Гранатовый браслет и другие повести

ALEXANDER КUPRIN

THE GARNET 
BRACELET

AND OTHER STORIES

Translated by Stepan Apresyan

УДК 372.8
ББК  81.2 Англ 
Б44

ISBN 978-5-9925-1377-6

Куприн, Александр Иванович.
Б44  
Гранатовый браслет и другие повести : книга для 
чтения на английском языке / А. И. Куприн. — [пер. 
с русск. яз. С. Апресяна]  — Санкт-Петербург : КАРО, 
2019. — 384 с. — (Русская классическая литература 
на иностранных языках).

ISBN 978-5-9925-1377-6.

В сборник вошли известные произведения русского классика 
Александра Ивановича Куприна «Гранатовый браслет», «Молох», 
«Гамбринус» и другие в переводе на английский язык.
УДК 372.8 
ББК 81.2 Англ

© КАРО, 2019 
Все права защищены

MOLOCH

I

A long blast from the mill siren announced a new working day. The deep, raucous sound seemed to come up from 
the bowels of the earth, spreading low above the ground. 
The murky dawn of a rainy August day tinged it with melancholy and foreboding.
The signal found Engineer Bobrov drinking tea.
During the last few days he had been suffering more 
than ever before from insomnia. Although he went to bed 
with a heavy head and started every moment with a jolt, 
he managed quite soon to drop off into a restless sleep; but 
he woke up long before dawn, shattered and irritable. This 
was doubtless due to mental and physical strain, and to his 
old habit of taking injections of morphia, a habit which he 
had recently begun to fight in earnest.

He now sat at the window, sipping his tea, which he 
found flat and tasteless. Raindrops zigzagged down the 
panes, and ruffled and rippled the puddles. Out of the window he could see a square pond framed by shaggy willows 
with bare, stumpy trunks and greyish-green leaves. Gusts 
of wind sent small waves racing over the surface of the 
pond, while the leaves of the willows took on a silvery hue. 
The faded grass, beaten down by the rain, drooped limply 
to the ground. The neighbouring village, the dark, jagged 
band of a forest stretching on the horizon, and the field 
patched with black and yellow showed grey and blurred 
as in a mist.
It was seven o’clock when Bobrov went out in a hooded 
oilskin raincoat. Like many nervous people, he felt miserable in the morning; there was a weakness in his body, his 
eyes ached dully as if someone were pressing them with 
force, and his mouth had a stale taste. But more painful 
than anything else was the conflict he had lately noticed 
in himself. His colleagues, who looked upon life from the 
most primitive, cheerful, and practical standpoint, would 
probably have laughed at what caused him so much secret 
agony; at any rate they would not have understood him. 
His abhorrence of work at the mill, a feeling that verged 
on horror, mounted with every passing day.
Considering his cast of mind, his habits and tastes, 
it would have been best for him to devote himself to 
armchair work, to professorial activities, or to farming. 
Engineering did not satisfy him, and he would have left 

college when he was in the third year but for his mother’s 
insistence.
His delicate, almost feminine nature suffered cruelly 
under the coarse impact of reality. In this respect he compared himself with one flayed alive. Sometimes trifles unnoticed by others caused him a deep and lasting vexation.
Bobrov was plain and unassuming in appearance. He 
was shortish and rather lean, but he breathed nervous, 
impulsive energy. The outstanding, feature of his face was 
his high white forehead. His dilated pupils, of different size, 
were so large that the grey eyes seemed black. His bushy, 
uneven eyebrows joined across the bridge of his nose, giving the eyes a fixedly stern, somewhat ascetic expression. 
His lips were thin and nervous but not cruel, and slightly 
unsymmetrical — the right corner of his mouth was a little higher than the left; his fair moustache and beard were 
small and scanty, for all the world like a young boy’s. The 
charm of his virtually plain face lay in his smile. When he 
smiled a gay and tender look would come into his eyes, and 
his whole face would become attractive.
After a half a mile’s walk he climbed a hillock. The vast 
panorama of the mill, covering an area of twenty square 
miles, sprawled below. It was a veritable town of red brick, 
bristling with tall, soot-blackened chimneys, reeking of 
sulphur and molten iron, deafened by a never-ending din. 
The formidable stacks of four blast-furnaces dominated 
the scene. Beside them rose eight hot-blast stoves for circulating heated air, eight huge iron towers topped with 

round domes. Scattered about the blast-furnaces were 
other structures: repair shops, a cast house, a washing 
department, a locomotive shed, a rail-rolling mill, openhearth and puddling furnaces, and so on.
The mill area descended in three enormous natural terraces. Little locomotives scurried in all directions. Coming 
into view on the lowest level, they sped upwards whistling shrilly, disappeared in the tunnels for a few seconds, 
rushed out again wrapped in white steam, clanked over 
bridges, and finally raced along stone trestles as if flying 
through the air, to empty ore or coke slap into the stack of 
a blast-furnace.
Farther off, beyond those natural terraces, you were bewildered by the sight of the chaos reigning on the building 
site of the fifth and sixth blast-furnaces. It was as if a terrific 
upheaval had thrown up those innumerable piles of crushed 
stone and bricks of various sizes and colours, those pyramids 
of sand, mounds of flagstone, stacks of sheet iron and timber. Everything seemed to be heaped up without rhyme or 
reason, a freak of chance. Hundreds of carts and thousands 
of people were bustling there like ants on a wrecked ant-hill. 
White, acrid lime dust hung in the air like mist.
Still farther away, close to the horizon, workmen 
crowded near a long goods train, unloading it. From the 
wagons bricks slid down planks in an unceasing stream, 
sheets of iron fell with a crash, thin boards flew quivering through the air. As empty carts moved away towards 
the train, others came in a string, loaded high. Thousands 

of sounds merged into a long, galloping hubbub: the clear 
notes of stone-masons’ chisels, the ringing blows of riveters pounding away at boiler rivets, the heavy crashing 
of steam hammers, the powerful hissing and whistling of 
steam pipes, and occasional muffled, earth-shaking explosions somewhere underground.
It was an engrossing and awe-inspiring sight. Human 
labour was in full swing like a huge, complex and precise 
machine. Thousands of people — engineers, stone-masons, 
mechanics, carpenters, fitters, navvies, joiners, blacksmiths — had come together from various corners of the 
earth, in order to give their strength and health, their wits 
and energy, in obedience to the iron law of the struggle for 
survival, for just one step forward in industrial progress.
That day Bobrov was feeling particularly wretched. 
Three or four times a year he would lapse into a strange, 
melancholy, and at the same time irritable mood. Usually 
it came on a cloudy autumn morning, or in the evening, 
during a winter thaw. Everything would look dull and 
lacklustre, people’s faces would appear colourless, ugly, 
or sickly, and their words, sounding as if they came from 
far away, would cause nothing but boredom. That day he 
was particularly irritated, when making the round of the 
rail-mill, by the pallid, coal-stained and fire-dried faces of 
the workmen. As he watched their toil while the breath of 
the white-hot masses of iron scorched their bodies and a 
piercing autumn wind blew in through the wide doorway, 
he felt as if he were going through part of their physical  

suffering. He was ashamed of his well-groomed appearance, 
his fine linen, his yearly salary of three thousand rubles.

II

He stood near a welding furnace, watching. Every moment its enormous blazing maw opened wide to swallow, 
one by one, hundred-pound pieces of white-hot steel, fresh 
from a flaming furnace. A quarter of an hour later, having 
passed with a terrific noise through dozens of machines, 
they were stacked in the shape of long, shining rails at the 
far end of the shop.
Someone touched Bobrov’s shoulder from behind. He 
spun round in annoyance and saw Svezhevsky, one of his 
colleagues.
Bobrov had a strong dislike for this man with his figure 
always slightly bent, as if he were slinking or bowing, his 
eternal snigger, and his cold, moist hands which he kept 
on rubbing. There was something ingratiating, something 
cringing and malicious, about him. He always knew before 
anybody else the gossip of the mill, and he reported it with 
especial relish to those who were likely to be most upset 
by it; when speaking he would fuss nervously, touching 
every minute the sides, shoulders, hands, and buttons of 
the person to whom he was talking.
“I haven’t seen you for ages, old chap,” said Svezhevsky with a snigger as he clung to Bobrov’s hand. “Reading 
books, I suppose?”

“Good morning,” replied Bobrov reluctantly, withdrawing his hand. “I just wasn’t feeling well.”
“Everybody’s missing you at Zinenko’s,” Svezhevsky 
went on significantly. “Why don’t you ever go there? The 
director was there the other day; he asked where you were. 
The talk turned to blast-furnaces, and he spoke very highly 
of you.”
“How very flattering.” Bobrov made a mock bow.
“But he did! He said the Board valued you as a most 
competent engineer who could go far if he chose to. In 
his view, we oughtn’t to have asked the French to design 
the mill since we had experienced men like you at home. 
Only — ”
“Now he’s going to say something nasty,” thought Bobrov.
“Only it’s a pity, he says, that you keep away from society as if you were a secretive person. One hardly knows 
what to make of you or how to talk to you. О yes! Here I am 
talking about this and that, forgetting to tell you the biggest 
news. The director wants everybody to be at the station 
tomorrow for the twelve o’clock train.”
“Going to meet somebody again, are we?”
“Exactly. Guess who!”
Svezhevsky’s face took on a sly and triumphant look. 
He rubbed his hands, apparently much pleased, because he 
was about to give a piece of interesting news.
“I really don’t know,” said Bobrov. “Besides, I’m no good 
at guessing.”

“Oh, please try. At least name somebody at random.”
Bobrov said nothing and made a show of watching 
a steam crane at work. Svezhevsky, noticing it, became 
fussier still.
“You couldn’t tell, not for the world. Well, I won’t tantalize you any longer. They’re expecting Kvashnin in person.”
The frankly servile tone in which he uttered the name 
sounded disgusting to Bobrov.
“What’s so awfully important about that?” he asked 
casually.
“How can you ask that? Why, on the Board of Directors he does as he pleases, and everybody listens to him as 
to an oracle. This time the Board has entrusted him with 
speeding up construction — that is, he’s entrusted himself 
with it. You’ll see the hell that’ll be raised here when he arrives. Last year he inspected the mill — that was before you 
came, wasn’t it? Well, the manager and four engineers were 
kicked out. How soon will you finish putting in the blast?”1 
“It’s as good as done.”
“That’s fine. In that case we can celebrate that and the 
laying of foundations when Kvashnin’s here. Have you ever 
met him?”
“No, never. Of course, I’ve heard the name.”
“I’ve had the pleasure. You wouldn’t come across 
another character like him, I can tell you. All Petersburg 

1 Heating a blast-furnace before operation to the melting point of ore, 
which is about 3,000° F. Sometimes it lasts several months. — Author’s 
note.