Category: Short Stories
In the spring of 1878 there was living in Moscow, in a small wooden house in Shabolovka, a young man of five-and-twenty, called Yakov Aratov. With him lived his father’s sister, an elderly maiden lady, over fifty, Platonida Ivanovna. She took charge of his house, and looked af...
In the spring of 1878 there was living in Moscow, in a small wooden house in Shabolovka, a young man of five-and-twenty, called Yakov Aratov. With him lived his father’s sister,...
2. Chapter 2For some time she did not raise her eyes; but suddenly she started, and passed over the rows of spectators a glance intent, but not attentive, absorbed, it seemed, in herself......
3. Chapter 3All the following day Aratov was in very low spirits. ‘What is it, Yasha?’ Platonida Ivanovna said to him: ‘you seem somehow all loose ends to-day!’... In her own peculiar idiom...
4. Chapter 4The house of the widow Milovidov turned out to be exactly as Kupfer had described it; and the widow herself really was like one of the tradesmen’s wives in Ostrovsky, though the...
5. Chapter 5Thoughts of the immortality of the soul, of the life beyond the grave crowded upon him again. Was it not said in the Bible: ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ And in Schiller: ‘And th...
6. Chapter 6Platonida Ivanovna was incessantly coming into Aratov’s room. She did not worry him with questions; she merely looked at him, muttered, sighed, and went out again. But he refuse...
7. Chapter 7‘Wherever you wish, my dear one,’ she answered solemnly and slowly, and slowly and solemnly she turned her face towards me. It struck me as less transparent than on the eve; mor...
8. Chapter 8Again a veil fell over my eyes.... Again I lost consciousness. The veil was withdrawn at last. What was it down there below? What was this park, with avenues of lopped lime-tree...
9. Chapter 9During the whole space of five years that had elapsed since his departure no one had heard anything of him; all talk about him had died away, as though he had vanished from the...
10. Chapter 10Valeria soon fell asleep; but Fabio could not sleep. In the stillness of the night, everything he had seen, everything he had felt presented itself more vividly; he put to himse...
11. Chapter 11‘And your father?’ ‘My father died long ago.’ He inquired my mother’s Christian name, and immediately gave an awkward laugh, but apologised, saying that he picked up some Americ...
12. Chapter 12He lay on his back, turned a little to one side, with his left arm behind his head ... the right was thrust under his bent body. The toes of his feet, in high sailor’s boots, ha...
13. Chapter 13The room big and low pitched with three windows; the walls whitewashed; no furniture. Before the house a barren plain; gradually sloping downwards, it stretches into the distanc...
14. Chapter 14Yellow, wrinkled, completely bald, with a scanty grey beard, he sat clothed in nothing but a shirt purposely slit open.... He could not bear the weight of even the lightest clot...
15. Chapter 15And on the distant sky-line, above the low strip of fields, gleamed, like a point of fire the golden cross on the white bell-tower of a Christian church.... That cross the godde...