Summary

As the fourth scene opens, Arkadi tells the audience that they will hear how Azdak came to sit in the judge’s seat, and sets the time as the Easter Sunday of the revolt, the same day Grusha began her journey with the child. Azdak has taken in someone who appears to be an old beggar, and giving him some cheese, sits there slightly drunk, trying to gather an understanding of who this old beggar is, and from whom he might be fleeing. As the beggar eats his cheese, Azdak examines his hands, and finding that they are not calloused and brown like those of a worker, takes a sterner tone with the beggar, and essentially accuses him of being a landowner, a “peasant flogger” (64). The old man the tries to make Azdak a proposition so he won...