and whips. The chest of drawers and the window-sills are littered with
cartridges, instruments for mending rifles, tins of gunpowder, and bags of
shot. The furniture is lame and the veneer is coming off it. I have to
sleep on a consumptive sofa, very hard, and not upholstered ... Ash-trays
and all such luxuries are not to be found within a radius of ten versts....
The first necessaries are conspicuous by their absence, and one has in all
weathers to slip out to the ravine, and one is warned to make sure there is
not a viper or some other creature under the bushes.

The population consists of old K., his wife, Pyotr, a Cossack officer with
broad red stripes on his trousers, Alyosha, Hahko (that is, Alexandr),
Zoika, Ninka, the shepherd Nikita and the cook Akulina. There are immense
numbers of dogs who are furiously spiteful and don't let anyone pass them
by day or by night. I have to go about under escort, or there will be one
writer less in Russia.... The most cursed of the dogs is Muhtar, an old cur
on whose face dirty tow hangs instead of wool. He hates me and rushes at me
with a roar every time I go out of the house.

Now about food. In the morning there is tea, eggs, ham and bacon fat. At
midday, soup with goose, roast goose with pickled sloes, or a turkey, roast
chicken, milk pudding, and sour milk. No vodka or pepper allowed. At five
o'clock they make on a camp fire in the wood a porridge of millet and bacon
fat. In the evening there is tea, ham, and all that has been left over from
dinner.

The entertainments are: shooting bustards, making bonfires, going to
Ivanovka, shooting at a mark, setting the dogs at one another, preparing
gunpowder paste for fireworks, talking politics, building turrets of stone,
etc.