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Updated: June 3, 2025
"What is the meaning of this performance?" he was asking himself. But with a preliminary sound of bumping outside some door behind him, the lady companion, in a threadbare black skirt and frayed blouse, came in rapidly, walking on her heels, and carrying in both hands a big Russian samovar, obviously too heavy for her.
She sank into an old-fashioned sofa, covered with silk a quarter of an inch thick, and the atmosphere seemed to breathe life and completeness. Tea and quantities of different little bonnes bouches awaited them. But if there was a samovar she did not recognize it as such; in fact, she had seen nothing which many writers describe as "Russian."
And there were piazzas with fringed Mexican hammocks, wild-grass cushions, a tea-table with a samovar, and, last, a lady in white muslin pouring tea. The stern reality apparently consisted in scorching alkali plains, with houses of the packing-box school of architecture at a distance of seventy or eighty miles apart.
Here there lived a relative of the Chichikovs, a wizened old lady who went to market in person and dried her stockings at the samovar. On seeing the boy, she patted his cheek and expressed satisfaction at his physique; whereupon the fact became disclosed that here he was to abide for a while, for the purpose of attending a local school. "See here, my boy.
He could hardly bear the look of his snow-covered courtyard any more, having no diversion except watching a man chop wood, and hearing the cawing of rooks. He paced to and fro, thinking that another quarter of an hour must have gone, and was surprised to find it was only a few minutes since he had last looked at his watch. He ordered the samovar and lit his pipe.
That is, he sniffed at the samovar and the lemons and so on; but when the rum came along he looked away sternly and in silence. Well, the desirable people came in numbers studios were the fad that year and as soon as Mrs. Palmer Pence understood that Abner was to be met with somewhere in the Burrow she hastened to enroll herself among them.
The servant also brought some punch, and bestirred himself round the table, while the mistress of the house filled the teapot from the samovar boiling in front of her. But all the comfort, all the feast for the eyes and the fine perfume of the tea did not move their hearts. The conversation again turned on the success that some men achieved and the ill-luck that befell others.
After she had watered the flowers and arranged the sheets of music scattered in disorder over the piano, she looked at the samovar, and remarked, "It needs polishing." Nikolay ran his finger over the dull metal, then stuck the finger close to his nose. He looked at the mother so seriously that she could not restrain a good-natured smile.
Musa came back; a decrepit little old woman followed her, bringing in a tarnished samovar. Punin began fussing about, and pressing me to take things; Baburin sat down to the table, leaned his head on his hands, and looked with weary eyes about him. At tea, however, he began to talk. He was dissatisfied with his position.
On holidays and thereabouts the town was filled with crowds of ragamuffins called "railies," of whom the people were afraid. I used often to see a miserable wretch with a bloody face, and without a hat, being dragged off by the police, and behind him was the proof of his crime, a samovar or some wet, newly washed linen.
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