Short Fiction by Vladimir Korolenko (ready player one ebook TXT) 📕

for more than a week the groans of the victims of the terrible tortures filled the air and birds of prey hung over the places of execution.

After this pacification arose on the mountainside houses of the “Village of God,” and the people began to sing the requiems on the hillside.⁠ ⁠…

Ere long the bone of the followers of Razin and of Bulavin were joined by the bones of the banished Stryeltsi.⁠ ⁠…66 Defiantly and in disobedience to the tsar’s order, they left Vekikiya Luki, whither they had been sent, and they stoutly resisted the tsar’s General, Shein, with a large force, but they were defeated in a desperate hand-to-hand encounter, as they were trying to cut their way through to Moscow to the Stryeltsi villages where their wives and children were living. The victorious general filled the prisons and dungeons of Arzamas with the men who had disobeyed the tsar’s orders. The ringleaders were punished. The tsar returning from abroad was dissatisfied with the weakness and the mildness shown by Shein to the rebels. A judge was sent from Moscow to make a new investigation.⁠ ⁠… There were not enough executioners in the city to administer the new tortures and punishments and more had to be summoned from Moscow for the occasion.⁠ ⁠…

New houses were added to the “Village of God.”⁠ ⁠…

Drenched with blood, the naive and rebellious dream of the people for a free life died away until new outbreaks commenced, a dream closely connected with the old cross and the beard, with Cossack bands, and with confused memories of the freedom of the steppes. The old injustice weighed more and more heavily upon them and hardened and increased their century-old suffering. The memory of the people involuntarily returned to those who promised freedom and who sealed this promise with their own and others’ blood.⁠ ⁠… Time and time again, like stones washed down to the shore by the raging torrent, new groups of “houses of God” appeared on the slopes of the mountain of Arzamas.

At first, perhaps, each grave preserved the memory of a definite man, his name, and his saint on an icon. Someone would bring these icons and sprinkle the tombs of shame with passionate tears of love and sympathy. These mourners died.⁠ ⁠… The wind, the rains, and the sun faded the faces on the icons, and along with these there perished the living personal memory of the people buried here. There remained hanging above the mountain only a vague tradition and a vague popular feeling,⁠ ⁠… a feeling of sad inability to comprehend, which dared not pronounce its own judgment and presented this to heaven.⁠ ⁠… And down the centuries, from year to year, even to our own times, sounds the solemn prayer for all those who had been put to death, be they innocent or guilty, and for all those who died an unknown death.⁠ ⁠…

… Whose names, O Lord, Thou knowest.⁠ ⁠…

III

I heard the following tale in Arzamas.

It was after the suppression of the rebellion of Razin. The tsar’s generals had erected near Arzamas a whole forest of columns with crossbeams and towards evening the city saw in horror, as they looked from one hill to another, hanging upon them the bodies of atamans and of the men of Arzamas who had joined the revolt. The bloody sun set behind the mountain, fearful darkness covered the heavens, and crows swarmed in clouds around their booty. The people kept asking one another: “Who is hanging there on the mountain? Criminals and murderers or the defenders of popular freedom, the avengers of century-old injustices?”

That same night a young merchant of Arzamas was driving his tired horse along the road from Saratov and he was urging it on with all his might. He abandoned far from the city his cart and the wares which he was bringing from the Volga, and was hurrying ahead without resting at all; he had learned from fugitives whom he had met that there was something wrong in the city and that the men of Razin were rioting in it. And he had left in the city his father and mother and his young wife with her firstborn babe.

At midnight the young man galloped on his foaming horse out of the forest on to a hill in sight of his natal city. There was no gleam of fire to be seen above the city, no alarm bells to be heard. The city seemed dead; but in two or three of the churches were there timid lights⁠—perchance by the dead bodies of “honorable citizens,” who were waiting Christian burial.⁠ ⁠…

Suddenly⁠ ⁠… his horse started.⁠ ⁠… It was at that very place where now stand the “houses of God.”⁠ ⁠… The merchant saw a dread and leafless forest standing on the mountain side, and, like ripe fruit, the bodies of good young men hanging on the trees, with crows flapping their wings and picking out the eyes of the dead.

The young merchant’s heart had been surging with uncertainty and sorrow during his hurried journey by day and night, uninterrupted save by the need of changing his tired horses, and his soul was weighted down as by a rock with his hatred for the rebels of Razin. He stopped his horse under one scaffold, rose in his stirrups and with all his strength he lashed one of the dead bodies and cursed it.⁠ ⁠… The body swayed.⁠ ⁠… The chain creaked and a cloud of crows rose in the air, flapping and cawing.

A dreadful result followed: the tortured dead descended from every scaffold, from every wheel, and from every hook and rushed at the merchant.⁠ ⁠… The maddened horse tore through the fields, leaped the ravines, and reached the city utterly exhausted. And throughout the whole flight, like autumn leaves driven by a gale, dashed after him the shades of the executed, with their dead eyes aflame, and their fettered hands grasped after him with curses and moans, and their dead voices wailed, lamented, cursed.⁠ ⁠…

Then the merchant realized that it was not for him