No one could have recognized this village of ours a little over a hundred years ago: a hamlet it was, the poorest kind of a hamlet. Half a score of miserable izbas, unplastered, badly thatched, were scattered here and there about the fields. There was not an enclosure or decent shed to shelter animals or wagons. That was the way the wealthy lived; and if you had looked for our brothers, the poor, -- why, a hole in the ground, -- that was a cabin for you! Only by the smoke could you tell that a God-created man lived there. You ask why they lived so? It was not entirely through poverty: almost everyone led a wandering, Cossack life, and gathered not a little plunder in foreign lands; it was rather because there was no reason for setting up a well-ordered khata (wooden house). How many people were wandering all over the country, -- Crimeans, Poles, Lithuanians! It was quite possible that their own countrymen might make a descent, and plunder everything. Anything was possible. In this hamlet a man, or rather a devil in human form, often made his appearance. . . .

Author Biography

Isabel Florence Hapgood (1851 - 1928) was an American ecumenist, writer and translator, especially of Russian and French texts. Hapgood became a major translator of French and Russian literature, as well as a key figure in the dialogue between Western Christianity and Orthodoxy. She helped Harvard professor Francis James Child with his Book of Ballads which began publication in 1882. In 1885 Hapgood published her own Epic Songs of Russia, for which Child supplied a preface and which received several good reviews. The next year Hapgood published translations of Leo Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth and Nikolay Gogol's Taras Bulba and Dead Souls. In 1887 her translations of the major works of Victor Hugo began publication, introducing that major French author to American audiences.