About the product
The story “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Leskov was written in 1864 and published in January of the following year in the literary magazine “Epoch”. According to the writer’s idea, the story was to lead a cycle dedicated to the characters of Russian women. However, Leskov’s plans were not destined to come true due to the closure of “Epoch”.
We recommend reading online a summary of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” chapter by chapter. A brief retelling of the book will be useful for the reading diary and in preparation for literature lessons.
The material was prepared jointly with a teacher of the highest category, Kuchmina Nadezhda Vladimirovna.
Experience as a teacher of Russian language and literature - 27 years.
Chapter Three
A warm, milky twilight hung over the city. Zinovy Borisych had not yet returned from the pond. Boris Timofeich’s father-in-law was also not at home: he went to an old friend’s for his name day, and even ordered not to wait for himself for dinner. Having nothing else to do, Katerina Lvovna had an early dinner, opened a window on her tower and, leaning against the doorframe, peeled sunflower grains. People in the kitchen had dinner and went around the yard to sleep: some to the sheds, some to the barns, some to the high, fragrant haylofts. Sergei came out of the kitchen later than everyone else. He walked around the yard, released the chained dogs, whistled and, passing by Katerina Lvovna’s window, looked at her and bowed low to her.
“Hello,” Katerina Lvovna said quietly to him from her tower, and the courtyard fell silent, like a desert.
- Madam! - someone said two minutes later at Katerina Lvovna’s locked door.
- Who is this? - Katerina Lvovna asked, frightened.
“Don’t be afraid: it’s me, Sergei,” answered the clerk.
- What do you need, Sergei?
- I have a little business for you, Katerina Ilvovna: I want to ask your honor for one little thing; let me come up for a minute.
Katerina Lvovna turned the key and let Sergei in.
- What do you want? - she asked, going to the window herself.
“I came to you, Katerina Ilvovna, to ask if you have any books to read.” Boredom is very overwhelming.
“I, Sergei, don’t have any books: I don’t read them,” answered Katerina Lvovna.
“Such boredom,” Sergei complained.
- Why are you bored?
- For pity’s sake, how can I not be bored: I’m a young man, we live as if in some kind of monastery, and all you can see ahead is that, perhaps, until your death, you must disappear in such solitude. Even despair sometimes comes.
- Why don’t you get married?
- It’s easy to say, madam, get married! Who should I marry here? I am an insignificant person; the owner’s daughter will not marry me, and because of poverty, everything we have, Katerina Ilvovna, you yourself know, is lack of education. How can they really understand anything about love? If you please see what their concept is like that of the rich. You, one might say, would be a consolation for every other person who feels bad, but now they keep you like a canary in a cage.
“Yes, I’m bored,” Katerina Lvovna burst out.
- How not to be bored, madam, in such a life! Even if you wanted to see the object from the outside, just like others do, it would be impossible for you to even see it.
- Well, it’s you... not at all. For me, if I gave birth to a child, it would seem that I would have fun with him.
- But this, let me tell you, madam, is that a child also suffers from something, but not the same. Is it that now, having lived for so many years with the owners and looking at such a woman’s life as a merchant, we also don’t understand? The song is sung: “without my dear friend, sadness and melancholy have seized me,” and this melancholy, I will tell you, Katerina Ilvovna, is so sensitive to my own heart, I can say, that I would take it, cut it out of my chest with a damask knife and throw it to yours legs. And it would be easier, a hundred times easier for me then...
Sergei's voice trembled.
- What are you telling me about your heart here? It's of no use to me. Go to yourself...
“No, excuse me, madam,” said Sergei, trembling with his whole body and taking a step towards Katerina Lvovna. - I know; I see and very much feel and understand that you are no easier in the world than I am; “Well, only now,” he said in one breath, “now all this is at this moment in your hands and in your power.”
- What are you doing? what? Why did you come to me? “I’ll throw myself out the window,” said Katerina Lvovna, feeling under the unbearable power of indescribable fear, and grabbed the window sill with her hand.
- You are my incomparable life! What should you throw yourself at? - Sergei whispered cheekily and, tearing the young hostess away from the window, hugged her tightly.
- Oh! Oh! “let me go,” Katerina Lvovna moaned quietly, weakening under Sergei’s hot kisses, and she spontaneously pressed herself against his powerful figure.
Sergei picked up the owner like a child in his arms and carried her into a dark corner.
There was silence in the room, broken only by the rhythmic ticking of her husband’s pocket watch hanging over the head of Katerina Lvovna’s bed; but this did not interfere with anything.
“Go,” Katerina Lvovna said half an hour later, not looking at Sergei and straightening her scattered hair in front of a small mirror.
“Why the hell am I going to leave here,” Sergei answered her in a happy voice.
- Father-in-law bans the door.
- Oh, soul, soul! What kind of people did you know that the only way to a woman was for them? Whether I come to you or from you, there are doors everywhere,” answered the young man, pointing to the pillars supporting the gallery.
| « Chapter 2 | Chapter 4" |
Summary
Chapter first
Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, although “was not born a beauty,” had a pleasant appearance. Her husband was a merchant from the Kursk province, whom she married not for love, but because she was poor and “she didn’t have to go through suitors.”
Katerina Lvovna lived in a rich merchant’s house with her husband, Zinovy Borisovich, who was “more than fifty years old,” and with his father, Boris Timofeevich. The Izmailov couple had no children, and this fact upset them very much.
Chapter two
Once a mill dam that belonged to the Izmailov merchants broke. Zinovy Borisovich went to solve this problem, and Katerina Lvovna “toiled at home all day long, alone.”
During the walk, Katerina joined the company of cheerful clerks, and for fun, she measured her strength with the handsome young servant Sergei.
In the meantime, the cook told the hostess that the handsome Sergei, without a twinge of conscience, “would seduce any woman and bring her to sin.”
Chapter Three
On a fine evening, Katerina Lvovna is bored alone: her husband stayed late at the mill, and her father-in-law went to his name day. Unexpectedly, Sergei comes to see her under a plausible pretext. His passionate declarations of love make the young woman dizzy. Sergei is not at a loss and takes her to the bedroom.
Chapter Four
All week, while Zinovy Borisovich was not at home, his wife walked with the handsome Sergei until the morning. But one day the father-in-law, suffering from insomnia, noticed the servant climbing out of the window. Boris Timofeevich whipped his shameless lover, and he himself sent people for his son.
Katerina Lvovna begged the old man to let Sergei go, but he firmly decided to punish the traitor and send her lover to prison.
Chapter Five
But it was in vain that old man Izmailov did not listen to his daughter-in-law. Having eaten “mushrooms with gruel at night,” by morning he died in terrible agony, “just as the rats died in his barns.”
Katerina freed her lover and, laying him on her husband’s bed, began to look after him.
Meanwhile, Zinovy Borisovich went a hundred miles away to buy timber, without learning about the domestic tragedy. Without waiting for him, by order of the hostess they hastily “buried Boris Timofeich.”
Katerina Lvovna was a “woman of the timid ten” - she became so insolent that she openly demonstrated her connection with Sergei.
Chapter Six
Katerina is overcome by a midday sleep, and she dreams of a “nice, gray, tall and overweight, fat” cat that rubs itself between her and Sergei. The woman unsuccessfully tries to drive away the uninvited guest, who “like fog passes right past her fingers.”
Katerina extracts declarations of love from Sergei, but he is not at all cheerful: the owner will soon return and then the end of their love joys will come. The smart guy hints that he is ready to marry her, and, intoxicated by his sweet words, the woman decides to settle the problem with her husband.
Chapter Seven
Katerina again dreams of “the old cat,” but only this time his head is not an ordinary cat’s, but his late father-in-law’s. He fawns over the woman and reproaches her for her difficult death.
Katerina lies “with her eyes open and suddenly hears” someone making noise in the yard. She understands: her old unloved husband has returned. Sergei quickly left the bedchamber and hid under the window.
Zinovy Borisovich enters, who already knows everything about the adventures of his unfaithful wife. However, his fair accusations only provoke Katerina. She calls Sergei and kisses him passionately in front of her husband. Zinovy Borisovich cannot stand it and gives her a strong slap in the face.
Chapter Eight
Katerina rushes at her husband and pushes him to the floor with all her might. Zinovy Borisovich understands that his wife “decided to do anything just to get rid of him.”
The lovers kill the merchant and take his body to the cellar. Having destroyed traces of the crime, Katerina turns to Sergei: “Well, now you are a merchant.”
Chapter Nine
The neighbors just can’t figure out where Zinovy Borisovich has gone. The search for the merchant began, but they did not yield anything: “the merchant disappeared into the water.”
A few months later, Katerina felt that she was pregnant. She managed to transfer all the affairs into her own name and personally take charge of running a large household.
Unexpectedly, Katerina Lvovna learned that most of the capital of her late husband belonged to his little nephew Feda. And a week after the news, “an old woman with a little boy” came to stay with her.
Chapter Ten
Fedya gets chickenpox. He is looked after alternately by his grandmother and Katerina. Looking at Fedya, she is surprised at “how much harm this boy causes her and how good it would be if he were not there.”
When the grandmother goes to church for an all-night vigil, and the sick Fedya is left alone, the lovers decide to take advantage of the opportunity.
Chapter Eleven
Sergei held the arms and legs of the unfortunate boy, while Katerina Lvovna “in one movement covered the child’s face” with a large pillow and leaned on it with her whole body. A few minutes later, “grave silence” reigned in the room.
Frightened Sergei began to run, but then terrible blows were heard on the windows. With a firm hand, Katerina opened “the doors into which a bunch of people were breaking.”
Chapter Twelve
People returning from service discussed the merchant's wife Izmailova and her love affair with Sergei. Everyone came to the same opinion: Katerina was so “disappointed that she is not afraid of God, or conscience, or human eyes.”
Walking past the Izmailovo house and seeing a light in the window, they decided to see what was going on there. At this moment, the curious became unwitting witnesses to the murder of a child.
During the investigation, Katerina Lvovna denied everything, while Sergei “burst into tears and sincerely confessed” to all the murders he had committed. At the trial, the criminals were sentenced: “to be punished with whips in the marketplace of their city and then to send both of them to hard labor.” In due time, Katerina gave birth to a child “in a prison hospital”, which she immediately abandoned.
Chapter Thirteen
Katerina Lvovna’s child was given to be raised by an old woman who had previously babysat Fedya. He became “the only heir to the entire Izmailovo fortune.”
Katerina easily parted with the baby: all her thoughts were occupied with Sergei, whom she hoped to see on the way to hard labor. She gave all her money to the guards so that she could see her lover occasionally. During this time, Sergei changed a lot and reacted with irritation to Katerina’s caresses.
Another one joined the party that included the lovers. Two women especially stood out in her: the loving and unpretentious beautiful soldier Fiona, and the young pretty blonde Sonetka, who “had taste and choice” in love affairs.
Chapter fourteen
Sergei liked the “languid beauty Fiona”, and he quickly managed to win her affection. One day Katerina found her lover with Fiona. After the humiliation she suffered, she tried to inspire herself with disgust for the insidious traitor, but to no avail.
While Katerina was angry with Sergei, he “began to act up and flirt with little white Sonetka.” Noticing his flirting, Katerina decided to forget about her pride and make peace with her lover.
Sergei, pretending to be sick, asked Katerina to get him woolen stockings. Fearing for his health, she gave him her only warm stockings.
Chapter fifteen
In the morning Katerina saw Sonetka in the “blue woolen stockings” that she knew well. Unable to bear such humiliation, she walked up to Sergei and spat in his face. That same night, two prisoners counted out fifty lashes to Katerina: this was Sergei’s revenge, which continued in the following days: he openly kissed Sonetka, joked and openly insulted his former mistress.
During the ferry crossing, Katerina peered intently into the waves, and images of the souls she had destroyed flashed before her eyes. Suddenly she “grabbed Sonetka by the legs and in one fell swoop threw her over the side of the ferry.” After a couple of moments, both rivals disappeared from sight.
Nikolai Leskov - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
1 …
Nikolay Semyonovich Leskov
LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK
“When I started to sing the first song.”
Proverb
Chapter first
Sometimes in our places such characters are created that, no matter how many years have passed since meeting them, you will never remember some of them without trembling. Among such characters is the merchant’s wife Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, who played out a once terrible drama, after which our nobles, with someone’s easy word, began to call her Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Katerina Lvovna was not born a beauty, but she was a very pleasant woman in appearance. She was only twenty-four years old; She was not tall, but slender, with a neck as if carved from marble, round shoulders, a strong chest, a straight, thin nose, black, lively eyes, a high white forehead and black, almost blue-black hair. They gave her in marriage to our merchant Izmailov from Tuskari from the Kursk province, not out of love or any attraction, but because Izmailov wooed her, and she was a poor girl, and she did not have to go through suitors. The Izmailovs’ house was not the last in our city: they traded in grain [1], kept a large rented mill in the district, had a profitable garden near the city and a good house in the city. In general, the merchants were wealthy. Moreover, their family was very small: father-in-law Boris Timofeich Izmailov, a man already about eighty years old, long widowed; his son Zinovy Borisych, Katerina Lvovna’s husband, also a man of over fifty years old, and Katerina Lvovna herself, and that’s all. Katerina Lvovna had no children for five years since she married Zinovy Borisych. Zinovy Borisych had no children from his first wife, with whom he lived for twenty years before he became a widower and married Katerina Lvovna. He thought and hoped that God would give him, at least from his second marriage, an heir to the merchant's name and capital; but again he was not lucky in this and with Katerina Lvovna.
This childlessness upset Zinovy Borisych a lot, and not just Zinovy Borisych alone, but also old Boris Timofeich, and even Katerina Lvovna herself was very sad about it. Once, excessive boredom in a locked merchant's mansion with a high fence and chained dogs more than once brought melancholy to the young merchant's wife, reaching the point of stupor, and she would be glad, God knows how glad she would be, to babysit the baby; and she was tired of the other and the reproaches: “Why did you go and why did you get married; Why did she tie a man’s fate, you bastard,” as if she really had committed some kind of crime before her husband, and before her father-in-law, and before all their honest merchant family.
Despite all the contentment and goodness, Katerina Lvovna’s life in her father-in-law’s house was most boring. She didn’t go on many visits, and even if she went with her husband to join her merchant class, it wouldn’t be a joy either. The people are all strict: they watch how she sits down, how she walks, how she gets up; and Katerina Lvovna had an ardent character, and, living as a girl in poverty, she got used to simplicity and freedom: she would run with buckets to the river and swim in her shirt under the pier or sprinkle sunflower husks through the gate of a passing young man; but here everything is different. The father-in-law and her husband will get up early, drink tea at six o’clock in the morning, and go about their business, but she alone wanders from room to room. Everywhere is clean, everywhere is quiet and empty, lamps shine in front of the images, and nowhere in the house is there a living sound or a human voice.
Katerina Lvovna walks and walks through the empty rooms, begins to yawn with boredom and climbs up the stairs to her marital bedchamber, built on a high small mezzanine. She’ll also sit here and watch how hemp is hung up in the barns or grains are poured into the barns - she will yawn again, and she’ll be happy: she’ll take a nap for an hour or two, and wake up - again the same Russian boredom, the boredom of a merchant’s house, which makes it fun, they say, even to hang yourself . Katerina Lvovna was not a keen reader, and besides, there were no books in the house, apart from the Kyiv Patericon[2].
Katerina Lvovna lived a boring life in her rich father-in-law’s house for five whole years of her life with her unkind husband; but no one, as usual, paid the slightest attention to her boredom.
Chapter two
In the sixth spring of Katerina Lvovnina’s marriage, the Izmailovs’ mill dam burst. At that time, as if on purpose, a lot of work was brought to the mill, but a huge hole was created: the water went under the lower bed [3] of the idle cover [4], and there was no way to grab it with a quick hand. Zinovy Borisych drove people from the whole neighborhood to the mill, and he himself sat there incessantly; The city affairs were already managed by one old man, and Katerina Lvovna toiled at home all day long, alone. At first she was even more bored without her husband, but now it seemed even better: she became freer alone. Her heart had never been particularly fond of him, and without him there was at least one less commander over her.
Once Katerina Lvovna was sitting on her lookout under her window, yawning and yawning, not thinking about anything in particular, and she finally felt ashamed of yawning. And the weather outside is so wonderful: warm, light, cheerful, and through the green wooden lattice of the garden you can see different birds flitting through the trees from branch to branch.
“Why am I really gaping? – thought Katerina Lvovna. “Well, at least I’ll get up and walk around the yard or go into the garden.”
Katerina Lvovna threw on an old damask [5] fur coat and went out.
It’s so bright and breathing in the yard, and there’s such cheerful laughter in the gallery near the barns.
-Why are you so happy? – Katerina Lvovna asked her mother-in-law’s clerks.
“But, Mother Katerina Ilvovna, they hanged a live pig,” the old clerk answered her.
- Which pig?
“But the pig Aksinya, who gave birth to a son, Vasily, did not invite us to the christening,” said the young man with a daring, handsome face, framed by pitch-black curls and a barely visible beard, boldly and cheerfully.
At that moment the fat face of the rosy-cheeked cook Aksinya peeked out from the flour tub suspended from the weight yoke.
“Devils, smooth devils,” the cook cursed, trying to grab the iron rocker and crawl out of the swinging tub.
“It takes eight pounds until lunch, and the fir [6] will eat the hay, and there won’t be enough weights,” the handsome fellow explained again and, turning the tub, he threw the cook onto a pile piled in the corner.
Baba, cursing playfully, began to recover.
- Well, how much will I have? - Katerina Lvovna joked and, holding the ropes, stood on the board.
“Three pounds, seven pounds,” answered the same handsome fellow Sergei, throwing the weights onto the weighing bench. - Wonderful!
– Why are you marveling?
- Why, you’ve got three pounds in you, Katerina Ilvovna. I reason like this, you have to be carried in your arms all day long - and you won’t get tired, but you will only feel it as a pleasure for yourself.
- Well, I’m not a person, or what? “You’ll probably get tired too,” answered Katerina Lvovna, slightly blushing, unaccustomed to such speeches, feeling a sudden surge of desire to babble and utter cheerful and playful words.
- Oh my God! “I would bring the happy one to Arabia,” Sergei answered her to her remark.
“That’s not how you’re reasoning, good fellow,” said the peasant who was pouring out. -What is this heaviness in us? Does our body pull? Our body, dear man, means nothing when weighed: our strength, the strength that pulls, is not the body!
“Yes, I had a strong passion for girls,” said Katerina Lvovna, again unable to resist. “Even a man didn’t overcome me.”
“Well, sir, allow me a pen, if this is true,” asked the handsome young man.
Katerina Lvovna was embarrassed, but extended her hand.
- Oh, let go of the ring: it hurts! - Katerina Lvovna screamed when Sergei squeezed her hand in his hand and pushed him in the chest with her free hand.
The young man let go of his owner’s hand and, at her push, flew two steps to the side.
“Well, yes, so you argue that she’s a woman,” the man was surprised.
“No, let me do this, pull it up,” said Seryoga, throwing out his curls.
“Well, get on with it,” answered Katerina Lvovna, cheerfully, and raised her elbows up.
Sergei hugged the young hostess and pressed her firm breasts against his red shirt. Katerina Lvovna just moved her shoulders, and Sergei lifted her from the floor, held her in his arms, squeezed her and quietly sat her down on an overturned measuring stick.
Katerina Lvovna did not even have time to use her vaunted strength. Red, red, she straightened, sitting on the measure, the fur coat that had fallen off her shoulder and quietly walked out of the barn, and Sergei bravely coughed and shouted:
- Well, you idiots of the king of heaven! Rash, don’t yawn, don’t stop rowing; there will be tops, our surpluses.
It was as if he didn’t even pay attention to what was happening now.
- This damned Seryozha is a girl! - said the cook Aksinya, trailing behind Katerina Lvovna. - The thief took everyone - what height, what face, what beauty, and will flatter and lead to sin. And what about fickle, scoundrel, very fickle, fickle!
1 …
Nikolay Leskov
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Feature article
“When I started to sing the first song.”
Proverb
Chapter first
Sometimes in our places such characters are created that no matter how many years have passed since meeting them, you will never remember some of them without trembling. Among such characters is the merchant’s wife Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, who played out a once terrible drama, after which our nobles, with someone’s easy word, began to call her Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Katerina Lvovna was not born a beauty, but she was a very pleasant woman in appearance. She was only twenty-four years old; She was not tall, but slender, with a neck as if carved from marble, round shoulders, a strong chest, a straight, thin nose, black, lively eyes, a high white forehead and black, almost blue-black hair. They gave her in marriage to our merchant Izmailov from Tuskari from the Kursk province, not out of love or any attraction, but because Izmailov wooed her, and she was a poor girl, and she did not have to go through suitors. The Izmailovs’ house was not the last in our city: they traded in grain, kept a large rented mill in the district, had a profitable garden near the city and a good house in the city. In general, the merchants were wealthy. Moreover, their family was very small: father-in-law Boris Timofeich Izmailov, a man already about eighty years old, long widowed; his son Zinovy Borisych, Katerina Lvovna’s husband, also a man of over fifty years old, and Katerina Lvovna herself, and that’s all. Katerina Lvovna had no children for five years since she married Zinovy Borisych. Zinovy Borisych had no children from his first wife, with whom he lived for twenty years before he became a widower and married Katerina Lvovna. He thought and hoped that God would give him, at least from his second marriage, an heir to the merchant's name and capital; but again he was not lucky in this and with Katerina Lvovna.
This childlessness upset Zinovy Borisych a lot, and not just Zinovy Borisych alone, but also old Boris Timofeich, and even Katerina Lvovna herself was very sad about it. Once, excessive boredom in a locked merchant's mansion with a high fence and chained dogs more than once brought melancholy to the young merchant's wife, reaching the point of stupor, and she would be glad, God knows how glad she would be, to babysit the baby; and another - and she was tired of the reproaches: “Why did you go and why did you get married; Why did she tie a man’s fate, you fool,” as if she really had committed some kind of crime before her husband, and before her father-in-law, and before all their honest merchant family.
Despite all the contentment and goodness, Katerina Lvovna’s life in her father-in-law’s house was most boring. She didn’t go on many visits, and even if she went with her husband to join her merchant class, it wouldn’t be a joy either. The people are all strict: they watch how she sits down, how she walks, how she gets up; and Katerina Lvovna had an ardent character, and, living as a girl in poverty, she got used to simplicity and freedom: she would run with buckets to the river and swim in her shirt under the pier or sprinkle sunflower husks through the gate of a passing young man; but here everything is different. The father-in-law and her husband will get up early, drink tea at six o’clock in the morning, and go about their business, but she alone wanders from room to room. Everywhere is clean, everywhere is quiet and empty, lamps shine in front of the images, and nowhere in the house is there a living sound or a human voice.
Katerina Lvovna walks and walks through the empty rooms, begins to yawn with boredom and climbs up the stairs to her marital bedchamber, built on a high small mezzanine. She’ll sit here, too, and watch how they hang hemp or grains in the barns and pour them in, and she’ll yawn again, and she’ll be happy: she’ll take a nap for an hour or two, and wake up—again the same Russian boredom, the boredom of a merchant’s house, which makes it fun, they say, even hang myself. Katerina Lvovna was not a keen reader, and besides the Kyiv patericon, there were no books in the house.
Katerina Lvovna lived a boring life in her rich father-in-law’s house for five whole years of her life with her unkind husband; but no one, as usual, paid the slightest attention to her boredom.
Chapter two
In the sixth spring of Katerina Lvovnina’s marriage, the Izmailovs’ mill dam burst. At that time, as if on purpose, a lot of work was brought to the mill, but a huge hole was created: the water went under the lower bed of the idle cover, and there was no way to grab it with a quick hand. Zinovy Borisych drove the people from the whole neighborhood to the mill and sat there incessantly; The city affairs were already managed by one old man, and Katerina Lvovna toiled at home all day long, alone. At first she was even more bored without her husband, but now it seemed even better: she became freer alone. Her heart had never been particularly fond of him, and without him there was at least one less commander over her.
One day Katerina Lvovna was sitting on her lookout under her window, yawning and yawning, not thinking about anything in particular, and she finally felt ashamed of yawning. And the weather outside is so wonderful: warm, light, cheerful, and through the green wooden lattice of the garden you can see different birds flitting through the trees from branch to branch.
“Why am I really gaping? – thought Katerina Lvovna. “Well, at least I’ll get up and walk around the yard or go into the garden.”
Katerina Lvovna threw on an old damask coat and went out.
It’s so bright and breathing in the yard, and there’s such cheerful laughter in the gallery near the barns.
-Why are you so happy? – Katerina Lvovna asked her mother-in-law’s clerks.
“But, Mother Katerina Ilvovna, they hanged a live pig,” the old clerk answered her.
- Which pig?
“But the pig Aksinya, who gave birth to a son, Vasily, did not invite us to the christening,” said the young man with a daring, handsome face, framed by pitch-black curls and a barely visible beard, boldly and cheerfully.
At that moment the fat face of the rosy-cheeked cook Aksinya peeked out from the flour tub suspended from the weight yoke.
“Devils, smooth devils,” the cook cursed, trying to grab the iron rocker and crawl out of the swinging tub.
“It takes eight pounds until lunch, and if the fir eats the hay, there won’t be enough weights,” the handsome fellow explained again and, turning the tub, he threw the cook onto a pile piled in the corner.
Baba, cursing playfully, began to recover.
- Well, how much will I have? - Katerina Lvovna joked and, holding the ropes, stood on the board.
“Three pounds, seven pounds,” answered the same handsome fellow Sergei, throwing the weights onto the weighing bench. - Wonderful!
- Why are you marveling?
- Why, you’ve got three pounds in you, Katerina Ilvovna. I reason like this, you have to be carried in your arms all day long - and you won’t get tired, but you will only feel it as a pleasure for yourself.
- Well, I’m not a person, or what? “You’ll probably get tired too,” answered Katerina Lvovna, slightly blushing, unaccustomed to such speeches, feeling a sudden surge of desire to babble and utter cheerful and playful words.
- Oh my God! “I would bring the happy one to Arabia,” Sergei answered her to her remark.
“That’s not how you’re reasoning, good fellow,” said the peasant who was pouring out. -What is this heaviness in us? Does our body pull? Our body, dear man, means nothing when weighed down: our strength, the strength that pulls, is not the body!
“Yes, I had a strong passion for girls,” said Katerina Lvovna, again unable to resist. “Even a man didn’t overcome me.”
