Sketches From a Hunter's Album

  ‘Hmm,’ said Mr Benevolensky, reflected a while and looked at Andryusha from under his brows. ‘Well, we’ll give it some thought,’ he added and rubbed his hands.

  That very day he asked Tatyana Borisovna permission to speak to her alone. They locked themselves away. After half an hour they summoned Andryusha. He entered. Mr Benevolensky was standing by the window with a slightly pink face and shining eyes. Tatyana Borisovna was sitting in a corner and wiping away tears.

  ‘Well, Andryusha,’ she began at last, ‘you must be grateful to Pyotr Mikhaylych, he is taking you into his keeping and is carrying you off to St Petersburg.’

  Andryusha literally froze where he stood.

  ‘You must tell me sincerely,’ began Mr Benevolensky in a voice filled with dignity and deference, ‘do you wish to be an artist, young man, do you feel a sacred calling towards art?’

  ‘I want to be an artist, Pyotr Mikhaylych,’ Andryusha confirmed haltingly.

  ‘In that case I’m very glad. It will be hard for you, of course,’ Mr Benevolensky went on, ‘to say goodbye to your honoured auntie. You must feel towards her the liveliest gratitude.’

  ‘I adore my auntie,’ interrupted Andryusha and blinked his eyes.

  ‘Of course, of course, that is very understandable and does you much credit. But on the other hand, just imagine what joy you’ll have in due course… your successes…’

  ‘Embrace me, Andryusha,’ murmured the kind lady of the house. Andryusha flung himself on her neck. ‘Well, now thank your benefactor…’

  Andryusha embraced Mr Benevolensky’s stomach, stood on tiptoe and reached out for his hand, which the benefactor, true, was ready to deliver to him, but in no great hurry, as if to say: one’s got to play along with a child’s wishes and satisfy them but one can have a bit of fun oneself, too. A couple of days later Mr Benevolensky left and carried off his new protégé.

  In the course of the first three years of separation Andryusha wrote fairly often and sometimes attached drawings to his letters. Occasionally Mr Benevolensky also added a few words of his own, for the most part words of approval. Later the letters became less and less frequent and finally stopped altogether. For a whole year her nephew was silent and Tatyana Borisovna began to grow worried, when suddenly she received a note with the following content:

  Dear auntie!

  Three days ago Pyotr Mikhaylych, my protector, passed away. A cruel paralytic stroke deprived me of this final support. Of course, I’m already nearly twenty. In the course of seven years I’ve had considerable success. I have strong hopes for my talent and am able to live off it. I am not downhearted but nevertheless, if you can, send me as soon as possible 250 roubles in banknotes. I kiss your hand and remain, etc., etc.

  Tatyana Borisovna dispatched 250 roubles to her nephew. After a couple of months he made the same demand again. She collected together the last money she had and sent it to him. Six weeks had scarcely gone by since the last parcel had been sent when he made a third demand, ostensibly to buy paints for a portrait commissioned from him by Princess Terteresheneva. Tatyana Borisovna refused. ‘In that case,’ he wrote to her, ‘I intend to travel to you in the country for the benefit of my health.’ And in fact, in May of that very year, Andryusha returned to Lower Kicking.

  Tatyana Borisovna didn’t recognize him at first. Judging by his letter, she’d expected to see someone ill and thin, but what she saw was a broad-shouldered, fat young man, with a broad, red face and lush curly hair. The slender and pale-faced Andryusha had turned into a robust Andrey Ivanov Belovzorov. It wasn’t only his appearance that had changed. The punctilious bashfulness, carefulness and neatness of former years had been replaced by the neglectful arrogance of youth and an intolerable slovenliness. He would sway to left and right as he walked and fling himself down into armchairs, sprawl on to the table, lounging about and yawning loudly. He was rude to his auntie and the servants. It was as if he were saying: ‘I’m an artist, a free-spirited Cossack! You ought to know how we behave!’ It would happen that for whole days at a time he never touched a paint brush. When so-called inspiration got hold of him he’d posture and show off as if drunk, heavily, ineptly and noisily. His cheeks would burn with crude colour and his eyes mist over and he’d launch himself into tirades about his talent, his successes, about how he was developing and progressing…

  In fact, it turned out that his abilities were barely up to doing decent small portraits. He was an all-round ignoramus and read nothing – and what’s the point of reading for an artist? Nature, freedom and poetry – those are his elements. All he needs to know is how to shake his curls and sing like a nightingale and inhale Zhukov tobacco! Russian panache is a fine thing, though only a few can carry it off; the untalented, secondhand artists of this world are impossible. Andrey Ivanych made himself at home at his auntie’s because the free food and lodging were evidently to his taste. He bored all her guests to death. He’d sit at a grand piano (Tatyana Borisovna had one) and begin with one finger to pick out ‘And races fast the dashing troika’;5 or he’d play chords, pounding on the keys; or for hours at a time he’d murder the romances of Varlamov ‘O-O so-olitary pine!’ or ‘No, doctor, no, come no more’,6 all the while his eyes swimming in fat and his cheeks shining tight as drums… Then he’d suddenly burst out with ‘Be gone, you restless passions!’7 and Tatyana Borisovna’d literally shudder.

  ‘It’s astonishing,’ she remarked to me once, ‘the sorts of songs they write nowadays, such melancholy stuff. They wrote different ones in my time. They were sad songs, but still pleasant to listen to. For instance:

  ‘Come, come to me in meadowland,

  Where I’ll await you vainly;

  Come, come to me in meadowland,

  Where I shed tears all hours…

  Alas, you’ll come to me in meadowland,

  But late ’twill be, my dearest friend!’8

  Tatyana Borisovna gave a sly smile.

  ‘I’m su-uffering, I’m su-uffering,’ howled her nephew in the next room.

  ‘That’s enough, Andryusha.’

  ‘My spirit droops now that you’re go-one,’ went on the indefatigable singer.

  Tatyana Borisovna shook her head. ‘My, oh my, these artistic types!’

  A year has passed since then. Belovzorov is still living with his auntie and still planning to go to St Petersburg. He’s grown broader than he’s tall since being in the country. His aunt – who’d have thought it? – can’t do enough for him and young ladies of the region are falling in love with him…

  Many of her former friends have stopped visiting Tatyana Borisovna.

  DEATH

  I HAVE a neighbour, a youthful squire and youthful hunter. One beautiful July morning I rode over to his place with a proposal that he should join me on a grouse shoot. He agreed. ‘Only,’ he said, ‘let’s go by way of some small property of mine in the Zusha1 direction. I’d like to have a look at Chaplygino, my oak wood, d’you know it? They’re cutting it down.’

  ‘Let’s be off, then.’

  He ordered a horse to be saddled and dressed himself in a short green jacket with bronze buttons bearing the image of a boar’s head, pulled on a worsted game-bag and silver flask, and having thrown a new French sports-gun over his shoulder, disported himself before the mirror, not without some approbation, and shouted for his dog, Esperance, a gift from a cousin, an elderly maiden lady with a warm heart but without a hair on her head.

  We set off. My neighbour took with him the local guardian of the peace, Arkhip, a stout and thick-set peasant with a square-shaped face and cheekbones of positively antediluvian dimensions, and a young man of about nineteen, lean, fair-haired and shortsighted, with sloping shoulders and a long neck, Mr Gottlieb von der Kock, recently engaged as a manager from the Baltic provinces. My neighbour had not long before inherited his estate. It had come to him as an inheritance from his aunt, Kardon-Katayeva, the widow of a state’s counsellor, a woman of unusual obesity who, even when lying in bed, had a
habit of emitting protracted and piteous groans. We reached his small property and Ardalion Mikhaylich (my neighbour) said, addressing his companions: ‘Wait for me out here in the clearing.’

  The German bowed, slid from his horse, extracted a small book from his pocket – a novel, it appeared, by Johanna Schopenhauer2 – and seated himself in the shade of a bush, while Arkhip remained out in the sun for a solid hour without budging an inch. Ardalion Mikhaylich and I made a round of the undergrowth, but were unable to find a single bird. My friend announced that he was determined to set off for his wood. I was also far from convinced that our hunting would be successful on such a day and trailed along behind him. We returned to the clearing. The German made a note of his page, stood up, placed his book in his pocket and, not without some difficulty, mounted his short-tailed reject of a mare which neighed and kicked at the slightest touch. Arkhip sprang to life, gave a sharp tug at both reins, clapped his legs against the animal’s flanks and eventually managed to set off on his cowed and shaken little steed. Off we went.

  Ardalion Mikhaylich’s wood had been known to me since my childhood. I had often gone to Chaplygino in the company of my French tutor, Monsieur Désiré Fleury, an excellent chap (who, however, only just avoided ruining my health irretrievably by forcing me to take the medicines of Leroy every evening). The entire wood consisted of some two or three hundred enormous oaks and ash trees. Their stately, powerful trunks used to stand out in magnificent dark relief against the golden transparency of the green-leaved rowans and nut trees; rising on high they composed their fine proportions against the lucid blue sky and there spread out the domes of their far-reaching, angular branches; hawks, merlins, kestrels, all whistled and hovered above their motionless crests and colourful woodpeckers tapped away loudly at their thick bark; the resonant song of the blackbird suddenly rang out amid the thick foliage in the wake of the lilting call of the oriole; below, in the undergrowth, robins, siskins and chiffchaffs chirruped and sang; finches darted to and fro across the paths; white hares ran along the edge of the wood in cautious stops and starts, and nut-brown squirrels leapt friskily from tree to tree, suddenly stopping with tails raised above their heads. In the grass, around tall ant-hills and in the mild shadiness offered by the beautiful fretwork of ferns, violets used to flower, and lilies of the valley, and reddish mushrooms grew, russula, emetic agaric, milk agaric, fairy clubs and red fly agaric; and in the meadows, among the widespread bushes, wild strawberries would grow crimson… And what deep shade there was in the wood! At noon, when the heat was greatest, it would be dark as night: peaceful, fragrant, moist… Time would pass for me so gaily at Chaplygino that it was, I admit, not without a feeling of sadness that I now rode into this all-too-familiar wood. The bitter, snowless winter of 1840 had not spared my old friends, the oaks and ash trees. Desiccated and naked, covered here and there with diseased leaf, they rose sadly above the young trees which ‘had supplanted them but not replaced them’…*3 Some, well covered with foliage on their lower boughs, raised on high, as if in reproach and desperation, their lifeless, broken upper branches; from other trees amidst foliage which was still quite thick, although not as abundant or overflowing as it was formerly, there stuck out fat, dry limbs of dead wood; from others, the bark had already fallen away; and there were some that had fallen down completely and lay rotting on the ground like corpses. Who could have foreseen that there would have been shadows in Chaplygino, where once there wasn’t a single shadow to be found! As I looked at the dying trees, I thought: surely you must know shame and bitterness? And I recalled the lines from Koltsov:4

  Where have you gone to

  Speech high and mighty,

  Strength so haughty,

  Courage so kingly?

  Where is it now

  The green sap and the power?

  ‘Why was it, Ardalion Mikhaylich,’ I began, ‘that these trees weren’t cut down the year afterwards? They won’t give you a tenth of what they were worth before.’

  He simply shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘You should have asked my aunt – merchants came to her, brought money, badgered her.’

  ‘Mein Gott! Mein Gott!’ von der Kock exclaimed at every step. ‘Such a sham! Such a sham!’

  ‘What sham?’ my neighbour remarked with a smile.

  ‘This eez a shame, what I wishes to tell.’ (It is well known that all Germans, once they have finally mastered our Russian letter ‘l’, dwell on it amazingly.)

  His compassion was particularly aroused by the oaks which lay on the ground – and no wonder, for many a miller would have paid a high price for them. But our guardian of the peace, Arkhip, maintained an imperturbable composure and showed not the least sign of regret; on the contrary, it was even with a certain pleasure that he jumped over them and lashed at them with his riding crop.

  We made our way to the place where the felling was going on, when suddenly, after the sound of a falling tree, there resounded cries and talk, and a few seconds later a young peasant, pale and dishevelled, raced towards us out of a thicket.

  ‘What’s the matter? Where are you running?’ Ardalion Mikhaylich asked him.

  He stopped at once.

  ‘Ardalion Mikhaylich, sir, there’s been an accident.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Maxim, sir, has been knocked down by a tree.’

  ‘How did it happen? Do you mean Maxim the contractor?’

  ‘Yes, sir, the contractor. We started cutting down an ash tree, and he stood and watched… He was standing there a long time, and then he went to the well to get water, like he wanted to have a drink, see. Then all of a sudden the ash tree starts creaking and falling right down on him. We shout to him: run, run, run… He could’ve thrown himself to one side, but instead he decides to run straight on… he got scared, you know. The ash tree’s top boughs fell on him and covered him. God only knows why it fell so quickly. Probably it was all rotten inside.’

  ‘So it struck Maxim, did it?’

  ‘It struck him, sir.’

  ‘Did it kill him?’

  ‘No, sir, he’s still alive, but it’s no good: his legs and arms are broken. I was just running to get Seliverstych, the doctor.’

  Ardalion Mikhaylich ordered the guardian of the peace to gallop into the village for Seliverstych and himself set off at a brisk trot for the site of the felling. I followed him.

  We found the wretched Maxim on the ground. Ten or so peasants were gathered round him. We alighted from our horses. He was hardly groaning at all, though occasionally he opened wide his eyes, as if looking around him with surprise, and bit his blue lips. His chin quivered, his hair was stuck to his temples and his chest rose irregularly: he was clearly dying. The faint shadow of a young lime tree ran calmly aslant his face. We bent down to him, and he recognized Ardalion Mikhaylich.

  ‘Sir,’ he began to say in a scarcely audible voice, ‘the priest… send for him… order to send… God has… has punished me… my legs, arms, all broken… today… Sunday… but I… but I… you see… I didn’t let the lads off.’

  He fell silent. His breath came in short gasps.

  ‘My money… the wife… give it to the wife… after what’s owing… Onisim knows… who I… owe what…’

  ‘We’ve sent for the doctor, Maxim,’ my neighbour said. ‘Perhaps you won’t die after all.’

  He wanted to open wide his eyes and with an effort raised his brows and eyelids.

  ‘No, I’ll die. See… see, there she’s coming, there she is, there… Forgive me, lads, if I’ve in any way…’

  ‘God’ll forgive you, Maxim Andreyich,’ the peasants said in husky unison and removed their caps. ‘And you forgive us.’

  He gave a sudden desperate shake of the head, lifted his chest regretfully and again sank back.

  ‘He shouldn’t have to die here,’ Ardalion Mikhaylich exclaimed. ‘Lads, get the mat from the cart over there and let’s carry him to the hospital.’

  A couple of men rushed to
the cart.

  ‘Off of Efim… Sychovsky,’ the dying man began to babble, ‘I bought a horse yesterday… I put money down… So the horse is mine… see the wife gets that as well…’

  They began to lay him on the mat. He started trembling all over, like a shot bird, and straightened up.

  ‘He’s dead,’ the peasants said.

  Silently, we mounted our horses and rode off.

  The death of the wretched Maxim put me in a reflective mood. What an astonishing thing is the death of a Russian peasant! His state of mind before death could be called neither one of indifference, nor one of stupidity; he dies as if he is performing a ritual act, coldly and simply.

  A few years ago a peasant belonging to another country neighbour of mine was burned in a barn. (He would, in fact, have remained in the barn had not a visitor from town pulled him out half dead: he doused himself in a pitcher of water and at a run broke down the door under the overhang which was already alight.) I visited him in his hut. It was dark inside, the atmosphere stuffy and smoky. ‘Where is the sick man?’ I inquired.

  ‘Over there, sir, above the stove,’ answered the singsong voice of an old woman weighed down by her burden of grief.

  I approached and found a peasant covered in a sheepskin, breathing painfully.

  ‘Well, how are you feeling?’

  The sick man grew restless, wanted to raise himself, but he was covered in wounds and close to death.

  ‘Lie down, lie down. Well? How is it?’

  ‘I’m poorly, that’s for sure,’ he said.

  ‘Does it hurt you?’

  No answer.

  ‘Is there anything you need?’

  Silence.

  ‘Shall I order some tea to be sent to you, eh?’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  I left him and sat down on a bench. I sat for a quarter of an hour, half an hour, and all the while the silence of the grave reigned in the hut. In one corner, by a table under the icons, a five-year-old girl was hiding, eating bread. From time to time her mother warned her to be quiet. Out on the porch people walked about, clattered and talked and a sister-in-law of the dying man was chopping cabbage.