I'd like to meet:
And now I'll example you with my mastery:
‘. . . a knowing fellow, I daresay, but he has such a smell coming from him – as if he had just emerged from a vodka distillery. . . Remedies may be found if, as he says, it is his natural odour. . . ‘
‘No, the smell is a thing impossible to dislodge: he tells me that his wet nurse dropped him when he was a baby and there has been a slight smell of vodka hanging about him ever since.’
INSPECTOR
‘My life, dear friend,’ he wrote, ‘floats in empyrean bliss: lots of young ladies, band playing, banner galloping. . .’ - all of it written with great, great feeling.
INSPECTOR
‘My eldest son, Sir, was born before I was married. . . Oh, it is only a manner of speaking. I engendered him exactly as though in lawful wedlock. . .’
INSPECTOR
‘Sure enough these ‘souls’ are dead. . . But on the other hand, what good are the live peasants of today? What men are they? Mere flies – not men!’
DEAD SOULS
‘Dear me,’ said Chichikov to himself with a sudden gush of emotion peculiar to sentimental scoundrels.
DEAD SOULS
. . . he asked whether the inn was profitable and whether the proprietor was a great scoundrel, to which the waiter, as was customary, replied: ‘Oh, yes sir, he is a great rogue.’
DEAD SOULS
There was something solid in the gentleman’s manners, and he blew his nose extremely loudly.
DEAD SOULS
Sometimes as the cards were flung down on the table the players would give utterance to such expressions as ‘Oh hang it all, I’ve nothing else, diamonds it is!’ Or simply to exclamations such as: Hearts! Heartache! Spades! Or Spadefulls! Spade-a-little-lady! Or simply, Speedy!
DEAD SOULS
. . . and they would imprint such a long and languishing kiss upon each other’s lips that one might easily have smoked a small cigar while it lasted.
DEAD SOULS
. . . he wouldn’t let ordinary peasant women alone. That’s what he calls ‘enjoying a piece of cheesecake.’
DEAD SOULS
The dogs had all sorts of names and most of them in the imperative mood: Shoot, Swear, Dash, Fire, Bully, Blast, Plague, Scorcher, Hurry, Guardian.
DEAD SOULS
‘Don’t you know the miser Plyushkin?’
‘Oh, the – in tatters!’ cried the peasant.
He had added a noun before the words ‘in tatters’ and a very apt one, too, but one that cannot be used in polite conversation, and so we omit it.
DEAD SOULS
. . . these were the sort of words that are like a bucket of cold water poured over some dreamy 21 year old returning from the theatre with his head full of a street in Spain, a moonlight night, and a ravishing woman with a guitar and beautiful hair.
DEAD SOULS
At times a more majestic voice, belonging no doubt to one of the chiefs, rang out peremptorily: ‘Here, copy that out again or else I’ll have your boots taken off and you’ll stay here for six days without anything to eat.’
DEAD SOULS
No one could refuse such a proposal. The mere mention of the fish market gave the witnesses an appetite.
DEAD SOULS
. . . the lieutenant from Ryazan was evidently a great lover of boots for he had already ordered four pairs and kept trying on a fifth.
DEAD SOULS
. . . appearances were preserved and the husband himself was so well coached that even if he did get wind of the affair or heard of it, he briefly and very sensibly quoted the Russian proverb: ‘What business is it of yours that your godmother was speaking to your godfather?’
DEAD SOULS
. . . the same oil paintings covered the whole wall, in short, everything was the same as everywhere else, the only difference being that a nymph in one of the pictures had such enormous breasts that the reader cannot possibly have seen anything like it before.
DEAD SOULS
During the first minute of conversation with him, you could not help saying, ‘What a kind and pleasant person!’ During the following minute you would say nothing and during the third you would say, ‘Damned if I can make him out!’ and you would get away from him as far as you could, for if not, you would be bored to death.
DEAD SOULS
To be honest with you, if I’d known the sour look I was going to get from the head of our department I wouldn’t have gone to the office at all. For some time now he’s been saying: ‘Why are you always in such a muddle? Sometimes you rush around like a madman and make such a mess of your work, the devil himself couldn’t sort it out. You start paragraphs with small letters and leave out the date and reference number altogether.’
MADMAN
She loved scandal-mongering, ate boiled beetroot in the mornings, swore like a trooper - and whichever of these activities she happened to be engaged in her expression never changed for a moment.
MADMAN
He could eat as many as nine pies at once, keeping a tenth in his pocket, and was a master at filling one piece of chancery notepaper with so much libel that no one could read it through without coughing and sneezing in between.
MADMAN
‘Lord,’ said one of them to the other, ‘what a wheel! What do you say? Would a wheel like that, if put to it, ever get to Moscow or wouldn’t it?’ ‘It would all right,’ replied the other. ‘But it wouldn’t get to Kazan, would it?’ ‘No, it wouldn’t get to Kazan,’ replied the other.
DEAD SOULS
Next followed a number of reflections so remarkable for their justice that we think it almost incumbent upon us to quote them: ‘What is life? – A vale of sorrows. What is society? – A crowd of people without feelings.’
DEAD SOULS
. . . he kept thinking about it for over an hour, and at last, spreading out his hands and inclining his head, said: ‘The letter is certainly very, very flowery!’
DEAD SOULS
Officers, ladies, frock-coats – everything became polite to the point of mawkishness.
DEAD SOULS
The arrival of the visitor woke the lap-dogs who were asleep in the sun: the shaggy haired Adele, who was continually getting entangled in her own coat, and the spindly-legged Potpourri.
DEAD SOULS
‘Not Nozdyrov!’
‘Why not? It’s just the sort of thing he would do. Don’t you know he once tried to sell his own father or rather gambled him away at cards.’
DEAD SOULS
Readers can find it easy to criticise, looking down from their comfortable height, from which the whole horizon lies open at everything that is taking place below, where man can only see the object nearest to him. And in the universal chronicle of mankind there are many entire centuries which he could apparently cross out and suppress as necessary.
DEAD SOULS
All he inherited was four irretrievably worn-out woollen sweaters, two old coats lined with lambswool, and an insignificant sum of money.
DEAD SOULS
‘One dies, another’s born, they’re all as good as corn.’ The secretary evidently could talk in rhyme.
DEAD SOULS
. . . first of all he got everyone in the right frame of mind (without a preliminary action of this kind, as we know only too well, it is impossible to obtain any official information or verification, at least one bottle of Madeira has to be poured down every throat).
DEAD SOULS
The whole basis of his system was strict discipline. ‘Discipline, discipline and discipline’ he used to say usually looking very solemnly into the face of the person he was addressing when he repeated this word for the third time. . . His normal everyday conversation with his subordinates consisted almost entirely of three phrases: ‘How dare you? Do you know who you’re talking to? Do you realise who’s standing before you?’
OVERCOAT
Temper, temper now! In the next world they’ll stick red hot needles in your tongue for such sacrilegious words! A man needs washing and disinfecting after talking to you.
IVANS
I must confess I have no idea how women can grab us by the nose as deftly as they take hold of a teapot handle. Either their hands are adapted for it, or else that is all our noses are fit for.
IVANS
But Ivan Ivanovich started talking about quail shooting, which he usually did when he wanted to change the subject.
IVANS
‘But why not?’ he said, speaking in a tone of annoyance, which was extremely rare for him, even when people put burning paper on his head – a trick which the judge and the mayor were very fond of playing.
IVANS
. . . a clerk in the civil service will read the address book with great enjoyment several times a day, not from any ulterior motives, but because he simply loves reading a list of names in print.
AUNT
. . . one of the dogs would seize the tasty morsel and wake her from her daydreams with its loud munchings: for this it was invariably beaten with a poker.
AUNT
From carpets the conversation quickly changed to pickling cucmbers and drying pears.
AUNT
Then he had another dream, that his wife was not a person at all, but some kind of woollen material. He had gone into a shop in Mogilev.
‘What kind of material would you like,sir?’ asked the shopkeeper. ‘Have some wife, it’s the latest thing now! Lovely quality as well. Everyone’s having coats made from it.’
The shopkeeper made his measurements and cut the wife up, Ivan Fyodorovich took it under his arm and went off to a Jewish tailor, who said,
‘No, that’s very poor material. No one uses that kind of stuff for coats now. . .’
AUNT
. . . his memory was like a miser’s pocket, from which you cannot entice a quarter of a kopeck.
ST JOHNS
. . . the church elder, who was fond of an occasional private interview with my grandfather’s brandy glass. . .
ST JOHNS
Some truant lackey probably yawns in front of these pictures, holding in his hand the dishes containing dinner from the cook-shop for his master, who will not get his soup very hot.
PORTRAIT
Have a care! Society already begins to have its attractions for you: I have seen you with a shiny hat, a foppish neckerchief. . .
PORTRAIT
In his youth he had been a captain and a braggart, a master in the art of flogging, skilful, foppish and stupid; but in his old age he combined these various qualities into a kind of dim indefinteness.
PORTRAIT
‘Hey!’ said he, tapping one canvas, on which was depicted a naked woman, ‘this subject is – lively. But why so much black under the nose? Did she take snuff?’
‘Shadow,’ answered Tcharfov gruffly, without looking at him.
PORTRAIT
Heroes:
Never mind that, let's have some more of my quotes:
When Pogodin's wife died I wrote to him: 'Jesus Christ will help you to become a gentleman, which you are neither by education nor inclination - she is speaking through me.'
. . . the ghost turned, stopped and inquired: 'What do you want, you?' - and showed a fist of a size rarely met with even among the living.
OVERCOAT
PREFECT: It’s an extraordinary thing, but there’s nobody who hasn’t got some sin on his conscience. The Lord himself has arranged it that way and it’s no good the Voltaireans saying otherwise.
SLAPPENCHITCHAT: There’s naughtiness and there’s naughtiness. I tell you frankly that I do accept bribes, but what sort of bribes? Greyhound puppies. That makes all the difference.
INSPECTOR
. . . get yourself a country wife, and you can spend all your days lying up above the stove and eating pies. . . there’s no denying that life in Petersburg is the best of all. If only there’s money, that’s the genteel and political way of living – theatres, dogs to dance for you, everything you want.
INSPECTOR
(Whistles, beginning with the air from ‘Robert le Diable,’ going on with ‘The Red Sarafan’ and ending up with something nondescript).
INSPECTOR
. . . but I can't live away from St Petersburg. After all, why should I waste my life among a lot of peasants? One wants other things now, my soul is eager for enlightenment.
INSPECTOR
I dislike ceremony, in fact I always try to slip in unnoticed.
INSPECTOR
Of course not like you get in Petersburg. I used to smoke cigars there, my dear Sir, costing twenty-five roubles a hundred; you feel simply gorgeous after one of them.
INSPECTOR
I’m down and out! I can’t see a thing. All I can see are pig’s snouts instead of faces. . .
INSPECTOR
Oh, you pen pushers, god damned liberals, spawn of the Devil! I’d like to tie you all up in a bundle, and grind you all down to powder and let the Devil have you for stuffing. Stuffing for the lining of his cap!
INSPECTOR
It’s said in England a fish swam to the surface and said two words in such a strange language the professors have been racking their brains for three years now to discover what it was. What’s more, I read somewhere in the papers about two cows going into a shop to ask for a pound of tea.
MADMAN
To hell with it! Letters are trash. Only chemists write letters.
MADMAN
The whole world knows that when England takes snuff, France sneezes.
MADMAN
‘I’ll give your Excellency a free shave twice, even three times a week, honest I will!’
‘No, no, my friend, that won’t do. Three barbers look after me already, and it’s an honour for them to shave me.’
NOSE
You will agree that it’s not done for someone in my position to walk around minus a nose. It’s all right for some old woman selling oranges on the Voskresensky Bridge to go around without one.
NOSE
As he entered the hall he saw his footman Ivan lying on a soiled leather couch lying on a soiled leather couch spitting at the ceiling, managing to hit the same spot with a fair degree of success.
NOSE
. . . all he could see was a lithograph showing a girl adjusting her stocking while a dandy with a small beard and a cutaway waistcoat peered at her from behind a tree – a picture that had hung there in that identical spot for more that ten years.
NOSE
. . . he belonged to the species known as perpetual titular councillor.
OVERCOAT
. . . he began to drink rather heavily on every church holiday – at first only on the most important feast days, but later on every single holiday marked by a cross on the calendar. In this respect he was faithful to ancestral tradition, and when he had rows about this with his wife he called her a worldly woman and a German.
OVERCOAT
Alas, it was stamped on the faces of mother and daughter that they had so overdanced themselves at balls that they had become wax figures.
PORTRAIT
In the centre of town are some sheds where a packet of round cakes, a stout woman in a red dress, a bar of soap, some pounds of bitter almonds, some lead, some cotton, and two shop men playing at svaika are always to be seen.
CALACHE
Pythagoras Pythagorovich Tchertokoutski had married a rather pretty lady with a dowry of 200 serfs and some thousands of roubles. This money was at once employed in the purchase of six fine horses, some gilt bronze locks and a tame monkey.
CALACHE
The dinner was magnificent: there were sturgeons, starlets, buzzards, quail, partridges. The flavour of all these dishes supplied an irrefutable proof of the sobriety of the cook during the twenty four hours preceding the dinner.
CALACHE
‘She is very fine, very fine,’ said Pythagoras Pythagorovich ‘a very well shaped beast. Will your Excellency allow me to ask whether she is a good goer?’
CALACHE
The calache is as light as a feather, and if you sit in it, it seems as if your nurse was rocking you in a cradle.
CALACHE
When I was still in the service, there was room in the calache to stow away ten bottles of rum, twenty pounds of tobacco, six uniforms, and two pipes, the longest pipes imaginable, your Excellency and in the pockets you could stow away a whole bullock.
CALACHE
Tchertokoutski could remember that he had won a great deal, but he did not take up his winnings, and after rising stood for some time in the position of a man who has no handkerchief in his pocket.
CALACHE
. . . she put on her slippers, which her husband had sent for her from St Petersburg, and a white dressing gown which fell about her like the waters of a fountain.
CALACHE
‘What?’ said the General – he always made an officer under the rank of Captain repeat his remarks twice over.
CALACHE
