by Leo Tolstoy
‘Been out after mushrooms, have you?’ asked the guard.
‘Yes, but I haven’t found any today,’ replied Ivan Mironov, pointing to the bast basket which he had brought with him in case of need.
‘That’s right, it’s not the mushroom season,’ said the guard, ‘but there’ll be some coming up in Lent.’ And he went on his way.
The forest guard realized that there was something suspicious here. There was no reason for Ivan Mironov to be out walking in the state forest early in the morning. The guard turned back and started to circle round through the trees. On getting near to the ravine he heard the sound of horses snorting and he crept up very quietly to the place the sound was coming from. The ground in the ravine was trampled by horses’ hooves and it was all over horse droppings. A little further on Gerasim was sitting eating something, and there were two horses standing tethered to a tree.
The guard ran back to the village and fetched the village elder, the constable and two witnesses. They approached the place where Gerasim was sitting from three directions, and seized him. Gerasim made no attempt to protest his innocence, but being drunk he at once confessed to everything. He told them that Ivan Mironov had got him drunk and talked him into doing the job, and had promised to come to the forest today to fetch the horses. The muzhiks left the horse and Gerasim where they were in the forest and set an ambush for Ivan Mironov. As soon as night had fallen they heard a whistle. Gerasim whistled back in reply. As soon as Ivan Mironov started to come down the slope they rushed at him, captured him and led him back to their village.
The next morning a crowd assembled in front of the elder’s hut. Ivan Mironov was brought out and they began to interrogate him. Stepan Pelageyushkin, a tall, stooping, long-armed muzhik with a beaky nose and a dour expression, was the first to ask him a question. Stepan was an independent peasant who had completed his military service. He had not long since moved out of his father’s house and was starting to do quite well, when his horse had been stolen from him. By working for a year in the mines Stepan managed to set himself up with two horses. Both of these had now been stolen.
‘Tell me where my horses are,’ began Stepan, pale with anger and glaring now at the ground, now straight into Ivan’s face.
Ivan Mironov denied all knowledge of them. Then Stepan struck him in the face and broke his nose, from which the blood started to trickle.
‘Tell me, or I’ll kill you!’
Ivan Mironov bent his head but said nothing. Stepan struck him again with his long arm – once, then a second time. Ivan still did not speak, just swung his head from side to side.
‘Come, all of you – beat him!’ shouted the village elder. And they all began to beat him. Ivan Mironov fell silently to the ground, then cried out: ‘You barbarians, you devils, beat me to death then. I’m not scared of you.’
Then Stepan took hold of a stone from a pile he had ready, and he smashed Ivan Mironov’s head in.
XV
Ivan Mironov’s murderers were brought to justice. Stepan Pelageyushkin was among them. The charge brought against him was particularly grave because they had all testified that he was the one who had smashed Ivan Mironov’s head in with a stone. At his trial Stepan did not try to conceal anything, but explained how when his last pair of horses had been stolen he had reported it at the police station, and they could probably have tracked the horses down with the help of the gypsies, but the district police officer had not even seen him, and had made no effort to organize a search.
‘What were we supposed to do with a man of his sort? He’d ruined us.’
‘So why didn’t the others beat him? Why just you?’ asked the prosecutor.
‘That’s not true. They all beat him, the village community decided to do away with him. I was just the one who finished him off. Why make him suffer more than necessary?’
The judges were struck by Stepan’s utterly calm expression as he described what he had done and how they had beaten Ivan Mironov to death and how he had finished him off.
Stepan did not indeed see anything very dreadful in this murder. When he was on his military service he had happened to be one of the firing-squad when a soldier was executed, and then, as also now at the murder of Ivan Mironov, he had seen nothing dreadful in it. If you killed a man, you killed a man. It’s his turn today, tomorrow it may be mine.
Stepan’s sentence was a light one: a year in prison. His peasant’s clothes were taken away from him and put in the prison stores with a number attached to them, and they made him put on a prison overall and some slippers.
Stepan had never had much respect for the authorities, but now he was utterly convinced that everyone in authority, all the masters – apart from the Tsar, who pitied the common people and treated them justly – were all of them robbers, sucking the life-blood of the people. The stories told by the exiles and the hard-labour convicts he met in prison confirmed his view of things. One had been sentenced to exile with hard labour for having denounced the thievery of the local authorities, another for striking an official who was trying unlawfully to seize the property of some peasants, and a third, for forging banknotes. The gentry and the merchants, whatever they did, could get away with it, whereas the muzhiks who had nothing got sent off to prison to feed the lice on account of any little thing whatever.
Stepan’s wife came to visit him from time to time in prison. With him away from home things had already been bad enough, but now she was ruined and destitute, and was reduced to begging with the children. The calamities afflicting his wife made Stepan even more bitter. His behaviour was vicious towards everyone he came into contact with in prison, and on one occasion he almost killed one of the cooks with an axe, for which he got an extra year on his sentence. During the course of that year he heard that his wife had died and his household no longer existed …
When Stepan had served his time he was summoned to the prison stores, and the clothes he had arrived in were taken down from a little shelf and given back to him.
‘Where am I to go now?’ he asked the quartermaster-sergeant as he put on his own clothes again.
‘Home, of course.’
‘I haven’t got a home. I reckon I shall just have to go on the road. And rob people.’
‘If you start robbing people, you’ll soon be back in here again.’
‘Well, what will be, will be.’
And Stepan went on his way. Despite what he had said, he set off in the direction of his home. He had nowhere else to go.
On his way there he happened to stop for the night at a coaching inn with a pothouse attached, which he knew.
The inn was kept by a fat tradesman from Vladimir. He knew Stepan. And he knew that Stepan had got himself into prison through bad luck. So he let him stay the night.
This rich tradesman had run off with the wife of a peasant neighbour and was living with her as his wife and business partner.
Stepan knew all about this episode – how the tradesman had offended the muzhik in his honour, and how this wretched woman had walked out on her husband and had grown obese with good eating; and now there she was, sitting all fat and sweaty over her tea – and was kind enough to invite Stepan to have some with her. There were no other travellers staying at the inn. Stepan was allowed to sleep the night in the kitchen. Matryona cleared away all the dishes and went off to the maid’s room. Stepan lay down on top of the stove, but he could not get to sleep, and kept snapping under his body the pieces of kindling which had been put there to dry. He could not get out of his head the image of the tradesman’s fat paunch bulging out of the waist of his cotton shirt, faded with washing and re-washing. The idea kept coming into his head of taking a knife and slashing that paunch wide open and letting out the fatty intestines. And of doing the same to the woman too. One moment he was saying to himself: ‘Come on now, devil take them, I shall be out of here tomorrow,’ and the next moment he would remember Ivan Mironov and start thinking again about the tradesman’s paunch and Matryona’s white,
sweaty throat. If he was going to kill one, he might as well kill them both. The cock crew for the second time. If he was going to do it, it had better be now, before it got light. He had noticed a knife the evening before, and an axe. He climbed down from the stove, picked up the axe and the knife and went out of the kitchen. Just as he had got out of the room he heard the click of the latch on another door. The tradesman opened the door and came out. Stepan had not meant to do it like this. He couldn’t use the knife in this situation, so he swung the axe up and brought it down, splitting the man’s head open. The tradesman collapsed against the lintel of the door and fell to the ground.
Stepan went into the maid’s room. Matryona jumped up and stood there by the bed in her nightshirt. Stepan killed her too with the same axe. Then he lit a candle, took the money from the cash desk, and made off.
XVI
In the chief town of a country district, in a house set somewhat apart from the other buildings, lived an old man who had been a civil servant in the days before he had taken to drink, his two daughters, and a son-in-law. The married daughter was also given to drinking and led a disreputable life, but the elder daughter Mariya Semyonovna, a thin, wrinkled woman of fifty whose husband had died, was their sole support on her pension of two hundred and fifty roubles a year. The whole family lived on this money. Mariya Semyonovna also did all the housework. She looked after her weak, drunken old father and her sister’s baby, cooked and did the washing. And as is always the case in such situations, all three of them loaded all their wants and needs on to her, all three of them shouted abuse at her, and the son-in-law would even beat her when he was in a drunken state. She endured it all meekly and silently, and again, as is always the case, the more things she was expected to do, the more she managed to carry out. She even gave aid to the poor, to her own cost, giving away her clothing, and she helped to look after the sick.
On one occasion Mariya Semyonovna had a village tailor, a cripple who had lost one leg, staying in the house to do some work for her. He was altering her old father’s coat and re-covering her sheepskin jacket with cloth for her to wear to market in the winter.
The crippled tailor was an intelligent and perceptive man who had met with a great variety of people in the course of his work, and because of his disability had to spend most of his time sitting down, which disposed him to do a lot of thinking. After living for a week in Mariya Semyonovna’s household he was lost in wonderment for the life she led. Once she came into the kitchen where he was sewing, to wash some towels, and she chatted with him about his life, and how his brother had taken his share of the property and gone off to live on his own.
‘I thought it would be better like that, but I’m still as poor as ever.’
‘It’s better not to change things, but to go on living as you’ve always lived,’ said Mariya Semyonovna.
‘That’s what amazes me so much about you, Mariya Semyonovna, that you’re always bustling about here and there worrying about other people’s needs. But as I see it, you get precious little good back from them in return.’
Mariya Semyonovna did not answer.
‘You must have decided that it’s like it says in the holy books, that you’ll get your reward in the next world.’
‘We don’t know about that,’ said Mariya Semyonovna, ‘but I’m sure it’s better to live in that way.’
‘And is that what it says in the holy books?’
‘Yes, that’s what it says,’ she replied, and she read him the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospels. The tailor fell to thinking. And when he had been paid off and he had returned home he still kept thinking about what he had seen in Mariya Semyonovna’s house, and about what she had said to him and read to him.
XVII
Pyotr Nikolayevich Sventitsky’s attitude towards the common people had changed completely, and so had their attitude towards him. Before a year was out they had felled twenty-seven of his oak trees and burned down the barn and the threshing-floor, which were not insured. Pyotr Nikolayevich decided that it was impossible to go on living among these people.
About this time the Livyentsov family were seeking a steward to look after their estates, and the marshal of the nobility had recommended Pyotr Nikolayevich as being the best farmer in the district. The Livyentsov estates although enormous in size were not yielding any profit, and the peasants were helping themselves to everything they could. Pyotr Nikolayevich undertook to set everything to rights, and after letting his own estate to a tenant he set off with his wife to go and live on the Livyentsovs’ land in the far-off Volga province.
Pyotr Nikolayevich had always been a lover of law and order, and now he was more unwilling than ever to tolerate these wild, uncivilized peasants who were illegally taking possession of property which did not belong to them. He was glad to have this chance to teach them a lesson and he set about his task with severity. One peasant he had imprisoned for the theft of forest timber, another he flogged with his own hand for not giving way to him on the road and failing to take off his hat. Concerning the meadows, about which there was a dispute, since the peasants regarded them as theirs, Pyotr Nikolayevich announced that if anyone let their cattle on to them, then he would have the animals impounded.
Spring came, and the peasants, as they had done in previous years, let their livestock out on to the manorial meadows. Pyotr Nikolayevich called all his farm-hands together and gave the order to drive the cattle and sheep into the manor farmyard. The muzhiks were out ploughing, so the farmhands, despite the women’s shrieks of protest, were able to drive the animals in. On getting back from their work the muzhiks gathered together and came across to the manor farmyard to demand that their livestock should be given back to them. Pyotr Nikolayevich came out to meet them carrying a rifle across his shoulders (he had just returned from making his tour of inspection on horseback) and informed them that he would only return their livestock to them on payment of a fine of fifty copecks per horned beast and ten copecks per sheep. The muzhiks began shouting that the meadows were theirs anyway, and had belonged to their fathers and their grandfathers before them, and that he had no right to go seizing other people’s stock.
‘Give us our cattle back, or it’ll be the worse for you,’ said one old man, going up to Pyotr Nikolayevich.
‘It’ll be the worse for me, will it?’ cried Pyotr Nikolayevich, his face all pale, advancing on the old man.
‘Give them back if you don’t want to get hurt. Parasite.’
‘What?’ shouted Pyotr Nikolayevich, and he struck the old man in the face.
‘You won’t dare fight us. Come on lads, take the cattle by force.’
The crowd surged forward. Pyotr Nikolayevich made as if to get out of the way, but they did not let him. He tried to force his way through. His rifle went off by accident, killing one of the peasants. A general riot broke out. Pyotr Nikolayevich was crushed to death. And five minutes later his mutilated body was dragged away and thrown into a ravine.
The murderers were brought before a military tribunal, and two of them were sentenced to death by hanging.
XVIII
In the village where the tailor came from five wealthy peasants had leased from the landowner for eleven hundred roubles a hundred and five desyatins of rich arable land as black as tar and distributed it among the other muzhiks in parcels costing eighteen or fifteen roubles each. None of the allotments of land went for under twelve roubles. So that they made themselves a good profit. The muzhiks who had leased the land each took five desyatins, and this land cost them nothing at all. One of these five muzhiks died, and the others invited the crippled tailor to come in with them as a partner.
When the tenants began to divide up the land, the tailor did not join in drinking vodka with them, and when the discussion turned to the question of who should get how much land, the tailor said that they should allocate it equally, and without taking money they didn’t need from the tenants, but only what they could afford.
‘What do you mean?�
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‘If we don’t do it like this, we are not acting like Christians. The other way may be all right for the masters, but we are Christian people. We should do things God’s way. That’s the law of Christ.’
‘So where is this law written down, then?’
‘In the holy book, in the Gospels. Why don’t you come over to my place on Sunday, so we can talk about it?’
When Sunday came not all the peasants went to the tailor’s house, but three of them did, and he started to read to them.
He read five chapters from the Gospel of Matthew, and then they started to discuss it. They all listened, but only one of them, Ivan Chuyev, really took it in. And he took it in to such an extent that he began trying to live his whole life according to God’s way. And his family too began to live like that. He refused to take the extra land and kept only his proper share.
People began coming regularly to the tailor’s house and to Ivan’s house, and they began to understand, then they really grasped it, and they gave up smoking, and drinking, and swearing and using foul language, and they started helping one another. They also gave up going to church, and they took their household ikons back to the priest. In the end seventeen households, comprising sixty-five people, were involved. The village priest was alarmed and he reported the matter to the bishop. The bishop considered what he should do, and he decided to send to the village Father Misail, who had formerly been a scripture teacher in a grammar school.
