United States or Vietnam ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Thus, if, before giving, you assure yourself that the recipient of the alms is worthy of the same, you will do much good; and as you travel you will become acquainted with all men and sundry, and they will treat you, not as a tchinovnik to be feared, but as one to whom, as a petitioner on behalf of the Church, they may unloose their tongues without peril."
But many active and apprehensive persons could by no means reassure themselves, and asserted that the dead tchinovnik still showed himself in distant parts of the city. In fact, one watchman in Kolomna saw with his own eyes the apparition come from behind a house.
Lermontoff and Poushkine fell in duels before antagonists who represented the tchinovnik class. Rileyev died on the scaffold; Griboiédov was assassinated at Teheran. His foreign policy was a return to that of Catherine the Great the restoration of the Byzantine Empire. Making admirable use of the Hellenic enthusiasm of Canning, he destroyed the Turkish fleet at Navarino.
Thereafter the watchmen conceived such a terror of dead men that they were afraid even to seize the living, and only screamed from a distance, "Hey, there! go your way!" So the dead tchinovnik began to appear even beyond the Kalinkin Bridge, causing no little terror to all timid people.
As to whether M. Plehve was anything more than a bold, energetic, clever official there may be differences of opinion, but he certainly could assume the airs of a profound and polished statesman, capable of looking at things from a much higher point of view than the ordinary tchinovnik, and he had the talent of tacitly suggesting that a great deal of genuine, enlightened statesmanship lay hidden under the smooth surface of his cautious reserve.
At length, having talked himself completely out, and more than that, having had his fill of pauses, and smoked a cigar in a very comfortable arm-chair with reclining back, he suddenly seemed to recollect, and said to the secretary, who stood by the door with papers of reports, "So it seems that there is a tchinovnik waiting to see me. Tell him that he may come in."
After some time more or less, according to circumstances, the household serf becomes a clerk; he gets his liberty and a place as writer in some district court; as a writer in the government's service he disdains, in addition to the peasant, his late comrades in the household; he learns to cavil in business, and begins to take email bribes in poultry, eggs, corn, &c.; he studies roguery systematically, and goes one step lower; he becomes a secretary and a genuine tchinovnik.
The father he is called Gorshkov is a little grey-headed tchinovnik who, seven years ago, was dismissed from public service, and now walks about in a coat so dirty and ragged that it hurts one to see it. Indeed it is a worse coat even than mine! Reserved though I myself am, he is even worse. As for his family, it consists of a wife and three children.
Yet, though he had thus turned the tables upon Chichikov with a tu quoque, and then capped that exploit with the words last quoted, the offended tchinovnik could not remain satisfied, but went on to send in an anonymous document to the authorities.
But the most noteworthy point was, that from that day forward the apparition of the dead tchinovnik ceased to be seen. Evidently the prominent personage's cloak just fitted his shoulders; at all events, no more instances of his dragging cloaks from people's shoulders were heard of.
Word Of The Day