in a little room at the one-eyed soldier's widow's, not one man among
the house-serfs had remained at Shumihino; for Styopushka, whom I
intend to introduce to the reader, could not be classified under the
special order of house-serfs, and hardly under the genus 'man' at all.

Every man has some kind of position in society, and at least some ties
of some sort; every house-serf receives, if not wages, at least some
so-called 'ration.' Styopushka had absolutely no means of subsistence
of any kind; had no relationship to anyone; no one knew of his
existence. This man had not even a past; there was no story told of
him; he had probably never been enrolled on a census-revision. There
were vague rumours that he had once belonged to someone as a valet; but
who he was, where he came from, who was his father, and how he had come
to be one of the Shumihino people; in what way he had come by the
fustian coat he had worn from immemorial times; where he lived and what
he lived on--on all these questions no one had the least idea; and, to
tell the truth, no one took any interest in the subject. Grandfather
Trofimitch, who knew all the pedigrees of all the house-serfs in the
direct line to the fourth generation, had once indeed been known to say
that he remembered that Styopushka was related to a Turkish woman whom
the late master, the brigadier Alexy Romanitch had been pleased to
bring home from a campaign in the baggage waggon. Even on holidays,
days of general money-giving and of feasting on buckwheat dumplings and
vodka, after the old Russian fashion--even on such days Styopushka did
not put in an appearance at the trestle-tables nor at the barrels; he
did not make his bow nor kiss the master's hand, nor toss off to the
master's health and under the master's eye a glass filled by the fat
hands of the bailiff. Some kind soul who passed by him might share an
unfinished bit of dumpling with the poor beggar, perhaps. At Easter
they said 'Christ is risen!' to him; but he did not pull up his greasy