Stories

  “And so?” asks Katya.

  “I’m leaving after my lecture, and on the stairs I meet that old idiot of ours, X … He’s walking along with his horse’s jaw thrust out as usual, looking for somebody to complain to about his migraine, his wife, and the students, who don’t want to attend his lectures. Well, I think, he’s seen me—that’s it, I’m lost…”

  And so on in the same vein. Or else he begins like this:

  “Yesterday I was at our Y’s public lecture. It surprises me that our alma mater—not to speak of the devil—ventures to show the public such patent oafs and dimwits as this Y. He’s a fool on a European scale! Good heavens, you wouldn’t find another like him in all of Europe, not even with a candle in broad daylight! He lectures, if you can imagine, just as if he’s sucking a candy: ssk-ssk-ssk … He gets cold feet, can’t make out his own notes, his wretched little thoughts barely move, like a monk on a bicycle, and above all there’s no way to tell what he’s trying to say. Flies die of boredom. The boredom can only be compared with what we have in our big auditorium at commencement, when the traditional speech is being read, devil take it.”

  And at once a sharp transition:

  “Some three years ago, as our Nikolai Stepanych remembers, I had to deliver that speech. Hot, stuffy, uniform tight under the arms—you could die! I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half, two hours … Well, I think, thank God, only ten pages left. And at the conclusion there were four pages I could omit altogether, so I counted on not reading them. That leaves only six, I thought. Then, imagine, I glance up and see some beribboned general and a bishop sitting next to each other in the front row. The poor souls are stiff with boredom, they roll their eyes so as not to fall asleep, and yet they still try to keep an attentive look on their faces and pretend that they like and understand my lecture. Well, I think, since you like it, you’re going to get it! For spite! And I up and read all four pages.”

  When he talks, only his eyes and eyebrows smile, as generally with people given to mockery. There is no hatred or spite in his eyes at these moments, but a good deal of sharpness and that peculiar foxy cunning that is seen only in very observant people. To go on about his eyes, I’ve noticed another peculiarity in them. When he takes a glass from Katya, or listens to some remark of hers, or follows her with his eyes when she momentarily leaves the room for some reason, I notice in his glance something meek, prayerful, pure …

  The maid removes the samovar and puts a big piece of cheese and some fruit on the table, along with a bottle of Crimean champagne, a rather bad wine that Katya came to like when she lived in the Crimea. Mikhail Fyodorovich takes two decks of cards from the shelf and lays out a game of patience. According to him, some varieties of patience call for considerable cleverness and concentration, but he still never stops entertaining himself with talk, even while he plays. Katya follows the cards attentively and helps him more with looks than with words. She drinks no more than two glasses of wine all evening, I drink a quarter of a glass; the rest of the bottle falls to Mikhail Fyodorovich, who can drink a lot and never gets drunk.

  Over patience we resolve various questions, mostly of a higher order, and what gets the most punishment from us is what we love most—that is, science.

  “Science has outlived itself, thank God,” Mikhail Fyodorovich says measuredly “Its song has been sung. Yes, sir. Mankind is already beginning to feel the need to replace it with something else. It sprang from the soil of superstition, was nourished by superstition, and is now as much the quintessence of superstition as the grandmothers it has outlived: alchemy, metaphysics, and philosophy. And what, indeed, has it given people? The difference between learned Europeans and the Chinese, who have no science themselves, is quite negligible and purely external. The Chinese don’t know science, but what have they lost because of it?”

  “Flies don’t know science either,” I say, “but what of that?”

  “You needn’t get angry, Nikolai Stepanych. I’m saying it here, among us … I’m more cautious than you think, and am not about to say it publicly, God forbid! The superstition persists among the masses that science and the arts are higher than agriculture and trade, higher than the handicrafts. Our sect feeds on that superstition, and it’s not for you or me to destroy it. God forbid!”

  Over patience the younger generation also comes in for rough treatment.

  “Our public has become paltry these days,” sighs Mikhail Fyodorovich. “I’m not even talking about ideals and all that, but they don’t even know how to work or think properly! It’s precisely: ‘In sorrow I gaze upon our generation.’”16

  “Yes, terribly paltry,” Katya agrees. “Tell me, have you had at least one outstanding student in the last five or ten years?”

  “I don’t know about other professors, but I don’t remember any among mine.”

  “I’ve seen lots of students in my time, and your young scientists, and lots of actors … And what? Never once was I deemed worthy of meeting not only a hero or a talent, but even simply an interesting human being. They’re all gray, giftless, puffed up with pretensions …”

  All these conversations about paltriness give me the feeling each time of having accidentally overheard some nasty conversation about my own daughter. It offends me that the accusations are so sweeping and built on such worn-out commonplaces, such bogeys, as paltriness, lack of ideals, or references to the beautiful past. Any accusation, even if it’s spoken in the company of ladies, must be formulated as definitely as possible, otherwise it’s not an accusation but empty maligning, unworthy of decent people.

  I’m an old man, I’ve been teaching for thirty years, but I don’t see any paltriness or lack of ideals, nor do I find it worse now than before. My porter Nikolai, whose experience in this case is valid, says that today’s students are no better or worse than before.

  If I were asked what I do not like in my present students, I would not answer at once or at length, but I would be sufficiently definite. I know their shortcomings and therefore have no need to resort to a fog of commonplaces. I do not like it that they smoke, use alcoholic beverages, and marry late; that they are careless and often indifferent to such a degree that they suffer people to go hungry in their midst and do not pay into the student aid society. They don’t know modern languages and speak Russian incorrectly; just yesterday a colleague of mine, a hygienist, complained to me that he had to lecture twice as long, because they have a poor knowledge of physics and are totally unacquainted with meteorology. They willingly submit to the influence of modern writers, and not even the best of them, but are completely indifferent to such classics as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability to distinguish great from small betrays most of all their everyday impracticality All difficult questions of a more or less social character (resettlement, for instance) they solve by subscriptions, and not by means of scientific research and experiment, though the latter are entirely at their disposal and best correspond to their purposes. They willingly become orderlies, assistants, laboratory technicians, adjuncts, and are ready to occupy those positions till the age of forty, though independence, a sense of freedom, and personal initiative are no less necessary in science than, for instance, in art or in trade. I have students and auditors, but no helpers or heirs, and therefore, though I feel love and tenderness for them, I am not proud of them. And so on and so forth.

  Such shortcomings, numerous though they are, can produce a pessimistic or abusive spirit only in a fainthearted and timid man. They all have an accidental, transient character and are totally dependent on life’s circumstances; some ten years are enough for them to disappear or yield their place to new and different shortcomings, which it is impossible to do without and which, in their turn, will frighten the fainthearted. I’m often vexed by my students’ sins, but this vexation is nothing compared with the joy I’ve experienced for thirty years, when I talk with my students, lecture to them, study their relations, and compare them with people in other ci
rcles.

  Mikhail Fyodorovich maligns, Katya listens, and neither notices what a deep abyss this apparently innocent amusement of judging their neighbors draws them into. They don’t feel how their simple conversation gradually turns into jeering and scoffing, and how they both even start using slanderous methods.

  “Some specimens are killingly funny,” says Mikhail Fyodorovich. “Yesterday I come to our Yegor Petrovich and find a studiosus, one of your medics, in his third year, I think. A face in the … the Dobrolyubov17 style, the stamp of profundity on his brow. We get to talking. ‘Thus and so, young man,’ I say. ‘I read that some German—I forget his name—has obtained a new alkaloid, idiotine, from the human brain.’ And what do you think? He believed me and his face even showed respect: That’s our boys for you! Then the other day I come to the theater. I sit down. In the row just in front of me these two are sitting: one of ‘our boyth,’ apparently doing law, the other all disheveled—a medic. The medic is drunk as a cobbler. Pays zero attention to the stage. Keeps dozing and nodding his head. But as soon as some actor starts loudly reciting a monologue or simply raises his voice, my medic gives a start, nudges his neighbor in the side, and asks: ‘What’s he saying? Something no-o-oble?’ ‘Something noble,’ answers the one from our boyth. ‘Brrravo!’ bawls the medic. ‘Something no-o-oble! Bravo!’ You see, the drunken blockhead has come to the theater not for art but for nobility. He’s after nobility.”

  And Katya listens and laughs. Her laughter is somehow strange: her inhalations alternate quickly and in regular rhythm with her exhalations, as if she were playing the harmonica, and yet all that laughs on her face are her nostrils. I’m dispirited and don’t know what to say. Beside myself, I explode, jump up from my place and shout:

  “Be quiet, finally! What are you doing sitting here like two toads poisoning the air with your breath? Enough!”

  And without waiting for them to finish their maligning, I prepare to go home. And it’s high time: past ten o’clock.

  “I’ll stay a little longer,” says Mikhail Fyodorovich. “May I, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?”

  “You may,” Katya answers.

  “Bene. In that case tell them to serve another little bottle.”

  The two of them see me off to the front door with candles, and while I’m putting my coat on, Mikhail Fyodorovich says:

  “You’ve grown terribly thin and old recently, Nikolai Stepanych. What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

  “Yes, I’m a bit ill.”

  “And he won’t be treated …” Katya puts in glumly.

  “Why won’t you be treated? My dear man, the Lord helps those who help themselves. Regards to your family and my apologies for not visiting them. One of these days, before I go abroad, I’ll stop and say good-bye. Without fail! I leave next week.”

  I go out of Katya’s annoyed, frightened by the talk of my illness, and displeased with myself. I ask myself: should I not, indeed, consult one of my colleagues? And I immediately imagine how my colleague, having auscultated me, goes silently to the window, ponders, then turns to me, and, trying to keep me from reading the truth on his face, says in an indifferent tone: “So far I see nothing special, but all the same, collega, I’d advise you to stop working …” And that will deprive me of my last hope.

  Who doesn’t have hopes? Now, diagnosing myself and treating myself, there are moments when I hope that my own ignorance is deceiving me, that I’m also mistaken about the protein and sugar I find in myself, and about my heart, and about the swelling I’ve noticed twice now in the morning; re-reading the manuals on therapy with the zeal of a hypochondriac and changing my medications daily, I keep thinking I’ll hit on something comforting. It’s all paltry

  Whether the sky is covered with clouds, or the moon and stars are shining in it, each time I return home, I look up at it and think that death will soon take me. One would think that at such moments my thoughts should be deep as the sky, bright, striking … But no! I think about myself, my wife, Liza, Gnekker, my students, people in general; my thoughts are bad, paltry, I’m tricking myself, and in those moments my worldview can be expressed in the words which the famous Arakcheev18 said in one of his private letters: “Nothing good in the world can be without bad, and there is always more bad than good.” That is, everything is muck, there is nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years I’ve lived should be considered a waste. I catch myself in these thoughts and try to convince myself that they are accidental, temporary, and not lodged deeply in me, but at once I think:

  “If so, then what is it that draws you to those two toads every evening?”

  And I swear to myself that I will not go to Katya’s anymore, though I know I’ll go to her again tomorrow.

  Ringing my doorbell and then going up the stairs, I feel that I no longer have a family and have no wish to return to it. Clearly, the new Arakcheevian thoughts are not lodged in me accidentally or temporarily, but govern my whole being. With a sick conscience, dejected, indolent, barely moving my limbs, as if a thousand pounds had been added to my weight, I lie down in bed and soon fall asleep.

  And then—insomnia …

  IV

  Summer comes, and life changes.

  One fine morning Liza enters my room and says in a joking tone:

  “Let’s go, Your Excellency. Everything’s ready.”

  My Excellency is taken outside, put into a carriage, and driven somewhere. I ride along and, having nothing better to do, read the signboards from right to left. The word “pothouse” comes out “esuohtop.” That would suit an ancient Egyptian: the pharaoh Esuohtop. I go on over a field past the cemetery, which makes precisely no impression on me at all, though I’ll soon be lying in it; then I go through a woods and another field. Nothing interesting. After a two-hour drive, My Excellency is led into the bottom floor of a summer house and installed in a very cheerful little room with light blue wallpaper.

  At night there’s the usual insomnia, but in the morning I’m not awake and listening to my wife, but lying in bed. I don’t sleep, but experience that drowsy, half-oblivious state when you know you’re not asleep, and yet have dreams. At noon I get up and, out of habit, sit at my desk, but I don’t work now, I entertain myself with the French books in yellow covers that Katya sends me. Of course, it would be more patriotic to read Russian authors, but I confess I’m not especially in favor of them. Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products. Even the best products of handicraft cannot be called remarkable and cannot be praised without a “but.” The same can be said of all the literary novelties I’ve read over the last ten or fifteen years: not one is remarkable, and there’s no avoiding a “but.” Intelligent, noble, but not talented; talented, noble, but not intelligent; or, finally, talented, intelligent, but not noble.

  I’m not saying that French books are talented, and intelligent, and noble. They don’t satisfy me either. But they’re less boring than the Russian ones, and not seldom one finds in them the main element of creative work—a sense of personal freedom, which Russian authors don’t have. I can’t remember a single new book in which the author doesn’t do his best, from the very first page, to entangle himself in all possible conventions and private deals with his conscience. One is afraid to speak of the naked body, another is bound hand and foot by psychological analysis, a third must have “a warm attitude towards humanity,” a fourth purposely wallows for whole pages in descriptions of nature, lest he be suspected of tendentiousness … One insists on being a bourgeois in his work, another an aristocrat, etc. Contrivance, caution, keeping one’s own counsel, but no freedom nor courage to write as one wishes, and therefore no creativity.

  All this refers to so-called belles-lettres.

  As for serious Russian articles, for instance on sociology, art, and so on, I avoid reading them out of sheer timidity. In my childhood and youth I was for some reas
on afraid of doormen and theater ushers, and that fear has stayed with me. I’m afraid of them even now. They say we fear only what we don’t understand. And, indeed, it’s very hard to understand why doormen and ushers are so important, so arrogant, and so majestically impolite. When I read serious articles I feel exactly the same vague fear. The extraordinary importance, the facetiously pontifical tone, the familiar treatment of foreign authors, the knack of augustly pouring from empty into void—I find it all incomprehensible, frightening, and nothing like the modesty and gentlemanly calm tone I’m accustomed to in reading what doctors and natural scientists write. Not only articles, it’s even painful for me to read the translations done or edited by serious Russian people. The conceited, benevolent tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator’s notes, which disturb my concentration, the parenthetical question marks and sic’s that the translator generously scatters through the article or book, are for me like an encroachment both upon the person of the author and upon my independence as a reader.

  I was once invited to the circuit court as an expert; during a break, one of my fellow experts drew my attention to the prosecutor’s rude treatment of the defendants, among whom were two women of the intelligentsia. I don’t think I was exaggerating in the least when I answered my colleague that this treatment was no more rude than that displayed towards each other by the authors of serious articles. Indeed, it is such rude treatment that one cannot speak of it without pain. Either they treat each other and the authors they criticize with excessive deference, forgetting all dignity, or the reverse, they handle them with greater boldness than I use in these notes, and in my thoughts, towards my future son-in-law Gnekker. Accusations of irresponsibility, of impure intentions, and of all sorts of criminality are the usual adornments of serious articles. And that, as young doctors like to put it in their articles, is the ultima ratio !19 Such relations cannot fail to be reflected in the morals of the younger generation of writers, and therefore I’m not surprised in the least that in the new books our literature has acquired over the last ten or fifteen years, the heroes drink gallons of vodka and the heroines are insufficiently chaste.