not get at them, as well as cheeses, sugar-loaves, cured fish, bags of dried mushrooms, and nuts bought from Finnish pedlars. On the floor stood cases of butter, huge, covered earthenware jugs of sour cream, baskets of eggs, and lots of other things. One would need the pen of a second Homer to describe fully and in detail all that had been accumulated in all the corners and on all the shelves of this small shrine of domestic life. The kitchen was the true scene of action of the great housewife and her worthy assistant, Anisya. Everything they needed was in the house, and everything was handy and in its proper place; indeed, everywhere there was order and cleanliness – at least one might have said so had it not been for one corner in the house where no ray of light, nor breath of fresh air, nor Agafya Matveyevna’s eye, nor Anisya’s quick, all-sweeping hand, had ever penetrated. That was Zakhar’s room or den. His room had no window, and the perpetual darkness helped to turn a human habitation into a dark hole. If Zakhar sometimes found there Agafya Matveyevna with all sorts of plans for improving and cleaning the place, he firmly declared that it was not a woman’s business to decide when and how his brushes, blacking, and boots ought to be kept, that it was nobody’s business why his clothes lay in a heap on the floor and his bed in the corner behind the stove was covered in dust, and that it was he and not she who wore the clothes and slept on the bed. As for the besom, some planks, two bricks, the bottom of a barrel, and two logs of wood which he kept in his room, he could not do without them in his work – though he did not explain why; furthermore, dust and spiders did not disturb him, and, in a word, since he never poked his nose into their kitchen, there was no reason why they should interfere with him. When he found Anisya there one day, he treated her with such scorn and threatened her with his elbow so seriously that she was afraid to look in any more. When the case was taken to a higher court and submitted to his master’s decision, Oblomov went to have a look at Zakhar’s room with the intention of taking all the necessary measures and seeing them strictly carried out, but thrusting his head through Zakhar’s door and gazing for a moment at all that was there, he just spat and did not utter a word. ‘Well, have you got what you wanted?’ Zakhar said to Agafya Matveyevna and Anisya, who had come with Oblomov in the hope that his interest might lead to some change. Then he smiled in his own manner across his whole face so that his eyebrows and whiskers moved apart.
All the other rooms were bright, clean, and airy. The old faded curtains had gone and the windows and doors of the drawing-room and study were hung with green and blue draperies and muslin curtains with red festoons – all of it the work of Agafya Matveyevna’s hands. The pillows were white as snow and rose mountainously almost to the ceiling; the blankets were quilted and of silk. For weeks on end the landlady’s room was crowded with several card-tables, opened up and placed end to end, on which Oblomov’s quilts and dressing-gown were spread out. Agafya Matveyevna did the cutting out and quilting herself, pressing her firm bosom to the work, fastening her eyes and even her teeth upon it when she had to bite the thread off; she laboured with love, with indefatigable industry, comforting herself modestly with the thought that the dressing-gown and the quilted blankets would clothe, warm, caress, and delight the magnificent Oblomov. For days, as he lay on the sofa in his room, he admired the way her bare elbows moved to and fro in the wake of the needle and the cotton. As in the old days at Oblomovka, he more than once dozed off to the regular sound of the needle going in and out of the material and the snapping of the thread when bitten off.
‘Do stop working, please; you’ll be tired,’ he besought her.
‘The Lord loves work,’ she answered, never taking her hands and eyes off her work.
His coffee was as carefully and nicely served and as well made as at