The Government Inspector and Other Works

the end of all the words; a spade was spadus, a female was femalus. It happened one day that he went with his father in the fields. The Latin scholar saw a rake and asked his father: ‘What do you call that, father?’ And without looking what he was doing he stepped on the teeth of the rake. Before the father had time to answer the handle flew up and hit the lad on the head. ‘The damned rake!’ he cried, putting his hand to his forehead and jumping half a yard into the air, ‘may the devil shove its father off a bridge, how it can hit one!’ So he remembered the name, you see, poor fellow!
Such a tale was not to the taste of our ingenious storyteller. He rose from his seat without speaking, stood in the middle of the room with his legs apart, craned his head forward a little, thrust his hand into the back pocket of his pea-green coat, took out his round lacquer snuffbox, flipped on the face of some Mussulman general, and taking a good pinch of snuff powdered with wood-ash and leaves of lovage, [3] crooked his elbow, lifted it to his nose and sniffed the whole pinch up with no help from his thumb – and still without a word. And it was only when he felt in another pocket and brought out a checked blue cotton handkerchief that he muttered the saying. I believe it was, ‘Cast not thy pearls before swine.’ [4] ‘There’s bound to be a quarrel,’ I thought, seeing that Foma Grigoryevitch’s fingers seemed moving as though to make a long nose. Fortunately my old woman chose the moment to set butter and hot rolls on the table. We all set to work upon it. Foma Grigoryevitch’s hand instead of forming a rude gesture stretched out for the hot roll, and as always happened they all began praising the skill of my wife.
We have another storyteller, but he (night is not the time to think of him!) has such a store of terrible stories that it makes the hair stand up on one’s head. I have purposely omitted them; good people might be so scared that they would be afraid of the beekeeper, as though he were the devil, God forgive me. If, please God, I live to the New Year and bring out another volume, then I might frighten my readers with the ghosts and marvels that were seen in old days in our Christian country. Among them, maybe, you will find some tales told by the beekeeper himself to his grandchildren. If only people will read and listen I have enough of them stored away for ten volumes, I dare say, if only I am not too damned lazy to rack my brains for them.

fiddler, there is an uproar at once, fun begins, they set off dancing, and I could not tell you all the pranks that are played.
But best of all is when they crowd together and fall to guessing riddles or simply babble. Goodness, what stories they tell! What tales of old times they unearth! What terrible things they describe! But nowhere are such stories told as in the cottage of the beekeeper Rudy Panko. Why the villagers call me Rudy Panko, I really cannot say. My hair, I fancy, is more grey nowadays than red. But think what you like of it, it is our habit – when a nickname has once been given, it sticks to a man all his life. Good people meet together at the beekeeper’s on the eve of a holiday, sit down to the table – and then you have only to listen! And I may say, the guests are by no means of the humbler sort, mere peasants; their visit would be an honour for someone of more consequence than a beekeeper. For instance, do you know the sacristan of the Dikanka church, Foma Grigoryevitch? Ah, he has a head! What stories he can reel off! You will find two of them in this book. He never wears one of those homespun dressing-gowns that you so often see on village sacristans; no, if you go to see him, even on working days he will always receive you in a gaberdine of fine cloth of the colour of cold potato mash, for which he paid almost six roubles a yard at Poltava. As for his high boots, no one in the village has ever said that they smelt of tar; every one knows that he rubs them with the very best fat, such as I believe many a peasant would be glad to put in his porridge. Nor would any one ever say that he wipes his nose on the skirt of his gaberdine, as many men of his calling do; no, he takes from his bosom a clean, neatly folded white handkerchief embroidered on the hem with red cotton, and after putting it to its proper use, folds it up in twelve as his habit is, and puts it back in his bosom.
And one of the visitors . . . Well, he is such a fine young gentleman that you might take him for an assessor or a kammerherr [2] any minute. Sometimes he would hold up his finger, and looking at the tip of it, begin telling a story – as choicely and cleverly as though it were printed in a book! Sometimes you listen and listen and begin to be puzzled. You can’t make head or tail of it, not if you were to hang for it. Where did he pick up such words? Foma Grigoryevitch once told him a funny story in mockery of this. He told him how a student who had been having lessons from a deacon came back to his father such a Latin scholar that he had forgotten our orthodox tongue: he put us on

Preface
‘What oddity is this: Evenings in a village near Dikanka? What sort of Evenings have we here? And thrust into the world by a beekeeper! Mercy on us! As though geese enough had not been plucked for pens and rags turned into paper! As though folks enough of all classes had not covered their fingers with inkstains! The whim must take a beekeeper to follow their example! Really, there is such a lot of paper nowadays that it takes time to think what to wrap in it.’
I had a foreboding in my heart of all this talk a month ago. In fact, for a villager like me to poke his nose out of his hole into the great world – is, merciful heavens, just like what happens if you go into the apartments of some great lord: they all come round you and make you feel like a fool; it would not matter so much if it were only the upper servants, but no, some wretched little whipper-snapper loitering in the backyard pesters you too; and on all sides they begin stamping at you and asking: ‘Where are you going? Where? What for? Get out, peasant, out you go!’ I can tell you . . . But what’s the use of talking! I would rather go twice a year into Mirgorod where the district court assessor and the reverend Father have not seen me for the last five years, than show myself in the great world; still, if you do it, whether you regret it or not, you must face the consequences.
At home, dear readers – no offence meant (you may be annoyed at a beekeeper like me addressing you so simply, as though I were speaking to some old friend or crony) – at home in the village it has always been the peasants’ habit, as soon as the work in the fields is over, to climb up on the stove [1] and rest there all the winter, and we beekeepers put our bees away in a dark cellar. At the season when you see no cranes in the sky nor pears on the trees, there is sure to be a light burning somewhere at the end of the village as soon as evening comes on, laughter and singing is heard in the distance, there is the twang of the balalaika and at times of the fiddle, talk and noise . . . Those are our evening parties! As you see they are like your balls, though not altogether so, I must say. If you go to balls, it is to move your legs and yawn with your hand over your mouth; while with us the girls gather together into one cottage, not for a ball, but with their distaff and carding-comb. And at first one may say they do work; the distaffs hum, there is a constant flow of song, and no one looks up from her work; but as soon as the lads burst into the cottage with the