United States or Togo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Though I am ashamed of it, I will describe one that occurred the other day after dinner. I was sitting in my room smoking a pipe; my wife came in as usual, sat down, and began saying what a good thing it would be for me to go to Harkov now while it is warm and I have free time, and there find out what sort of person our Gnekker is. "Very good; I will go," I assented.
As it would be useless to contend against my present mood and, indeed, beyond my power, I have made up my mind that the last days of my life shall at least be irreproachable externally. If I am unjust in regard to my wife and daughter, which I fully recognize, I will try and do as she wishes; since she wants me to go to Harkov, I go to Harkov.
An hour of waiting, a glass of vodka, a tidy-up and a wash, and cabbage soup. Change to another train. The carriage was crammed full. Immediately after Kursk I made friends with my neighbours: a landowner from Harkov, as jocose as Sasha K.; a lady who had just had an operation in Petersburg; a police captain; an officer from Little Russia; and a general in military uniform.
Another time, after I had become a student, I was traveling by rail to the south. It was May. At one of the stations, I believe it was between Byelgorod and Harkov, I got out of the tram to walk about the platform.
He was sometimes so weak from haemorrhage that he could see no one, but as soon as the attack was over his mood changed, the doors were thrown open, visitors arrived, there was music again, and Chekhov was once more in the wildest spirits. The summers of those two years, 1888 and 1889, he spent with his family in a summer villa at Luka, in the province of Harkov.
Apparently, illustrious names are created to live on their own account, apart from those that bear them. Now my name is promenading tranquilly about Harkov; in another three months, printed in gold letters on my monument, it will shine bright as the sun itself, while I s hall be already under the moss. A light tap at the door. Somebody wants me. "Who is there? Come in."
"What about Merik?" asked Lyubka. "Merik is not one of us," said Kalashnikov. "He is a Harkov man from Mizhiritch. But that he is a bold fellow, that's the truth; there's no gainsaying that he is a fine fellow." Lyubka looked slily and gleefully at Merik, and said: "It wasn't for nothing they dipped him in a hole in the ice." "How was that?" asked Yergunov.
When late at night I went to her door and listened, I distinctly heard her crying. Next morning the waiter, handing me my clothes, informed me, with a smile, that the lady in number thirteen was confined. I dressed somehow, and almost fainting with terror ran to Zinaida Fyodorovna. In her room I found a doctor, a midwife, and an elderly Russian lady from Harkov, called Darya Milhailovna.
The attendant turns out to be a native of Harkov; he knows the town like the fingers of his hand, but does not remember any household of the surname of Gnekker. I question him about the estate the same answer. The clock in the corridor strikes one, then two, then three.... These last months in which I am waiting for death seem much longer than the whole of my life.
One autumn evening a merchant in the drapery line put up at Akim's inn. He was journeying by various cross-country roads from Moscow to Harkov with two loaded tilt carts; he was one of those travelling traders whose arrival is sometimes awaited with such impatience by country gentlemen and still more by their wives and daughters.
Word Of The Day