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And while we looked at the ravaged face of our brother, convulsed with spasmodic laughter and tears, a feeling of horror seized upon us.... We felt as if the spectre of death had risen from a lonely yurta somewhere behind the lost town of Zaszyversk and was staring at us with cold glassy eyes.... A dead silence brooded over the frightened assembly.
When I read the order I could not believe my eyes, and though I was sober I reeled. I called another official and showed him the curious document. 'He was an old, experienced hand at the office, but when he saw this order, the paper dropped from his hands. "Where to?" I asked. "To Zaszyversk!" We looked at each other. Nice things that young man must have been up to!
'Our prisoner was obviously beginning to feel rather bad, so he addressed me from time to time; at last he tried to get information out of me concerning the life in Zaszyversk. "How many inhabitants were there? what was the town like? was there any chance of his finding something to do there, perhaps private lessons?"
In this case there was a yet deeper significance in the description, for the town of Zaszyversk does, as I said, exist, but only in the imagination of cartographers and in geography manuals, not in reality. So much so is it non-existent that not a single house, not a yurta, not a hovel marks the place which is pointed out to you on the map.
'And whether you will believe me or won't' he crossed himself again the man wept like a child when I told him I would take him to the nearest Yakut yurta, at a distance of thirty versts from the town of Zaszyversk, and I swear to you for the third time it was with joy that he wept... although he was not much better off in that yurta....
I have a vivid remembrance of a story told me by a former official; he described to me how when he was stationed in V. as Ispravnik, 'a certain gentleman' was sent out to him with orders to take him to the settlement in Zaszyversk. 'You see, little brother, said the ex-Ispravnik, 'the town of Zaszyversk does exist.
When we had advanced ten versts on the ice, the old Cossack showed me the place where sixty years ago a few yurtas had stood which were called in geographical terms "Zaszyversk, town out of governmental bounds". "Stop," I cried, "let the young gentleman get out; here we are! This is the town of Zaszyversk...."
Therefore the question whether and how one could live and suffer there, was a vital one for us. And now the news came unexpectedly that one of our own class, a man closely allied to us by his intellectual development and a number of ways and customs, had actually lived for three years in a yurta not much better situated than the one behind the imaginary town of Zaszyversk.
I ordered three troikas to be brought round; he was put into the first with the Cossack who escorted him, I was in the second with an old Cossack, who remembered where this town of Zaszyversk had once stood, and the third contained provisions; then we started.