Book: The night before Christmas

... you are my mother, and my father, and everything that is dear in the world. If the king called me and said: “Blacksmith Vakula, ask me for everything that is best in my kingdom, I will give it all to you. I will order you to make a gold forge, and you will forge with silver hammers.” “I don’t want,” I would say to the king, “neither expensive stones, nor a gold forge, nor your entire kingdom: better give me my Oksana!”

... but he was consoled by the fact that he himself deliberately wanted this and did not do it as he was advised.

... I fought only in the mornings with my husband, because that was the only time I saw him sometimes.

Wonderfully arranged in our world! Everything that lives in him tries to adopt and imitate one another.

Oksana was not yet seventeen years old, and in almost the entire world, both on the other side of Dikanka and on this side of Dikanka, there was nothing but talk about her. The boys proclaimed in droves that there had never been and never would be a better girl in the village.

At first he lived like a real Cossack: he did not work, slept three-quarters of the day, ate for six mowers and drank almost a whole bucket at a time.

...on the wall to the side, as you enter the church, Vakula painted a devil in hell, so disgusting that everyone spat when they passed by; and the women, as soon as the child burst into tears in their arms, brought him to the picture and said: “It’s a big deal, it’s like it’s painted!” - and the child, holding back his tears, glanced sideways at the picture and huddled close to his mother’s chest.

Kuma's wife was such a treasure, which are not few in the world.