No matter how much I wished to hasten the completion of my journey, hunger—as the saying goes—smashes stone walls,121 and it forced me to enter the post hut and, until I could gain access once more to ragoÛts, fricassees, pâtés, and other French food invented to poison the stomach, to dine on the old piece of roast beef that traveled with me as stores. Having dined this time much worse than many colonels (not to mention generals) sometimes dine on long marches, I, according to praiseworthy common custom, poured into a cup the coffee prepared for me and assuaged my capriciousness with the fruits of the sweat of miserable African slaves.
Spotting the sugar in front of me, the hostess who was kneading dough, sent a small boy to me to ask for a little piece of this food of boyars. “Why boyars’?” I said to her, giving my remaining sugar to the child. “Can you, too, really not use it?” “It is boyars’ because we do not have the means to buy it, while boyars use it because they are not the ones who furnish the money. It is true that our steward, when he goes to Moscow, buys it, but he, too, pays with our tears.” “Do you really think that whoever uses sugar makes you weep?” “Not everyone, but all noblemen, yes. Is it not your peasants’ tears that you drink when they eat the same bread as we do?” As she said this, she showed me the composition of her bread. It consisted of three-quarters of chaff and one quarter of unsifted flour. “And even in the current bad harvests we thank God. Many of our neighbors are worse off. How much good can it do you, boyars, that you eat sugar while we go hungry? Children are dying, adults die too. But what can you do—you grieve for a while, you grieve but do what your master orders.” And she began to put bread loaves into the oven.
This rebuke, uttered not angrily or indignantly but with a deep feeling of stirring sorrow, filled my heart with grief. For the first time I examined carefully all the tools of the peasant hut. For the first time I turned my heart to something that it had previously only glided over.—Four walls covered halfway atop with soot, as was the entire ceiling. The cracked floor, covered with dirt at least a vershok* thick; the oven, although lacking a chimney, was the best protection from the cold, and its smoke filled the hut every morning in the winter and summer; window frames over which a bovine membrane was stretched allowed in a dingy midday light; two or three pots (lucky is the hut to have in one of them every day any meatless cabbage soup!). A wooden bowl and round platters called plates; a table hewn with an axe which is scraped clean for holidays. A trough to feed pigs or calves when there are any, and to sleep together with them, gasping air in which a burning candle looks as if it were in fog or behind a curtain. If lucky, they have a barrel with kvass tasting like vinegar and outside there is a bathhouse in which, when they do not steam in it, cattle sleep. A hempen shirt, footwear given by nature, leg wrappers and bast shoes to go out in.—Here is what is considered to be in all fairness the source of the state surplus, strength, power. But here also can be seen weakness, deficiencies and abuse of laws, and their, so to speak, rough side. Here can be seen the greed of the nobility, larceny, our tyranny, and the defenseless state of the poor.—Greedy beasts, insatiable bloodsuckers, what do we leave to the peasant? Just what we cannot take away: air. Yes, air alone. Often we deprive him not only of bread and water, a gift of Earth, but also of light itself.—The law forbids taking away his life.—Forbids only when it is done quickly. How many ways there are to take it away gradually! On the one side, you find near omnipotence; on the other side, defenseless vulnerability. For in relation to a peasant, the landlord is a lawgiver, judge, executor of his own decision, and, as suits him, plaintiff against whom the defendant dares not speak. This is the fate of someone in chains, this is the fate of someone locked in a fetid dungeon, this is the fate of a bullock in a yoke….
Cruel-hearted landowner, look at the children of the peasants subjected to you. They are almost naked. Why? Was it not you who imposed over and beyond fieldwork a quitrent on those who gave them birth into pain and sorrow? Is it not you who allocated for your own profit flax that was still unwoven? What do you care about the fetid rag which your hand, accustomed to luxury, loathes to lift? It is scarcely fit to use for wiping the beasts that serve you. You take even what you do not need despite the fact that the uncovered nakedness of your peasants will be a reproach to you. If in this world there is no judge over you—well, you will come before the Judge respecting no persons, who once gave even you conscience, a guide to the good that your dissolute reason, however, long ago ousted from its dwelling, your heart. But do not flatter yourself that you have impunity. This vigilant guardian of your actions will catch you when you are alone and you will feel His punishments. Oh! if only these were of any use to you and to your subordinates…. Oh! if only man could confess his deeds to an implacable judge, his conscience, by entering frequently his inner self. Changed into an immobile pillar by a thunderous voice, he would not permit himself secret malefactions; ruination, devastation would become rare … and so on, and so on, and so on.
