Songs in the village
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Songs in the village ( Russian Песни на деревне , Pesni na derewne) is a short story by Lev Tolstoy , which was completed on November 8, 1909 in Yasnaya Polyana and published in 1910 in Jubileiny sbornik Literaturnowo fonda . In 1983 the text was published in Vol. 14 Powesti and Tales of the 22-volume Tolstoy edition by the Verlag für Künstlerische Literatur in Moscow .
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In the village, on an “unforgettable misty morning”, a “gruesome” process takes place under the narrator's eyes. The narrator does not reveal himself as the landlord of this Russian village, but after reading the reader the impression remains that it must be him. That follows from the almost familiar, brief dialogues that he occasionally has with this or that villager in the crowd.
The narrator follows the harmonica in the village, mixed with polyphonic singing. It turns out the village says goodbye to four single boys and a married young man. The five have to enlist for military service. The narrator had once instructed the married man's father, the farmer Vasily Orechow. Orechow's daughter-in-law, now without a husband for a long time, disgruntledly climbs down from the stove when the narrator and the future soldiers enter Orechow's living room. The five young men who march through the village to say goodbye to happy singing and sounding have to stop here and there and are offered a schnapps. Neither of the five is a drinker. After careful tasting, those convened refuse such a drink. The cheerfulness of the singers and the players seems to be put on and is always interrupted by the heartbreaking wail of the affected female adult members of the five. The narrator is ashamed. How could he curiously follow the songs in the village?
Used edition
- Songs in the village. Translated from the Russian by Hermann Asemissen . Pp. 413-418 in: Eberhard Dieckmann (Ed.): Lew Tolstoi. Haji Murat. Late narratives . Vol. 13 by Eberhard Dieckmann (ed.), Gerhard Dudek (ed.): Lew Tolstoi. Collected works in twenty volumes . Rütten and Loening, Berlin 1986
Web links
- The text
- Wikisource Песни на деревне (Толстой) (Russian)
- online at tolstoy-lit.ru (Russian)
- online at RVB.ru (Russian)
- Entry in the list of works Late Stories (1888–1910)
- Entry at fantlab.ru (Russian)
- Marietta Boiko : Commentary on the text (Russian)
See also
The author had denounced the recruiting practices almost half a century earlier in the story Polikei .
annotation
- ↑ In his younger years, Tolstoy ran a village school modeled on Rousseau .