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Dark Avenues / Темные аллеи. Книга для чтения на английском языке
Dark Avenues / Темные аллеи
“I have been keeping an eye on Bunin’s brilliant talent. He really is the enemy.”
Andrei Bely
“Your influence is truly beyond words… I do not know any other writer whose external world is so closely tied to another, whose sensations are more exact and indispensable, and whose world is more genuine and also more unexpected than yours.”
André Gide
“He was a great stylist who wrote very suggestively. He didn’t spray us with ideologies or worries. His writing is pure poetry.”
Andrei Makine
“A most powerful ‘connoisseur of colours’. One could write an entire dissertation on his colour schemes.”
Vladimir Nabokov
“You have, Mr Bunin, thoroughly explored the soul of vanished Russia, and in doing so you have most deservedly continued the glorious traditions of the great Russian literature.”
Professor Wilhelm Nordenson, at the 1933 Nobel Prize banquet
Part One
Translation Copyriht © Hugh Aplin, 2008
Published by Alma Classics Ltd
© КАРО, 2019
Dark Avenues
In the cold, foul weather of autumn, on one of Tula’s highways, flooded by rains and indented with many black ruts, up to a long hut with a government posting station in one wing and private living quarters where one could rest or spend the night, have dinner or ask for the samovar in the other, there drove a tarantass[1], bespattered with mud and with its top half-raised, pulled by three quite ordinary horses with their tails tied up out of the slush. On the box of the tarantass sat a sturdy peasant in a tightly belted, heavy cloth coat, serious and dark-faced, with a sparse, jet-black beard, looking like a robber of old, and inside the tarantass sat a svelte old military man in a large peaked cap[2] and a grey greatcoat with an upright beaver collar of Nicholas I’s time, still black-browed, but with white whiskers which joined up with similar sideburns; his chin was shaved, and his appearance as a whole bore that resemblance[3] to Alexander II[4] which was so prevalent among military men at the time of his reign; his gaze was both enquiring, stern and at the same time weary.
When the horses came to a halt[5], he threw a leg in a level-topped military boot out of the tarantass and, holding back the skirts of the greatcoat with suede-gloved hands, ran up onto the porch of the hut.
“To the left, Your Excellency,” the coachman cried out rudely from the box and, stooping slightly on the threshold because of his height, the man went into the little entrance hall, then to the left into the living quarters.
The living quarters were warm, dry and tidy: there was a new, goldcoloured icon in the left-hand corner, beneath it a table covered with a clean, unbleached tablecloth, and at the table there were benches, scrubbed clean; the kitchen stove, occupying the far right-hand corner, was newly white with chalk; nearer stood something like an ottoman, covered with mottled rugs, with its folding end resting against the side of the stove; from behind the stove door came the sweet smell of cabbage soup – cabbage boiled down until soft, beef and bay leaves.
The new arrival threw his greatcoat down on a bench and proved to be still more svelte in just his dress uniform[6] and long boots; then he took off the gloves and cap, and with a weary air ran a pale, thin hand over his head – his grey hair, combed down on his temples towards the corners of his eyes, was slightly curling; his attractive, elongated face with dark eyes retained here and there minor traces of smallpox. There was nobody in the living quarters and, opening the door into the entrance hall a little, he cried out in an unfriendly way:
“Hey, anybody there?”
Immediately thereafter into the living quarters came a dark-haired woman, also black-browed and also still unusually attractive for her age, looking like an elderly gypsy, with dark down on her upper lip and alongside her cheeks, light on her feet, but plump, with large breasts under her red blouse and a triangular stomach like a goose’s under her black woollen skirt.
“Welcome, Your Excellency,” she said. “Would you be wanting to eat, or would you like the samovar?”
The new arrival threw a cursory glance at her rounded shoulders and light feet in worn, red Tatar slippers, and curtly, inattentively replied:
“The samovar. Are you the mistress here or a servant?”