Cursed Days by Ivan Bunin

Author:Ivan Bunin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
Published: 1998-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

Nighttime, the same day

I was looking through my briefcase, and I tore up several poems and stories that I never finished. I already regret what I did. All this from grief, a sense of hopelessness (though this is not the first time I have felt like this). I also hid the various notes I made about the years ’17 and ’18.

Oh, these nightly furtive hidings and rehidings of papers and money! Over the years millions of Russians have endured this corruption, this degradation. And how many treasures will people find someday! This entire era will become a fairy tale, a legend. . . .

The summer of ’17. It is twilight. A group of peasants are standing on the street next to a hut. They are talking about “the grandmother of the Russian Revolution.”1 The owner of the hut says in a measured way: “I’ve heard about this old lady for quite some time. She’s a soothsayer, that’s for sure. The word on her is that she’s been predicting all these goings-on for the past fifty years. But God help us, she’s really beastly looking: fat, angry, with very small, penetrating eyes—I once saw her portrait in a feuilleton. She was chained up in a stockade for forty-two years, but they couldn’t break her. She was never left alone day or night, but they couldn’t hold her back: even in the stockade she managed to get hold of a million rubles!2

“Now she’s buying people for support, promising to give them land and not to draft them for war. But what’s in it for me? I don’t need to own the land. I’m better off leasing it because I don’t have the capital for manure and other things. And they won’t take me into the army ’cause I’m too old. . . .”

As it turned out, someone in a shirt that made him look all white in the twilight—“the pride and joy of the Revolution”—dared to interrupt, saying:

“Such a provocateur in our country, we should arrest and shoot him right off!”

But the peasant objected quietly but firmly:

“You may be a sailor, but you’re also a fool. I’m old enough to be your father. I remember when you used to run past my hut without your pants. What kind of a commissar are you when you’re always around the girls and look up their dresses right in broad daylight? Just wait, just you wait, pal—someday there’ll be holes in your official-looking pants; the money you’ve stolen you’ll waste on drink; and you’ll be asking shepherds for work! As I said, pal, you’ll be arresting my pig. It won’t be like laughing at the masters! I’m not afraid of you and all your Zhukovs!”

(By Zhukov, he meant Guchkov.)

For no reason at all, Sergei Klimov added:

“Yeah, Petrograd, we should have given it up a long time ago. There’s only chaos going on there. . . .”

Girls scream in the park:

Love the Whites, with curly strands

With silver watches in their hands. . . .

From under a

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