/lit/ - Literature

Dead Souls, easily

"The room was the familiar sort, for the hotel was also the sort familiar in provincial capitals, where for two rubles a day travelers get a quiet room with cockroaches black as damsons peeking out of every corner, and with a door, blocked by a chest of drawers, leading to a room where someone else is staying, taciturn and unobtrusive but extremely inquisitive and curious about every detail of his neighbor, the traveler. The hotel’s exterior façade matched its interior: it was very long and two stories high. The lower story was of plain dark-red brick, even darker thanks to the deleterious effects of the seasons, and dirty by its very nature. The upper story was painted the inevitable yellow. Built into the lower story were shops selling yokes, ropes, and wooden balls to protect horses’ legs from chafing. In the corner shop, or in the window to be precise, a spiced-drink seller was sitting, with a copper samovar and a face equally copper-colored, so that at a distance you might think that there were two samovars in the window, were it not that one of these samovars had a beard as black as pitch."
"While the servants were busy sorting everything out, the gentleman set off for the dining room. Any traveler knows only too well what these dining rooms are like: the usual oil-painted walls, blackened high up by pipe smoke and rubbed to a shine farther down by the backs of various travelers, even more so by the backs of the local merchants, for on market days the merchants come in groups of six or seven to drink their usual pot of tea with an extra pot of boiling water; the usual sooty ceiling; the usual sooty chandelier with a thicket of pendant bits of glass, which bounce up and down and jingle every time the waiter runs past between the oilcloth-covered tables, waving with bravura a tray carrying as many teacups as there are birds on the seashore; the usual oil paintings on the wall—in a word, the same as anywhere else, the only difference being that one picture portrayed a nymph with breasts more enormous than any that the reader, I am certain, has ever seen, although such a freak of nature can be seen in certain historical paintings of unknown date, provenance, and ownership, which are imported into Russia, sometimes by our great magnates, lovers of the arts, who buy a lot of them in Italy on the advice of their guides."