Roman
November 3, 2001, 10:24pm
1
A friend sent me this from a book he’s reading these days and kept on insisting to read and comment on it, despite all my predictable slacking literary habits. So finally, today, on a bleak saturday afternoon, I decided to give it a shot - mainly because I was having a headache and just thought of making it more miserable by reading something that looked as undesirable as this one, only to be remain content with just the headache later instead of whinning now. Hey, sometimes you have to practically teach yourself the true meaning of the phrase, “Things could be worst”.
Here is the character. Character of Arina Vlassyevna. She is so familar that I can swear I have met her many times - and I might even have lived with her for many years of my life as the same.
Arina Vlassyevna was a true russian gentlewoman of the old school: she ought to have lived a couple of centuries earlier, in the days of Muscovy. Very devout and emotional, she believed in fortune telling, charms, dreams and omens of every conveivable kind; she believed in half crazy visionaries, in house spirits, in wood-sprites, in unlucky encounters, in the evil eye, in folk remedies, in salt prepared on Maundy Thursday, and the imminent end of the world; she believed that if the candles carried in procession during easter night service did not go out there would be a good crop of buckwheat, and that a mushroom will stop growing if a human eye has looked on it; she believed that the devil likes to be where the water is, and that anyone who does not share her beliefs has a blood-red mark on his breast; she was afraid of mice, adders, frogs, spparrows, leeches, thunder, of cold water, draughts, of horses, goats, red-haired people and black cats; she regarded crickets and dogs as unclean creatures; she never ate veal pigeon, crayfish, cheese, asparagus, jerusalem artichokes, hares or water-melons because a sliced water-melon suggested the head of John the Baptist; the mere mention of oysters made her shudder; she loved food - but fasted strictly; she never went to bed at all if her husband had so much as a headache; she never read a single book except Alexis, or The Cottage in the Forest; she wrote one, or at the most two letters in a year, but she was an expert housewife and knew all about preserving and jammaking though she did not touch a thing with her own hands and was generally reluctant to move from her chair.
Arina Vlassyevna was very kindhearted, and in her way far from stupid. She knew that the world is divided into the gentry who were there to give orders and the common people whose duty it was to serve - and so she felt no repugnance against servile behaviour and obsequiosness; but she was always gentle and considerate, never let a single beggar go away empty handed, and though she gossiped at times she never criticised anyone.
In her youth she had been very comely, had played the clavichord and spoken french a little; but in the course of many years of wandering with her husband, to whom she had been married against her will, she had grown stoutand forgotten both her music and her french. Her son she loved and feared to an inexpressible degree; she let her husband manage her propertyand no longer took any part in it, groaning, waving her handkerchief about and raising her eyebrows higher and higher in horror directly he broached the subject of impending land reforms and his own plans. She was apprehensive, always expecting some disaster, and would burst into tears whenever she remebered anything sad… Nowadays such women as she have ceased to exist. Heaven only knows whether this should be a matter for rejoicing !