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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: a mere sprinkling for the barin.
Still more difficult did he find it to deal with the peasant women.
Ever and anon they would beg to be excused from work, or start making
complaints of the severity of the barstchina. Indeed, they were
terrible folk! However, Tientietnikov abolished the majority of the
tithes of linen, hedge fruit, mushrooms, and nuts, and also reduced by
one-half other tasks proper to the women, in the hope that they would
devote their spare time to their own domestic concerns--namely, to
sewing and mending, and to making clothes for their husbands, and to
increasing the area of their kitchen gardens. Yet no such result came
about. On the contrary, such a pitch did the idleness, the
Dead Souls |
