The crossways creep and crawl like a winding thread, without beginning and without end. Sometimes their stretch tires and vexes— one wants to go by a shorter route and turns aside, goes astray, comes back to the former way. Two wheel-tracks, ripple grass, a foot- path and around them, besides sky or rye or snow or trees, are the crossways, without beginning or end or limit. And over them pass the peasants singing their low toned songs. At times these are sorrowful, as endless as the crossways themselves: Russia was borne in these songs, born with them, from them.
Our ways lie through the crossways as they ever have done, and ever will. All Russia is in the crossways—amid the fields, thickets marshes, and forests.
But there were also those Others who wanted to march over the bog- ways, who planned to throw Russia on to her haunches, to press on through the marshlands, make main-roads straight as rules, and barricade themselves behind granite and steel, forgetful of Russia's peasant cottages. And on they marched!
Sometimes the main-road is joined by the crossways, and from them to the main-road and over it passes the long vaunted Rising, the people's tumult, to sweep away the Unnecessary, then vanish back again into the crossways.
Near the main-road lies the railway. By turning aside from it, walking through a field, fording a river, penetrating first through a dark aspen grove, then through a red pine belt, skirting some ravines, threading a way across a village, trudging wearily through dried-up river-beds and on through a marsh, the village of Pochinki is reached, surrounded by forest.
In the village were three cottages, their backs to the forest; their rugged noses seemed to scowl from beneath the pine-trees, and their dim, tear-dribbling window-eyes looked wolfish. Their grey timbers lay on them like wrinkles, their reddish-yellow thatch, like bobbed hair, hung to the ground. Behind them was the forest; in front, pasture, thickets, forest again, and sky. The neighbouring crossways coiled round them in a ring, then narrowed away into the forest.
In all three cottages dwelt Kononovs: they were not kinsfolk, though they bore that name, closer linked through their common life than kinsmen ever were. Kononov-Yonov, the One-Eyed, was the village elder: he no longer remembered his grandfather's name, but knew the olden times well, and remembered how his great-grandfathers and his great-great-grandfathers had lived and how it was good for men to live.
From the oldest to the youngest they toiled with all their strength from spring to autumn, from autumn to spring, and from sunrise to sundown, growing grey like their hen-coops from smoke, scorching in the heat and steaming sweat like boiling tar.
The kinsfolk of Yonov the One-eyed made tar besides tilling the land, while Yonov himself kept bee-hives in the forest. The sisters Yonov barked lime-trees and made bast shoes. It was a hard, stern life, with its smoke, heat, frosts, and languour; but they loved it profoundly.
The Kononovs lived alone in friendship with the woods, the fields, and the sky; yet ever engaged in stubborn struggle against them. They had to remember the rise and set of the sun, the nights and the dung- mounds. They had to look into putrid corners, watch for cold blasts from the north, and give ear to the rumbling and gabbling of the forest.