The Cossack Page #2

"The Cossack" is a short story by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov that explores themes of nature, cultural identity, and the human condition. It follows a Russian officer who visits a picturesque Cossack village and becomes captivated by the lifestyle and values of the Cossacks. As he interacts with the local inhabitants, he reflects on his own life and the contrasts between their simple existence and the complexities of modern society. Chekhov's vivid descriptions and subtle characterizations offer a poignant commentary on the search for meaning and belonging in a rapidly changing world.

								

though he were a pig. We ought to have brought the sick man home and fed
him, and we did not even give him a morsel of bread."

"Catch me letting you spoil the Easter cake for nothing! And one that
has been blessed too! You would have cut it on the road, and shouldn't I
have looked a fool when I got home?"

Without saying anything to his wife, Maxim went into the kitchen,
wrapped a piece of cake up in a napkin, together with half a dozen eggs,
and went to the labourers in the barn.

"Kuzma, put down your concertina," he said to one of them. "Saddle the
bay, or Ivantchik, and ride briskly to the Crooked Ravine. There you
will see a sick Cossack with a horse, so give him this. Maybe he hasn't
ridden away yet."

Maxim felt cheerful again, but after waiting for Kuzma for some hours,
he could bear it no longer, so he saddled a horse and went off to meet
him. He met him just at the Ravine.

"Well, have you seen the Cossack?"

"I can't find him anywhere, he must have ridden on."

"H'm . . . a queer business."

Tortchakov took the bundle from Kuzma, and galloped on farther. When he
reached Shustrovo he asked the peasants:

"Friends, have you seen a sick Cossack with a horse? Didn't he ride by
here? A red-headed fellow on a bay horse."

The peasants looked at one another, and said they had not seen the
Cossack.

"The returning postman drove by, it's true, but as for a Cossack or
anyone else, there has been no such."

Maxim got home at dinner time.

"I can't get that Cossack out of my head, do what you will!" he said to
his wife. "He gives me no peace. I keep thinking: what if God meant to
try us, and sent some saint or angel in the form of a Cossack? It does
happen, you know. It's bad, Lizaveta; we were unkind to the man!"

"What do you keep pestering me with that Cossack for?" cried Lizaveta,
losing patience at last. "You stick to it like tar!"

"You are not kind, you know . . ." said Maxim, looking into his wife's
face.

And for the first time since his marriage he perceived that he wife was
not kind.

"I may be unkind," cried Lizaveta, tapping angrily with her spoon, "but
I am not going to give away the holy Easter cake to every drunken man in
the road."

"The Cossack wasn't drunk!"

"He was drunk!"

"Well, you are a fool then!"

Maxim got up from the table and began reproaching his young wife for
hard-heartedness and stupidity. She, getting angry too, answered his
reproaches with reproaches, burst into tears, and went away into their
bedroom, declaring she would go home to her father's. This was the first
matrimonial squabble that had happened in the Tortchakov's married life.
He walked about the yard till the evening, picturing his wife's face,
and it seemed to him now spiteful and ugly. And as though to torment him
the Cossack haunted his brain, and Maxim seemed to see now his sick
eyes, now his unsteady walk.

"Ah, we were unkind to the man," he muttered.

When it got dark, he was overcome by an insufferable depression such as
he had never felt before. Feeling so dreary, and being angry with his
wife, he got drunk, as he had sometimes done before he was married. In
his drunkenness he used bad language and shouted to his wife that she
had a spiteful, ugly face, and that next day he would send her packing
to her father's. On the morning of Easter Monday, he drank some more to
sober himself, and got drunk again.

And with that his downfall began.

His horses, cows, sheep, and hives disappeared one by one from the yard;
Maxim was more and more often drunk, debts mounted up, he felt an
aversion for his wife. Maxim put down all his misfortunes to the fact
that he had an unkind wife, and above all, that God was angry with him
on account of the sick Cossack.

Lizaveta saw their ruin, but who was to blame for it she did not
understand.
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