Epiphany: January 19 (Julian Calendar)
name down: members of the Russian Orthodox Church customarily carried a small book with names in it of relatives and friends, living and dead, to be remembered
Old Believer: someone who adhered to the ritual of the Russian Orthodox Church as practiced before the 17th century reforms; they did not eat or drink with the same utensils as other people
St. Peter's Day: June 29 (Julian Calendar)
Mazeppa: a traitor; Ivan S. Mazeppa (1645-1709) went over to the Swedish enemy at the Battle of Poltava
A. . . a. . . va: Chekhov is imitating sounds that remain after other syllables are lost in the wind
Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Sabaoth: from Isaiah 6:3; used in the Russian Orthodox liturgy
Pyotr Mogila: Peter Mogila (1596-1647) was a famous cleric and educator
Do not apply yourself to strange and diverse studies: Hebrews 13:9
Saul: 1 Samuel 28:8-20
Basil the Great: 329-379, a famous churchman
St. Nestor: 11th century monk
honour your mother: Exodus 20:12
sat down: a Russian tradition to bring good luck on the journey
* * *
Lights
by Anton Chekhov
THE dog was barking excitedly outside. And Ananyev the engineer, his assistant called Von Schtenberg, and I went out of the hut to see at whom it was barking. I was the visitor, and might have remained indoors, but I must confess my head was a little dizzy from the wine I had drunk, and I was glad to get a breath of fresh air.
'There is nobody here,' said Ananyev when we went out. 'Why are you telling stories, Azorka? You fool!'
There was not a soul in sight.
'The fool,' Azorka, a black house-dog, probably conscious of his guilt in barking for nothing and anxious to propitiate us, approached us, diffidently wagging his tail. The engineer bent down and touched him between his ears.
'Why are you barking for nothing, creature?' he said in the tone in which good-natured people talk to children and dogs. 'Have you had a bad dream or what? Here, doctor, let me commend to your attention,' he said, turning to me, 'a wonderfully nervous subject! Would you believe it, he can't endure solitude -- he is always having terrible dreams and suffering from nightmares; and when you shout at him he has something like an attack of hysterics.'
'Yes, a dog of refined feelings,' the student chimed in.
Azorka must have understood that the conversation was concerning him. He turned his head upwards and grinned plaintively, as though to say, 'Yes, at times I suffer unbearably, but please excuse it!'
It was an August night, there were stars, but it was dark. Owing to the fact that I had never in my life been in such exceptional surroundings, as I had chanced to come into now, the starry night seemed to me gloomy, inhospitable, and darker than it was in reality. I was on a railway line which was still in process of construction. The high, half-finished embankment, the mounds of sand, clay, and rubble, the holes, the wheel-barrows standing here and there, the flat tops of the mud huts in which the workmen lived -- all this muddle, coloured to one tint by the darkness, gave the earth a strange, wild aspect that suggested the times of chaos. There was so little order in all that lay before me that it was somehow strange in the midst of the hideously excavated, grotesque-looking earth to see the silhouettes of human beings and the slender telegraph posts. Both spoiled the ensemble of the picture, and seemed to belong to a different world. It was still, and the only sound came from the telegraph wire droning its wearisome refrain somewhere very high above our heads.
We climbed up on the embankment and from its height looked down upon the earth. A hundred yards away where the pits, holes, and mounds melted into the darkness of the night, a dim light was twinkling. Beyond it gleamed another light, beyond that a third, then a hundred paces away two red eyes glowed side by side -- probably the windows of some hut -- and a long series of such lights, growing continually closer and dimmer, stretched along the line to the very horizon, then turned in a semicircle to the left and disappeared in the darkness of the distance. The lights were motionless. There seemed to be something in common between them and the stillness of the night and the disconsolate song of the telegraph wire. It seemed as though some weighty secret were buried under the embankment and only the lights, the night, and the wires knew of it.
'How glorious, O Lord!' sighed Ananyev; 'such space and beauty that one can't tear oneself away! And what an embankment! It's not an embankment, my dear fellow, but a regular Mont Blanc. It's costing millions. . . .'
Going into ecstasies over the lights and the embankment that was costing millions, intoxicated by the wine and his sentimental mood, the engineer slapped Von Schtenberg on the shoulder and went on in a jocose tone:
'Well, Mihail Mihailitch, lost in reveries? No doubt it is pleasant to look at the work of one's own hands, eh? Last year this very spot was bare steppe, not a sight of human life, and now look: life . . . civilisation. . . And how splendid it all is, upon my soul! You and I are building a railway, and after we are gone, in another century or two, good men will build a factory, a school, a hospital, and things will begin to move! Eh!'
The student stood motionless with his hands thrust in his pockets, and did not take his eyes off the lights. He was not listening to the engineer, but was thinking, and was apparently in the mood in which one does not want to speak or to listen. After a prolonged silence he turned to me and said quietly:
'Do you know what those endless lights are like? They make me think of something long dead, that lived thousands of years ago, something like the camps of the Amalekites or the Philistines. It is as though some people of the Old Testament had pitched their camp and were waiting for morning to fight with Saul or David. All that is
