“Really!” said he, “how old was that horse? Akh, Kuzma! Kuzma! You’d better compose something practical—well, about the war, for example.”
And Kuzma, catering to the taste of the market-place, began with great zeal to write about what the bazaar was discussing at the moment—the Russo-Turkish war: about how—
“In the year of seventy-seven
The Turk set out to fight;
He advanced with his hordes
And tried to capture Russia”
and how those hordes
In uncouth nightcaps
Crept stealthily to the Tsar-Cannon.[15]
Later on it pained him to realize how much stupidity and ignorance this doggerel contained, the servile quality of its language, and its Russian scorn for foreign headgear. With pain he recalled much else. For example, Zadonsk. One day there he was overcome by a passionate longing for repentance, a terror lest his mother, who had died, practically, of starvation, had bitterly reported in heaven her sorrowful life; and he set forth on foot to the abode of a holy man. Once there, he did nothing whatever except to read to assembled admirers, with malicious joy, a “sheet” which had made a special impression on him: how a certain village scribe had taken it into his head to reject the authorities and the Church, and God had waxed so wroth that “this aristocrat was laid low on his bed of death,” his malady such that “he devoured more than a pig, and shrieked that that was not enough, and withered away until he was unrecognizable.” And Kuzma’s entire youth was spent in just such affairs! He thought and professed one thing—and said and did something entirely different. Aspiring to write and reckoning up the sum-total of his life, Kuzma shook his head mournfully: “A genuine Russian trait, sir! The sowing was half peas, half thistles.”