Stories

"...the fool is not a fool after all. Well, who else do you love?" "No one," Levka answered simply. "Ah, you born-fool, you born-fool, ha, ha, ha! Do you love your own mother less, perhaps?" "Less," Levka answered. "And your father?" "I do not love him at all." "Oh, my Lord God, honor your father and your mother, and you, fool, what? Even senseless animals love their parents; how can a reasonable image of God not love them?"

"What kind of animals?"

"Well, what kind? Dogs, horses... all kinds."

"Well, our cat Maska loves my Sharik a common name for a dog more than anyone."

And my father would laugh from the heart, adding: "Blessed are the poor in spirit!"

I was already finishing my rhetoric a subject in the seminary curriculum focusing on classical persuasive speaking and writing then, and therefore it is not hard to understand why it occurred to me to write "A Word on the Godless Treatment of the Born-Foolish by People." Wishing to arrange my composition according to all the rules of Quintilian a Roman rhetorician, and observing the laws of the chreia gloss: a rhetorical exercise consisting of a brief anecdote followed by an elaboration, I went out onto the road while thinking it over. I was walking and, without noticing it, found myself in the forest; since I had entered it without paying attention, it is not surprising that I lost my way. I searched and searched and became even more lost in the forest, when suddenly I heard the familiar barking of Levka's dog. I went in the direction from which it sounded, and was soon met by Sharik. About fifteen paces from him, under a large tree, Levka was sleeping. I quietly approached him and stopped—how meekly, how calmly he slept! He was dull-looking at first glance.