The Three [antikvár]

Many solitary graves are scattered through the woods of Kerzhenetz. The bones of old hermits, devotees of ancient sects, rot within these graves, and about one such hermit, Antippa by name, the village folk of the Kerzhenetz region recount the following story. Antippa Lunyev, a rich peasant of stern disposition, having enjoyed the iniquitous life of this world to the age of fifty, suddenly gave himself up to meditation, grew melancholic, left his family, and took to the woods. There, on the edge of a ravine, he felled logs for a cell in which he lived for eight years, summer and winter, allowing no one to enter it, neither friend nor kinsman. Occasionally people who lost their way in the woods came upon Antippa's cell and caught sight of him there kneeling at prayer in the doorway. He was a fearful sight to behold: he had withered away with fasting and praying and was as overgrown with hair as the beasts of the field. When- 7