“That means you’ll be a rich man one day.” “Heavens, I didn’t know it was you,” she said. Vasilisa started, but at once recognized him and smiled cordially. “So winter’s back again,” said the student, going up to the campfire. There was a sound of men’s voices it was the laborers watering their horses at the river. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a man’s sheepskin coat, was standing by and gazing pensively into the fire her daughter Lukerya, a little pockmarked woman with a stupid-looking face, was sitting on the ground, washing a cauldron and spoons.

A campfire was burning brightly with a crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the plowed earth. The vegetable plots were called “widows’” because they were kept by two widows, mother and daughter. And he did not want to go home.Īristarkh Lentulov, Sunset on the Volga, oil, 1928 And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought of similar winds blowing in the time of Rurik, Ivan the Terrible, and Peter the Great – during their reigns there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression – all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. As it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. The student remembered that, as he had left the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing. The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ vegetable plots near the river the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mists. All around it was deserted and somehow peculiarly gloomy. It seemed to him that this sudden onset of cold had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening shadows thickened more rapidly than usual.

His fingers were numb and his face burned in the wind.

Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, was returning home along the path across the water meadows after a shooting expedition. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. But when it began to get dark in the forest, an unwelcome, penetrating wind blew up from the east, and everything sank into silence.

A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it echoed cheerfully in the spring air. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by some living creature droned plaintively, with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle.

Anton chekhov short stories