The tutor
The narrator reveals in his memory images of his tutor Karl Ivanich. The the character of the tutor is imprinted in the narrator’s recollections in “wadded dressing-gown and red cap (a few grey hairs visible beneath the latter) sitting beside the table”. Karl Ivanich liked to read, so is remembered by Nikolenka with “one hand holding a book, and the other one resting on the arm of the chair”. Karl Ivanich was a neat person, had “a clear conscience and a quiet mind”, as a proof of this serves the order on his table, and its contents which never changed: “before him lie his watch, with a huntsman painted on the dial, a check cotton handkerchief, a round black snuff-box, and a green spectacle-case”. The narrator recollects how he used to peep into the tutor’s room and saw him “sitting alone in his armchair as, with a grave and quiet expression on his face, perusing one of his favourite books”. The image of Karl Ivanich brings cosiness and a peaceful atmosphere to the narration.
Domestic settings
The author is very careful regarding the details of surroundings and precisely describes the environment and furniture. Here we see “a table, covered with a torn black oilcloth so much cut about with penknives that the edge of the table showed through”, “round the table stood unpainted chairs which, through use, had attained a high degree of polish”. Attention is also paid to the windows, but not so much to the windows as to the views from them. one of the windows throws a view as following: “immediately there ran a high road on which every irregularity, every pebble, every rut was known and dear to me”. The road is important to a child, as it is associated with dreams and hopes. “Beside the road stretched a row of lime-trees, through which glimpses could be caught of a wattled fence, with a meadow with farm buildings on one side of it and a wood on the other—the whole bounded by the keeper’s hut at the further end of the meadow”. All these details produce a feeling of both sadness and happiness. As the narrator turns to his memories, these images have a soothing effect on him; he had a happy childhood, but the sadness of it is that it is in past.
The Idiot
An image of an idiot is presented by a holy person called Grisha. He is a poor old man, who has nothing at all, but prayers and faith in God. Grisha had “a pale, attenuated face pitted with smallpox, long grey hair, and a scanty beard of a reddish hue”. Grisha was always dressed in “a sort of smock that was much torn” and used to “laugh in a dreadful, unnatural way”. Adding to this “he had lost the sight of one eye, and its colourless pupil kept rolling about and imparting to his hideous face an even more repellent expression than it otherwise bore”. To look at Grisha brought little pleasure, as well as listen to him, as “his voice was harsh and rough, all his movements hysterical and spasmodic, and his words devoid of sense or connection”. Nothing is known of his past, but that “from his fifteenth year upwards he had been known as an imbecile who went barefooted both in winter and summer, visited convents, gave little images to any one who cared to take them, and spoke meaningless words which some people took for prophecies”. An image of Grisha helps to develop a theme of religion in the story, and adds this vivid note to Russian rural life.
The harvest
With deep love and admiration, the narrator remembers the time of harvest: “On the further side of a large, shining, yellow stretch of cornland lay a high purple belt of forest which always figured in my eyes as a distant, mysterious region behind which either the world ended or an uninhabited waste began”. The image of a cornland is perceived as a magic one, but the child’s imagination does not reveals all the hardships the harvest brings rural people. “The expanse of corn-land was dotted reapers… could be seen the backs of women as they stooped among the tall, thick grain or lifted armfuls of corn and rested them against the shocks”. It was a hard work, and with the image the author tries to bring what a pitiful position yard people lived under, as even “in one corner a woman was bending over a cradle”.
