose owner is a comic, haughty figure.

In the fly-filled room he faces hours of waiting while the men talk of manure and oats, hating everything; then the host calls his daughter to pour tea.

He dwells on her flawless features, feels hurt that she ignores him because he is dusty and young, then forgets himself entirely in the consciousness of her beauty.

Horses circle unwillingly, raising clouds of golden chaff, while women rake and carts move among the stacks.

Her features are ordinary, yet her restless movements, laughter and freshness make her lovelier than any perfect face.

He hates the strange customer, whose room once filled with sulphurous pink smoke, and dreams of the rich being ruined while he lords it over some other poor shoemaker.

Fitting the boots, he discovers the customer has a hoof; instead of fleeing he flatters the devil, who asks what he wants.

He pours out his lifelong envy of the rich and complaints about his good but coarse wife, and asks to be made rich; the devil wants his soul, and he insists on payment after delivery.

He is transformed into a gentleman served an enormous dinner, eats until he is uncomfortably stuffed, and orders his old rival sent for.

He abuses his rival as he was once abused, feels uneasy at the memory, counts his money but only wants more, and lies awake fearing thieves beside a new, grand wife.

At church he sees rich and poor are equal before God and in the grave; when he sings or plays in the street, policemen and cabmen tell him it is not proper for a gentleman.