The novella Viy does not have a table of contents or titled chapters.

“I cannot see! Lift up my eyelids!” (The Viy’s words)

“And I know why he perished: because he was afraid.”

“Go on, brother, and do not grieve, but do not follow us, for we have strayed from the path.”

“She suddenly burst into laughter. And there was something unnatural, something with a completely inhuman tinge, in that laughter.”

“And he jumped up and rushed, with all his might, to the door, but at the door he stopped and froze.”

As soon as the quite loud seminary bell, hanging at the gates of the Brotherhood Monastery in Kyiv, struck in the morning, students and seminarians would hurry in crowds from all over the city. Grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, and theologians, with notebooks tucked under their arms, trudged to class. The grammarians were still very small; as they walked, they nudged each other and swore among themselves in the thinnest treble; they were almost all in tattered or stained clothes, and their pockets were eternally filled with all kinds of junk, such as knucklebones, whistles made from feathers, half-eaten pie, and sometimes even small sparrows, one of which, suddenly chirping in the middle of the extraordinary silence of the class, earned its patron a decent thrashing on both hands, and sometimes with cherry twigs. The rhetoricians walked more solidly: their clothes were often quite whole, but their faces were nearly always adorned with some kind of rhetorical trope: either one eye had retreated far up under the forehead, or there was a huge blister instead of a lip, or some other mark; these spoke and swore amongst themselves in tenor. The philosophers spoke a whole octave lower; their pockets, besides strong tobacco roots, contained nothing else. They made no provisions whatsoever and everything they came across they ate immediately; the smell of a pipe and spirits sometimes lingered so far from them that a passing artisan would stop and sniff the air like a hound for a long time afterward.

The market at this time was usually just beginning to stir, and market women with bagels, buns, watermelon seeds, and poppy seed rolls eagerly tugged at the coat-tails of those whose coats were made of fine cloth or some kind of cotton material.

“Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Here! Here!” they called from all sides. “Here are bagels, poppy seed rolls, whirligigs, nice loaves! By God, nice! With honey! I baked them myself!”

Another, holding up something long, twisted from dough, shouted: “Here’s a candy stick! Gentlemen, buy a candy stick!”

“Don’t buy anything from this one: look how nasty she is—her nose is bad, and her hands are dirty…”

But they were afraid to bother the philosophers and theologians, because philosophers and theologians always liked to take things only for a taste, and then by the handful.

Upon arriving at the seminary, the entire crowd dispersed into the classrooms, which were located in low, yet quite spacious rooms with small windows, wide doors, and stained benches. The classroom was suddenly filled with varied buzzing: auditors listened to their students; the grammarian’s loud treble struck right against the chime of the glass set in the small windows, and the glass answered with almost the same sound; in the corner, a rhetorician was droning, whose mouth and thick lips should have belonged, at the very least, to philosophy. He droned in a bass, and all that could be heard from a distance was: boo, boo, boo, boo… The auditors, listening to the lesson, kept one eye under the bench, where a bun, or a dumpling, or pumpkin seeds peeked out from the pocket of the subordinate seminarian.

When this whole learned crowd managed to arrive somewhat earlier or when they knew that the professors would be later than usual, then, by general consent, a fight would be planned, and everyone had to participate in this fight, even the censors, who were obliged to watch over the order and morality of the entire student body. Two theologians usually decided how the battle should proceed: whether each class should stand on its own or whether everyone should be divided into two halves: the boarding house (bursa) and the seminary. In any case, the grammarians started first, and as soon as the rhetoricians intervened, they would run away and stand on raised ground to watch the battle. Then the philosophy students joined in, with their long black mustaches, and finally the theology students, in awful wide trousers and with very thick necks. It usually ended with the theology students beating everyone, and the philosophy students, scratching their sides, were pressed back into the classroom and settled on the benches to rest. The professor, entering the class and having once participated in such fights himself, would immediately know from the flushed faces of his listeners that the fight had been a good one, and while he was caning the rhetoricians’ fingers, in another class another professor was finishing off the philosophy students’ hands with wooden paddles. The theology students, however, were dealt with quite differently: they were, in the words of the theology professor, “given their measure of large peas,” which consisted of short leather whips.

On solemn days and holidays, the seminarians and boarding students would go home with puppet shows. Sometimes they would act out a comedy, and in such cases, there was always some theologian, little shorter than the Kyiv bell tower, who played Herodias or Penthephria, the wife of the Egyptian courtier. As a reward, they received a piece of linen, or a bag of millet, or half a boiled goose, and the like.

All these learned people, both the seminary and the boarding house, who harbored a kind of hereditary hostility towards each other, were extremely poor in means of sustenance and, moreover, extraordinarily voracious; so that counting how many dumplings each of them gobbled up at supper would have been a completely impossible task; and therefore the voluntary donations of affluent landowners could not be sufficient. Then the senate, consisting of philosophers and theologians, would send the grammarians and rhetoricians, under the leadership of one philosopher—and sometimes joined by the senate itself—with sacks on their shoulders, to devastate other people’s vegetable gardens. And pumpkin gruel would appear in the boarding house. The senators would gorge themselves so much on watermelons and melons that the next day the auditors heard two lessons from them instead of one: one came from their mouths, the other grumbled in the senator’s stomach. The boarding students and seminarians wore long approximations of frock coats, which extended po sie vremya [down to this time]: a technical term meaning—beyond the heels.

The most solemn event for the seminary was the vacations—the time from June, when the boarding house was usually disbanded to return home. Then the whole high road would be covered with grammarians, philosophers, and theologians. Whoever did not have his own refuge would go to one of his comrades. The philosophers and theologians went na konditsii [for tutoring], that is, they took jobs teaching or preparing the children of well-to-do people, and received new boots, and sometimes even a frock coat, for the year. This whole company stretched out together in one camp; they cooked gruel for themselves and spent the night in the field. Each dragged a sack behind him, containing one shirt and a pair of foot wraps. The theologians were especially thrifty and neat: in order not to wear out their boots, they would take them off, hang them on sticks, and carry them on their shoulders, especially when there was mud. Then, rolling up their wide trousers to their knees, they would fearlessly splash through the puddles with their feet. As soon as they spotted a farmstead off to the side, they immediately turned off the main road and, approaching the neatest built cottage, stood in a row before the windows and began to sing a canticle at the top of their lungs. The owner of the cottage, some old Cossack-settler, would listen to them for a long time, leaning on both hands, then would weep bitterly and say, turning to his wife: “Woman! What the scholars are singing must be very wise; bring them out some lard and something else we have!” And a whole bowl of dumplings would tumble into the sack. A decent piece of lard, several palianitsy (round loaves), and sometimes a tied-up chicken would be placed together. Having fortified themselves with such provisions, the grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, and theologians continued their journey again. The farther they went, however, the more their crowd diminished. Almost everyone had dispersed to their homes, and those who remained were those whose parental nests were farther away than the others.

Once during such a journey, three seminarians turned off the main road to the side, intending to stock up on provisions at the first farmstead they came across, because their sack had long been empty. These were: the theologian, Khalyava; the philosopher, Khoma Brut; and the rhetorician, Tiberiy Gorobets.

The theologian was a tall, broad-shouldered man and had an extremely strange nature: everything that lay near him, he would inevitably steal. In other respects, his character was extremely gloomy, and when he got drunk, he would hide in the weeds, and it took the seminary a great effort to find him there.

The philosopher Khoma Brut was of a cheerful disposition. He loved to lie down and smoke his pipe. If he drank, he would certainly hire musicians and dance the tropak. He was often treated to “large peas” [the whips], but with completely philosophical indifference—saying that what is destined to be, cannot be avoided.

The rhetorician Tiberiy Gorobets did not yet have the right to wear a mustache, drink spirits, or smoke a pipe. He wore only a oseledets [a long lock of hair], and therefore his character had not yet fully developed; but judging by the large bumps on his forehead, with which he often appeared in class, it could be assumed that he would make a good fighter. The theologian Khalyava and the philosopher Khoma often pulled him by the forelock as a sign of their patronage and used him as a deputy.

It was already evening when they turned off the main road. The sun had just set, and the daytime warmth still lingered in the air. The theologian and the philosopher walked silently, smoking their pipes; the rhetorician Tiberiy Gorobets knocked the tops off the beetroot growing along the roadside with his stick. The road went between scattered groups of oaks and hazel trees covering the meadow. Slopes and small hills, green and round as domes, sometimes interspersed the plain. A field of ripening rye visible in two places gave a sign that some village should soon appear. But more than an hour had passed since they passed the grain fields, and yet they did not come across any dwelling. Twilight had completely darkened the sky, and only a remnant of crimson glow faded in the west.

“What the devil!” said the philosopher Khoma Brut, “it seemed quite certain that there would be a farmstead immediately.”

The theologian remained silent, looked around the vicinity, then put his pipe back in his mouth, and they all continued on their way.

“By God!” said the philosopher, stopping again. “Not a devil’s fist [nothing at all] is visible.”

“Well, maybe some farmstead will appear further on,” said the theologian, without letting go of his pipe.

But meanwhile, it was already night, and a rather dark night. Small clouds intensified the gloom, and judging by all the signs, neither stars nor moon could be expected. The seminarians noticed that they had lost their way and had long been walking off the road.

The philosopher, having poked around with his feet in all directions, finally said abruptly: “And where is the road?”

The theologian was silent and, having pondered, added: “Yes, it’s a dark night.”

The rhetorician moved aside and tried to grope for the road by crawling, but his hands only fell into foxholes. Everywhere was just a steppe, where it seemed no one ever traveled. The travelers made another effort to move forward a bit, but everywhere was the same wilderness. The philosopher tried to call out, but his voice was completely swallowed up on the sides and met with no answer. Only a faint groan, similar to a wolf’s howl, was heard a little later.

“See, what’s to be done here?” said the philosopher.

“What? Stay and spend the night in the field!” said the theologian and reached into his pocket to get his flint and light his pipe again. But the philosopher could not agree to this. He always had the habit of tucking away a half-pood (~8 kg) loaf of bread and about four pounds of lard for the night and felt an unbearable loneliness in his stomach this time. Moreover, despite his cheerful nature, the philosopher was somewhat afraid of wolves.