Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian

Stories by Foreign Authors:
Russian

Project Gutenberg's Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian, by Various
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Title: Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian
Author: Various
Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5741] [This file was first posted on
August 20, 2002] [Date last updated: June 1, 2005]
Edition: 10

Language: English
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STORIES BY FOREIGN AUTHORS
RUSSIAN
MUMU.................BY IVAN TURGENEV
THE SHOT.............BY ALEXANDER POUSHKIN
ST. JOHN'S EVE.......BY NIKOLAI VASILIEVITCH GOGOL
AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE..BY LYOF N. TOLSTOI
NEW YORK 1898

CONTENTS
MUMU...................Ivan Turgenev THE SHOT...............Alexander
Poushkin ST. JOHN'S EVE.........Nikolai Vasilievitch Gogol AN OLD
ACQUAINTANCE... Lyof N. Tolstoi

MUMU
BY
IVAN TURGENEV
From "Torrents of Spring." Translated by Constance Garnett.
In one of the outlying streets of Moscow, in a gray house with white
columns and a balcony, warped all askew, there was once living a lady,
a widow, surrounded by a numerous household of serfs. Her sons were
in the government service at Petersburg; her daughters were married;
she went out very little, and in solitude lived through the last years of
her miserly and dreary old age. Her day, a joyless and gloomy day, had
long 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 heroic
build, and deaf and dumb from his birth. The lady, his owner, had
brought him up from the village where he lived alone in a little hut,
apart from his brothers, and was reckoned about the most punctual of
her peasants in the payment of the seignorial dues. Endowed with
extraordinary strength, he did the work of four men; work flew apace
under his hands, and it was a pleasant sight to see him when he was
ploughing, while, with his huge palms pressing hard upon the plough,
he seemed alone, unaided by his poor horse, to cleave the yielding
bosom of the earth, or when, about St. Peter's Day, he plied his scythe
with a furious energy that might have mown a young birch copse up by
the roots, or swiftly and untiringly wielded a flail over two yards long;
while the hard oblong muscles of his shoulders rose and fell like a lever.
His perpetual silence lent a solemn dignity to his unwearying labor. He
was a splendid peasant, and, except for his affliction, any girl would
have been glad to marry him. . . But now they had taken Gerasim to
Moscow, bought him boots, had him made a full-skirted coat for
summer, a sheepskin for winter, put into his hand a broom and a spade,
and appointed him porter.
At first he intensely disliked his new mode of life. From his childhood
he had been used to field labor, to village life. Shut off by his affliction
from the society of men, he had grown up, dumb and mighty, as a tree
grows on a fruitful soil. When he was transported to the town, he could
not understand what was being done with him; he was miserable and
stupefied, with the stupefaction of some strong young bull, taken
straight from the meadow, where the rich grass stood up to his 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 sturdy beast, he is whirled
onwards, whirled along with loud roar and whistle, whither--God
knows! What Gerasim had to do in his new duties seemed a mere trifle
to him after his hard toil as a peasant; in half an hour all his work was
done, and he would once more stand stock-still in the middle of the
courtyard, staring open-mouthed at all the passers-by, as though trying
to wrest from