Yes; one can but repeat, in another sense, Alexey
Sergeitch’s words: ‘They were good
old times ... but enough of them!’
1881.
Reader, do you know those little homesteads of country
gentlefolks, which were plentiful in our Great Russian
Oukraine twenty-five or thirty years ago? Now
one rarely comes across them, and in another ten years
the last of them will, I suppose, have disappeared
for ever. The running pond overgrown with reeds
and rushes, the favourite haunt of fussy ducks, among
whom one may now and then come across a wary ‘teal’;
beyond the pond a garden with avenues of lime-trees,
the chief beauty and glory of our black-earth plains,
with smothered rows of ‘Spanish’ strawberries,
with dense thickets of gooseberries, currants, and
raspberries, in the midst of which, in the languid
hour of the stagnant noonday heat, one would be sure
to catch glimpses of a serf-girl’s striped kerchief,
and to hear the shrill ring of her voice. Close
by would be a summer-house standing on four legs,
a conservatory, a neglected kitchen garden, with flocks
of sparrows hung on stakes, and a cat curled up on
the tumble-down well; a little further, leafy apple-trees
in the high grass, which is green below and grey above,
straggling cherry-trees, pear-trees, on which there
is never any fruit; then flower-beds, poppies, peonies,
pansies, milkwort, ‘maids in green,’ bushes
of Tartar honeysuckle, wild jasmine, lilac and acacia,
with the continual hum of bees and wasps among their
thick, fragrant, sticky branches. At last comes
the manor-house, a one-storied building on a brick
foundation, with greenish window-panes in narrow frames,
a sloping, once painted roof, a little balcony from
which the vases of the balustrade are always jutting
out, a crooked gable, and a husky old dog in the recess
under the steps at the door. Behind the house
a wide yard with nettles, wormwood, and burdocks in
the corners, outbuildings with doors that stick, doves
and rooks on the thatched roofs, a little storehouse
with a rusty weathercock, two or three birch-trees
with rooks’ nests in their bare top branches,
and beyond—the road with cushions of soft
dust in the ruts and a field and the long hurdles of
the hemp patches, and the grey little huts of the village,
and the cackle of geese in the far-away rich meadows....
Is all this familiar to you, reader? In the house
itself everything is a little awry, a little rickety—but
no matter. It stands firm and keeps warm; the
stoves are like elephants, the furniture is of all
sorts, home-made. Little paths of white footmarks
run from the doors over the painted floors. In
the hall siskins and larks in tiny cages; in the corner
of the dining-room an immense English clock in the
form of a tower, with the inscription, ‘Strike—silent’;
in the drawing-room portraits of the family, painted
