Sixth Division commander Savitsky, whip on his table
beautiful gigantic body? perfume, soap, legs looked like girls?
His long legs looked like a pair of girls clad in shiny shoulder-length jackboots.
can not picture this at all - one of his legs is like a girl in boots up to her shoulder?
chief of staff dictated, from Savitsky
Ivan Chesnokov to Chugunov-Dobryvodka , destroy enemy or be shot himself
Savitsky happily signs order
Narrator reports to Savitsky, yes he can read, studied law.
Savistsky calls him pansy, mocks him for having glasses, says he’s get cut to pieces
Narrator says he’ll get along, goes to find his quarters
The dying sun, yellow and round as a pumpkin, was breathing its last rosy breath into the sky.
Quartermaster tries to soften words of commander, saying men of distinction, wearing glasses might get trouble around there, but one who rapes is a hero.
Quartermaster “jumps back in despair” ran to first courtyard where soldiers shaving - Whats he’s in despair about? such a horrible place it is, I guess
you have to take this fellow into your billet, and no nonsense, on account of his having suffered on the fields of learning…”
young lad tosses narrator’s trunk over gate, turns and farts at him. Cossacks laugh.
Narrator picks up his papers, sees pork cooking,
like one’s family home in the village seen from a distance, mingling inside me a feeling of hunger and unprecedented loneliness.
He tries to relax, hay on his trunk, tries reading Lenin’s speech, but the lines traveled down “a thorny path” and did not reach him. Cossacks stepped on him, made fun of him, so he seeks out semi-blind landlady, looking for food. She’s beside herself:
“Comrade,” she said, after a pause, “this business makes me want to hang myself.”
So the narrator pushes the old lady in the chest, angrily. Then he find a sword lying around, picks it up, notices a goose wandering around, kills it right away. Does not ask anyone about it. “The white neck stretched out in the dung” wings folded
Orders the woman to cook it- she picks it up, half blind, wearing glasses, & says again
“Comrade,” she said, after a pause, “I want to hang myself,” and shut the door behind her.
Now the Cossacks say - he’s our kind of lad — happy to see he likes to kill
The moon hung over the yard like a cheap earring.
They invite him to eat with them, ask what’s the news, so he reads Lenin’s speech to them.
Evening enveloped me in the bracing dampness of its twilight sheets—evening laid its motherly palms on my blazing forehead. I read and rejoiced, and caught, rejoicing, the mysterious curve of Lenin’s straight line.
Now I take some interest in the story. Had not up till now. Evening enveloped me in the dampness of its twilight sheets - laid its motherly palms on my forehead - caught Lenin’s meaning…
Surovkov, platoon commander comments about Lenin:
“Truth tickles every nostril,” Surovkov said when I’d finished. “Question is, how do you pull it out of the pile? But Lenin hits it straight away, like a hen pecking at a grain.”
Then six slept huddled together for warmth, legs tangled. His heart “heart, crimson with murder, creaked and bled.”
THE END
Didn’t expect it to end so soon. At least he feels bad about how he killed that goose — and probably it will not get roasted - that old landlady sounds like a madwoman, or else she is there to show how terrible the place is. Like the quartermaster, who was embarrassed about how mean the commander was — But its war time and what else are we to expect?
Does this story do anything for me? Not so far. Certainly I don’t like it, except for those parts where the description is so extraordinary.
Evening enveloped me in the bracing dampness of its twilight sheets—evening laid its motherly palms on my blazing forehead.
The moon hung over the yard like a cheap earring.
The dying sun, yellow and round as a pumpkin, was breathing its last rosy breath into the sky.
But so a set of excellent sentences make a story worthwhile? Why would it?
This seems to be a story about an educated lonely man arriving at a really horrible place he has to be in as a soldier - he’s been drafted or made to join this military camp for some reason.
So you have to know something about Cossacks and about Lenin and these times.
The Cossacks are a group of predominantly East Slavic Orthodox Christian people who became known as members of democratic, self-governing, semi-military communities originating in the steppes of Eastern Europe …They inhabited sparsely populated areas …played an important role in the historical and cultural development of both Ukraine and Russia.[3][4]