Oblomov / Обломов. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Иван Гончаров

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СКАЧАТЬ are regarded there as a gastronomic luxury – no, the morals of the inhabitants had not been corrupted to that extent: a quail is a bird which is not mentioned in the dietary rules. In that part of the country it delights the ear with its singing; that is why almost every house has a quail in a string cage under the roof.

      The poet and dreamer would have remained dissatisfied by the general appearance of that modest and unpretentious district. They would never have succeeded in seeing an evening in the Swiss or Scottish style, when the whole of nature – the woods, the river, the cottage walls, and the sandy hills – is suffused by the red glow of the sunset, against which is set off a cavalcade of gentlemen, riding on a twisting, sandy road after having escorted a lady on a trip to some gloomy ruin and now returning at a smart pace to a strong castle, where an ancient native would tell them a story about the Wars of the Roses and where, after a supper of wild goat’s meat, a young girl would sing them a ballad to the accompaniment of a lute – scenes with which the pen of Walter Scott has so richly filled our imagination. No, there is nothing like that in our part of the country.

      How quiet and sleepy everything is in the three or four villages which compose this little plot of land! They lie close to one another and look as though they had been flung down accidentally by a giant’s hand and scattered about in different directions, where they had remained to this day. One cottage, dropped on the edge of a ravine, has remained hanging there since time immemorial, half of it suspended in the air and propped up by three poles. People have lived quietly and happily there for three or four generations. One would think that a hen would be afraid to go into it, and yet Onisim Suslov, a steady man, who is too big to stand up in his own cottage, lives there with his wife. Not everyone would be able to enter Onisim’s cottage, unless, indeed, the visitor persuaded it to stand with its back to the forest and its front to him. For its front steps hang over the ravine, and in order to enter it one has to hold on to the grass with one hand and its roof with the other, and then lift one’s foot and place it firmly on the steps.

      Another cottage clings precariously to the hillside like a swallow’s nest; three other cottages have been thrown together accidentally not far away, and two more stand at the very bottom of the ravine.

      Everything in the village is quiet and sleepy: the doors of the silent cottages are wide open; not a soul is to be seen; only the flies swarm in clouds and buzz in the stuffy air. On entering a cottage, you will call in vain in a loud voice: dead silence will be your answer; very seldom will some old woman, who is spending her remaining years on the stove, reply with a painful sigh or a sepulchral cough; or a three-year-old child, long-haired, barefoot, and with only a torn shirt on, will appear from behind a partition, stare at you in silence, and hide himself again.

      In the fields, too, peace and a profound silence reign; only here and there a ploughman can be seen stirring like an ant on the black earth – and, scorched by the heat and bathed in perspiration, pitching his plough forward. The same imperturbable peace and quiet prevail among the people of that locality. No robberies, murders, or fatal accidents ever happened there; no strong passions or daring enterprises ever agitated them. And, indeed, what passions or daring enterprises could have agitated them? Everyone there knew what he was capable of. The inhabitants of those villages lived far from other people. The nearest villages and the district town were twenty and twenty-five miles away. At a certain time the peasants carted their com to the nearest landing-stage of the Volga, which was their Colchis or Pillars of Hercules, and some of them went to the market once a year, and that was all the intercourse they had with the outside world. Their interests were centred upon themselves and they never came into contact with or ran foul of any one else’s. They knew that the administrative city of the province was sixty miles away, but very few of them ever went there; they also knew that farther away in the same direction was Saratov or Nizhny-Novgorod; they had heard of Petersburg and Moscow, and that French and Germans lived beyond Petersburg, and the world farther away was for them as mysterious as it was for the ancients – unknown countries, inhabited by monsters, people with two heads, giants; farther away still there was darkness, and at the end of it all was the fish which held the world on its back. And as their part of the country was hardly ever visited by travellers, they had no opportunity of learning the latest news of what was going on in the world: the peasants who supplied them with their wooden vessels lived within fifteen miles of their villages and were as ignorant as they. There was nothing even with which they could compare their way of living and find out in this way whether they lived well or no, whether they were rich or poor, or whether there was anything others had that they, too, would like.

      These lucky people imagined that everything was as it should be and were convinced that everyone else lived like them and to live otherwise was a sin. They would not believe it if someone told them that there were people who had other ways of ploughing, sowing, harvesting, and selling. What passions and excitements could they possibly have? Like everyone else, they had their worries and weaknesses, rent and taxes, idleness and sleep; but all this did not amount to a great deal and did not stir their blood. For the last five years not one of the several hundred peasants of that locality had died a natural, let alone a violent, death. And when someone had gone to his eternal sleep either from old age or from some chronic illness, the people there had gone on marvelling at such an extraordinary event for months. And yet it did not surprise them at all that, for instance, Taras the blacksmith had nearly steamed himself to death in his mud hut so that he had to be revived with cold water. The only crime that was greatly prevalent was the theft of peas, carrots, and turnips from the kitchen gardens, and on one occasion two sucking pigs and a chicken had suddenly disappeared – an event which outraged the whole neighbourhood and was unanimously attributed to the fact that carts with wooden wares had passed through the village on their way to the fair. But, generally speaking, accidents of any kind were extremely rare.

      Once, however, a man had been found lying in a ditch by the bridge outside a village, evidently a member of a co-operative group of workmen who had passed by on their way to the town. The boys were the first to discover him, and they ran back terrified to the village with the news that some terrible serpent or werewolf was lying in a ditch, adding that he had chased them and nearly eaten Kuzka. The braver souls among the peasants armed themselves with pitchforks and axes and went in a crowd to the ditch.

      «Where are you off to?» The old men tried to stop them. «Think yourselves stout fellows, do you? What do you want there? Leave it alone, no one’s driving you».

      But the peasants went, and about a hundred yards from the spot began calling to the monster in different voices, and as there was no reply, they stopped, then moved on again. A peasant lay in the ditch, leaning his head against its side; a bundle and a stick with two pairs of bast-shoes tied on it, lay beside him. They did not venture near him or touch him.

      «Hey you, there!» they shouted in turn, scratching their heads or their backs. «What’s your name? Hey, you! What do you want here?»

      The stranger tried to raise his head but could not; evidently he was either ill or very tired. One peasant nearly brought himself to touch him with his pitchfork.

      «Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him!» many of the others cried. «How do we know what sort of a man he is? He hasn’t said a word. He may be one of them – don’t touch him, lads!»

      «Let’s go», some said. «Come on now: he isn’t one of ours, is he? He’ll only bring us trouble!»

      And they all went back to the village, telling the old men that a stranger was lying there who would not speak and goodness only knows what he was up to.

      «Don’t have anything to do with him if he is a stranger», the old men said, sitting on the mound of earth beside their cottages, with their elbows on their knees. «Let him do as he likes! You shouldn’t have gone at all!»

      Such was the spot where Oblomov suddenly found himself in his dream. Of the three or four villages scattered there, one was Sosnovka and another Vavilovka, about a mile from each other. Sosnovka and Vavilovka were СКАЧАТЬ