ABSTRACT
Where the River Oka joins the Volga there is a hill, studded with white walls and crowned with golden onions. Across the Oka a bridge of boats connects the town with what looks like an early nineteenth-century anticipation of a World’s Fair. Villagers from hundreds of miles, merchants from the chief towns of Russia, meet to make their annual fortune or buy their annual stock. A cosmopolitan crowd. It mills in the streets, which are narrow and muddy. The master had Kozakov flogged when he found out, and threatened to flog him to death if he persisted. But he did persist; and the master, sending the actress off to serve as a dairy-maid, gave orders for Kozakov to be horse-whipped. But Kozakov escaped and ran away. The young slaves thus developed as artists with a false bubble round their souls. They could cleverly ape the manners of a world they could never know.
