What is the most popular word today?
The most popular word today is “electrification.”
Giving electric light to Russia is very important. But it has problems. I’m not saying it costs too much. It costs money—that’s all. No, I’m saying something else.
I was living in a big building. Everyone in this building used oil lamps. Some people had nice lamps. Some had just a can of oil with a little flame. The poorest people used candles. Life was not easy.
Then they started to put in electric light.
First the building manager put light in his room. He was a quiet man. He didn’t say what he was thinking. But he walked around in a strange way.
Then my wife came home. Her name is Yelizaveta Ignatyevna. She said we should put electric light in our home.
“Everyone is getting light,” she said. “The director put in light too.”
So we did the same.
They put in the light, and the room was bright—and what did we see? Dirt everywhere!
Before, you went to work in the morning, you came home in the evening, you drank tea, and you went to bed. You never saw anything with just an oil lamp. But now, with electric light—you could see the wallpaper falling off the wall. You could see an old shoe on the floor. You could see a bug running away from the light. An old piece of cloth here, dirt there, and insects jumping around.
It made me very sad.
In our room, we had a sofa. I always thought it was a good sofa. In the evenings I sat on it. But now with this electricity—what a sofa! Parts were sticking up, parts were hanging down, parts were falling out. How could I sit on this sofa?
No, I thought, I do not live well. Everything looks bad.
Then I looked at my wife. She looked sad. She was cleaning the kitchen and talking to herself.
“Why are you so sad?” I asked her.
She moved her shoulders up and down.
“I didn’t know,” she said, “how poor my life was.”
I looked at our things. Not good. Dirt and old clothes everywhere. The light showed everything.
So I started to feel sad when I came home in the evenings.
I came in. I turned on the light. I looked at it for a moment. Then I put my face in the pillow.
Then I thought again. I got my money from work. I bought paint. I mixed it—and I started to work. I took off the old wallpaper. I killed the bugs. I cleaned away the old spider webs. I fixed the sofa. I painted. I made everything nice. I was happy.
I did well. But not well enough. It was all for nothing. My wife cut the wires.
“Light,” she said, “makes our life look very poor. Why show our poverty? The bugs will laugh at us.”
I asked her not to do this. I talked and talked. It was no use.
“You can move to another home,” she said. “I don’t want to live with light. I don’t have money to fix everything.”
But how could I move after I spent so much money on paint? I gave up.
Light is good, but it’s not easy to live with.