Behzin Meadow by Ivan Turgenev, 1852
The magic trick:
A collection of scary stories that taken together portray an entire way of life
I’m not sure I know of a story that uses the supernatural quite like this one.
In “Behzin Meadow,” one of the true highlights from Turgenev’s famed A Sportsman’s Notebook collection, our narrator meets five boys who are camped out along a river. He listens in as they trade scary stories.
The stories all involve the supernatural, but they’re also rooted in the reality of the boys’ local life. They are stories about the neighbor who sees something strange when he crosses the dam; the ghost that appears when the boys have to stay late at their factory jobs; the woman who watches the road to find out which of the townspeople will die in the next year.
Each one can be enjoyed as a fun, scary ghost story. But taken together, they create a very interesting picture of the world these peasant boys live in. It’s a world where bad things happen. People drown, people die. The natural world is ever present – beautiful but also dangerous. It’s a world that, despite the natural wonder around them, also seems to be somewhat boring, or at least very limiting.
Even surrounded by horses and wolves and rivers and everything else, they still find the need to spruce up their existence with ghost stories and superstition.
It’s really an amazing story. One of the best.
You can revel in the thrills and chills of the ghost stories, or focus more on the portrait of a place.
And that’s quite a trick on Turgenev’s part.
The selection:
“You see, it was like this. Me and my brother, and Fyodor from Mikheyevo and cross-eyed Ivashka, and the other Ivashka from the Red Hills and a third Ivashka with the withered arm, and some other boys—about ten of us all told; the whole shift, you see—had to spend the night in the pulping room. I mean, we didn’t just happen to spend the night there, but Nazorov, our foreman, would not let us go home. ‘What do you boys want to go home for?’ he says. ‘There’s lots of work for you tomorrow, so you’d better not go home,’ he says. So we stayed, and we all lay down together, and Adruyshka, he starts saying, ‘What,’ he says, ‘if the house goblin was to come tonight, boys?’ And before he—Adruyshka, that is—finished speaking, someone suddenly started walking over our heads. You see, we was lying downstairs, and he starts walking upstairs by the wheel. So we hears him walking about, the boards bending under him—creaking, they was—and now he passes over our heads; and suddenly the water starts making an awful noise over the wheel, and the wheel starts knocking and turning round and round, although, you see, the slides in the troughs was let down. So we was wondering who could have lifted them up to let the water go through. Anyway, the wheel turned and turned and then stopped. Then he goes to the door upstairs again and starts coming down the stairs. Aye, coming down slowly, he was, just as if he was in no hurry at all, so that the steps under him fairly groaned. Well, so he walks up to our door, he does, and there he stands waiting and waiting, and—then—all of a sudden the door just flies open! It scared the life out of us, I can tell you. We looked, but there was nothing there, nothing at all….Suddenly the net of one of the vats starts moving, then it starts rising, then dipping and floating about in the air, just as if someone was rinsing it, and then back it goes to its old place again. After that the hook of another vat comes off its nail, and then back on its nail it goes again. And then someone seems to walk up to the door, and there, suddenly, it starts coughing, clearing its throat just like it was a sheep, only very loud it was. Well, we just all falls down in a heap, and each of us tries to crawl under the other. Aye, we was scared all right that night!”
“Fancy that!” said Pavlusha. “What did he start coughing for?”
“Dunno. Must have been the damp.”
They all fell silent for a while.
As always, join the conversation in the comments section below, on SSMT Facebook or on Twitter @ShortStoryMT.
Subscribe to the Short Story Magic Tricks Monthly Newsletter to get the latest short story news, contests and fun.
Short Story Magic Tricks 