November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Although Pluzhnikov had always shown his esteem for the older Blagodarev with a word of greeting, a bow, or by consulting him on some matter concerning the credit association, they had never eaten at each other’s tables, and Elisei Nikiforovich understood that Pluzhnikov was inviting him mainly because of his son. This was still an honor, not an affront, for it was truly said, “Don’t pride yourself on your father, pride yourself on a fine son": you don’t choose your father and don’t rear him, but your son is your own stock through and through, the fruit of your loins, for him you will be blamed and for him you will be praised.

  With a dignified inclination of his head Elisei accepted the invitation for himself and his son.

  A fine head, the old man had, and he carried it like a youngster. His gaze had become placid over the years, but was still so piercing that even Pluzhnikov abandoned that air of conscious superiority which he usually wore with peasants. Yes. Pluzhnikov had invited him because of his son, his son was becoming an important figure in the village, with his two George medals, he was literate, a high flyer. Pluzhnikov was looking forward to the rural reconstruction so close at hand, he already had a multitude of innovations and improvements in mind, and men like Arseni would be beyond price. But the father too was splendid. The Russian village was still as strong as ever, two years of war had not undermined it. Pluzhnikov had made it his duty to consolidate that strength.

  Another man stood nearby, waiting for Pluzhnikov, dressed in a three-piece worsted suit with a silver watch chain showing over one pocket. This was their fellow villager, the greatly respected merchant Evpati Bruyakin, nothing much to look at, but worth thousands. The time had come for them to resume an important, not to say earth-shaking, discussion begun some time ago. Bruyakin had disclosed to Pluzhnikov his decision, not yet made public, to wind down his business and eventually stop buying and selling altogether. Pluzhnikov opposed the idea outright. He couldn’t see the sense of it—the village’s very own merchant ceasing to do business, for no reason at all, when things were going smoothly? Pluzhnikov had to go home, where a visitor from town was waiting, so he and Bruyakin walked off with all eyes upon them, to continue their discussion as they made their leisurely way down the dry slope and turned to pass the zemstvo hospital.

  Evpati’s father, Gavrila, had started the business, but Evpati had made his first excursion as a buyer, under his father’s supervision, at the age of eight. At thirteen he already had a granary license—in his father’s name to begin with, in his own from the age of sixteen—and had later obtained a license to deal in groceries and haberdashery. For thirty years now the whole district had known that Satya (his street name) “had everything.” His shop was on the main street of Kamenka and the approach to it was strewn with shingle from the river. To one side of the building there were stacks of beams, panels, posts, laths, and planks, and hired hands sawed off lengths as required. Before the entrance stood a scale that could take up to forty poods, and a kerosene tank with a pump. The stout outer door and the shutters were secured by iron hasps and ring bolts. When only the glass doors were closed callers tugged at the bell rope and one of the family would come down from the second floor of the half-timber, half-brick house to serve them. The air in the roomy shop was heavy with smells to tickle a peasant’s nose, and you didn’t know where to look first. There were barrels of tar and linseed oil, crates containing axle grease, chalk, and lime, if you weren’t careful you’d trip over boxes full of horseshoes and nails of all sizes, and sheets of glass stood in boxes against the walls. There were steelyards, with sets of weights of one pound and upward. There were felloes and yokes. Painted wooden tableware. Pottery—earthenware or china, dyed and glazed or unglazed—was ranged on shelves. Ovenware, jugs, pots, teacups, bread dishes. Farther along there were enameled saucepans, teapots, and mugs, cast-iron cooking pots, frying pans, and braziers. The other side of the shop was the place for barrels of herring and boxes of dried and smoked roach. On a landing up three steps, where they could more easily be lowered onto the scales on their way to a cart, were bast sacks containing salt, and bags of flour, granulated sugar, conical sugar loaves wrapped in blue paper and tied with string, packets in all sizes from the whole sugar loaf to an eighth of a pound. There was also small lump sugar in little boxes but there was no call for that, it melted too easily. In drawers that tilted outward there were slabs of gingerbread, gingerbread rings, bonbons, lozenges, toffee, chocolate coins, half ruble and ruble size, wrapped in golden paper, raisins, dates, figs, and prunes. (In summer there were also watermelons, muskmelons, and grapes.) As well as other provisions. There were cigarettes too—Shurymury, Uncle Kostya, and Koz’ma Kryuchkov, machines for rolling your own leaf tobacco, coarse-cut makhorka, cigarette paper, writing paper, exercise books, indelible pencils, colored pencils, writing slates.

  But what Satya liked best was the drapery side—selling calico, satin, and even fine linen and silk. These goods brought him into contact with women, of whom he was terribly fond, and all the more so because he was no oil painting himself. He would load two carts with fabric and ride out to all the fairs in the neighborhood. These goods occupied the most eye-catching shelves in his shop. Shelves crammed with broadcloth, plush, and twill. Cloth for trousers, jackets, and suits. Woolen shawls and angora shawls, Orenburg and Penza shawls. Head scarves, and ribbons of all colors. You got goods down from the upper shelves with the aid of a ladder, or you might only need a pole with a fork on the end. On the counter lay rolls of oilcloth, each with one edge turned out to show the pattern. Under the glass lids were buttons of a hundred colors and sizes, pieces of lace, pins, hairpins, knitting needles, fine combs, large-toothed combs. Lined up on a stand, there were felt boots—ordinary ones, soft ones, hairy ones, black, gray, or white, and even some embroidered with red and green thread. There too were shiny rubber galoshes, men’s and women’s, shoe high or boot high. The one thing Bruyakin didn’t sell was leather footwear. But he stocked dressed leather pieces. And this smoothly running machine, thirty years in the building, this source of wealth for himself and of comfort for the whole village he now proposed to run down, to shut off, to destroy. All at once to abandon his own way of life and deprive the village of its character. But why? What would become of all these good things?

  Pluzhnikov was up in arms. But sure that he could talk Evpati out of it, nip his plan in the bud.

  Evpati Bruyakin’s expression was mild, almost obsequious, with never a stubborn line in it—no foothold there for contrariness. The merest wisp of beard, the merest wisp of mustache. He always looked the same—willing to listen, ready to learn, eager to oblige. Ah, but those eyes were shrewd, crafty, quick to see the main chance.

  “Oh dear, Grigori Naumovich,” he said with a sigh that summed up many nights of thought. “Ask a bird how it knows bad weather is on the way. Why it hides beforehand. When if it didn’t it would be done for. Well, that’s how I am. I have this feeling.”

  “Where do you get it from? Why haven’t I got it? What signs are there?” Pluzhnikov, as was his habit, spoke with the voice of authority. “Business isn’t falling off, is it?”

  “No,” Evpati agreed. “Not yet, not so you’d notice.” But his eyes were prickly, resentful. “I can feel it, though. Like when they looted Anokhin’s place in ‘05. And the Solovovs’. We’re headed down that same road again.”

  “That’s not the way things are going at all!” Pluzhnikov said. Stubborn as a mule! “Bigger and better opportunities for the peasants, that’s what’s just around the corner. We’ll really get started after the war, just you wait and see!”

  “Oh dear, no. Dear me, no, Grigori Naumych. Don’t fool yourself. Business likes freedom. And there won’t be any.”

  “Won’t be any freedom?? Where d’you get that idea from? Won’t be any? That’s exactly what’s on the way—freedom for the likes of us!” Black-haired Pluzhnikov’s eyes flashed.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, don’t fool yourself, Grigori Naumych. Bad times are upo
n us.”

  “All the more reason to serve the mir! Having a merchant of our own makes the people stronger.”

  “Business and friendship are strangers.” Evpati spread his hands, nimble, prehensile hands with strong fingers. “Best to shut the gate while the street’s empty.”

  Pluzhnikov pierced him with a look. But there was puzzlement in it too. One of them was barking up the wrong tree. And Pluzhnikov wasn’t used to being wrong.

  He turned his mind to practicalities. “So then, who’s going to take over? The cooperative?”

  Bruyakin smiled briefly under his soft fair mustache. “Goods without a master are orphans.”

  “What about you—what are you going to do?”

  “I might just buy an extra piece of land and expand my farm.” As it was, he had never given up farming.

  “Well, just wait a bit, don’t make your mind up yet, let’s think about it! What will you do with your stock? And all the rest? How will Kamenka manage? No, I just don’t believe it!”

  They stopped talking as they neared Pluzhnikov’s house—a brick-built “five-waller” with a tin roof and brick lintels. It stood by the river, fronting the street, close to the bridge.

  Bruyakin wanted to go home, but Pluzhnikov asked him in for a chat with a visitor from town. This was Zyablitsky, who had once worked for the zemstvo, but had since spent some years with a cooperative association and was one of its accredited buyers. He had set out for Kamenka on business early Monday morning with nothing further from his mind than Our Lady Comforter of All the Afflicted, unaware that the parish holiday had not yet ended—and so the only business he found himself doing was with beer and sterlet.

  Pluzhnikov’s wife, Agasha, and his mother-in-law were busy about the house, and the children were at home, so the men walked through to the best room. The man from town sat looking glum for a while, but suddenly cheered up. He was wearing town clothes—a suit and the whitest of white collars. Small spectacles framed his bright gaze. A puny fellow with a thin neck. He introduced himself. “Anatol Sergeich …”

  Bruyakin could put on airs too. “Evpati Gavrilych.”

  Pluzhnikov laughed. “Go on, talk to him a bit, he’ll entice you into the co-op as well.”

  The best room was seven arshins by seven, with three windows looking out on the street and three onto the stream, and even on a dark day, and through the flowers on the windowsills, and the lace curtains, there was light enough. The eighteen-inch floorboards were smoothly painted, with not a bump or a crack, and the walls were plastered and whitewashed like those of a town house. The room was furnished in town fashion too—not a single bench, but an oak wardrobe, a cupboard for the best crockery, a tall mirror with a carved frame—you could see yourself full-length in it—and a bedstead with hollow, nickel-plated posts (but, in country fashion, the coverlet had a flounce of homemade lace, there were two counterpanes, one showing from under the other, two pillows at the head of the bed and two at the foot). The table was not in the icon corner (indeed, there was no icon corner) but moved out into the middle of the room, covered with a deep red embroidered cloth and surrounded by bentwood chairs. There was also a hard sofa with a felted back, and a phonograph aiming its horn at the room from one corner, with an armchair beside it.

  Pluzhnikov’s motto was “Old is best—best got rid of.”

  In Zyablitsky’s view it was Pluzhnikov and his like who gave the intelligentsia, and enlightened ideas, their entrée to the village. He himself had worked for over ten years first as a zemstvo statistician and economist and then in the cooperative movement, a representative of the “third element” so detested by the government for its “revolutionism,” and no less despised by committed revolutionaries for choosing the anthill of “little deeds,” worrying about grants and arrears, about goods bought or sold without excessive profit, but too soon consumed or worn out. Who could think of that as a worthwhile alternative to the enormous upheavals which would bring about the rebirth of mankind, brushed instantaneously by the fiery wing of salvation? Many leaders of public opinion and many progressive writers ridiculed those stuck in the dim bog of “little deeds” with no wider horizon beyond it. True, there were revolutionaries of the older school like Chaikovsky, who remained true to the doctrine that the one reliable means of access to the village for an intellectual was via peasant cooperatives. And the zemstvo intelligentsia, caught between the harassment of officialdom and the scorn of progressive youth, bravely and stubbornly stood their ground, labored patiently on, and lived to celebrate, with becoming modesty in the years immediately before the war, the steady expansion, indeed the full flowering of their patient activity, to succeed at last in capturing the villagers’ imagination. For Zyablitsky the great reward had always been a chance to expound his cherished beliefs to enlightened villagers like those now before him. Pluzhnikov had not stopped at establishing a credit association, but had invited agronomists to lecture the villagers in the winter, and was now trying to organize an office for the leasing of agricultural machinery and a permanent agricultural advisory service. With allies like these, Zyablitsky believed, the village, and hence Russia as a whole, could be transformed.

  “But one thing I must say to you, Grigori Naumovich, and to both of you gentlemen, is that practical people like you do not fully appreciate the significance of cooperation. It is not just a commercial mechanism, not just a means of maximizing profits by achieving economies. Cooperation is a broad movement, whose limits are the ideals of humanity. An elected cooperator is, in a manner of speaking, the people’s first minister. The people instruct him, and the people call him to account. Cooperation teaches the masses to stand up for their legitimate interests in a state where the rule of law does not obtain. It is the spontaneous path to freedom.”

  He turned his smoothly brushed head to look at Pluzhnikov’s big-boned face in its frame of black beard.

  “I’ve always been for cooperation,” Pluzhnikov said. “If anybody is, I am. But you can’t pull all peasant Russia out of the mud with just cooperation, it’ll take a stronger horse than that.”

  Zyablitsky was upset to meet with a rebuff even from this quarter. “Cooperation,” he said more insistently, “must produce its own peasant intelligentsia. It must refashion customs and characters, continue the efforts of the populist school. That was the idea of our founder, Robert Owen. Any social order can choose as its base and its support either the best people or the rabble. And cooperation is there to help it choose the first.”

  That was a strange look on Bruyakin’s face. Not cantankerous exactly. Withdrawn, unseeing. Zyablitsky had seen that look on peasant faces so often, and despaired. You could never read them, never get through to them.

  “That’s all very well,” Pluzhnikov said, scowling, “but all we want co-ops for is to protect us from the towns. And people from the towns use them to get at us, and educate us. We don’t need them. We can teach ourselves all we need to know.”

  “Of course you can,” Zyablitsky said eagerly, lacing his fingers. “That’s just what I’m telling you. But for the time being, how can you refuse help from the towns?”

  “Help?” Pluzhnikov, wolfish, said. He appealed to Bruyakin. “When did we ever see any help from the town? Or anything except beggar-my-neighbor? The town’s no friend to us. The town is the enemy!”

  Bruyakin, with his “I’m not arguing but I’m not looking either” gaze, again silently assented.

  Zyablitsky, alarmed, rocked back in his chair and threw up his hands. “Grigori Naumovich, I implore you! How can you set the two against each other in that way? Just read the newspapers, look at the debates in the Duma, see what they say at Zemgor congresses.”

  Pluzhnikov might look stolid but he could fly off the handle. He pushed his chair back from under himself, using his feet, not his hands, and rose.

  “Martyn coveted nobody’s riches, but kept his cash in his own britches. It’s time the peasant spoke up for himself. I’ve read your Duma debates! All th
ose arguments about how ministers should be appointed, that’s all over our heads. The most literate of us can hardly make out what your Duma’s saying, and it just irritates us. Now if we had a rural district zemstvo, that would be something. Those newspapers of yours, what Zemgor says—I read it all! And what do they write? That the village must be curbed, that the village is getting too rich, that’s what those sons of bitches write! Hit the villages with lower prices!”

  Prominent brown eyes ablaze under his forelock, shoulders squared, fist like a hammer.

  He started pacing the roomy parlor in his creaky patent-leather boots, wide breeches, and embroidered silk shirt, held tight by a plaited cord, about-facing with military precision. He spoke from near the window.

  “Rich, you say? Oh yes, everybody’s got paper money, and they all deposit it with the association, but when it’s been lying there a while what will you be able to do with it? Rich? With rye at a ruble and a half? Wheat at two-thirty? When boots”—he slapped his boot top—"cost seven rubles before the war, and now they’re twenty-five? Meaning seventeen poods of rye.”