Chapter 23

Olenin's life went on with monotonous regularity. He had little
intercourse with the commanding officers or with his equals. The
position of a rich cadet in the Caucasus was peculiarly
advantageous in this respect. He was not sent out to work, or for
training. As a reward for going on an expedition he was
recommended for a commission, and meanwhile he was left in peace.
The officers regarded him as an aristocrat and behaved towards him
with dignity. Cardplaying and the officers' carousals accompanied
by the soldier-singers, of which he had had experience when he was
with the detachment, did not seem to him attractive, and he also
avoided the society and life of the officers in the village. The
life of officers stationed in a Cossack village has long had its
own definite form. Just as every cadet or officer when in a fort
regularly drinks porter, plays cards, and discusses the rewards
given for taking part in the expeditions, so in the Cossack
villages he regularly drinks chikhir with his hosts, treats the
girls to sweet-meats and honey, dangles after the Cossack women,
and falls in love, and occasionally marries there. Olenin always
took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten
tracks. And here, too, he did not follow the ruts of a Caucasian
officer's life.

It came quite naturally to him to wake up at daybreak. After
drinking tea and admiring from his porch the mountains, the
morning, and Maryanka, he would put on a tattered ox-hide coat,
sandals of soaked raw hide, buckle on a dagger, take a gun, put
cigarettes and some lunch in a little bag, call his dog, and soon
after five o'clock would start for the forest beyond the village.
Towards seven in the evening he would return tired and hungry with
five or six pheasants hanging from his belt (sometimes with some
other animal) and with his bag of food and cigarettes untouched.
If the thoughts in his head had lain like the lunch and cigarettes
in the bag, one might have seen that during all those fourteen
hours not a single thought had moved in it. He returned morally
fresh, strong, and perfectly happy, and he could not tell what he
had been thinking about all the time. Were they ideas, memories,
or dreams that had been flitting through his mind? They were
frequently all three. He would rouse himself and ask what he had
been thinking about; and would see himself as a Cossack working in
a vineyard with his Cossack wife, or an abrek in the mountains, or
a boar running away from himself. And all the time he kept peering
and watching for a pheasant, a boar, or a deer.

In the evening Daddy Eroshka would be sure to be sitting with him.
Vanyusha would bring a jug of chikhir, and they would converse
quietly, drink, and