The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy

It was quite true that Olénin had been walking about the yard when Maryánka entered the gate, and had heard her say, "That devil, our lodger, is walking about. " He had spent that evening with Daddy Eróshka in the porch of his new lodging. He had had a table, a samovar, wine, and a candle brought out, and over a cup of tea and a cigar he listened to the tales the old man told seated on the threshold at his feet. Though the air was still, the candle dripped and flickered: now lighting up the post of the porch, now the table and crockery, now the cropped white head of the old man. Moths circled round the flame and, shedding the dust of their wings, fluttered on the table and in the glasses, flew into the candle flame, and disappeared in the black space beyond. Olénin and Eróshka had emptied five bottles of _chikhir_. Eróshka filled the glasses every time, offering one to Olénin, drinking his health, and talking untiringly. He told of Cossack life in the old days: of his father, "The Broad", who alone had carried on his back a boar's carcass weighing three hundredweight, and drank two pails of _chikhir_ at one sitting. He told of his own days and his chum Gírchik, with whom during the plague he used to smuggle felt cloaks across the Térek. He told how one morning he had killed two deer, and about his "little soul" who used to run to him at the cordon at night. He told all this so eloquently and picturesquely that Olénin did not notice how time passed.

"Ah yes, my dear fellow, you did not know me in my golden days; then I'd have shown you things. Today it's ‘Eróshka licks the jug', but then Eróshka was famous in the whole regiment. Whose was the finest horse? Who had a Gurda sword? To whom should one go to get a drink? With whom go on the spree? Who should be sent to the mountains to kill Ahmet Khan? Why, always Eróshka! Whom did the girls love? Always Eróshka had to answer for it. Because I was a real brave: a drinker, a thief (I used to seize herds of horses in the mountains), a singer; I was a master of every art! There are no Cossacks like that nowadays. It's disgusting to look at them. When they're that high (Eróshka held his hand three feet from the ground) they put on idiotic boots and keep looking at them-that's all the pleasure they know. Or they'll drink themselves foolish, not like men but all wrong. And who was I? I was Eróshka, the thief; they knew me not only in this village but up in the mountains. Tartar princes, my _kunaks_, used to come to see me! I used to be everybody's _kunak_. If he was a Tartar-with a Tartar; an Armenian-with an Armenian; a soldier-with a soldier; an officer-with an officer! I didn't care as long as he was a drinker. He says you should cleanse yourself from intercourse with the world, not drink with soldiers, not eat with a Tartar."