Yama [The Pit], a Novel in Three PartsKuprin, A. I. (Aleksandr Ivanovich)
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Yama [The Pit], a Novel in Three Parts
Kuprin, A. I. (Aleksandr Ivanovich)
Prostitutes -- Russia -- Fiction; Russia -- Fiction; Russian fiction -- Translations into English
He got up and went on farther, looking closely at everything that he
met with an incessant, sharpened, and at the same time calm attention,
just as though he were looking at the God-created world for the first
time. A gang of stone masons went past him on the pavement, and all of
them were reflected in his inner vision with an exaggerated vividness
and brilliance of colour, just as though on the frosted glass of a
camera obscura. The foreman, with a red beard, matted to one side, and
with blue austere eyes; and a tremendous young fellow, whose left eye
was swollen, and who had a spot of a dark-blue colour spreading from
the forehead to the cheekbone and from the nose to the temple; and a
young boy with a naive, country face, with a gaping mouth like a
fledgling’s, weak, moist; and an old man who, having come late, was
running after the gang at a funny, goat-like trot; and their clothes,
soiled with lime, their aprons and their chisels—all this flickered
before him in an inanimate file—a colourful, motley, but dead
cinematographic film.
He had to cut across the New Kishenevsky Market. Suddenly the savoury,
greasy odour of something roasted compelled him to distend his
nostrils. Lichonin recalled that he had not eaten anything since noon
yesterday, and at once felt hunger. He turned to the right, into the
centre of the market.
In the days of his starvings—and he had had to experience them more
than once—he would come here to the market, and for the pitiful
coppers, gotten with difficulty, would buy himself bread and fried
sausage. This was in winter, oftenest of all. The huckstress, wrapped
up in a multiplicity of clothes, usually sat upon a pot of coals for
warmth; while before her, on the iron dripping-pan, hissed and crackled
the thick, home-made sausage, cut into pieces a quarter of a yard in
length, plentifully seasoned with garlic. A piece of sausage usually
cost ten kopecks, the bread two kopecks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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