«Viy»

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*Viy is i colossal creation of folk imagination. This name is applied
by people in Utlle Russia to the chief of [he gnomes, whose eyelids teach to
the ground. The whole story is a popular legend. 1 did not wish to change it
in any way and tell it almost as simply is 1 heard it. (Author's note)


As soon as the booming seminary bell that hung by the gates of the
Bratsky Monastery in Kiev rang out in the morning, crowds of schoolboys and
seminarians' came hurrying from all over the city. Grammarians,
rhetoricians, philosophers, and theologians, notebooks under their arms,
trudged to class. The grammarians were still very small; as they walked they
pushed each other and quarreled among themselves in the thinnest trebles;
their clothes were almost all torn or dirty, and their pockets were
eternally fall of various sorts of trash, such as knucklebones, whistles
made from feathers, unfinished pieces of pie, and occasionally even a little
sparrow that, by chirping suddenly amidst the extraordinary silence of the
classroom, would procure for its patron a decent beating on both hands, and
sometimes the cherrywood rod. The rhetoricians walked more sedately: their
clothes were often perfectly intact, but instead their faces were almost
always adorned with some rhetorical trope: one eye completely closed, or a
big bubble instead of a lip, or some other mark; these swore by God and
talked among themselves in tenors. The philosophers dropped a whole octave
lower: there was nothing in their pockets except strong, coarse tobacco.
They kept nothing stashed away and ate whatever came along on the spot; the
smell of pipes and vodka sometimes spread so far around them that a passing
artisan would stand for a long time sniffing the air like a hound.
The marketplace at that time was usually just beginning to stir, and
women with bagels, rolls, watermelon seeds, and poppyseed cakes tugged those
who had them by their coattails of thin broadcloth or some sort of cotton.
"Young sirs! Young sirs! Here! Here!" they said on all sides. "There
are good bagels, poppyseed cakes, twists, rolls! Fine ones, by God! with
honey! homemade!"
Another woman, holding up something long made of twisted dough, cried;
"Here's an icicle, young sirs! Buy an icicle!"
"Don't buy anything from that one! Look how foul she is--her nose is
awful and her hands are dirty . . ."
But they were afraid to pester the philosophers and theologians,
because the philosophers and theologians liked to sample things, and always
by the handful.
On reaching the seminary, the whole crowd settled by classes in
low-ceilinged but raiher spacious rooms with small windows, wide doors, and
dirty desks.