XVI —The witch and other Stories

Yegor, tasked by Vasil­isa to pen a let­ter to her long-lost daugh­ter Yefimya in Peters­burg, finds him­self in the home­ly yet sti­fling atmos­phere of the tav­ern kitchen dur­ing the Christ­mas sea­son. Vasil­isa, hav­ing not heard from Yefimya for four years since her wed­ding, is dri­ven by a moth­er’s yearn­ing to recon­nect. She and her hus­band, Pyotr, an old man seem­ing­ly lost to his own sight, bear the weight of years passed in silence from their daugh­ter. The task is sim­ple yet mon­u­men­tal: con­vey the love, the greet­ings, and the life updates of par­ents to their dis­tant daugh­ter.

Vasil­isa, her face shad­owed with wor­ry and the scars of time, instructs Yegor to write of parental bless­ings, Christ­mas wish­es, and the peren­ni­al state of their well-being, hop­ing her daugh­ter and son-in-law, Andrey Hrisan­fitch, share the same for­tunes. Yet, as the let­ter begins to take form, her thoughts over­run with the depth of all that remains unsaid. Years of change, of vil­lage life con­tin­u­ing its cycles of joy and sor­row with­out her daugh­ter’s pres­ence, seem impos­si­ble to com­press into a mere let­ter.

Yegor, amidst the sim­plic­i­ty and heat of his sur­round­ings, probes for more to add to the let­ter. The rev­e­la­tion that Andrey was once a sol­dier like him­self, now employed at a hydro­path­ic estab­lish­ment in Peters­burg, leads them to digress into the specifics of his cur­rent life based on an old let­ter, almost lost to mem­o­ry. Vasil­isa’s heart hangs heavy with the fear that her daugh­ter and son-in-law may no longer be alive.

Eager to ful­fill his task, Yegor pro­ceeds to craft the let­ter with a blend of for­mal advice and per­son­al updates, seem­ing­ly strange yet deeply reflec­tive of the gap between the lives of the vil­lagers and the imag­ined exis­tence of their kin in the bustling, dis­tant cap­i­tal. The warmth and pain of the hum­ble kitchen scene con­trast sharply with the cold unknown of Yefimya’s life in Peters­burg, under­lin­ing a sto­ry of famil­ial love stretched thin by dis­tance and silence. The chap­ter clos­es on the reflec­tions of a fam­i­ly dis­con­nect­ed by life’s unpre­dictable tides, yet cling­ing to hope through the act of writ­ing, a poignant reminder of the endur­ing bond between par­ents and their child, bridged by words on paper.