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same work for hire and letters of congratulations …
    Nevyrazimov stopped in the middle of the duty-room and pondered.
    The need for a new, better life wrung his heart with unbearable anguish. He passionately longed to find himself suddenly in the street, to merge with the living crowd, to take part in the festivity, in honor of which the bells were all booming and the carriages clattering. He wanted something he used to experience in childhood: the family circle, the festive faces of his relatives, the white table cloth, light, warmth … He remembered the carriage in which a lady had just passed by, the overcoat in which the office manager strutted about, the gold chain adorning the secretary’s chest … He remembered a warm bed, a Stanislas, 7 new boots, a uniform with no holes in the elbows … remembered, because he did not have any of it …
    “Maybe try stealing?” he thought. “Stealing’s not hard, I suppose, but the problem is hiding it … They say people run away to America with what they steal, but, devil knows, where is this America? In order to steal, you also have to have education.”
    The ringing stopped. Only the distant noise of a carriage was heard, and Paramon’s coughing, and Nevyrazimov’s sadness and spite grew stronger and more unbearable. The office clock struck half-past midnight.
    “Maybe write a denunciation? Proshkin denounced somebody and started rising in the world …”
    Nevyrazimov sat down at his desk and pondered. The lamp, which had completely run out of kerosene, was smoking badly now and threatening to go out. The stray cockroach still scurried about the table and found no shelter …
    “I could denounce somebody, but how write it out! It has to be with all those equivocations and dodges, like Proshkin … Not me!I’ll write something and get in trouble for it myself. A complete nitwit, devil take me!”
    And Nevyrazimov, racking his brain for some way out of his hopeless situation, stared at the draft of the letter he had written. The letter was to a man he hated and feared with all his soul, and from whom he had been trying for ten years to obtain a transfer from a sixteen-rouble post to an eighteen-rouble …
    “Ah … running about here, you devil!” With the palm of his hand he spitefully swatted the cockroach, which had had the misfortune of catching his eye. “What vileness!”
    The cockroach fell on its back and desperately waved its legs … Nevyrazimov took it by one leg and threw it into the lamp. The lamp flared and crackled …
    And Nevyrazimov felt better.
    M ARCH 1885

T HE H UNTSMAN

    A sultry and stifling day. Not a cloud in the sky … The sun-scorched grass looks bleak, hopeless: there may be rain, but it will never be green again … The forest stands silent, motionless, as if its treetops were looking off somewhere or waiting for something.
    A tall, narrow-shouldered man of about forty, in a red shirt, patched gentleman’s trousers, and big boots, lazily saunters along the edge of the clearing. He saunters down the road. To his right are green trees, to his left, all the way to the horizon, stretches a golden sea of ripe rye … His face is red and sweaty. A white cap with a straight jockey’s visor, apparently the gift of some generous squire, sits dashingly on his handsome blond head. Over his shoulder hangs a game bag with a crumpled black grouse in it. The man is carrying a cocked double-barreled shotgun and squinting his eyes at his old, skinny dog, who runs ahead, sniffing about in the bushes. It is quiet, not a sound anywhere … Everything alive is hiding from the heat.
    “Yegor Vlasych!” the hunter suddenly hears a soft voice.
    He gives a start and turns around, scowling. Beside him, as if sprung from the ground, stands a pale-faced woman of about thirty with a sickle in her hand. She tries to peer into his face and smiles shyly.
    “Ah, it’s you, Pelageya!” says the hunter, stopping and slowly un-cocking his gun. “Hm! … How did