Viy

Early in the morning, as soon as they rang the resounding seminary bell that hung by the gates of the Brotherhood Monastery in Kyiv, schoolboys and bursaks would come hurrying in crowds from all parts of the city.¹ Grammarians (first-year students), Rhetoricians (second-year), Philosophers (third-year), and Theologians (seniors), with their notebooks under their arms, would make their way to class.² The Grammarians were still quite small; as they walked they shoved each other and quarreled in thin little soprano voices; almost all of them wore torn or stained clothes, and their pockets were constantly full of all sorts of trash, like knucklebones, little whistles made out of feathers, half-eaten pies, and sometimes even tiny little sparrows, one of which, when it suddenly started cheeping during a particularly quiet moment in class, would earn its patron a pretty painful slap on both hands with a ruler, or sometimes a whipping with a cherrywood switch. The Rhetoricians walked along in a more respectable way: Their clothes were often completely intact, but on the other hand their faces were almost always adorned by a rhetorical trope: either one of their eyes would be so swollen it was climbing up the forehead, or there’d be a big blister instead of a lip, or some other marking; they talked and swore among themselves in tenor voices. The Philosophers’ voices were a whole octave lower; there was nothing in their pockets except strong shag tobacco. They didn’t store anything up, but just devoured whatever came their way right on the spot; sometimes you could smell their pipes and vodka so far off that a tradesman walking by would stop and sniff the air like a hunting hound for a good long while.

The marketplace would usually just be starting to get going at that hour, and the market women selling bagels, rolls, watermelon seeds, and poppyseed cakes would tug at the garments of those walking by, as long as they were made of fine cloth or some kind of cotton material.

“Young gentlemen! Young gentlemen! Look here! Look here!” they would call from all directions. “I have bagels, poppyseed cakes, fancy cakes, fine loaves! I swear they’re fine! Made with honey! I baked them myself!”

Another would lift up a long, twisted roll and cry, “Here’s an icicle! Young gentlemen, buy an icicle!”

“Don’t buy anything from that one. Look how nasty she is—her nose is ugly, and her hands are dirty…”

But they were afraid to tug at the Philosophers and the Theologians, because the Philosophers and the Theologians always liked to take things just to sample, and they’d grab a whole handful at a time.

After arriving at the seminary, the whole crowd would disperse to their classes, which were in low-ceilinged but spacious rooms with small windows, wide doors, and grubby benches. The classroom would suddenly be filled with the humming of many different voices: The senior students serving as auditors would be listening to their pupils read out their lessons; the ringing soprano of a Grammarian would hit a resonance with the glass in the small windows, and the glass would reply with almost the exact same sound; in the corner a Rhetorician would be droning, and his mouth and thick lips looked as if they should have belonged to a Philosopher at the very least. He droned in a bass voice, and all you could hear from a distance was “Boo… boo… boo…” While they were listening to the lessons, the auditors would look with one eye under the bench, where they could see a roll, or a fruit dumpling, or some pumpkin seeds peeking out of the pocket of the bursak under their charge.

When this whole scholarly crowd had managed to arrive early or when they knew that the professors would be later than usual, by unanimous consent they would make a plan for a fight, and everyone had to take part in the fight, even the monitors who were supposed to ensure the orderliness and morality of the whole student estate. Two Theologians would usually decide how the battle was to proceed: whether each class year was supposed to stand up for itself or whether they were to divide into two halves: the bursa and the seminary. In any case, the Grammarians would start first, and as soon as the Rhetoricians got mixed up in it, the Grammarians would run away and stand on higher ground to watch the battle. Then the Philosophers with their long black mustaches would enter in, and finally the thick-necked Theologians, in horrible wide trousers. Usually it would end with Theology beating everyone, while Philosophy, scratching its sides, would be crowded into the classroom and disperse to the benches to take a rest. The professor, who had participated in similar fights himself, would come into the class and in a single second recognize from the flushed faces of his students that it had been quite a fight. At the same time that he was beating the fingers of Rhetoric with a switch, in another classroom another professor would be working over Philosophy’s hands with wooden paddles. The Theologians were treated in a quite different manner: As the professor of Theology put it, they got poured out to them a measure of marrowfat peas, which consisted of blows from short leather whips.

On holidays the seminarists and bursaks would travel around to people’s homes with puppet theaters. Sometimes they would perform a play based on a Bible story, and in those cases there would always be some Theologian who was almost as tall as the Kyiv bell tower, who would distinguish himself by playing Herodias or the wife of Potiphar, the captain of the guard in Pharaoh’s palace.³ As a reward they would receive a piece of canvas, or a sack of millet, or half a boiled goose, all that sort of thing.

This whole scholarly tribe, both the seminarists and the bursaks, who felt a kind of hereditary hostility toward each other, were extremely poor in means of support and at the same time were unusually gluttonous, so that it would be quite impossible to calculate how many dumplings each of them could put away at dinner; thus the voluntary contributions of well-to-do property owners could hardly suffice. So a senate consisting of Philosophers and Theologians would send out some Grammarians and Rhetoricians under the leadership of a Philosopher—and sometimes he would participate himself—with sacks on their backs, to empty out other people’s vegetable gardens. And pumpkin porridge would appear in the bursa. The senators would gobble so many watermelons and melons that the next day the auditors would hear not one but two lessons from them: one came from their mouths, and the other rumbled in the senators’ stomachs. The bursaks and the seminarists wore long cassock-like garments, which reached to this very day, a technical term meaning “below the heels.”

The most festive event for the seminary was the school vacation—the time starting in June when the bursaks would usually disperse to their homes. Then the whole highway would be strewn with Grammarians, Philosophers, and Theologians. Whoever did not have a haven of his own would go to visit the home of one of his comrades. The Philosophers and Theologians would set off on condition, that is, they undertook to teach or prep the children of well-to-do people, and in return they would receive a new pair of boots and sometimes also a frock coat for the coming year. This whole gang set off together in a camping party. They would boil porridge for themselves and sleep out in the fields. Each one of them dragged a sack in which there was one shirt and a pair of foot wraps. The Theologians were particularly thrifty and careful: In order not to wear out their boots, they would take them off, hang them on poles, and carry them on their shoulders, especially when there was a lot of mud. Then they would tuck up their wide trousers to their knees and fearlessly splash through the puddles.

As soon as they caught sight of a farmstead off in the distance, they would immediately turn off the highway and, when they neared a farmhouse that was built a little bit better than the others, they would stand in a row in front of the windows and start to sing a canticle at the top of their voices. The owner of the farmhouse, some old peasant Cossack, would listen to them for a long time, arms akimbo, then he’d start sobbing bitterly, turn to his wife and say, “Wife! These students are singing something that must be very intelligent. Bring them some fatback and whatever else we have!” And a whole bowlful of filled dumplings would be poured into the sack. A decent-sized piece of fatback, a few round loaves, and sometimes even a tied-up chicken would find a place in the sack together. Fortified by this supply, the Grammarians, Rhetoricians, Philosophers, and Theologians would continue on their way. The farther they went, however, the smaller their crowd became. Almost all of them had dispersed to their homes, and the only ones who remained were those whose parents’ nests were farther away.

Once during such a journey, three bursaks turned off the highway in order to stock up on provisions at the first farmstead they could find, because their sack had long since been emptied out. They were the Theologian Khalyava, the Philosopher Khoma Brut, and the Rhetorician Tiberius Gorobets.⁴

The Theologian was a strapping, broad-shouldered man with an extremely strange disposition: He would never fail to steal anything that was lying around near him. Moreover, he was of an extremely gloomy character. When he got drunk, he would hide in the tall weeds, and the seminary authorities would have a difficult time finding him.

The Philosopher Khoma Brut was of a cheerful disposition. He loved to lie around and smoke his long-stemmed pipe. When he was drinking, he would always hire musicians and dance a trepak.⁵ He would often get a taste of the marrowfat peas, but always showed philosophical indifference, saying, whatever will be, will be.

The Rhetorician Tiberius Gorobets was not yet old enough to grow a mustache, drink vodka, or smoke a pipe. All he had was a forelock, and therefore his character had not yet been developed; but judging by the big bumps he often had on his forehead when he appeared in class, it might be supposed that he would become a good warrior. The Theologian Khalyava and the Philosopher Khoma often pulled him by his forelock as a sign of their patronage, and they made use of him as their deputy.⁶

It was already evening when they turned off the highway. The sun had just set, and the warmth of the day still remained in the air. The Theologian and the Philosopher walked in silence, smoking their pipes; the Rhetorician Tiberius Gorobets was knocking the heads off the roadside thistles with a stick. The road wound through scattered groups of oak and hazelnut trees that covered the meadow. Declivities and small green hills, as round as church domes, sometimes crisscrossed the plain. Visible in two places, a field full of ripening grain was a sign that a village must be somewhere nearby. But it had been more than an hour since they had passed the swaths of grain, and still they had not seen any dwellings. The twilight had completely darkened the sky, and only in the west could one see a pale remnant of crimson radiance.

“What the devil!” the Philosopher Khoma Brut said, “it really seemed like there was a farmstead nearby.”

The Theologian looked silently around, then again took his pipe in his mouth, and they all continued their journey.

“Honest to God!” the Philosopher said, stopping again. “You can’t see so much as the devil’s fist, it’s so dark.”

“Maybe a farmstead will appear a little farther along,” the Theologian said, his pipe still in his teeth.

But meanwhile night had fallen, and a rather dark night. Small storm clouds intensified the darkness, and judging by all appearances, neither stars nor moon could be expected. The bursaks noticed that they had gone astray and had long ago wandered off the road.

The Philosopher groped with his feet in all directions and finally said abruptly, “Where’s the road?”

The Theologian was silent for a moment, and after thinking it over, he said, “Yes, it’s a dark night.”

The Rhetorician went off to the side and tried to find the road by crawling on all fours, but his hands just kept going into foxes’ holes. All around was nothing but the steppe, which seemed never to have been traversed by anyone. The travelers made yet another effort to move forward, but they encountered the same wilderness everywhere. The Philosopher tried calling out to someone, but his voice died away on all sides and encountered no response. Only a little while later did they hear a faint moaning that resembled the howling of wolves.

“Look, what are we going to do?” the Philosopher said.

“What do you think? We’ll spend the night in the field!” the Theologian said and reached into his pocket to get his tinderbox and light up his pipe again. But the Philosopher could not consent to this. He had the habit of putting away a twenty-pound hunk of bread and about four pounds of fatback before bed, and at this point he was feeling a kind of unbearable solitude in his stomach. Besides, despite his cheerful disposition, the Philosopher was somewhat afraid of wolves.

“No, Khalyava, that’s not possible,” he said. “How can we just lie down and stretch out like dogs, without eating anything to keep up our strength? Let’s keep trying. Maybe we’ll stumble on some kind of dwelling place and at least drink a glass of vodka before bed.”

At the word “vodka,” the Theologian spat to the side and said, “You know, you’re right, there’s no reason to stay out here in the fields.”

The bursaks started walking on ahead, and to their immense joy, they could hear barking in the distance. They listened attentively to hear what direction it was coming from, and then they set out more confidently. After walking a little while, they saw a light.

“A farmstead! Honest to God, a farmstead!” the Philosopher said.

His supposition did not deceive him: Very soon they in fact saw a small farmstead consisting of just two huts in a single courtyard. A light was burning in the windows. A dozen plum trees stuck up from behind a lath fence. When they looked through the gaps in the wooden gates, the bursaks saw a courtyard filled with chumaks’ wagons.⁷ Now there were a few stars peeping out in the sky.

“Come on, brothers, don’t lag behind! No matter what, we have to get a place for the night!”

Together the three learned men knocked at the gates and shouted, “Open up!”

The door of one of the huts creaked, and a moment later the bursaks saw before them an old woman in a sheepskin coat.

“Who’s there?” she cried, coughing faintly.

“Let us in, Granny, to spend the night. We’ve lost our way. It’s as nasty out in the field as in a hungry belly.”

“And what kind of folk are you?”

“We’re harmless folk, the Theologian Khalyava, the Philosopher Brut, and the Rhetorician Gorobets.”

“I can’t,” the old woman grumbled. “My farmyard is full of people, and all the corners of my hut are occupied. Where would I put you? And you’re all such strapping and healthy lads! My hut would collapse if I tried to fit you in. I know these Philosophers and Theologians. If you start taking in drunkards like that, pretty soon you won’t even have a farmyard. Get out! Get out! There’s no room for you here.”

“Have mercy, Granny! How can it be that Christian souls should perish for no good reason? Put us wherever you like. And if we do something or somehow or something else, then may your arms wither away or God knows what else happen to you. How about that!”

It seemed that the old woman was relenting a bit.

“All right,” she said after thinking it over, “I’ll let you in, but I’m going to put you in different places. Otherwise I won’t feel easy at heart if you’re lying together.”

“Whatever you like; we won’t argue,” the bursaks answered.

The gates creaked open, and they went into the farmyard.

“Say, Granny,” the Philosopher said as he followed the old woman, “if we could just, as they say… Honest to God, my stomach feels as if somebody were riding on wheels in it. I haven’t had even a wood chip to eat since early morning.”

“Look what he wants!” the old woman said. “I don’t have anything, nothing of the sort, and I haven’t lit the stove today.”

“But we’d pay for all of it,” the Philosopher continued, “we’d pay you properly tomorrow, in hard cash.”

“Yeah,” he continued quietly, “like hell we’ll pay you!”

“Go on, go on, and be happy with what you’re given. The devil himself brought me such sensitive young gentlemen!”

The Philosopher Khoma got completely depressed when he heard these words. But suddenly his nose caught the scent of dried fish. He looked at the Theologian’s wide trousers as he walked alongside and saw a huge fish tail sticking out of his pocket: The Theologian had already managed to filch a whole carp off one of the wagons. And since he had done this not out of any self-interest but solely out of habit, and had completely forgotten about his carp and was now looking around to see what else he could swipe, determined not to miss out on even a broken wheel—Khoma the Philosopher stuck his hand into the Theologian’s pocket as if it were his own, and pulled out the carp.

The old woman found different places to lodge the bursaks. She put the Rhetorician in the hut, she locked up the Theologian in an empty pantry, and for the Philosopher she allocated a sheep pen that was also empty.

As soon as he remained alone the Philosopher ate up the carp in a single minute, then inspected the wattled walls of the pen, pushed away with his foot the snout of a curious pig who had stuck her nose in from the neighboring pen, and turned onto his other side in order to fall into the sleep of the dead. Suddenly the low door opened, and the old woman came into the pen, all bent over.

“What do you need, Granny?” the Philosopher said.

But the old woman came walking right toward him with her arms outstretched.

“So that’s it!” the Philosopher thought. “No way, my dear, you’re too old.” He moved away a little, but the old woman again came right up to him without ceremony.

“Listen, Granny!” the Philosopher said, “it’s fast time now, and I’m the kind of man who won’t violate the holy fasts for a thousand gold pieces.”⁸

But the old woman spread her arms and tried to catch hold of him, without saying a word.

The Philosopher got frightened, especially when he noticed that her eyes were flashing with a kind of unusual glitter.

“Granny! What’s wrong with you? Go away, go away, and may God be with you!” he shouted.

But the old woman said not a word and kept trying to grab him.

He jumped onto his feet, intending to run away, but the old woman stood in the door, fixed her flashing eyes on him, and again started coming up to him.

The Philosopher wanted to push her away, but to his amazement he noticed that he couldn’t raise his arms, and his legs would not move, and he saw with horror that even his voice made no sound from his mouth. The words stirred soundlessly on his lips. He heard nothing but his heart beating; he saw the old woman come up to him, fold his arms, bend his head down, and jump onto his back with the swiftness of a cat. She struck his side with a broom, and prancing like a saddle horse, he carried her away on his shoulders. This all happened so fast that the Philosopher could hardly come to his senses and grab his own knees, trying to hold his legs back, but to his great amazement, they lifted against his will and galloped faster than a Circassian trotter. Only when they had already left the farmstead and a flat valley opened up before them, and woods as black as coal stretched out to the side, did he say to himself: “Aha! She’s a witch.”

The inverted sickle of the moon was shining in the sky. A timid midnight radiance, like a transparent veil, lay lightly on the earth and gave off smoke. Woods, meadows, sky, valleys—everything seemed to be sleeping with open eyes. If only a wind would flutter up somewhere. There was something moist and warm in the nocturnal freshness. Like comets, the shadows of trees and bushes cast dark wedge-shaped shadows on the sloping plain. That was the kind of night it was when the Philosopher Khoma Brut galloped with a weird rider on his back. He felt a kind of agonizing, unpleasant, and at the same time sweet feeling rising up to his heart. He lowered his head and saw that the grass that had been right under his feet seemed to be growing deeply downward and that above it was water as clear as a mountain spring, and the grass seemed to be the bottom of a sort of sea that was bright and transparent to its very depths. At least he could see clearly how he was reflected in it together with the old woman sitting on his back. He saw some sort of sun shining there instead of the moon; he heard bluebells ringing as they bent their little heads. He saw a water nymph swim out from behind some sedge, and caught a glimpse of her back and her leg, which was plump and springy, made all of gleaming and trembling. She turned toward him—and now her face, with bright, sparkling, piercing eyes that sang their way into his soul, was getting close to him, was on the surface, and then moved away, trembling with sparkling laughter—and now she had turned over onto her back, and her cloudlike breasts, with a matte surface like unglazed porcelain, shone translucent in the sun along the edges of their white, tenderly elastic roundedness. Water bestrewed them in little beadlike bubbles. She was all trembling and laughing in the water…

Was he seeing this or not? Was this in waking life or in a dream? And what’s that over there? The wind or music: It rings, it rings, and it twines, and it approaches, and it pierces the soul with a kind of unbearable trill…

“What is this?” the Philosopher Khoma Brut thought, looking beneath him as he flew at full speed. Sweat was pouring from him. He felt a demonically sweet sensation, he felt a kind of piercing, agonizingly frightening pleasure. It often seemed to him as if his heart was no longer in him, and in fright he tried to grasp it with his hand. Exhausted, bewildered, he started recalling all the prayers he knew. He went over in his mind all the incantations against evil spirits—and suddenly he felt a kind of refreshment; he felt that his pace was getting lazier, and the witch was holding onto his back more feebly. The thick grass touched him, and he no longer saw anything unusual about it. The bright sickle shone in the sky.

“All right, good!” the Philosopher Khoma thought to himself, and started uttering the incantations almost out loud. Finally he leaped out from under the old woman with the speed of lightning and jumped up onto her back in his turn. The old woman started running with a quick, rhythmic pace, so fast that her rider could hardly catch his breath. He could just barely glimpse the earth beneath him. Everything was clear in the moonlight, although the moon was not full. The valleys were smooth, but he was glimpsing everything vaguely and in fragments because of the speed they were going. He grabbed a log that was lying on the road and started whacking the old woman with it with all his might. She uttered wild howls. At first her howls were angry and threatening, then they became feebler, more pleasant, purer, and finally they were just barely ringing softly, like fine little silver bells, and they sank deeply into his soul. Involuntarily the thought flashed in his head: Is this really the old woman? “Oh, I can’t do it any more,” she said in exhaustion and fell to the ground.

He stood on his feet and looked into her eyes: The dawn blazed up, and the golden domes of the churches of Kyiv gleamed in the distance. In front of him lay a beautiful woman with a disheveled plait of luxuriant hair, with eyelashes that were as long as arrows. Insensibly, she flung her bare white arms out to the sides and moaned, raising her tear-filled eyes upward.

Khoma began trembling like a leaf. Pity and a kind of strange excitement and cowardice, which he himself did not understand, overcame him; he started running as fast as he could. On the way, his heart pounded in agitation, and he could not explain to himself what this strange new feeling was that had overcome him. He no longer wanted to go to any farmsteads, and he hurried back to Kyiv, meditating on this inexplicable incident the whole way.

There were almost no bursaks in the city. They had all dispersed to various farmsteads, either on condition or without any sort of conditions, because at Little Russian farmsteads one can eat small dumplings, cheese, sour cream, and stuffed dumplings the size of a broad-brimmed hat, without paying a cent. The large dilapidated building in which the bursa was housed was completely empty, and no matter how the Philosopher rummaged in all the corners and even felt all the holes and depressions in the roof, he could find neither a piece of fatback nor an old roll that might have been hidden away by the bursaks, as was their habit.

But the Philosopher soon found a way to solve his problem. He walked three times through the marketplace, whistling. At the very end he winked at a young widow wearing a yellow cap and selling ribbons, shot, and wheels—and that very day he was given his fill of stuffed wheat dumplings, chicken… in short, it’s impossible to list everything he had at the table that was set for him in a small earthen house in the middle of a cherry orchard. That same evening the Philosopher was seen in a tavern. He was lying on a bench, smoking his pipe, as was his custom, and everyone saw him throw the Jewish tavern-keeper half a gold piece. A tankard stood in front of him. He watched the people coming in and going out with indifferent and contented eyes and was no longer thinking at all about the unusual incident that had happened to him.

■ □ ■

Meanwhile rumors spread everywhere that the daughter of one of the richest Cossack lieutenants, whose farmstead was located about thirty miles from Kyiv, had returned one day from a walk all beaten up.⁹ She had hardly had the strength to make it to her father’s house, she was on her deathbed, and before her hour of death she had expressed the desire to have the prayers for the dying read for her for the three days after her death by one of the Kyiv seminarists: Khoma Brut. The Philosopher learned this from the rector himself, who had officially summoned him into his room and declared that he must quickly set off, without any delay, and that the eminent Cossack lieutenant had sent servants and a wagon expressly for him.

The Philosopher shuddered with a kind of instinctive feeling that he himself would not have been able to explain. A dark premonition told him that something evil was awaiting him. Without himself knowing why, he declared straight out that he would not go.

“Listen, Mister Khoma!” the rector said (on certain occasions he could speak very politely to his subordinates), “no one gives a good goddamn whether or not you want to go. All I’ll say to you is that if you’re going to kick up your heels and try to be smart, I’ll order them to whip your back and other bodily parts with a young birch so that you won’t need to go to the bathhouse.”¹⁰

The Philosopher went out of the room, scratching lightly behind his ear, not saying a word, and planning at the first opportunity to place his hopes in his own legs. Deep in thought, he descended the steep staircase that led into the courtyard planted with poplars, and he stopped for a moment, hearing distinctly the voice of the rector, who was giving orders to his steward and to someone else, probably one of the people the lieutenant had sent to get him.

“Thank his lordship for the millet and eggs,” the rector was saying, “and tell him that as soon as those books he wrote about are ready, I’ll send them immediately. I’ve already given them to the scribe to copy. And don’t forget, my dear man, to add that I know they have some good fish, especially sturgeon, on their farm, and ask him to send some when he has a chance. The fish they have in the markets here is of poor quality and expensive. Yavtukh, give each of the lads a glass of vodka. And tie up the Philosopher, or he’ll surely make a run for it.”

“Look what a son of the devil he is!” the Philosopher thought to himself. “He’s sniffed me out, the long-legged rascal!”

He went down and saw a covered wagon that at first he took for a grain-drying barn on wheels. Indeed, it was as deep as an oven for baking bricks. It was the usual Krakow carriage in which fifty Jews will set off with their goods to all the towns in which they can sniff out a fair. About six hearty and strong Cossacks, already of middle age, were waiting for him. Their caftans made of fine cloth with tassels showed that they belonged to a quite notable and rich proprietor. Their small scars indicated that they had at one time played a not inglorious role in war.

“What is to be done? Whatever will be, will be,” the Philosopher thought to himself, and turning to the Cossacks, he said loudly, “Hello, comrade brothers!”

“Greetings, Mister Philosopher!” some of the Cossacks answered.

“So I’m to sit with you? This is quite a splendid carriage!” he continued as he climbed in. “All you have to do is hire some musicians, and you could have a dance in it.”

“Yes, it’s a well-proportioned carriage!” one of the Cossacks said as he took a seat on the box alongside the coachman, who had wound a rag around his head to replace the cap he had left behind in a tavern. The other five men together with the Philosopher climbed into the depths of the carriage and took their seats on sacks filled with various goods they had bought in the town.

“It would be interesting to know,” the Philosopher said, “if, for example, you were to fill this carriage with some kind of goods—let’s say salt or iron wedges—how many horses would you need then to pull it?”

“Yes,” the Cossack on the box said after a moment’s silence, “you’d need a pretty good number of horses.”

After this satisfactory answer the Cossack considered himself fully justified in remaining silent for the rest of the journey.

The Philosopher very much wanted to find out in more detail: who was this lieutenant; what was his disposition; what did people know about his daughter, who had returned home in such an unusual fashion and was now at death’s door, and whose story was now somehow tied to his own; how did they live and what went on in their home? He addressed his questions to the men, but apparently the Cossacks were also philosophers, because they answered him by remaining silent and smoking their pipes as they lay on the sacks. Only one of them addressed the driver on the box with the terse order: “Watch out, Overko, you’re such an old scatterbrain. As soon as you get to the tavern on the Chukhrailovsky Road, don’t forget to stop and wake me and the other lads up, if any of us has happened to fall asleep.” After saying this, he fell asleep rather loudly. These instructions were quite superfluous, however, because hardly had the gigantic carriage come near the tavern on the Chukhrailovsky Road than they all shouted in one voice: “Stop!” Moreover, Overko’s horses were so well trained that they stopped in front of every tavern all by themselves.

Despite the hot July day, they all got out of the carriage and went into the low-ceilinged dingy room where the Jewish innkeeper rushed to receive his old acquaintances with signs of joy. The Jew brought some pork sausages hidden under his shirt, and after laying them on the table, he immediately turned his back on this fruit forbidden by the Talmud. They all took seats around the table. Earthenware tankards appeared in front of each guest. The Philosopher Khoma was obligated to take part in the general carousal. And since Little Russians, when they go on a binge, never fail to start kissing or crying, soon the whole hut was filled with the sounds of kissing: “Oh, Spirid, let’s kiss!”—“Come here, Dorosh, I’ll give you a hug!”

One Cossack who was a little older than the others, with a gray mustache, propped his cheek on his hand and started sobbing with deep feeling about the fact that he had neither father nor mother and had ended up all by his lonesome in the world. Another was a great thinker and kept consoling him, saying, “Don’t cry, by God, don’t cry! What’s all this… God knows what all this is.”

The one named Dorosh got very curious and kept addressing questions to the Philosopher Khoma: “I’d like to know what they teach you in that bursa. Do they teach you the same thing the lector reads out in church, or something else?”

“Don’t ask!” the great thinker drawled out. “Just let everything be the way it was. God knows how things should be; God knows everything.”

“No, I want to know,” Dorosh said, “what’s written in those books. Maybe it’s something entirely different from what the lector reads.”

“Oh, my God, my God!” the well-respected preceptor said. “Why say such things? It’s as God’s will has decreed. Whatever God has given, no one can change.”

“I want to know everything that’s been written. I’ll go to the bursa, honest to God, I’ll go! You think I can’t learn it all? I’ll learn it all, all of it!”

“Oh, my God, my God!” the consoler said and lowered his head to the table, because he no longer had the strength to hold it up on his shoulders.

The other Cossacks were talking about landowners and about why the moon shines in the sky.

The Philosopher Khoma, seeing the state all their heads were in, resolved to make use of it and slip away. At first he turned to the gray-haired Cossack who was grieving about his father and mother: “Why are you weeping, old fellow,” he said, “I’m an orphan myself! Lads, let me go free! What am I to you?”

“Let’s let him go free!” some of them responded. “He’s an orphan, after all. Let him go wherever he wants.”

“Oh, my God, my God!” the consoler said, raising his head. “Let him go! Let him go on his way!”

And the Cossacks were ready to lead him out into the open field, but the one who had displayed his curiosity stopped them, saying:

“Don’t touch him. I want to talk to him about the bursa. I’m going to the bursa myself.”

But this escape could hardly have succeeded anyway, because when the Philosopher tried to get up from the table, his legs seemed to have turned to wood, and he was seeing such a multitude of doors in the room that he could hardly have figured out which was the real one.

Only in the evening did this whole company remember that they needed to continue their journey. They clambered into the carriage and set off, urging on the horses and singing a song whose words and meaning no one would have been able to make out. After traveling the greater part of the night, constantly losing their way although they knew it by heart, they finally went down a steep hill into a valley, and the Philosopher noticed a paling or wattle fence stretching out on either side, with short trees and roofs peeking out from behind them. This was the large hamlet that belonged to the lieutenant. It was long past midnight; the sky was dark, and tiny little stars twinkled here and there. No light could be seen in a single hut. They rode into the farmyard, accompanied by the barking of dogs. On either side one could see barns and little houses with straw roofs. One of them, located right in the middle opposite the gates, was larger than the others and seemed to be the residence of the lieutenant. The carriage stopped in front of a small simulacrum of a barn, and our travelers went to find sleeping places. The Philosopher, however, wished to look around the master’s mansions from the outside for a while; but no matter how he strained his eyes, nothing would appear in a clear form: instead of a house he’d see a bear; a chimney would become the rector. The Philosopher gave up and went to find a place to sleep.

When the Philosopher woke up, the whole house was in motion: The pannochka had died in the night.¹¹ The servants were rushing back and forth. Some of the old women were crying. A crowd of curious people were looking through the fence at the master’s farmyard, as if they could catch sight of something.

The Philosopher began to inspect at his leisure the places he hadn’t been able to discern the night before. The master’s house was a small, low building of the kind that used to be built in the old days in Little Russia. It had a straw roof. A small gable with a sharp, tall peak and a little window that looked like an upraised eye was decorated with painted light-blue and yellow flowers and red crescents. It was supported by oak pillars that were round from halfway up and hexagonal below that, with fancifully carved tops. Under this gable was a small porch with little benches on each side. On the sides of the house were canopies supported on the same sort of pillars, some of which were in the form of a spiral. In front of the house was a tall green pear tree with a pyramidal crown and trembling leaves. Several storehouses stood in front of the house in two rows, forming a kind of broad street leading to the house. Behind the storehouses, up against the gates, stood two triangular wine cellars, one opposite the other, also roofed in straw. Each cellar’s triangular wall had a low door and was decorated with various painted images. On one was painted a Cossack sitting on a barrel, holding a tankard over his head, with the caption: “I’ll drink it all.” On the other was a bottle and flasks, and to enhance the beauty, on the sides were painted an upside-down horse, a pipe, tambourines, and the caption: “Wine is the Cossack’s joy.” From a huge dormer window in the attic of one of the barns a drum and some brass trumpets peeped out. Two cannons stood by the gates. Everything showed that the master of the house liked to have a good time and that his yard often heard the resounding shouts of a drinking bout.

Beyond the gates were two windmills. Behind the house stretched the gardens, and through the tops of the trees all you could see were the dark chimney tops of the huts that were hidden in the thick green foliage. The whole hamlet was situated on the broad and even ledge of a hill. From the north, the steep hill shielded it all, and its base ended right at the farmyard. When you looked at the hill from below, it seemed even steeper, and on its high top the irregular stalks of scraggly weeds stuck out here and there and showed black against the bright sky. The hill’s bare, clayey appearance inspired a feeling of despondency.¹² It was all pitted by rain gullies and ruts. On its steep slope two huts stuck up in two places. Over one of them spread the branches of a broad apple tree, supported at its roots by small stakes with dirt mounded up on them. Apples blown down by the wind came rolling down all the way to the master’s yard. A road came winding down from the very top of the hill, and as it descended it went past the farmyard into the hamlet. When the Philosopher measured its terrible steepness and recalled their journey of the night before, he decided that either the master had the most intelligent horses ever, or the Cossacks had the strongest heads ever, if in their drunken state they had managed not to go flying head over heels along with their enormous carriage and baggage. The Philosopher was standing on the highest point in the yard, and when he turned around and looked in the other direction, he saw something completely different. The hamlet rolled down the slope to a plain. Boundless meadows opened up into distant space; their bright greenness got darker the farther away they were, and whole strings of hamlets showed dark blue in the distance, although they were more than fifteen miles away. To the right of these meadows stretched a line of hills, and off in the distance the strip of the Dnieper River shimmered darkly.

“Oh, what a beautiful place!” the Philosopher said. “I’d love to live here, fish in the Dnieper and in the ponds, go hunting with snares or a gun for little bustards and snipe! Come to think, I bet there are quite a few great bustards in these meadows too. You could dry a ton of fruit and sell it in the city, or even better, make vodka out of it, because fruit vodka is incomparably better than grain vodka. And it wouldn’t hurt to start thinking about how to slip away from here.”

He spied out a little path beyond the wattle fence, completely covered with overgrown weeds. He stepped onto it absentmindedly, thinking that he’d first take a little stroll, and then on the quiet, between the huts, he’d light out running into the fields, when suddenly he felt a firm hand on his shoulder.

Behind him stood that same old Cossack who yesterday had so bitterly mourned the deaths of his father and mother and grieved his own loneliness.

“Mister Philosopher, you’re wrong to think you’re going to take to your heels from the farmstead!” he said. “This isn’t the kind of establishment from which you can escape. The roads are no good for traveling on foot. You’d better go see the master. He’s long been waiting for you in the parlor.”

“Let’s go! What do you mean… I’d be happy to,” the Philosopher said and went along with the Cossack.

The lieutenant, an aged man, with a gray mustache and an expression of gloomy sadness, was sitting at a table in the parlor, leaning his head on both hands. He was about fifty years old, but the deep despondency on his face and a kind of pale, gaunt color showed that his soul had been killed and destroyed suddenly, in a single moment, and all his former gaiety and raucous life had disappeared forever. When Khoma came in with the old Cossack, he removed one hand and slightly nodded in response to their low bows.

Khoma and the Cossack stood respectfully by the door.

“Who are you, and where are you from, and what is your rank, my good man?” the lieutenant said, neither kindly nor sternly.

“I am a bursak, the Philosopher Khoma Brut.”

“And who was your father?”

“I don’t know, noble sir.”

“And your mother?”

“I don’t know who my mother was either. According to sound reasoning, I must have had a mother, of course; but who she was, and where she was from, and when she lived—honest to God, my lord, I do not know.”

The lieutenant was silent for a moment and seemed to have fallen into thought.

“But how did you meet my daughter?”

“I never met her, noble sir, honest to God, never. I’ve never had any dealings with pannochkas as long as I’ve lived. God keep them away from me, let me say that instead of a dirty word.”

“But why then did she ask by name for you to read, and not someone else?”

The Philosopher shrugged: “God knows how to explain it. It’s a well-known fact that noble people sometimes want things that the most literate person can’t figure out. Even the proverb says, ‘The devil has to jump when the lord gives him an order!’ ”

“Are you perhaps lying to me, Mister Philosopher?”

“May thunder strike me down on this very spot if I’m lying,”

“If you had only lived just a tiny minute more,” the lieutenant said sadly, “then I would probably have found out everything. ‘Don’t let anyone read over me, Daddy, but send immediately to the Kyiv seminary and have them bring the bursak Khoma Brut. Let him pray for three nights for my sinful soul. He knows…’ But what he knows, I did not hear. That’s all the darling girl was able to say, then she died. You, good man, are probably well known for your holy life and your charitable works, and perhaps she heard about you.”

“Who, me?” the bursak said, stepping back in amazement. “My holy life?” he said, looking right into the lieutenant’s eyes. “God be with you, sir! What are you talking about! Although it might be indecent to mention it, I went to see the baker-woman right before Maundy Thursday.”¹³

“Hmmm… well, she must have had some reason for naming you. You must begin your task this very day.”

“In answer to that I would say to your lordship that of course any person who is learned in the Holy Scripture might be able to do this in some degree… but propriety demands a deacon or at least a lector for this task. They are sensible people and know how to do all this, while I… And I don’t have the right kind of voice, and I myself am the devil knows what. I don’t look like anything at all.”

“You can say whatever you like, but I am going to carry out everything that my darling girl left me to do as her dying will, without sparing myself. And if you read the prayers over her in a proper fashion for the next three nights, I will reward you; if not—I wouldn’t advise the devil himself to get me angry.”

The lieutenant uttered these last words so firmly that the Philosopher fully understood their meaning.

“Come with me!” the lieutenant said.

They went out into the entryway. The lieutenant opened the door into another parlor that was opposite the first. The Philosopher stopped for a moment in the entryway to blow his nose and then stepped across the threshold with a kind of inexplicable terror. The floor was carpeted in red nankeen cloth. In the corner under the icons, the body of the dead young woman lay on a high table, on a dark-blue velvet blanket trimmed with golden fringe and tassels. Tall wax tapers with guelder-roses wound around them stood at the foot and head of the table, shedding their dull light, which was lost in the light of the sun. The face of the dead woman was screened from him by the inconsolable father, who sat before her with his back turned toward the door. The Philosopher was struck by the words he heard: “My dearest, darling daughter, I don’t regret the fact that you have left the earth in the flower of your years, without living out your appointed time, to my great sadness and grief. My little sweetheart, I do not regret the fact that I do not know who my mortal enemy is, the man who caused your death. And if I knew who it was who could even think of offending you or even saying something unpleasant about you, I swear to God, he would no longer see his children, if he’s as old as I am; nor his father and mother, if he is still in the prime of life, and his body would be cast out to be eaten by birds and the beasts of the steppe. But my darling wild marigold, my little quail, my little star, my sorrow is that I must live out the rest of my life without any joy, wiping away with the hem of my shirt the constant tears flowing from my old eyes, while my enemy will be making merry and secretly laughing at the feeble old man…”

He stopped because of a burst of grief that resolved into a whole flood of tears.

The Philosopher was moved by such inconsolable sadness. He coughed and made a little sound to clear his throat.

The lieutenant turned around and pointed him to a place at the head of the dead woman, in front of a small lectern with books on it.

“I’ll somehow manage to work through the three nights,” the Philosopher thought, “and his lordship will fill both my pockets with clean banknotes for it.”

He came closer, cleared his throat again, and started to read, not paying any attention to anything else and resolving not to look at the face of the dead woman. A deep silence reigned. He noticed that the lieutenant went out. Khoma slowly turned his head to look at the dead woman and…

A shiver went through his veins: Before him lay a beauty the likes of which had never been seen on earth. It seemed that never before had facial features been formed in such a sharply defined and at the same time harmonious beauty. She lay as if still alive. Her beautiful brow, tender as snow or silver, seemed to be thinking; her fine, even eyebrows, like night in the middle of a sunny day, rose proudly over her closed eyes, and her eyelashes lay like arrows on her cheeks, which glowed with the fire of secret desires; her lips were rubies ready to break out into a grin… But he saw something terrifyingly piercing in those very features. He felt his soul begin to ache painfully, as if suddenly in the middle of a whirlwind of carousing and a madly dancing crowd someone had struck up a song about an oppressed people.¹⁴ The rubies of her lips seemed to be stuck to his very heart by blood. Suddenly something terrifyingly familiar appeared in her face.

“The witch!” he screamed in a voice not his own, moved his eyes away, turned all pale, and started to read his prayers.

It was the same witch that he had killed.

When the sun started to go down, they carried the dead woman to the church. The Philosopher supported the black funereal coffin with one shoulder and felt something on that shoulder that was as cold as ice. The lieutenant himself walked in front, carrying the right side of the dead woman’s cramped house with his arm. The wooden church, all blackened, covered with green moss, with three cone-shaped domes, stood dejectedly almost on the edge of the village. One could see that no services had been held in it for a long time. There were candles lit in front of almost every icon. They put the coffin in the middle, right opposite the altar. The old lieutenant kissed the dead woman once more, prostrated himself, and left along with the pallbearers. He gave an order to feed the Philosopher well and then bring him to the church after supper. When they came into the kitchen, all the pallbearers started to warm their hands at the stove, which is what Little Russians usually do after they’ve seen a corpse.

The hunger that the Philosopher had started to feel at that time caused him to forget the dead woman completely for a few minutes. Soon all the servants gradually gathered in the kitchen. The kitchen in the lieutenant’s home was something like a club where everyone who lived in the farmstead thronged, including the dogs who came, with their tails wagging, up to the very door to get bones and slops. No matter where a person had been sent and no matter what their errand, they would always stop in at the kitchen first in order to rest a moment on the bench and smoke a pipe. All the bachelors who lived in the house, sporting their Cossack caftans, would lie here almost all day on a bench, under a bench, on the stove—in short, wherever they could find a comfortable place for lying around. Plus they were always forgetting something in the kitchen—either a cap, or a whip to ward off strange dogs, or something like that. But the largest gathering would be at suppertime, when the horse-wrangler, who had managed to drive his horses into the paddock, and the drover, who had brought the cows in to be milked, and all those people one didn’t see during the day, would come. Over supper even the most reticent tongues would be overcome by chatter. They would talk about everything: about who had had new trousers made, and what can be found in the middle of the earth, and who had seen a wolf. There were a lot of specialists in the bon mot, who are always in abundance among the Little Russians.

The Philosopher sat down with the others in a big circle in the fresh air in front of the threshold to the kitchen. Soon a peasant woman in a red coif popped out of the door, holding a hot crock full of dumplings in both hands, and put it down in the middle of the circle of people waiting for their supper. Each one took a wooden spoon out of his pocket, except for those who didn’t have one, who got out sharp-pointed sticks they could skewer the dumplings with. As soon as their mouths started to move a little more slowly and the wolfish hunger of the whole gathering had been somewhat sated, many of them started to converse. Naturally the conversation turned to the dead woman.

“Is it true,” said one young shepherd, who had put so many buttons and brass plates on the leather shoulder belt he carried his pipe on that it looked like a petty tradeswoman’s shop, “is it true that the pannochka, not to speak ill of the dead, but is it true she had dealings with the Evil One?”

“Who? The pannochka?” said Dorosh, with whom our Philosopher was already acquainted. “She was a downright witch! I swear she was a witch!”

“That’s enough, Dorosh!” said the man who had been so eager to console people when they were on the road. “It’s none of our business, let it go. There’s no need to talk about that.”

But Dorosh was in no mood to stay silent. He had just gone down to the wine cellar with the steward on some important errand, and after bending over two or three barrels he had come out quite happy and talking nonstop.

“What do you want? You want me to keep silent?” he said. “Why, she took a ride on my back! Honest to God, she did!”

“Say, old fellow,” said the young shepherd with the buttons, “are there some kind of markings you can tell a witch by?”

“No,” Dorosh answered. “You can’t tell, even if you read all the Psalters, you won’t be able to tell.”

“Yes, you can, Dorosh. Don’t say that,” said the consoler. “God has given everyone a particular custom. People who know their stuff say that a witch has a tiny little tail.”

“If a woman is old, then she’s a witch,” the gray-haired Cossack said coolly.

“Oh, you’re fine ones!” caught up the woman, who was pouring fresh dumplings into the crock that had been emptied out, “you’re regular fat old castrated hogs.”

A smile of pleasure appeared on the lips of the old Cossack, whose name was Yavtukh (nickname Hair-Mat), because he saw that his words had really hit home with the old woman, and the cattle drover gave such a loud laugh it was as if two bulls standing face to face had started bellowing at the same time.¹⁵

The conversation they had started aroused an insurmountable desire and curiosity in the Philosopher to find out in more detail about the lieutenant’s dead daughter. So he tried to bring the conversation back to the previous topic by addressing his neighbor with the following words: “I would like to ask why this whole estate of people sitting over supper considers the pannochka to be a witch? Did she really do any evil to anyone or torment anyone?”

“All kinds of things happened,” answered one of the people sitting there, whose face was so smooth it had an uncanny resemblance to a spade.

“Who doesn’t remember Mikita the master of hounds, or the one…”

“What about Mikita the master of hounds?” asked the Philosopher.

“Wait! I’ll tell him about Mikita the master of hounds,” said Dorosh.

“I’ll tell about Mikita,” the horse-wrangler answered, “he was my best friend.”¹⁶

“I’ll tell about Mikita,” said Spirid.

“Let him, let Spirid tell it!” the crowd shouted.

Spirid began: “You didn’t know Mikita, Mister Philosopher Khoma. Oh, what a rare person he was! He knew each dog as if it were his own father. Our present master of hounds Mikola, who’s sitting right over there, can’t hold a candle to him. Although he knows his business, in comparison to Mikita he’s trash, garbage.”

“You’re telling it well, really well!” Dorosh said, nodding with approval.

Spirid continued: “He’d see a hare before you could wipe the snuff from your nose. He’d whistle: ‘Come on, Bandit, come on, Speedy!’ and he’d be riding his horse at full speed himself—and you couldn’t tell who would overtake who first: would he outrun the dog or the dog outrun him. He’d swill down a quart of moonshine as if it was nothing. He was a great master of hounds! But just recently he started constantly looking at the pannochka. Whether he’d fallen in love with her or she’d bewitched him, he was just ruined, he became just like a woman; he became the devil knows what; ugh! it’s indecent even to say.”

“He’s telling it well,” said Dorosh.

“As soon as the pannochka would look at him he’d drop the reins, he’d call Bandit Hound-Dog, he’d stumble, and who knows what else he’d do. Once the pannochka came to the stable where he was grooming his horse. ‘Come on, Mikitka,’ she said, ‘let me put my little leg on you.’ And like a fool he was happy about it. He said, ‘Don’t just put your little leg on me, but mount on top of me yourself.’ The pannochka raised her little leg, and as soon as he saw her bare, plump, white leg, they say he was dazed by a spell. The fool bent his back, and taking hold of her bare legs with both hands, he started galloping like a horse all over the field, and he couldn’t say all the places they went; but he came back hardly alive, and from that time he just dried up like a wood chip, and one day when they came to the stable, they found instead of him just a pile of ashes and an empty bucket: He had burned right up, all by himself. And he was the sort of master of hounds that you can’t find in the whole world.”

When Spirid had finished his story, everyone started talking about the fine qualities of the former master of hounds.

“And did you hear about Sheptun’s wife?” Dorosh said, turning to Khoma.¹⁷

“No.”

“O-ho-ho! So they don’t teach you everything there in the bursa. Well, listen! We have a Cossack in the village called Sheptun. A good Cossack! Sometimes he likes to steal and he’ll lie for no good reason, but he’s a good Cossack. His hut isn’t far from here. At just about the same time that we’ve been having supper today, Sheptun and his wife went to bed after supper, and since it was nice weather, Sheptun’s wife lay down in the yard, and Sheptun lay down in the hut on the bench; or no: It was Sheptun’s wife who lay down in the hut on the bench, and Sheptun lay down in the yard…”

“Sheptun’s wife lay down on the floor, not on the bench,” the woman interjected, standing on the threshold and leaning her cheek on her hand.

Dorosh looked at her, then looked down, then again at her, and after a brief silence, he said: “When I pull off your underskirt in front of everyone, it’s not going to be very nice.”

This warning had its effect. The old woman fell silent and did not interrupt again.

Dorosh continued: “So in the cradle that hung in the middle of the hut was lying a year-old child—I don’t know whether of the male or female sex. Sheptun’s wife was lying there, and then she heard a dog scratching at the door and howling so that you wanted to run out of the hut. She got scared, because women are such stupid folk that if you stick your tongue out at one of them from the doorway, she’ll start shaking with fear. Anyway, she thought, why don’t I just hit the damned dog in the snout, and maybe he’ll stop howling—and taking the poker, she went out to open the door. But as soon as she opened it just a little, the dog rushed between her legs and went right to the child’s cradle. Sheptun’s wife saw that it wasn’t a dog any more but the pannochka. And if only it had been the pannochka in the form she knew her in—that wouldn’t have been so bad. But here’s the thing and here’s the situation: She was all dark-blue, and her eyes were burning like coals. She grabbed the child, bit into its neck, and started to drink its blood. Sheptun’s wife just screamed: ‘Oh, my God!’ and ran out of the hut. But she saw that the doors were locked in the entryway. She went to the attic; she sat there trembling, the stupid woman, and then she saw the pannochka coming up to her in the attic; the pannochka flung herself on the stupid woman and started biting her. The next morning Sheptun dragged his wife out of there, all bitten up and turned dark-blue. The next day the stupid woman died. So those are the kinds of arrangements and seductions that happen! Although she may be of noble spawn, a witch is still a witch.”

After telling this story Dorosh looked around with self-satisfaction and stuck his finger into his pipe, preparing it for stuffing in more tobacco. There seemed to be inexhaustible stores of material about the witch. Each one in his turn rushed to tell some kind of story. One of them had seen the witch in the form of a haystack come right up to the door of his hut; she had stolen a cap or a pipe from another; she had cut off the plaits of many of the young girls in the village; she had drunk several buckets of blood from others.

Finally the whole company pulled themselves together and saw that they had gotten carried away in chattering, because night had fallen. They all started dispersing to their sleeping places, either in the kitchen or in the barns or out in the yard.

“All right, Mister Khoma! Now it’s time for us to go to the deceased woman,” the gray-haired Cossack said, turning to the Philosopher, and all four of them, including Spirid and Dorosh, set off for the church, using their whips to lash the dogs, of which there was a great multitude on the street, and who were viciously gnawing at their walking sticks.

The Philosopher, despite the fact that he had fortified himself with a good-sized tankard of vodka, secretly felt cowardice setting in as they came near the illuminated church. The tales and strange stories he had heard caused his imagination to work even harder. The gloom under the lath fence and the trees started to thin out; the place became more exposed and bare. Finally they walked through the ramshackle church paling into a small yard, beyond which there was not a single little tree, and only an empty field and meadows engulfed by nocturnal gloom opened before them. The three Cossacks and Khoma climbed a steep staircase to the porch and entered the church. Here the Cossacks left the Philosopher, wishing him a successful execution of his duties, and locked the door behind him, as the master had ordered.

The Philosopher remained alone. At first he yawned, then he stretched, then he blew into his hands, and finally he looked around. In the middle of the church stood the coffin. Candles glimmered in front of the darkened icons. Their light illuminated only the iconostasis and a bit of the center of the church. The distant corners of the narthex were wrapped in gloom. The tall, ancient iconostasis displayed its extreme decrepitude; its gilded openwork carving shone only in sparks now. In some places the gilding had fallen off, in others it had turned quite black; the visages of the saints, completely darkened, had a gloomy look. The Philosopher looked around once again.

“Well,” he said, “what is there here to be afraid of? A man can’t come in here, and for corpses and ghosts I have such prayers that as soon as I read them, the spirits can’t touch me. All right!” he repeated, waving his hand. “Let’s start reading!”

As he approached the choir, he saw several bundles of candles.

“That’s good,” the Philosopher thought. “I should light up the whole church so that one can see as well as by day. Oh, it’s just too bad that in God’s temple you can’t smoke your pipe!”

And he started sticking the wax candles to all the cornices, lecterns, and icons, not stinting on them, until the whole church was filled with light. But the gloom seemed to become even thicker up above, and the gloomy icons looked more morosely out of their ancient carved frames, whose gilding still sparkled here and there. He went up to the coffin and looked fearfully into the face of the dead woman. He couldn’t help but squint his eyes with a slight shudder.

Such terrifying, sparkling beauty!

He turned and wanted to walk away; but thanks to a strange curiosity, a strange contradictory feeling that does not leave a man especially during times of terror, he couldn’t resist looking at her one more time as he walked away, and then, feeling the same trepidation, he looked at her once more. Indeed, the sharply defined beauty of the deceased woman seemed terrifying. Perhaps she wouldn’t have inspired such panicked horror if she had been a bit uglier. But there was nothing dim, turbid, or dead in her features. The face was alive, and it seemed to the Philosopher as if she was looking at him with her closed eyes. It even seemed to him as if a tear started trickling from under the lashes of her right eye, and when it came to rest on her cheek, he could see clearly that it was a drop of blood.

He hurriedly walked over to the choir, opened a book, and in order to give himself courage, he began to read in the loudest possible voice. His voice struck the wooden church walls, which had long been silent and deaf. All alone, with no echo, his thick bass voice poured forth in the completely dead silence, seeming somewhat wild and strange even to the reader himself.

“What is there to be afraid of?” he thought to himself meanwhile. “She’s not going to rise from her coffin, because she will fear the word of God. Let her lie there! What kind of Cossack am I if I get scared? All right, so I drank a little too much—that’s why it seems scary. I’ll just take some snuff. Oh, good old snuff! Wonderful snuff! Great snuff!”

But as he turned each page, he kept looking sideways at the coffin, and it seemed that an involuntary feeling was whispering to him: “She’s going to rise now! She’s getting up now, she’s about to look out of the coffin!”

But there was dead silence. The coffin stood immobile. The candles were pouring out a whole flood of light. Fearful is a church illuminated at night, with a dead body and not a single other human soul!

Raising his voice, he started to sing in different voices, wishing to muffle the remains of his fear. But every moment he kept turning his eyes to the coffin, as if involuntarily asking the question: “What if she gets up, if she rises?”

But the coffin did not stir. If only there had been some sound, some living creature, even a cricket making an answering sound in the corner! All that could be heard was the slight crackling of a distant candle or the faint plopping sound of a drop of wax falling to the floor.

“What if she gets up?…”

She lifted her head…

He looked at her wildly and rubbed his eyes. Indeed she was no longer lying down, but was sitting up in her coffin. He turned his eyes away and then turned toward the coffin in horror. She got up… she was walking around the church with her eyes closed, constantly stretching out her arms as if trying to catch someone.

She was walking straight toward him. In terror he drew a circle around himself. He made an effort and began to read the prayers and recite the incantations that he had been taught by a certain monk who had seen witches and evil spirits his whole life long.

She came to stand almost right on the line itself, but it was clear that she did not have the power to step across it. She had turned all dark blue, like a person who has been dead for several days. Khoma did not have the courage to look at her. She was terrifying. She gnashed her teeth and opened her dead eyes. But since she couldn’t see anything, with fury expressed on her quivering face, she turned in another direction, stretching out her arms and grabbing at every pillar and corner, trying to catch Khoma. Finally she stopped, shook a threatening finger at him, and lay down in her coffin.

The Philosopher was still unable to come to his senses and kept looking in terror at the witch’s cramped dwelling place. Finally the coffin suddenly tore away from its place and started flying all around the church with a whistling sound, crossing the air in all directions. The Philosopher saw it go almost above his head, but at the same time he saw that the coffin could not cross the circle he had drawn, so he intensified his recital of the incantations. The coffin crashed down in the middle of the church and remained motionless. The corpse again got up out of it, all green and dark-blue. But at that moment the distant cry of a rooster was heard. The corpse lowered itself into the coffin and slammed the lid shut.

The Philosopher’s heart was pounding and sweat was pouring from him, but emboldened by the rooster’s cry, he quickly finished reading the pages he was supposed to have read earlier. At the first light of dawn the lector and the gray-haired Yavtukh, now in the capacity of a churchwarden, came to relieve him.

After finding his distant sleeping place, the Philosopher could not fall asleep for a long time, but his fatigue overcame him, and he slept until the midday meal. When he woke up, the whole nocturnal event seemed to have taken place in a dream. They gave him a quart of vodka to restore his strength. Over the meal he soon relaxed. He added a few remarks to what was being said and ate almost a whole somewhat old suckling pig, but because of a feeling he himself couldn’t explain, he could not bring himself to speak about the event in the church, and to the questions of the curious he answered: “Yes, there were all kinds of marvels.” The Philosopher was one of those people who conceive an extraordinary philanthropy once they’ve been well fed. Lying there with his pipe between his teeth, he looked at everyone with extraordinarily sweet eyes and kept spitting to the side.

After the midday meal the Philosopher was in very good spirits. He managed to walk all around the hamlet and meet almost everyone. He was even driven out of two huts; one pretty young peasant wife gave him a good smack on the back with a spade when he had gotten it into his head to take a feel to see what kind of material her blouse and skirt were made of. But the closer it came to evening time, the more pensive the Philosopher got. An hour before supper almost all the servants gathered to play ball or kragli—a kind of skittles that uses long sticks instead of balls, in which the winner has the right to ride on the back of another player. This game became very interesting for the spectators: Often the drover, who was as broad as a pancake, would straddle the swineherd, a short, puny man who consisted entirely of wrinkles. Another time the drover offered his back, and as he jumped up onto him, Dorosh would always say, “What a big healthy bull!” The more respectable folks were sitting by the threshold to the kitchen. They had an extremely serious look as they smoked their pipes, even when the young people would be laughing heartily at some witticism by the drover or Spirid. In vain did Khoma try to join in this game. Some kind of dark thought was sitting in his head like a nail. No matter how he tried to cheer himself up over supper, terror blazed up in him along with the darkness that was spreading over the sky.

“All right, it’s time for us to go, Mister Bursak!” the familiar gray-haired Cossack said to him, getting up along with Dorosh. “Let’s go to work.”

They took Khoma to the church in the very same way. Again they left him alone and locked the door behind him. As soon as he remained alone, cowardice again started to take root in his breast. Again he saw the dark icons, the shining frames, and the familiar black coffin standing in threatening silence and immobility in the middle of the church.

“Well,” he said, “all these strange things won’t be anything new to me. It’s only scary the first time. Yes! It’s only a little scary the first time, and then it’s not scary any more; it’s not at all scary any more.”

He quickly took up his stance in the choir, drew a circle around himself, recited a few incantations, and began to read loudly, resolving not to raise his eyes from the book and not to pay attention to anything. He had been reading for about an hour when he started to get a little tired and felt the need to cough. He took his snuff horn out of his pocket and before he brought the snuff to his nose, he cast his eyes timidly at the coffin. His heart stood still.

The corpse was already standing in front of him right on the line and was fixing him with its dead eyes that had turned green. The bursak shuddered, and he could feel coldness running all through his veins. He lowered his eyes to the book and began to read his prayers and incantations more loudly, and he could hear the corpse again gnashing its teeth and waving its arms, trying to grab hold of him. But out of the corner of his eye he could see that the corpse was trying to catch him in a place where he wasn’t standing, and apparently could not see him. She started growling faintly and speaking terrible words with her dead lips; they sobbed hoarsely, like the gurgling of boiling pitch. What they meant he could not have said, but there was something terrifying in them. The Philosopher realized with terror that she was making incantations.¹⁸

The words caused a wind to blow through the church, and there was a sound as if from a multitude of flying wings. He heard the wings beating at the glass of the church windows and their iron frames, he heard their talons squeal as they scratched at the iron, and he heard an overwhelming force battering the doors and trying to break in. His heart was pounding all this time. He squeezed his eyes closed and kept reading incantations and prayers. Finally something suddenly whistled in the distance: It was the distant cry of a rooster. The exhausted Philosopher stopped, and his spirit rested.¹⁹

The men who came to relieve the Philosopher found him barely alive. He was leaning with his back to the wall and looked with motionless, bulging eyes at the Cossacks who were shoving him. They almost had to drag him out and had to support him the whole way back. When they got to the master’s farmyard, he pulled himself together and ordered them to give him a quart of vodka. After drinking it, he ran his hand over his hair and said: “A lot of trash happens in the world! And such terrors happen that—well…” The Philosopher waved his hand while saying this.

The people who had gathered around him in a circle lowered their heads when they heard these words. Even a little urchin boy, whom all the servants felt justified in deputizing for themselves when it was time to clean out the stable or carry water, even that poor little boy gaped at him.

At that moment a wench of not quite middle age, wearing a tight-fitting skirt that showed off her rounded and firm figure, was walking past. She was the assistant to the old cook, a terrible flirt, who was always finding something to pin to her coif: either a piece of ribbon, or a carnation, or even a scrap of paper, if she couldn’t find anything else.

“Hello there, Khoma!” she said when she saw the Philosopher. “Oh my goodness! What’s wrong with you?” she screamed, throwing up her hands.

“What are you talking about, you stupid woman?”

“Oh, my God! You’ve turned all gray!”

“Hey! She’s speaking the truth!” said Spirid, looking closely at him. “You’ve turned as gray as our old Yavtukh.”

Hearing this, the Philosopher took off running to the kitchen, where he noticed a triangular piece of mirror stuck to the wall, stained by fly droppings, in front of which were stuck forget-me-nots, periwinkles, and even a garland of marigolds, indicating that the mirror was used for the dressing ritual of the stylish flirt. With horror he saw the truth of their words: In fact half of his hair had turned white.

Khoma Brut hung his head and fell into meditation.

“I’ll go to the master,” he finally said, “I’ll tell him everything and explain that I cannot read any more. Let him send me back to Kyiv this very hour.”

Lost in these thoughts, he made his way to the porch of the master’s house.

The lieutenant was sitting almost motionless in his parlor. The same despairing sadness that Khoma had earlier encountered on his face was still preserved there to this moment. The only difference was that his cheeks had grown much more sunken. One could see that he had taken very little food, or perhaps had not touched any. His unusual pallor lent him a kind of stony immobility.

“Hello, poor man,” he said when he saw Khoma, who had stopped at the door with his cap in his hands. “How is your work going? Is everything going successfully?”

“It depends how you define ‘successfully.’ There are such devilish doings that you just want to take your cap and run off as fast as your legs will carry you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that your daughter, my lord… Of course according to sound reasoning, she is of noble family; no one can dispute that, but please don’t be offended, may God rest her soul…”

“What about my daughter?”

“She’s allowed Satan to service her.²⁰ She’s struck such terror into me that Holy Scripture has no role to play.”

“Keep reading, keep reading! She had some reason for summoning you. My dear sweetie took care for her soul and wanted to drive out all evil intentions by prayer.”

“As you wish, my lord. But honest to God, I can’t stand it any more!”

“Keep reading, keep reading!” the lieutenant continued in the same exhortative tone. “You only have one night left. You’ll do a Christian deed, and I’ll reward you.”

“No matter what rewards… Suit yourself, my lord, but I will not read!” Khoma said decisively.

“Listen, Philosopher!” the lieutenant said, and his voice had become firm and threatening, “I don’t like all these tales you’re telling. You can do that over in your bursa. But not with me: I’ll give you a flogging like you’ve never had from the rector. Do you know what good leather Cossack whips are like?”

“How could I help knowing!” the Philosopher said, lowering his voice. “Everyone knows what leather Cossack whips are. When you use a lot of them, it’s quite an unbearable thing.”

“Yes. But you don’t yet know how my lads can pour it on!” the lieutenant said threateningly, getting to his feet, and his face took on a commanding and savage expression that revealed his unbridled character, which had been lulled to sleep for a time by his grief. “First they’ll give you a good flogging, then they’ll sprinkle you with vodka, then they’ll do it again. Run along, do your job! If you don’t do it—you’ll never get up again; and if you do it—you’ll get a thousand gold pieces!”

“Oh-ho-ho! Now that’s a bold fellow!” the Philosopher thought as he went out. “He’s not to be trifled with. Just wait, my friend. I’ll take to my heels so fast you won’t be able to hunt me down with your dogs.”

And Khoma firmly decided to run away. He was just waiting for the hour after the midday meal, when all the servants had the habit of crawling into the hay near the barns, opening their mouths, and emitting so much snoring and whistling that the master’s farmstead began to resemble a factory. That time finally came. Even Yavtukh was lying stretched out in the sun with his eyes closed tight. The Philosopher, trembling in fear, set off quietly into the master’s garden, which seemed to him to be the easiest and least noticeable route for escape into the fields. This garden was terribly neglected and thus was extremely auspicious for all kinds of secret enterprises. Except for a single little path that had been trodden down for household needs, the whole garden was covered by thickly spreading cherry trees, elderberry bushes, and burdock, which had stuck up its tall stalks, with their prickly pink burrs, above all the rest. A hop plant covered the top of this whole motley collection of trees and bushes like a net, and formed a roof over them that stretched onto the wattle fence and fell down from it in curly snakes together with wild bluebells. Beyond the fence that served as a boundary for the garden extended a whole forest of tall weeds, into which it seemed no one had ever had the curiosity to peek. It seemed that a scythe would shatter into pieces if it tried to touch the thick woody stalks with its blade.

When the Philosopher prepared to step over the wattle fence, his teeth were chattering and his heart was beating so hard that he frightened himself. The hem of his long garment seemed to stick to the ground as if someone had nailed it down. When he was stepping over the fence, it seemed to him that some kind of voice was jabbering in his ear with a deafening whistle: “Where are you going, where are you going?” The Philosopher scampered into the weeds and set off running, constantly stumbling on the old roots and trampling on moles. He could see that after he got out of the weeds he would have to run across the field, beyond which one could see thick blackthorn shrubs, where he thought that he would be safe, and that once he passed through the blackthorn he would find the road leading straight to Kyiv. He quickly ran across the field and found himself in the thick blackthorn shrubs. He crawled through the blackthorn, leaving pieces of his frock coat on each sharp thorn instead of a toll. He found himself in a small gully. A pussy willow with its spreading branches reached almost to the ground in places. A small spring, as pure as silver, sparkled. The first thing the Philosopher did was lie down and drink his fill from it, because he was unbearably thirsty.

“Good water!” he said, wiping his mouth. “I can rest for a little while here.”

“No, we’d better keep moving. What if they pursue you!”

These words resounded right above his ears. He looked around: Yavtukh was standing before him.

“That damned Yavtukh!” the Philosopher thought angrily. “I’d like to take you by the legs… And I’d beat your disgusting face and everything else you have with an oak log.”

“You shouldn’t have gone such a roundabout way,” Yavtukh continued. “It’s much better to go the way I went, right past the stables. Too bad about your frock coat. It’s good cloth. How much did you pay per yard? Anyway, you’ve had a nice stroll, time to go home.”

The Philosopher followed Yavtukh, scratching his head. “Now the damned witch is really going to give it to me hot,” he thought. “But anyway, what am I, in fact? What am I afraid of? Am I not a Cossack? After all, I’ve read for two nights, God will help me with the third. That damned witch must have committed a pile of sins, since the powers of evil are so solidly behind her.”

These were his meditations as he entered the master’s farmyard. After cheering himself up with such observations, he asked Dorosh, who by virtue of the steward’s patronage sometimes had access to the master’s wine cellars, to grab a bottle of raw vodka. The two friends drank almost half a pail while sitting near the barn, so that the Philosopher suddenly got up onto his feet, shouting: “Musicians! I must have musicians!” Without waiting for the musicians, he started dancing a trepak in a clear space in the middle of the yard. He danced until it was time for the midafternoon snack, and the servants, who had surrounded him in a circle, as is usual in such cases, finally spat and walked away, saying, “That’s how long a man can keep dancing!” Finally the Philosopher lay down to sleep right on the spot, and it took a decent-sized tub of cold water to wake him up for supper. At supper he talked about what a Cossack is and how he shouldn’t fear anything on earth.

“It’s time,” Yavtukh said, “let’s go.”

“Curse your tongue, you damned boar!” the Philosopher thought. Getting up, he said, “Let’s go.”

As they walked, the Philosopher kept looking to both sides and tried to start up a conversation with his escorts. But Yavtukh was silent; even Dorosh was uninterested in talking. It was a hellish night. A whole pack of wolves was howling in the distance. And even the barking of the dogs was somehow terrifying.

“It seems something else is howling: That’s not a wolf,” Dorosh said.

Yavtukh was silent. The Philosopher could not find anything to say.

They neared the church and entered its decrepit wooden vaults, which showed how little the master of the estate had concerned himself with God and with his own soul. Yavtukh and Dorosh went away as they had before, and the Philosopher remained alone. Everything was just the same. Everything looked threateningly familiar as it had before. He stopped for a moment. In the middle of the church the coffin of the horrible witch stood just as immobile. “I’m not going to be afraid, honest to God, I’m not going to be afraid!” he said, and drawing a circle around himself as before, he began to recall all his incantations. The silence was terrifying; the candles flickered and flooded the whole church with light. The Philosopher turned over one page, then turned another, and noticed that he was reading something completely different from what was written in the book. With terror he crossed himself and began to sing. This emboldened him a bit; the reading started up again, and the pages flashed by one after another. Suddenly… amid the silence… the iron lid of the coffin broke open with a crash and the corpse got up. It was still more terrifying than the first time. Its teeth clashed against each other in a terrifying way, its lips were convulsed, and incantations rushed from it with a wild squealing. A whirlwind flew through the church, the icons fell to the ground, broken panes of the windows flew down from above. The doors tore off their hinges, and an overwhelming force of monsters flew into God’s church. The terrifying noise from their wings and the scraping of their talons filled the whole church. Everything was flying and soaring, seeking the Philosopher everywhere.

The very last traces of drunkenness left Khoma’s brain. He just kept crossing himself and reading the prayers haphazardly. All the while he could hear the evil powers rushing around him, almost touching him with the tips of their wings and their repulsive tails. He didn’t have the courage to look at them; all he could see was some kind of huge monster occupying the whole wall, enveloped in tangled hair as if in a forest; two eyes with brows slightly lifted looked through the network of hair in a terrifying way. Above it, something in the form of a huge bubble hovered in the air, with a thousand pincers and scorpion stingers extending out from it. Black earth hung on them in clumps. The monsters were all looking at him, searching for him, and couldn’t see him because he was surrounded by the mystical circle.²¹

“Bring Viy! Go get Viy!” resounded the words of the corpse.

And suddenly the church became silent; one could hear the wolves howling in the distance, and soon the sound of heavy steps echoed throughout the church; looking sideways, he could see that they were leading some kind of squat, burly, splay-footed person. He was all covered by black earth. His legs and arms, with earth scattered over them, protruded like sinewy, strong roots. He stepped heavily, constantly stumbling. His long eyelids hung down to the very ground. Khoma noticed with horror that his face was made of iron. They led him by the arms and placed him right by the spot where Khoma was standing.

“Lift my eyelids: I cannot see!” Viy said in an underground voice—and the whole mob rushed to lift his eyelids.

“Don’t look!” some kind of inner voice whispered to the Philosopher. He couldn’t resist and he looked.

“There he is!” Viy screamed, pointing his iron finger at him. And they all threw themselves onto the Philosopher. He crashed lifeless to the ground, and his spirit immediately flew out of him from terror.

The rooster’s cry resounded. This was the second cry; the gnomes had failed to hear the first one. The frightened spirits rushed helter-skelter to the windows and doors in order to fly out as fast as they could, but it was no use: They remained there, stuck to the doors and windows. When the priest came in, he stopped at the sight of such a desecration of God’s holy shrine and did not dare to hold the funeral service in such a place. And so the church remained forever with the monsters stuck to the doors and windows; it was overgrown by trees, roots, weeds, and wild blackthorn; and now no one can find the way to it.²²

■ □ ■

When rumors reached Kyiv about this, and the Theologian Khalyava finally learned of the fate of the Philosopher Khoma, he spent a whole hour thinking about it. During the intervening time great changes had happened to him. Happiness had smiled on him. After finishing his course of study he was made the bell ringer in the highest bell tower, and he almost always appeared with a smashed nose, because the wooden staircase in the bell tower had been built in a very slapdash fashion.

“Did you hear what happened to Khoma?” Tiberius Gorobets said to him. He had meanwhile become a Philosopher himself and was sporting a brand-new mustache.

“That was God’s will for him,” said the bell ringer Khalyava. “Let’s go to a tavern and drink to his memory!”

The young Philosopher, who had begun to enjoy his rights with the passion of an enthusiast, so that his trousers, and his frock coat, and even his cap gave off a smell of alcohol and shag tobacco, immediately expressed his willingness to partake.

“Khoma was a really good fellow!” the bell ringer said, when the lame tavern keeper had placed his third tankard in front of him. “He was a notable fellow! And he perished for no good reason.”

“I know why he perished: because he was afraid. If he hadn’t been afraid, the witch couldn’t have done anything to him. All you have to do is cross yourself and spit right on her tail, and then nothing will happen to you. I know all about it. After all, here in Kyiv all the women who sit in the bazaars are witches.”

To this the bell ringer nodded his head as a sign of agreement. But when he noticed that his tongue could no longer utter a single word, he carefully got up from the table and went staggering off to hide in the most distant spot in the tall weeds. At the same time, according to his old custom, he didn’t neglect to swipe an old boot sole that was lying there on a bench.