Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

"About the master? Is he in, or what?"

"The master's here," said the housekeeper.

"But where?" Chichikov reiterated.

"What, my dear, are you blind or something?" said the housekeeper. "Egad! But I am the master!"

Here our hero involuntarily stepped back and looked at him intently. He had chanced to meet many different kinds of people, even kinds such as the reader and I may never get to meet; but such a one he had never met before. His face presented nothing unusual; it was about the same as in many lean old men, only his chin protruded very far forward, so that he had to cover it with a handkerchief all the time to keep from spitting on it; his small eyes were not yet dim and darted from under his high arched eyebrows like mice when, poking their sharp little snouts from their dark holes, pricking up their ears and twitching their whiskers, they spy out whether there is a cat or a mischievous boy in hiding, and sniff the very air suspiciously. Far more remarkable was his outfit: no means or efforts would avail to discover what his robe was concocted of: the sleeves and front were so greasy and shiny that they looked like the tarred leather used for making boots; behind, instead of two skirts, four hung down, with tufts of cotton wool emerging from them. Around his neck, too, something unidentifiable was tied: a stocking, a garter, a bellyband, anything but a cravat. In short, if Chichikov had met him, attired thus, somewhere at a church door, he probably would have given him a copper. For to our hero's credit it must be said that he had a compassionate heart and could never refrain from giving a poor man a copper. But before him stood no beggar, before him stood a landowner. This landowner had more than a thousand souls, and it would have been hard to find another who had so much wheat in grain, flour, or simply in stacks, whose storerooms, barns, and granaries were crammed with so much linen, felt, sheepskin dressed and raw, dried fish, and all sorts of vegetables and foodstuff. Had anyone peeked into his workshop, where all kinds of wood and never-used wares were stored up in reserve—he would have thought he had landed somehow on woodworkers' row in Moscow, where spry beldames set out daily, with their scullery maids in tow, to make their household purchases, and where there gleam mountains of wooden articles—nailed, turned, joined, and plaited: barrels, halved barrels, tubs, tar buckets, flagons with and without spouts, stoups, baskets, hampers in which village women keep their skeins of flax and other junk, panniers of thin bent aspen, corbeils of plaited birchbark, and much else that is put to service in rich and poor Rus. [27] Rus was the old name for Russia, before Rossiya came into use in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Rus began to be used again, especially in romantic apostrophes to the fatherland. It is in this sense, or in an ironic parody of it, that Gogol uses the word. What need, one might ask, did Plyushkin have for such a mass of these artifacts? Never in all his life could they have been used even on two such estates as his—but to him it still seemed too little. Not satisfied with it, he walked about the streets of his village every day, looked under the little bridges and stiles, and whatever he came across—an old shoe sole, a woman's rag, an iron nail, a potsherd—he carried off and added to the pile that Chichikov had noticed in the corner of the room. "The fisherman's off in pursuit again!" the muzhiks would say, when they saw him going for his booty. And, indeed, after him there was no need to sweep the streets: if a passing officer happened to lose a spur, the spur would immediately be dispatched to the famous pile; if a woman started mooning by the well and forgot her bucket, he would carry off the bucket. However, if a muzhik noticed and caught him in the act, he would not argue and would surrender the purloined thing; but if it did make it to the pile, it was all over: he would swear to God that he had bought the thing at such and such a time from such and such a person, or inherited it from his grandfather. In his room he picked up whatever he saw on the floor—a bit of sealing wax, a scrap of paper, a feather—and put it all on the bureau or the windowsill.

And yet once upon a time he had been simply a thrifty manager! was married and had a family, and a neighbor would come to dine with him, to listen and learn from him the ways of management and wise parsimony. Everything flowed briskly and was accomplished at a regular pace: the gristmills and fulling mills turned, the felting, wood-turning, and spinning machines worked; into everything everywhere the manager's keen glance penetrated, and, like an industrious spider, ran busily yet efficiently to all ends of his managerial spiderweb. His features reflected no very strong emotions, but one could see intelligence in his eyes; his speech was pervaded by experience and knowledge of the world, and it was pleasant for a guest to listen to him; the affable and talkative mistress of the house was famous for her hospitality; two comely daughters came to meet the guest, both blond and fresh as roses; the son ran out, a frolicsome lad, and kissed everyone, paying little heed to whether the guest was glad of it or not. All the windows were open in the house, the garret was occupied by the French tutor, who shaved splendidly and was a great shot: he always brought home grouse or duck for dinner, but on occasion only sparrow eggs, which he ordered served as an omelette for himself, since no one else in the house would eat them. In the garret there also lived a young lady compatriot of his, who taught the two girls. The master himself used to come to table in a frock coat, somewhat worn but neat, the elbows in good order: not a patch anywhere. But the good mistress died; part of the keys, and of the petty cares along with them, passed to him. Plyushkin grew more restless and, like all widowers, more suspicious and stingy. He could not rely altogether on his eldest daughter, Alexandra Stepanovna, and right he was, because Alexandra Stepanovna soon eloped with a staff captain of God knows what cavalry regiment and married him hastily somewhere in a village church, knowing that her father disliked officers, from the strange prejudice that the military are all supposed to be gamblers and spendthrifts. The father sent her a curse for the road, but did not bother pursuing her. The house became still emptier.

In the master of the house, stinginess displayed itself still more noticeably, furthered in its development by its faithful friend, the gray flickering in his coarse hair; the French tutor was dismissed, because the time came for the son to enter the civil service; madame was chased out, because she was found not guiltless in Alexandra Stepanovna's elopement; the son, having been sent to the provincial capital to learn in a government office what, in his father's view, real service was, enlisted in a regiment instead and wrote to his father only after he enlisted, asking for money to equip himself; for which, quite naturally, he got what among common folk is known as a fig. Finally the last daughter, who had stayed at home with him, died, and the old man found himself the sole guardian, keeper, and master of his riches. Solitary life gave ample nourishment to his avarice, which, as is known, has a wolf's appetite and grows more insatiable the more it devours; human feelings, never very deep in him anyway, became shallower every moment, and each day something more was lost in this worn-out ruin. There came a moment, as if on purpose to confirm his opinion of the military, when his son happened to lose heavily at cards; he sent him a paternal curse from the bottom of his heart, and was never again interested in knowing whether his son existed in the world or not. Each year more windows in his house were closed up, until finally only two were left, one of which, as the reader already knows, had paper glued over it; each year more and more of the main parts of management were lost sight of, and his petty glance turned to the little scraps and feathers he collected in his room; he grew more unyielding with the buyers who came to take the products of his estate; the buyers bargained, bargained, and finally dropped him altogether, saying he was a devil, not a man; the hay and wheat rotted, the stooks and ricks turned to pure dung, good for planting cabbages in; the flour in the cellars became stone and had to be hacked up; the felt, linen, and homespun materials were even frightening to touch: they turned to dust. He himself had forgotten by then how much he had of what, and only remembered where in the cupboard he kept a little decanter with the remainder of some liqueur, on which he himself had made a mark, so that no one could steal a drink from it, or where a feather or a bit of sealing wax lay. But meanwhile the revenues of the estate were collected as before: the muzhik had to bring the same amount of quitrent, every woman was taxed the same amount of nuts, or as many lengths of linen if she was a weaver—all this was dumped in the storerooms, and it all turned to rot and gape, and he himself finally turned into a sort of gape in mankind. Alexandra Stepa-novna once came a couple of times with her little son, trying to see if she could get anything; apparently camp life with the staff captain was not as attractive as it had seemed before the wedding. Plyushkin forgave her, however, and even gave his little grandson a button that was lying on the table to play with, but money he gave none. The next time Alexandra Stepanovna came with two little ones and brought him a kulich [28] A kulich is a rich, sweet yeast bread, generally cylindrical in form, baked especially for Easter. for tea and a new robe, because her papa's robe was such that it was not only embarrassing but even shameful to behold. Plyushkin was nice to both grandchildren and, placing one of them on his right knee and the other on his left, rocked them in exactly the same way as if they had been riding a horse; he accepted the kulich and the robe, but gave his daughter decidedly nothing; and with that Alexandra Stepanovna left.