In the Village

“The local authorities themselves let the matter go completely off the rails with a badly handled levy, and then suddenly demanded: pay at once; hand it over. For the Cherkasy people it’s easy—they have a ‘machine’ right next to them, almost like a city: bread costs forty-seven kopecks, only two kopecks cheaper than in the city, and from their bear-infested backwoods to you it’s only about seventy versts, yet you still have to give Ivan Vasilyevich twenty-seven kopecks anyway. They have salt for thirty-five kopecks; you pay fifty. They have ‘karasin’—two kopecks per pound—while you get the same Ivan Vasilyevich charging you a five-kopeck piece. The Cherkasy sell one hundred poods of bread—and that’s how their levy is made up, whereas for the same amount you almost paid away half of a single levy…”