Scarecrow by Nikolai Leskov. Short summary

5 seconds

The story of the scary Selivan, who actually turned out to be a kind, honest and decent man.

1 minute

The boy was born into a noble family, which the nanny explained his inability to play with the city boys. Moving to the countryside was a blessing.

He quickly made friends with his peers, but made a special friendship with the miller. This man, Ilya, told the barchuk about the waterman, the woodsman and the kikimora. But the most famous in the area was the legend of Selivan. Once he received a ruined inn as a gift from a merchant. Since then, people had allegedly been disappearing there.

Having sold his soul to the devils, he lured them into the thicket, robbed and killed them. Everyone was so afraid of the «scarecrow» that they avoided the forest. After the many adventures of country life, he was assigned to study at a noble boarding school. For the Christmas vacations his aunt took him and his brother to his parents, traveling with a very large sum of money. There were twenty miles to go when they were caught in a snowstorm.

The travelers would have surely frozen, but the very same fearsome Selivan warmed them up in his house. They still thought he was responsible for the loss of the money box. He was not arrested in time, though. He retrieved the money himself and even refused the reward. That is how the notoriety of a good man with an unhappy fate was dispelled.