Мёртвые души / Dead Souls

The bearers of the same were the gentleman’s coachman, Selifan (a little man in a large overcoat), and the gentleman’s valet, Petrushka – the latter a fellow of about thirty, clad in a worn, over-ample jacket which formerly had graced his master’s shoulders, and possessed of a nose and a pair of lips whose coarseness communicated to his face rather a sullen expression. Behind the portmanteau came a small dispatch-box of redwood, lined with birch bark, a boot-case, and (wrapped in blue paper) a roast fowl; all of which having been deposited, the coachman departed to look after his horses, and the valet to establish himself in the little dark anteroom or kennel where already he had stored a cloak, a bagful of livery, and his own peculiar smell.

Pressing the narrow bedstead back against the wall, he covered it with the tiny remnant of mattress – a remnant as thin and flat (perhaps also as greasy) as a pancake – which he had managed to beg of the landlord of the establishment.

While the attendants had been thus setting things straight the gentleman had repaired to the common parlour.

The appearance of common parlours of the kind is known to every one who travels. Always they have varnished walls which, grown black in their upper portions with tobacco smoke, are, in their lower, grown shiny with the friction of customers’ backs – more especially with that of the backs of such local tradesmen as, on market-days, make it their regular practice to resort to the local hostelry for a glass of tea. Also, parlours of this kind invariably contain smutty ceilings, an equally smutty chandelier, a number of pendent shades which jump and rattle whenever the waiter scurries across the shabby oilcloth with a trayful of glasses (the glasses looking like a flock of birds roosting by the seashore), and a selection of oil paintings. In short, there are certain objects which one sees in every inn. In the present case the only outstanding feature of the room was the fact that in one of the paintings a nymph was portrayed as possessing breasts of a size such as the reader can never in his life have beheld. A similar caricaturing of nature is to be noted in the historical pictures (of unknown origin, period, and creation) which reach us – sometimes through the instrumentality of Russian magnates who profess to be connoisseurs of art – from Italy; owing to the said magnates having made such purchases solely on the advice of the couriers who have escorted them.