Short Fiction by Aleksandr Kuprin (nonfiction book recommendations .txt) 📕

his platform. For a second he thought that he was going to faint. But he recovered himself. Straining the utmost resources of his mighty voice, he began solemnly:

“To the joy of our earth, to the ornament and the flower of our life, to the true comilitant and servant of Christ, to the boyard Leo.⁠ ⁠…”

He became silent for a second. There was not a whisper, not a cough, not a sound in the crowded church. It was that awful moment of silence when a large crowd is mute, obedient to one will, seized by one feeling. And now, the archdeacon’s eyes reddened and became suffused with tears, his face suddenly became radiant with that beauty which can transform the face of a man when in the ecstasy of inspiration. He coughed again, and suddenly, filling the whole edifice with his terrible voice, roared:

“Lo‑o‑ong li‑i‑ife.”

And, instead of lowering his candle, as is done in the rite of anathematization, he raised it high above his head.

It was in vain that the regent hissed at his choirboys, struck them on the heads with his tuning-fork, closed their mouths with his hand. Joyfully, like the silvery sounds of the archangels’ trumpets, their voices rang out through the church: “Long life! Long life!”

In the meantime, Father Prior, Father Provost, an official of the Consistory, the psalm-reader, and the archdeacon’s wife had mounted on the platform.

“Let me alone.⁠ ⁠… Let me alone⁠ ⁠…” said Father Olympy in a wrathful, hissing whisper, contemptuously brushing aside Father Provost. “I’ve spoiled my voice, but it was for the glory of the Lord. Go away.”

He took off the surplice embroidered with gold, reverently kissed the stole, made the sign of the cross, and came down. He went out through the aisle, towering over the crowd, immense, majestic, and sad, and people involuntarily moved away, experiencing strange fear. As if made of stone, he walked past the archbishop’s place without even glancing at it.

It was only in the churchyard that his wife caught up with him. Crying and pulling him by the sleeve, she began to shriek:

“What have you done, you crazy idiot? Got drunk in the morning, and started up.⁠ ⁠… It’ll be lucky if they only send you to some monastery to clean cesspools. How much trouble I’m going to have now, and all on account of you, you blockhead!”

“Doesn’t make any difference,” said the archdeacon, looking at the ground. “I’ll go as a common laborer, become a switchman or a janitor, but I won’t serve in the church any more. I’ll go tomorrow. Don’t want it any more. My soul can’t stand it. I believe truly, according to the symbol of the faith, yes, I believe in Christ and the Apostolic Church. Yet I feel no wrath.”

And then again, the familiar, beautiful words rushed through his mind:

“Everything that God has made is for man’s joy.”

“Idiot! Blockhead!” shrieked his wife. “I’ll send you to the insane asylum.⁠ ⁠… I’ll go to the governor, to the Tsar.⁠ ⁠… Got drunk out of his senses, the blockhead.”

Then Father Olympy paused, turned around, and, opening wide his large, angry eyes, said sternly and heavily:

“Well?”

For the first time his wife became timidly silent. She turned away from her husband, covered her face with a handkerchief, and burst into tears.

And he walked on, immense, dark, and majestic, like a monument.

The Laestrygonians I Silence

At the end of October, or the beginning of November, the city of Balaklava, that most original corner of the variegated Russian Empire, begins to live a life all its own. The days are still warm and pleasant, as they sometimes are in the fall, but at night it grows cold and the ground resounds under your step. The last summer visitors have gone to Sebastopol with their bundles, suitcases, trunks, sickly children, and decadente young ladies. As mementos of the recent guests, there still remain grape-skins which the invalid summer visitors had scattered in abundant quantities on every pier and in every narrow street, all for the purpose of aiding their precious health, and piles of paper, refuse, cigarette stumps, scraps of letters and newspapers, which always remain behind when the summer visitors go away.

And immediately Balaklava becomes roomy, fresh, comfortable, and cozy, as though it were an apartment which had just been left by a crowd of noisy, smoking, arguing, uninvited guests. The old, native Greek population, which had until then concealed itself in back rooms and shacks, now creeps forth and takes possession of the streets.

On the street running along the shore fishing-nets are spread out, stretched across the whole width of the street. Against the rough cobbles of the street they seem thin and delicate as a cobweb, and the fishermen, creeping over them on all fours, appear like black spiders mending their broken, airy traps. Other fishermen are twisting the cord that they will use for catching the sturgeon and the flounder; with a serious and preoccupied air, they run back and forth with the cord thrown over their shoulders, twisting the thread without stopping.

The captains of the fishing-boats are sharpening the sturgeon-hooks, the old, dull copper hooks which, according to an old tradition of fishermen, are always preferred by the fish to the modern steel hooks of the English style. On the other side of the bay the boats, drawn on the shore and turned with the keel up, are being calked, tarred, and painted.

Around the stone fountains, where a thin stream of water runs and murmurs without stopping, the thin, dark-faced Greek women, with large eyes and long noses⁠—so strangely and touchingly like the representations of the Holy Virgin on the old Byzantine images⁠—chatter for hours at a time about their petty household affairs.

And all this is done without any undue haste, in a pleasant, neighborly way, with skill and deftness acquired by age-long habits, beneath the bright and pleasant autumn sun, on the shore of the merry blue bay, under the clear autumn sky, which rests so calmly upon the