The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

I was born a serf and come from the household staff of Count K——of Orel province.¹³ Now, under the young masters, these estates have been broken up, but under the old count they were very sizeable. In the village of G——, where the count himself lived, there was a great, huge mansion, with wings for guests, a theater, a special skittles gallery, a kennel, live bears sitting chained to posts, gardens; his singers gave concerts, his actors performed various scenes; there were his own weavers, and he kept workshops for various crafts; but most attention was paid to the stud farm. Special people were appointed for each thing, but the horse department received still more special attention, and as in military service in the old days cantonists descended from soldiers in order to fight themselves, so with us little coachmen came from coachmen in order to drive themselves, from stablemen came little stablemen to tend the horses, and from the fodder peasant—the fodder boy, to carry fodder from the threshing floor to the cattle yard. My father was the coachman Severyan, and though he wasn’t among the foremost coachmen, because we had a great many, still he drove a coach-and-six, and once, during the tsar’s visit, he came in seventh and was awarded an old-style blue banknote.¹⁴ I was left an orphan of my mother at a very young age and I don’t remember her, because I was her prayed-for son, meaning that, having no children for a long time, she kept asking God for me, and when she got what she asked for, having given birth to me, she died at once, because I came into the world with an unusually big head, for which reason I was called not Ivan Flyagin, but simply Golovan.* Living with my father in the coachmen’s yard, I spent my whole life in the stables, and there I comprehended the mystery of animal knowing and, you might say, came to love horses, because as a little boy I crawled on all fours between horses’ legs, and they didn’t hurt me, and once I got a little older, I became quite intimate with them. Our stud farm was one thing, the stables were another, and we stable folk had nothing to do with the farm, but we received horses ready to be taught and trained them. Every coachman and postillion drove a coach-and-six, and of all different breeds: Vyatka, Kazan, Kalmyk, Bitiug, Don—these were all horses bought at fairs and brought to us. There were more of our own from the stud farm, naturally, but they’re not worth talking about, because stud-farm horses are placid and have neither strong character nor lively fantasy, but these wild ones were terrible beasts. The count used to buy up whole shoals of them, entire herds outright, cheap, at eight or ten roubles a head, and once we drove them home, we immediately set about schooling them. They were terribly headstrong. Half of them would even drop dead rather than submit to training: they stand there in the yard—they’re bewildered and even shy away from the walls, and only keep their eyes turned to the sky, like birds. You’d even feel pity looking at them, because you see how the dear heart would like to fly away, save that he has no wings … And from the very start he won’t eat or drink for anything, neither oats nor water from the trough, and so he pines away, until he wears himself out completely and drops dead. Sometimes we lost half of what we spent, especially on Kirghiz horses. They love steppe freedom terribly. And of those who get habituated and stay alive, no small number get crippled during training, because against their wildness there’s only one means—strictness; but then those that survive all this training and learning come out as such choice horses, no stud-farm horse can compare to them in driving quality.