I got up early in the morning, at sunrise, to go to Dubetchnya.
There was not a soul in our Great Dvoryansky Street; everyone was
asleep, and my footsteps rang out with a solitary, hollow sound.
The poplars, covered with dew, filled the air with soft fragrance.
I was sad, and did not want to go away from the town. I was fond
of my native town. It seemed to be so beautiful and so snug! I loved
the fresh greenery, the still, sunny morning, the chiming of our
bells; but the people with whom I lived in this town were boring,
alien to me, sometimes even repulsive. I did not like them nor
understand them.

I did not understand what these sixty-five thousand people lived
for and by. I knew that Kimry lived by boots, that Tula made samovars
and guns, that Odessa was a sea-port, but what our town was, and
what it did, I did not know. Great Dvoryansky Street and the two
other smartest streets lived on the interest of capital, or on
salaries received by officials from the public treasury; but what
the other eight streets, which ran parallel for over two miles and
vanished beyond the hills, lived upon, was always an insoluble
riddle to me. And the way those people lived one is ashamed to
describe! No garden, no theatre, no decent band; the public library
and the club library were only visited by Jewish youths, so that
the magazines and new books lay for months uncut; rich and well-educated
people slept in close, stuffy bedrooms, on wooden bedsteads infested
with bugs; their children were kept in revoltingly dirty rooms
called nurseries, and the servants, even the old and respected ones,
slept on the floor in the kitchen, covered with rags. On ordinary
days the houses smelt of beetroot soup, and on fast days of sturgeon
cooked in sunflower oil. The food was not good, and the drinking