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Updated: June 2, 2025
From the very first the two men had been opponents. It seemed as though Nikitin's great stature and fine air, as of a king travelling in disguise from some foreign country, made him the only man in the world to put out Semyonov's sinister blaze. Nikitin was an idealist, a mystic, a dreamer everything that Semyonov was not.
The smell rose higher and higher, the bloody rags lay about the kitchen floor, torn arms, smashed legs, heads with gaping wounds, the pitiful crying and praying, the shrill voices of the delirious, Nikitin, his arms steeped in blood to the elbows, probing, cutting, digging, I myself bandaging until I did not know what my hands were doing.... Then suddenly the battle coming right back to us again, overhead now as it seemed; the cannon shaking three silly staring china dogs on the kitchen dresser, the rifle fire clattering like tumbling crockery about the walls of the cottage and through it all the white youth, crouched like a ghost on the stove, watching without pause....
On the night of the death of Marie Ivanovna I slept a heavy, dreamless sleep. I was wakened between six and seven the next morning by Nikitin, who told me that he, Trenchard, Andrey Vassilievitch and I were to return at once to the forest. I realised at once that indescribable quiver in the air of momentous events.
The rooms, especially in the morning, always smelt like a menagerie, and nothing could destroy the odour; the cats frequently fought with the dogs. The spiteful beast Mushka was fed a dozen times a day; she still refused to recognize Nikitin and growled at him: "Rrr . . . nga-nga-nga!" One night in Lent he was returning home from the club where he had been playing cards.
I could see that he was depressed. "Well, Andrey Vassilievitch," I said to him. "You're depressed about something?" "Yes," he said very gloomily indeed. "I have many unhappy hours, Ivan Andreievitch." I did not get up and leave him as I very easily might have done. I had had, since the night when Nikitin had spoken to me so frankly, a desire to know the little man's side of that affair.
For instance, you set the boys in the eighth class an essay on 'Pushkin as a Psychologist. To begin with, you shouldn't set such a difficult subject; and, secondly, Pushkin was not a psychologist. Shtchedrin now, or Dostoevsky let us say, is a different matter, but Pushkin is a great poet and nothing more." "Shtchedrin is one thing, and Pushkin is another," Nikitin answered sulkily.
A crescent moon was shining over the garden, and drowsy tulips and irises were stretching up from the dark grass in its faint light, as though entreating for words of love for them, too. When Nikitin and Masha went back to the house, the officers and the young ladies were already assembled and dancing the mazurka.
"Then why has he treated Varya so badly?" "Why badly?" asked Nikitin, beginning to feel irritation against the white cat, who was stretching and arching its back. "As far as I know, he has made no proposal and has given her no promises." "Then why was he so often at the house? If he didn't mean to marry her, he oughtn't to have come." Nikitin put out the candle and got into bed.
Where's the satisfaction of putting on the fetters at your age?" "I am not young!" said Nikitin, offended. "I am in my twenty-seventh year." "Papa, the farrier has come!" cried Varya from the other room. And the conversation broke off. Varya, Masha, and Polyansky saw Nikitin home.
Nikitin knew nothing about horses; it made absolutely no difference to him whether he held his horse on the bridle or on the curb, whether he trotted or galloped; he only felt that his position was strained and unnatural, and that consequently the officers who knew how to sit in their saddles must please Masha more than he could. And he was jealous of the officers.
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