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THE RIVER OF LIFE




  THE RIVER OF LIFE

  AND OTHER STORIES

  BY

  ALEXANDER KUPRIN

  TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY
  S. KOTELIANSKY AND J. M. MURRY


  JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY
  BOSTON
  1916




INTRODUCTORY NOTE


Alexander Kuprin was born in 1870. He attended the Cadet School and
the Military College at Moscow, and entered the Russian Army as a
lieutenant in 1890. Seven years later he resigned his commission to
devote himself to literature.

He achieved fame by a novel, _The Duel_, in which he described with
a ruthless realism the army life in a garrison town upon the Western
Frontier. The book, which in reality falls into line with the rest of
his work as a severely objective presentation of a life which he has
found vivid and rich, was, fortunately for his success, interpreted
as an indictment of the Russian Army and the ill-starred Manchurian
campaign. He was accepted by the propagandists as one of themselves,
and though he protested vigorously against his unsought reputation, his
position was thenceforward assured.

But the interest of Kuprin’s talent is independent of the accidents
of his material. He is an artist who has found life wide and rich and
inexhaustible. He has been fascinated by the reality itself rather
than by the problems with which it confronts a differently sensitive
mind. Therefore he has not held himself aloof, but plunged into the
riotous waters of the River of Life. He has swum with the stream and
battled against it as the mood turned in him; and he has emerged with
stories of the joy he has found in his own eager acceptance. Thus
Kuprin is alive as none of his contemporaries is alive, and his stories
are stories told for the delight of the telling and of the tale.
They may not be profound with the secrets of the universe; but they
are, within their compass, shaped by the perfect art of one to whom
the telling of a story of life is an exercise of his whole being in
complete harmony with the act of life itself.

                                                  J. M. M.




CONTENTS


                      PAGE
  THE RIVER OF LIFE      1


             II

  CAPTAIN RIBNIKOV      37


             III

  THE OUTRAGE           99


             IV

  THE WITCH            127




I

THE RIVER OF LIFE


I

The landlady’s room in the ‘Serbia.’ Yellow wallpaper; two windows
with dirty muslin curtains; between them an oval squinting mirror,
stuck at an angle of forty-five degrees, reflects a painted floor and
chair legs; on the window-sills dusty, pimply cactuses; a cage with
a canary hangs from the ceiling. The room is partitioned off by red
screens of printed calico: the smaller part on the left is the bedroom
of the landlady and her children; that on the right is blocked up with
varied odds and ends of furniture--bedridden, rickety, and lame. In the
corners all kinds of rubbish are in chaotic cobwebbed heaps: a sextant
in a ginger leather case, and with it a tripod and a chain, some old
trunks and boxes, a guitar without strings, hunting boots, a sewing
machine, a ‘Monopan’ musical box, a camera, about five lamps, piles of
books, dresses, bundles of linen, and a great many things besides. All
these things had been detained at various times by the landlady for
rent unpaid, or left behind by runaway lodgers. You cannot move in the
room because of them.

The ‘Serbia’ is a third-rate hotel. Permanent lodgers are a rarity, and
those are prostitutes. Mostly they are casual passengers who float
up to town on the Dnieper: small farmers, Jewish commission agents,
distant provincials, pilgrims, and village priests who come to town to
inform, or are returning home when the information has been lodged.
Rooms in the ‘Serbia’ are also occupied by couples from the town for
the night or a few days.

Spring. About three in the afternoon. The curtains of the open windows
stir gently, and the room smells of kerosene and baked cabbage. It
is the landlady warming up on her stove a _bigoss à la Polonaise_ of
cabbage, pork fat, and sausage, with a great deal of pepper and bay
leaves. She is a widow between thirty-six and forty, a strong, quick,
good-looking woman. The hair that she wears in curls over her forehead
has a strong tinge of grey; but her face is fresh, her big sensual
mouth red, and her young dark eyes moist and playfully sly. Her name
is Anna Friedrichovna. She is half German, half Pole, and comes from
the Baltic Provinces; but her close friends call her Friedrich simply,
which suits her determined character better. She is quick-tempered,
scolds and talks bawdy. Sometimes she fights with her porters and the
lodgers who have been on the spree; she drinks as well as any man, and
has a mad passion for dancing. She changes from abuse to laughing in a
second. She has but small respect for the law, receives lodgers without
passports, and with her own hands, as she says, ‘chucks into the
