"Viy" by Nikolai Gogol

...their clothes were almost all torn or dirty, and their pockets were eternally full of various sorts of trash, such as knucklebones, whistles made from feathers, unfinished pieces of pie, and occasionally even a little sparrow that, by chirping suddenly amidst the extraordinary silence of the classroom, would procure for its patron a decent beating on both hands, and sometimes the cherrywood rod.

The rhetoricians walked more sedately: their clothes were often perfectly intact, but instead their faces were almost always adorned with some rhetorical trope: one eye completely closed, or a big bubble instead of a lip, or some other mark; these swore by God and talked among themselves in tenors.

A professor who had once taken part in such battles himself, on entering the classroom, would know at once from his students’ flushed faces that it had been a fine battle, and while he gave the rhetorics a knuckle-rapping, in another class another professor would be applying the wooden slats to the hands of philosophy.

With the theologians it was done in a totally different way: each was allotted, as the professor of theology put it, a measure of “big peas,” dealt out with a short leather whip.

A decent hunk of lard, a few white loaves, and sometimes even a trussed-up chicken would go in as well.

Once during such a journey three students turned off the high road in order to provide themselves with victuals at the first farmstead they happened upon, because their sack had long been empty.

The philosopher Khoma Brut was of a merry disposition.

He often got a taste of the “big peas,” but with perfectly philosophical indifference, saying what will be, will be.

The theologian Khalyava and the philosopher Khoma often pulled him by the topknot as a sign of their patronage and employed him as their deputy.

The plain was occasionally disrupted by slopes and small hills, green and round as cupolas.

Twilight was already darkening the sky, and only in the west was there a pale remnant of vermilion radiance.

“Go on, go on! and be content with what you’ve got. Such tender young sirs the devil’s brought us!”
The philosopher Khoma became utterly despondent at these words.

And since he had done it not for any profit but simply from habit, and, having forgotten his carp completely, was looking around for something else to filch, not intending to overlook even a broken wheel, the philosopher Khoma put his hand into his pocket as if it were his very own and pulled out the carp.

He saw a water nymph swim from behind the sedge; her back and leg flashed, round, lithe, made all of a shining and quivering.

The philosopher learned it from the rector himself, who summoned him specially to his room and announced that he must hasten on his way without delay, that the eminent chief had specially sent people and a cart for him.

A dark foreboding told him that something bad lay in store for him.

I’m telling you only this, that if you keep standing on your mettle and being clever, I’ll order you whipped with young birch rods on the back and other parts—so well that you won’t need to go to the steam-baths.

He was awaited by some six stalwart and sturdy Cossacks, no longer young men.

“Just hire some musicians and you could dance in it!”
“Yes, a commensurate vehicle!” said one of the Cossacks, getting up on the box along with the coachman, who had a rag wrapped around his head instead of his hat, which he had already left in the tavern.

After spending the better half of the night rambling about, constantly losing the way, which they knew by heart, they finally descended a steep hill into a valley, and the philosopher noticed a palisade or wattle fence stretching along the sides, low trees and roofs peeking from behind them.

He was about fifty years old; but the deep despondency on his face and a sort of wasted pallor showed that his soul had been crushed and destroyed all of a sudden, in a single moment, and all the old gaiety and noisy life had disappeared forever.

To that, your honor, I’d reply...of course, anybody versed in Holy Scripture could commensurably...only here it would call for a deacon, or at least a subdeacon.

The face of the dead girl was screened from him by the disconsolate father, who sat before her, his back to the door.

He stopped, and the reason for it was the rending grief that resolved itself in a whole flood of tears.

The old chief kissed the dead girl once more, made a prostration, and walked out together with the bearers, ordering the philosopher to be given a good meal and taken to the church after supper.

During supper, loquacity would come to the most taciturn tongues. Here everything was usually talked about: someone who was having new trousers made for himself...and what was inside the earth...and someone who had seen a wolf.

During supper, loquacity would come to the most taciturn tongues.

Only in more recent days he started staring at the young miss all the time. Either he was really smitten, or she’d put a spell on him, only it was the end of the man, he went all soft, turned into devil knows what—pah! it’s even indecent to say it.

Though she’s the master’s progeny, all the same a witch is a witch.

The tall, ancient iconostasis showed a profound decrepitude; its openwork, covered in gold, now gleamed only in sparks.

He turned and wanted to step away; but with strange curiosity, with the strange, self-contradictory feeling that will not leave a man especially in a time of fear, he could not refrain from glancing at her as he went, and then, with the same feeling of trepidation, glancing once more.

To bolster his strength, he was given a pint of vodka.

But the closer it came to evening, the more pensive the philosopher grew.

It was clear that he had taken very little food, or perhaps not touched anything at all. His extraordinary pallor gave him a sort of stony immobility.

“Read, read!” the chief went on in the same admonitory voice. “You’ve got one night left now. You’ll do a Christian deed, and I’ll reward you.”

In fear and trembling, the philosopher quietly went to the garden, from where it seemed to him it would be easier and less conspicuous to escape into the fields.

This garden, as commonly happens, was terribly overgrown and thus highly conducive to any secret undertaking.

Hops covered the top of this whole motley collection of trees and bushes like a net, forming a roof above them that spread over to the wattle fence and hung down it in twining snakes along with wild field bluebells.

His earth-covered legs and arms stuck out like strong, sinewy roots.

The frightened spirits rushed pell-mell for the windows and doors in order to fly out quickly, but nothing doing: and so they stayed there, stuck in the doors and windows.