Once, long ago, in the days of my youth, in the days of my flashed-by never-to-return childhood, I used to rejoice when I approached an unknown place for the first time: no matter whether it was a little village, a wretched provincial town, a settlement, a hamlet—much that was curious in it revealed itself to a child's curious eyes. Every building, everything that bore on itself the stamp of some noticeable peculiarity—everything arrested and amazed me. A stone government building of familiar architecture with half its windows false, sticking up all by itself amid a trimmed log pile of common one-storied tradesmen's houses, or a regular round cupola, all clad in white sheet metal, soaring high above a snowy, whitewashed new church, or a marketplace, or a provincial fop who turned up in the middle of town—nothing escaped my fresh, keen attention, and, poking my nose out of my traveling cart, I gazed at the never-before-seen cut of some frock coat, and at the wooden boxes of nails, of sulphur yellowing from afar, of raisins and soap, flashing by in the doorway of a grocer's shop together with jars of stale Moscow candy, gazed also at an infantry officer walking off to one side, brought from God knows what district capital into provincial boredom, and at a merchant in a tight-waisted coat flashing by in a racing droshky, and mentally I would be carried off with them into their poor lives. Should a provincial official pass by, it was enough to set me thinking: where is he going, to spend the evening with some crony of his, or straight to his own home, to linger for half an hour or so on the porch, until dusk gathers fully, and then sit down to an early supper with his mama, his wife, his wife's sister, and the whole family, and what will be talked about among them, while a serf girl in a coin necklace or a lad in a thick jacket comes in after the soup bringing a tallow candle in a long-lived homemade candlestick. Approaching the estate of some landowner, I looked with curiosity at the tall, narrow wooden belfry or the broad, dark old wooden church. From far off through the green of the trees, the red roof and white chimneys of the landowner's house flashed enticingly to me, and I waited impatiently for the gardens screening it to part on both sides and show the whole of the house with its—then, alas!—by no means trite appearance; and from it I tried to guess what the landowner himself was, whether he was fat, and whether he had sons or as many as six daughters with ringing girlish laughter, games, and the youngest sister invariably a beauty, and whether they had dark eyes, and whether he himself was a jolly man, or sullen as the last days of September, looking at the calendar and boring the young folk with talk of rye and wheat.
Now it is with indifference that I approach any unknown estate, and with indifference that I gaze at its trite appearance; my chilled glance finds no refuge, I do not laugh, and that which in earlier days would have awakened a lively movement in my face, laughter and unceasing talk, now flits by, and my motionless lips preserve an impassive silence. Oh, my youth! Oh, my freshness!
While Chichikov thought and chuckled inwardly over the nickname the muzhiks had bestowed upon Plyushkin, he failed to notice that he had driven into the middle of a vast settlement with a multitude of cottages and lanes. Soon, however, it was brought to his notice by a quite decent jolt, produced by the log pavement, to which town cobblestones are nothing in comparison. These logs, like piano keys, kept rising up and down, and the unwary traveler would acquire a bump on his head, or a bruise on his brow, or might chance to give a painful bite with his own teeth to the tip of his own tongue. He noticed a sort of special dilapidation in all the village buildings: the logs of the cottages were dark and old; many of the roofs were riddled like sieves; some had just a ridge pole on top and rafters like ribs on the sides. It seemed as if the owners themselves had torn off the shingles and laths, considering—correctly, of course—that one does not roof cottages in the rain, and in fair weather there is no dripping anyway, so why sit around women's skirts inside, when there is free space enough in the pot-house and on the high road—in short, anywhere you like. The windows of the cottages had no glass, some were stopped up with a rag or a jacket; the little roofed balconies with railings, which for unknown reasons are built onto some Russian cottages, were lopsided and blackened, not even picturesquely. Behind the cottages in many places stretched rows of huge stacks of wheat, which had evidently been standing there for a long time; in color they resembled old, poorly baked brick, trash of all kinds was growing on top of them, and bushes even clung to their sides. The wheat evidently belonged to the master. From behind the wheat stacks and dilapidated roofs there soared and flashed in the clear air, now right, now left, according to the turns the britzka made, two village churches, one next to the other: an abandoned wooden one, and a stone one, its yellowed walls all stains and cracks. Parts of the master's house came into view and finally the whole of it appeared in a gap where the chain of cottages broke off and in their place was left a vacant lot, formerly a kitchen garden or cabbage patch, surrounded by a low, in places broken, fence. Long, immeasurably long, the strange castle looked like some decrepit invalid. In places it had one story, in places two; on the dark roof, which did not everywhere reliably shield its old age, two belvederes had been stuck, facing each other, both of them shaky now, deprived of the paint that had once covered them. The walls of the house showed bare lath in places and had evidently suffered much from all sorts of bad weather, rains, gales, and autumnal changes. Of the windows, only two were open, the rest being either shuttered or even boarded up. These two windows, for their part, were also weak-sighted; one of them had a dark triangle of blue sugar paper glued to it.
A vast, old garden stretching behind the house, extending beyond the village and then disappearing in the fields, overgrown and overrun, alone seemed to refresh this vast estate and alone was fully picturesque in its scenic devastation. In green clouds and irregular, leaf-fluttering cupolas against the sky's horizon lay the joined tops of the freely branching trees. The colossal white trunk of a birch, deprived of its crown, broken off in a tempest or thunderstorm, rose out of this green thickness and rounded in the air like a regular, gleaming marble column; the sharp, slanting break that topped it instead of a capital showed dark against its snowy whiteness, like a hat or a black bird. Wild hops, smothering the elder, mountain ash, and hazel bushes underneath and then running over the top of the whole thicket, finally raced upwards, twining around half the length of the broken birch. Having reached the middle, it hung down from there and began to catch at the tops of other trees or else dangled in air, tying its thin, grasping hooks into rings, swayed lightly by the air. In places the green thickets, lit by the sun, parted and revealed an unlit gap between them, yawning like a dark maw; it was all shrouded in shadow, and in its dark depths there barely flashed a running, narrow path, a collapsed railing, a rickety gazebo, the hollowed, decrepit trunk of a willow, a hoary hawthorn sticking out from behind the willow in a dense stubble of tangled and intertwined leaves and branches, withered in that terrible occlusion, and, finally, a young maple bough, stretching from the side its green pawlike leaves, one of them suddenly transformed by the sun, which got under it God knows how, into something transparent and fiery, shining wondrously in that dense darkness. To one side, at the very edge of the garden, several tall aspens, grown beyond the level of the rest, lifted up huge crows' nests on their fluttering tops. From some of them, broken but not quite sundered branches hung down with their withered leaves. In short, it was all just right, as neither nature nor art can contrive, but as only occurs when they join together, when, after the heaped-up, often senseless, labors of men, nature makes a finishing pass with her chisel, lightening the heavy masses, removing the crude-feeling regularity and indigent gaps through which the bare, undisguised plan peeps out, and imparts a wondrous warmth to all that was created in coldly measured cleanness and neatness.
Having made one or two turns, our hero finally found himself right in front of the house, which now seemed more mournful still. Green mold covered the already decayed wood of the fence and gate. A crowd of buildings— servants' quarters, barns, cellars, all visibly decaying—filled the courtyard; near them, to right and left, gates could be seen leading to other yards. Everything bespoke the vast scale on which estate life had once gone on here, and everything now looked dismal. Nothing to enliven the picture could be noticed: no doors opening, no people coming out from anywhere, no lively household hustle and bustle! Only the main gates were open, and that because a muzhik had driven in with a loaded cart covered with bast matting, appearing as if by design to enliven this desolate place; at other times the gates, too, were tightly locked, for a giant padlock was hanging in the iron staple. By one of the buildings Chichikov soon noticed some figure, who had begun squabbling with the muzhik on the cart. For a long time he could not make out the figure's sex, male or female. It was dressed in something completely indefinite, much like a woman's housecoat, with a cap on its head such as household serf wenches wear in the country, only the voice seemed to him rather too husky for a woman. 'Ai, a female!' he thought to himself, and added at once: 'Ah, no!' Finally he said, 'A female, of course!'—having looked more intently. The figure for her part was also staring intently at him. It seemed that a visitor was a remarkable thing for her, because she scrutinized not only him, but also Selifan and the horses, from tail to muzzle. By the keys hanging from her belt, and by the fact that she was scolding the muzhik in rather abusive terms, Chichikov concluded that this must be the housekeeper.
'Listen, dearie,' he said, getting out of the britzka, 'about the master...'
'Not home,' the housekeeper interrupted, without waiting for the end of the question, and then, after a minute, she added: 'What do you want?' 'It's business.
'Go in!' said the housekeeper, turning away and showing him her back, dusted with flour, with a big rip
