Short Fiction by Leo Tolstoy (book reader for pc TXT) 📕

could not tolerate the Abbot’s action. “I have renounced everything for the glory of God, and here I am exhibited like a wild beast!” “Had you renounced vanity for God’s sake you would have borne it. Worldly pride is not yet dead in you. I have thought about you, Sergius my son, and prayed also, and this is what God has suggested to me. At the Tambóv hermitage the anchorite Hilary, a man of saintly life, has died. He had lived there eighteen years. The Tambóv Abbot is asking whether there is not a brother who would take his place. And here comes your letter. Go to Father Païssy of the Tambóv Monastery. I will write to him about you, and you must ask for Hilary’s cell. Not that you can replace Hilary, but you need solitude to quell your pride. May God bless you!”

Sergius obeyed the starets, showed his letter to the Abbot, and having obtained his permission, gave up his cell, handed all his possessions over to the monastery, and set out for the Tambóv hermitage.

There the Abbot, an excellent manager of merchant origin, received Sergius simply and quietly and placed him in Hilary’s cell, at first assigning to him a lay brother but afterwards leaving him alone, at Sergius’s own request. The cell was a dual cave, dug into the hillside, and in it Hilary had been buried. In the back part was Hilary’s grave, while in the front was a niche for sleeping, with a straw mattress, a small table, and a shelf with icons and books. Outside the outer door, which fastened with a hook, was another shelf on which, once a day, a monk placed food from the monastery.

And so Sergius became a hermit.

III

At Carnival time, in the sixth year of Sergius’s life at the hermitage, a merry company of rich people, men and women from a neighbouring town, made up a troika-party, after a meal of carnival-pancakes and wine. The company consisted of two lawyers, a wealthy landowner, an officer, and four ladies. One lady was the officer’s wife, another the wife of the landowner, the third his sister⁠—a young girl⁠—and the fourth a divorcee, beautiful, rich, and eccentric, who amazed and shocked the town by her escapades.

The weather was excellent and the snow-covered road smooth as a floor. They drove some seven miles out of town, and then stopped and consulted as to whether they should turn back or drive farther.

“But where does this road lead to?” asked Makóvkina, the beautiful divorcee.

“To Tambóv, eight miles from here,” replied one of the lawyers, who was having a flirtation with her.

“And then where?”

“Then on to L⁠⸺, past the Monastery.”

“Where that Father Sergius lives?”

“Yes.”

“Kasátsky, the handsome hermit?”

“Yes.”

“Mesdames et messieurs, let us drive on and see Kasátsky! We can stop at Tambóv and have something to eat.”

“But we shouldn’t get home tonight!”

“Never mind, we will stay at Kasátsky’s.”

“Well, there is a very good hostelry at the Monastery. I stayed there when I was defending Mákhin.”

“No, I shall spend the night at Kasátsky’s!”

“Impossible! Even your omnipotence could not accomplish that!”

“Impossible? Will you bet?”

“All right! If you spend the night with him, the stake shall be whatever you like.”

“A discrétion!”

“But on your side too!”

“Yes, of course. Let us drive on.”

Vodka was handed to the drivers, and the party got out a box of pies, wine, and sweets for themselves. The ladies wrapped up in their white dogskins. The drivers disputed as to whose troika should go ahead, and the youngest, seating himself sideways with a dashing air, swung his long knout and shouted to the horses. The troika-bells tinkled and the sledge-runners squeaked over the snow.

The sledge swayed hardly at all. The shaft-horse, with his tightly bound tail under his decorated breechband, galloped smoothly and briskly; the smooth road seemed to run rapidly backwards, while the driver dashingly shook the reins. One of the lawyers and the officer sitting opposite talked nonsense to Makóvkina’s neighbour, but Makóvkina herself sat motionless and in thought, tightly wrapped in her fur. “Always the same and always nasty! The same red shiny faces smelling of wine and cigars! The same talk, the same thoughts, and always about the same things! And they are all satisfied and confident that it should be so, and will go on living like that till they die. But I can’t. It bores me. I want something that would upset it all and turn it upside down. Suppose it happened to us as to those people⁠—at Sarátov was it?⁠—who kept on driving and froze to death.⁠ ⁠… What would our people do? How would they behave? Basely, for certain. Each for himself. And I too should act badly. But I at any rate have beauty. They all know it. And how about that monk? Is it possible that he has become indifferent to it? No! That is the one thing they all care for⁠—like that cadet last autumn. What a fool he was!”

“Iván Nikoláevich!” she said aloud.

“What are your commands?”

“How old is he?”

“Who?”

“Kasátsky.”

“Over forty, I should think.”

“And does he receive all visitors?”

“Yes, everybody, but not always.”

“Cover up my feet. Not like that⁠—how clumsy you are! No! More, more⁠—like that! But you need not squeeze them!”

So they came to the forest where the cell was.

Makóvkina got out of the sledge, and told them to drive on. They tried to dissuade her, but she grew irritable and ordered them to go on.

When the sledges had gone she went up the path in her white dogskin coat. The lawyer got out and stopped to watch her.

It was Father Sergius’s sixth year as a recluse, and he was now forty-nine. His life in solitude was hard⁠—not on account of the fasts and the prayers (they were no hardship to him) but on account of an inner conflict he had not at all anticipated. The sources of that conflict were two: doubts, and the lust of the flesh. And these two enemies always appeared together. It