Page:Gorky - Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi.djvu/33

 This is the maliciousness of a "bogatyr" : Vaska Buslayev played such pranks in his youth, mischievous fellow. He is experimenting, all the time testing something, as if he were going to fight. It is interesting, but not much to my liking. He is the devil, and I am still a babe, and he should leave me alone.

ERHAPS peasant to him means merely—bad smell. He always feels it, and involuntarily has to talk of it.

Last night I told him of my battle with General Kornet's wife; he laughed until he cried, and he got a pain in his side and groaned and kept on crying out in a thin scream:

"With the shovel! On the bottom with the shovel, eh? Right on the bottom! Was it a broad shovel?"

Then, after a pause, he said seriously: "It was generous in you to strike her like that; any other man would have struck her on the head for that. Very generous! You understood that she wanted you?"

"I don't remember. I hardly think that I can have understood."

"Well now! But it's obvious. Of course she wanted you."

"I did not live for that then."