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p Most probably they did not come true, because the Parashkino commune disappeared completely. The account of its disappearance is set out in the story How and Where They Migrated. It is impossible to convey the painful impression which this story of Mr. Karonin’s makes. The colours are so black that the reader involuntarily wonders whether there is not some exaggeration here.

p Unfortunately there is no exaggeration, and we shall see that the author has not deviated in the slightest from sad Russian reality.

p When we reread this story we recalled Schiller’s words: "Ernst 1st das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst."  [98•*  These words are inapplica- 99 ble to us, alas! Our social life is sad, and the art which serves as its faithful reflection is not at all gay either.

p But let us return to the subject. The Parashkino “commoon” was breathing its last. The curse of desolation was settling on the unfortunate village.

p “Formerly the village had stretched in two rows along the river,” we read in the story, "but now only a few traces of the street were left. In place of most of the houses there were empty spaces covered with piles of manure, firewood and rubbish and overgrown with grass. Occasionally there were simply pits in place of the houses. All that remained of the former village was a few dozen houses.... The fields around the village were no longer cultivated right up to it as before; there were large yellow patches of abandoned land in many places; here and there the earth was covered with heather”, the cattle had grown emaciated and "could hardly drag itself along, it was mangy and thin with protruding ribs and scraggy backs".

p The poor inhabitants of Parashkino developed a kind of strange indifference to everything around them. They, who had once asked themselves the anxious and perplexed question "who will pay, if we all run away?”, had now forgotten to even think about this fatal question, although it had not only remained unsolved, but was becoming increasingly insoluble as the number of tax-payers shrank. The burden of unpaid arrears grew, the kulak Yepishka enmeshed them in his snares, they had no bread or other stores.... Yet all this could not pierce the indifference that had descended upon them. "They had ceased to understand themselves and their needs, and had lost all sense in general. Their existence throughout this time was simply fantastic. They themselves would not have been able to explain at all clearly what they had lived on.” Sometimes they happened to get hold of some seasonal employment, sometimes they managed to find some new nutriments such as the bran they got from the miller Yakov, or the clover they received from the landowner Pyotr Petrovich Abdulov.

_p On several occasions they were helped out by a loan from the Zemstvo,^^31^^ but all this was, of course, insufficient. The Parashkino villagers went hungry. Alarmed by rumours of their hopeless position the gubernia Zemstvo sent a councillor to find out on the spot what their requirements were. The councillor gathered the villagers together by the volost headquarters and tried to hold a conversation with them. "But the villagers were silent, and each word had to be dragged out of them.

_p “~‘Are you all here?’ the councillor began by asking. •

_p “The villagers exchanged glances, shuffled about, but said nothing.

“’Are you all who are left?’

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p “’Lucky to have this many!’ replied Ivan Ivanov rudely.

_p ’"The rest are off on seasonal labour, are they?’ asked the councillor, getting annoyed.

_p “’The rest? They’ll never come back, oh, no! We’re all here.’

p ’"How are things with you? No food?’

_p “’Aye, that’s about it.... That’s the way things are.... It couldn’t be much worse__’ a few voices replied, dully and apathetically.

_p “’Has it been like that for long?’

p “Yegor Pankratov answered this question for all of them.

_p “’I should say so,’ he said. ’It’s been like that no end of a time, but we kept hanging on, kept thinking it would pass and God would provide.... That’s how blind we are!’

_p “’Why didn’t you have the sense to say something?’

p “’That’s how blind we are, you see!’" and so on.

p It emerged from the ensuing conversation of the villagers with the councillor that their position would not have changed in the slightest even if they had not kept quiet about it—

p “’If you don’t mind us asking, your worship, what about a loan.... Will we get a loan, or not?’ ’You won’t get anything,’ he replied sombrely and went away."

p His refusal did not upset the villagers unduly. They no longer expected help from anywhere. Evidently all that remained for them was to "die off”, when suddenly the peasant Yershov quite unexpectedly began talking about moving to new parts. According to him, he knew of places so full of abundance that when the villagers reached them there would be no need to "die off" after all. "The forest’s so thick that not a shaft of sunlight comes through,” he said, after one village meeting, "and there’s all the land you could want, with a rich top soil about two metres deep, like this!" The villagers’ despairing hearts began to beat joyfully at these words. The tempting picture of places where there was "all the land you could want" gave them new energy, "there was now not a trace of the former apathy and quiet on a single face”. Yershov was surrounded on all sides and bombarded with questions.

p The main question which immediately occurred to these allegedly “free” peasant farmers was whether the authorities would let them go.

p “’Just go off! That’s a good one! How can we go off, how can we get away from here?’ they shouted at Yershov.

_p ’"How can we get away from here? We’ll get passports and give a reason for going away, like getting seasonal work, I tell you,’ Yershov retorted, beginning to get worried himself.

p ’"What if they catch us?’

p “’What the devil do they need you for? Catch us.... Who’s going to try and catch us if they’re not after us for arrears. We’ll do everything properly, just as it should be, with passports....’"

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p In order to agree on how to "get away" they resolved to hold a secret meeting at night in the forest, away from the watchful eye of the volost authorities. At this meeting it was decided to get passports the very next day and then set off without delay.

p The following detail is extremely characteristic. Since together with the influx of new energy the Parashkino villagers’ awareness of the dire need to pay also returned, they immediately realised that although "they’re not after us for arrears”, as Yershov had put it, the powers that be would not take kindly to their disappearance.

p Therefore the conspirators prevailed upon the village scholar Frol, who always played the role of solicitor for them, "to go straight to the authorities and intercede for them; they might be forgiven, even though it was after the event!" No sooner said than done. The villagers got their passports and went on their way. Only four families stayed behind: old woman Ivanikha (the mother of the afore-mentioned Dyoma) and grandpa Tit, who strongly disapproved of the villagers’ venture. "Your evil heads won’t get there,” he shouted, banging his crutch menacingly on the ground, "they’ll wring your necks! Mark my words, they’ll wring your necks!" The old man’s ties with the land were far stronger than those of the other villagers, who belonged to a different generation. "A man should die in the place where he was born; he should put his bones to rest in the earth he has chosen,” was his reply to all the arguments of his fellow villagers, whom he regarded as thoughtless youngsters. This feature is most significant. N. Zlatovratsky also shows in many of his sketches that the old men are far more strongly attached to their “foundations” than the peasants of the younger generation.

p So the Parashkino villagers set off for new parts. They walked with light hearts, cheerful and happy. Their happiness was, however, short-lived. Following hot on their heels came the district police officer, like Pharaoh pursuing the Jews on their flight from Egypt.

_p “’Where do you think you’re going, my pretty ones?’ he shouted, having caught up with them on the fifteenth verst.

_p “The villagers froze to the spot and said nothing.

_p “’So you thought you’d go a-travelling, eh?’

p “They took off their caps and moved their lips.

p ’"Thought you’d go a-travelling, eh? And where to, may J ask?’ the police officer enquired. Then with a sudden change of tone he said angrily: ’What are you up to ... eh? Migrating? I’ll give you migrating.... I’m sick to death of you! I’ve not slept for two nights because of you. Home, quick march! Ugh! They never give a man any peace!’

_p “The villagers had been standing rooted to the spot, but at the sound of the word ’home’they started up and said almost in unison:

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p “’As you please, your honour, but it’s all the same to us. We will run away!’"

p The police pharaoh was undeterred by this threat and began to escort the fugitives back to Parashkino. The two witnesses got into the first cart of migrants and he himself rode along behind. In this form the strange convoy resembling, as Mr. Karonin says, "a funeral procession carrying several dozen corpses to a common grave—the village" set off. When they were half-way there the police officer rode up to the middle of the convoy and asked loudly:

_p “’Now then, lads, have you changed your minds? Or do you still want to run away? Forget about it! It won’t do you any good!’

p “’We will run away!’ the villagers replied firmly."

p As they were about to enter the village the police officer resumed the measures of inducement and exhortation.

p “We will run away!" the villagers answered with the same sombre firmness. The vigilant and efficient officer, who had not expected anything of the kind, became frightened and perplexed.

p His position was indeed a difficult one. But he had not yet completely lost hope of breaking the fugitives’ stubborn will, and, in order to awaken in their hardened hearts an affection for the beneficial “power” of the marshes, he decided to employ some slightly more energetic methods. He locked the captive villagers in a log enclosure where the herdsmen of the landowner Abdulov used to round up the cattle. And he decided to keep them there "until they realised the unlawfulness of their actions and renounced the desire to run away".

p For more than three days the captives sat in the cattle pen, without food for themselves or fodder for their horses, but their resolve remained unshaken.

p “We will run away!" they replied to all threats. Eventually the pharaoh could stand it no longer. He was overcome by such “melancholy” that all he wanted was to get out of the wretched village. "Do as you like, damn you!" he exclaimed and rode away. "And on the second day after his departure the villagers left. Not together and not for new parts, but one by one, in whatever direction they happened to be looking at the time. Some fled to the town.... Others disappeared without trace and could not be found, although they continued to be registered as living in the village. Yet others wandered about in the vicinity, without family, a fixed occupation or refuge, because nothing would induce them to return to their village. And that was the end of the village of Parashkino."

p All this seems to you a strange and extremely tendentious exaggeration, does it not, reader? But we can assure you that the picture drawn by Mr. Karonin is quite true to reality. The story How ’ and Where They Migrated is a true “record”, although not 103 in the spirit of the Zolaists. Here is a fairly convincing piece of evidence. In 1868 it was reported in the Slavophil newspaper Moskva (issue for October 4) that many peasants in Smolensk Gubernia were selling their property and fleeing wherever the fancy took them. The Porechye police officer described this phenomenon as follows in his report on it to the gubernia authorities: "As a result of the difficult food situation in the past year of the peasants of state properties in the uyezd entrusted to me, of Verkhovskaya, Kasplinskaya,’ Loinskaya and Inkovskaya volosts, individual peasants burdened with families sold their cattle and other possessions for food; this being insufficient to satisfy their needs for food, they proceeded to sell their sown crops, outbuildings and the rest of their property and, under the pretext of obtaining seasonal employment, to take away their families with the aim of migrating to other gubernias...."

p “The peasants’ hopeless starving condition,” the same district police officer wrote further on, "has engendered in them a spirit of despair verging on unrest".... The Deputy-Governor of Smolensk, the police officer,and a police colonel set off to try and catch the vagrant peasants and return them to their place of residence, butitheir^arguments were in vain. "The peasants of Inkovskaya volost declared to the Deputy-Governor that they would go away in any case and that, if they were turned back and subjected to imprisonment, this would nevertheless be better than starving to death at home."

We have conveyed this fact just as it was related by Moskva.  Is not the declaration of the Smolensk peasants the same as Karonin’s "we will run away"? And the pursuit of them by the DeputyGovernor, the district police officer and the police colonel is even more grandiose than Karonin’s police officer chasing after the Parashkino villagers. Kindly accuse our author of exaggerating after that!