‘A strange trick of fortune brought me finally to the home of one of my professors. This is how it happened: I came to him to sign on to his course, but he suddenly took it into his head to invite me home for an evening. This professor had two daughters, about twenty-seven years old, such dumpy things – God be with them – with such majestic noses, hair all in frizzly curls, eyes of the palest blue and red hands with white fingernails. One was called Linchen, the other Minchen. I started visiting the professor’s house. I ought to tell you that this professor was not so much foolish as literally punch-drunk: when he lectured he was fairly coherent, but at home he stumbled over his words and wore his spectacles stuck up all the time on his forehead; yet he was a most learned chap… And then what? Suddenly it seemed to me I’d fallen in love with Linchen – and this seemed to be the case for a whole six months. I talked with her little, it’s true, mostly just looked at her; but I read aloud to her various touching works of literature, squeezed her hands in secret and in the evenings used to sit dreaming beside her, gazing fixedly at the moon or simply up in the air. At the same time, she could make excellent coffee! What more could one ask for? Only one thing bothered me: at this very moment, as they say, of inexplicable bliss there would be a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach and my abdomen would be assailed by a melancholy, cold shivering. In the end I couldn’t abide such happiness and ran away. I spent a further two years abroad even after that: I went to Italy, in Rome I stood for a while in front of the Transfiguration, and in Florence I did the same thing in front of the Venus; I became subject to sudden, exaggerated enthusiasms, just like fits of bad temper; in the evenings I would do a little writing of verses, begin keeping a diary; put in a nutshell, I did exactly what everyone else did. And, yet, look how easy it is to be original! For instance, I’m a complete philistine when it comes to painting and sculpture, but to admit such a thing out loud – no, quite impossible! So you hire a guide, dash off to see the frescos…’
He again lowered his head and again flung down his nightcap.
‘So I returned finally to my native country,’ he continued in a tired voice, ‘and came to Moscow. In Moscow I underwent a surprising change. Abroad I had mostly kept my mouth shut, but now I suddenly began talking with unexpected vigour and at the same time conceived God knows how many exalted ideas about myself. Indulgent people cropped up to whom I seemed to be almost a genius; ladies listened considerably to my blatherings; but I did not succeed in remaining at the height of my fame. One fine day gave birth to some gossip on my account (I don’t know who trotted it out into the light of God’s world; probably some old maid of the male sex – the number of such old maids in Moscow is infinite), it was born and started putting out shoots and runners as fast as a strawberry plant. I got entangled in them, wanted to jump free, break through the sticky threads, but there was nothing doing. So I left. That’s where I showed what an empty person I was; I should have waited until it had blown over, in the way people wait for nettle-rash to pass, and those very same indulgent people would again have opened their arms to me, those very same ladies would again have smiled at my eloquence… But that’s just my problem: I’m not original. A feeling of honesty, you understand, awoke in me: I became somehow ashamed of chattering ceaselessly all the time, holding forth yesterday in the Arbat, today in Truba Street, tomorrow in the Sitsevo-Vrazhok, and always about the same thing. What if that’s what they expect of you? Take a look at the real old battleaxes in that line of the country: it doesn’t mean a thing to them; on the contrary, that’s all they want; some of them have been wagging their tongues for twenty years and all the time in the same direction. That’s real self-assurance, real egotistical ambition for you! I had it, too – ambition, that is – and even now it’s not completely left me. But the bad part of it is that, I repeat, I’m not original. I’ve stopped half-way: nature should either have allowed me a great deal more ambition or have given me none at all. But in the first stages things really got very steep for me; at the same time, my journey abroad had finally exhausted my means and I had no desire to marry a merchant’s daughter with a body already as flabby as jelly, even though young. So I retreated to my place in the country. I suppose,’ my neighbour added, again glancing at me sideways, ‘I can pass over in silence the first impressions of country life, all references to the beauties of nature, the quiet charm of a life of solitude and so on…’
‘You can, you can,’ I responded.
‘So much the better,’ the speaker continued, ‘since it’s all nonsense, at least so far as I’m concerned. I was as bored in the country as a puppy put under lock and key, although, I admit, as I returned for the first time in springtime past a birch grove that was familiar to me my head was dizzy and my heart beat fast in vague, delightful anticipation. But such vague expectations, as you yourself know, never come to anything; on the contrary, the things that actually happen are always those one had somehow never expected: epidemics among the cattle, arrears of rent, public auctions and so on, and so forth. Making out from day to day with the help of my bailiff Yakov, who had taken the place of the former manager and turned out subsequently to be just as much of a pilferer, if not a greater one, and who, to top it all, poisoned my existence with the smell of his tarred boots. I recalled one day a neighbouring family of my acquaintance consisting of a retired colonel’s widow and two daughters, ordered my carriage to be harnessed and went to visit them. That day must always remain fixed in my memory: six months later I was married to the widow’s younger daughter!’
The speaker let his head drop and raised his arms high in the air.
‘Not that,’ he continued heatedly, ‘I’d want to give you a poor impression of my late lamented spouse! God forbid! She was the noblest of creatures, the kindest, most loving person and capable of any kind of sacrifice, although I must, between ourselves, admit that, if I had not had the misfortune to lose her, I would probably not be in a position to talk to you today, because in my earth-floor barn you will find to this day in good shape the beam on which I had more than once intended to hang myself!’
‘Some pears,’ he began after a short silence, ‘need to lie a while covered with earth in a cellar to enable them, as they say, to acquire their true taste; my late wife, apparently, belonged to such types of natural produce. It is only now that I can do her full justice. It is only now, for instance, that the memory of certain evenings spent in her company before our marriage not only does not arouse in me the least bitterness but, to the contrary, touches me almost to the point of tears. They were not rich people; their house, very ancient, of wooden construction, but comfortable, stood on a hill between a garden buried under weeds and an overgrown courtyard. At the foot of the hill ran a river and it was scarcely visible through the thick foliage. A large terrace led from the house into the garden, and in front of the terrace there arrayed itself in all its splendour a lengthy flower-bed covered with roses; at the end of the flower-bed grew two acacias which had been twined as young bushes into a screw shape by the late owner of the property. A little farther away, in the very depths of a neglected and wild raspberry patch, stood a summer-house, decorated with exceeding cleverness inside, but so ancient and dilapidated on the outside that it gave one the shivers to look at. From the terrace a glass door led into the drawing-room; while inside the drawing-room the following items met the curious gaze of the onlooker: tiled stoves in the corners, a flat-sounding piano on the right-hand side piled with sheets of handwritten music, a divan upholstered in a faded, pale-blue material with broad whitish patterns, a round table, two cabinets containing china and bead trinkets of the time of Catherine the Great, on the wall hung a well-known portrait of a fair-haired girl with a dove on her breast and upraised eyes, on the table stood a vase with fresh roses… Note in what detail I describe it all. In that drawing-room and on that terrace was enacted the entire tragic comedy of my love.
‘The widow herself was a dreadful woman, with the continuous rasp of malice in her throat, a bu
rdensome and cantankerous creature; of her daughters one of them – Vera – was in no way distinguishable from the ordinary run of provincial young ladies, the other was Sofia and it was with Sofia that I fell in love. Both sisters had another little room, their common bedroom, which contained two innocent little wooden beds, some yellow little albums, some mignonette, some portraits of friends of both sexes, drawn rather poorly in pencil (among them there stood out one gentleman with an unusually energetic expression on his face who had adorned his portrait with a still more energetic signature and had aroused in his youth unusual expectations, but had ended like all of us by doing nothing), busts of Goethe and Schiller, some German books, some withered garlands and other objects preserved for sentimental reasons. But I entered that room on few occasions and then unwillingly: somehow or other it made me gasp for breath. Besides, strange though it may be, Sofia pleased me most when I was sitting with my back to her or again, if you will, when I was thinking or, more likely, dreaming about her, particularly in the evening, out on the terrace. I would gaze then at the sunset, the trees, the tiny green leaves which, though already darkened, were still sharply outlined against the rosy sky; in the drawing-room Sofia would be seated at the piano endlessly playing over some favourite, exceedingly meditative phrase from Beethoven; the wicked old woman would be peacefully snoring on the divan; in the dining-room, illuminated by a flood of crimson light, Vera would be fussing over the tea; the samovar would be hissing fancifully to itself, as if enjoying some secret joke; pretzels would break with a happy crackling, spoons would strike resonantly against teacups; the canary, mercilessly chirping away all day long, would suddenly grow quiet and chirrup only now and then as if asking a question about something; one or two drops of rain would fall from a translucent, light cloud as it passed by… But I would sit and sit, listening and listening and watching, and my heart would fill with emotion, and it would again seem to me that I was in love. So, under the influence of just such an evening I asked the old woman for her daughter’s hand and about two months later I was married.
‘I suppose that I was in love with her. Even though by now I should know, yet – my God! – I don’t know even now whether I loved Sofia or not. She was a kind creature, intelligent, quiet, with a warm heart; but God knows why, whether from having lived such a long time in the country or from some other cause, she secreted at the bottom of her soul (if the soul may be said to have a bottom) a wound or, better, a festering hurt which it was impossible to cure and which neither she nor I was able to give a name to. Naturally, I did not perceive the existence of this trauma until after our marriage. What I didn’t do to help her, but nothing was any good! In my boyhood I had a little finch which the cat once got her claws into; we rescued it, nursed it, but my wretched finch didn’t get right again; it began to droop and ail and stopped singing. The matter ended one night when a rat got into its open cage and bit off its beak, as a result of which it finally decided to die. I don’t know what cat had got its claws into my wife, but she also started to droop and ail like my luckless finch. Sometimes she herself obviously wanted to flutter her wings and frolic in the fresh air, in sunlight and freedom; she’d try it and then curl up into a ball again. Yet she certainly loved me: she assured me time and again that she had nothing more to wish for – oh, the devil take it! – and yet there she was with her eyes already fading. Is there something in her past? I wondered. I sought around for information, but there was nothing to be found. Well, then, judge for yourself: an original fellow would have given a shrug of the shoulders, perhaps, sighed once or twice and then settled down to live his life in his own way; but I, unoriginal creature that I am, began looking for suitable beams. My wife had become so profoundly imbued with all the habits of an old maid – Beethoven, nightly strolls, mignonette, writing letters to friends, keeping albums and so on – that she was quite incapable of accustoming herself to any other form of life, particularly to the life of a lady of the house; and yet it’s ridiculous for a married woman to languish from some nameless heartbreak and spend her evenings singing: “Awaken her not till dawn has broken.”7
‘However, sir, in such a manner we passed a blissful three years. In the fourth year Sofia died in childbirth and – strange though it may be – I literally had a premonition that she would be in no condition to present me with a son or daughter and the earth with a new inhabitant. I remember her funeral. It happened in the spring. Our parish church is not large and it is ancient, with a blackened icon screen, bare walls and a brick floor with holes in it; each choir stall has a large antiquated icon. They brought in the coffin, set it down in the very middle of the church before the holy doors, draped it with a faded cloth and placed three candlesticks round it. The service began. A frail sexton, with a little plaited knot of hair on the nape of his neck, wearing a green girdle tied low down, made sad mumblings before the lectern; the priest, also elderly, with a small, kindly, purblind face, in a mauve cassock with yellowing patterning, officiated both for himself and for the sexton. The entire area of open windows was filled with the shimmerings and rustlings of the young, fresh leaves of weeping birches; a smell of grass wafted in from the graveyard; the red flames of the wax candles paled in the gay sunlight of the spring day; sparrows chirruped throughout the whole church and occasionally the noisy twitterings of a swallow that had flown in resounded beneath the cupola. In the golden dust of the sun’s rays the auburn heads of the sparse peasant congregation rose and fell in quick obeisances as they uttered earnest prayers for the soul of the departed; incense rose from the opening in the censer in a delicate, pale-blue stream. I looked at the dead face of my wife. My God! Even death, death itself, had not freed her, not healed her wound: her face wore the same sickly, timid, dumb look, as if she literally felt awkward lying in her coffin. My blood stirred bitterly within me. Kind, kind being that you were, but you still did well for yourself in dying!’
The speaker’s cheeks reddened and his eyes lost their brightness.
‘Having rid myself finally,’ he started to say again, ‘of the weight of despondency which settled on me after my wife’s death, I thought I ought to get down to work, as they say. I entered the service in the provincial centre, but the large rooms of the government building made my head ache and also had a bad effect on my eyes; other convenient reasons also came along… So I retired. I had wanted to go to Moscow, but, in the first place, I hadn’t enough money, and in the second place… I have already mentioned to you that I had become reconciled. Such reconciliation came to me both suddenly and gradually. In spirit, so to say, I had long ago become reconciled, yet my head was still unwilling to bow down. I used to ascribe the humble mood of my feelings and thoughts to the influence of country life and my misfortune. On the other hand, I had long ago noticed that almost all my neighbours, both old and young, who were cowed to begin with by my show of learning, foreign travel and other perquisites of my education, not only succeeded in becoming quite used to me but even began to treat me not so much rudely as off-handedly, not bothering to hear my discourses through to the end and failing to address me in a proper manner when speaking to me. I also forgot to tell you that during the first year of my marriage I attempted out of boredom to turn my hand to writing and even sent a small piece – a short work of fiction, if I’m not wrong – to a journal; but after a certain lapse of time I received from the editor a polite letter, in which mention was made, among other things, of the fact that it was impossible to deny me intellect but it was possible to deny me talent, and talent was the one thing needed in literature. Over and above this, it came to my knowledge that a certain Moscovite who was passing through the province – the kindliest young man imaginable, by the way – had made a passing reference to me at a Governor’s soirée as a person of no consequence who had exhausted his talents. But I still persisted in maintaining my partially voluntary blindness; I didn’t feel, you know, like pulling down my ear-flaps. Eventually, one fine morning, I had my eyes opened.
‘This is ho
w it happened. The local police inspector called on me with the object of directing my attention to a broken-down bridge on my property, which I definitely had no means of repairing. Tasting a tot of vodka along with a piece of cold sturgeon, this condescending pillar of the law reproached me in a fatherly way for my lack of scruple, entered none the less into my position and advised me simply to order my peasants to spread some muck by way of repairs, lit up his little pipe and started talking about the forthcoming elections. The honourable title of provincial marshal of nobility was being sought at that time by a certain Orbassanov, an empty loudmouth and, what is more, a bribe-taker. Besides, he was distinguished neither for wealth nor lineage. I expressed my opinion about him, and even rather freely: I confess that I looked down on Mr Orbassanov. The inspector looked at me, fondly tapped me on the shoulder and declared benevolently: “Now, now, Vasily Vasilych, it’s not for you and me to discuss such people, so what’s it got to do with us? Every cricket should know its own hearth.” “But kindly tell me,” I protested in annoyance, “what difference there is between me and Mr Orbassanov?” The inspector took his pipe out of his mouth, screwed up his eyes – and burst into spluttering laughter. “Well, you’re one for a joke!” he uttered eventually, through his tears. “What a thing to say, what a thing to let drop just like that! You’re a one, aren’t you?” – and right up to his departure he kept on making fun of me, from time to time nudging me with his elbow and adopting an extremely intimate form of address in talking to me. He left finally. His attitude was all I needed: the cup of my humiliation was full to overflowing. I walked several times about the room, stopped before the mirror, gazed for minutes on end at the look of confusion on my face and, slowly sticking out my tongue, shook my head in bitter derision. The scales had fallen from my eyes: I now saw clearly, more clearly even than I saw my own face in the mirror, what an empty, worthless, unnecessary, unoriginal person I was!’