* * * * *
It usually takes as much time to feel happy as to wind up one's watch.
* * * * *
A dirty tavern near the station. And in every tavern like that you
will find salted white sturgeon with horse radish. What a lot of
sturgeon must be salted in Russia!
* * * * *
Z. goes on Sundays to the Sukharevka (a market-place in Moscow) to
look for books; he finds a book, written by his father, with the
inscription: "To darling Nadya from the author."
* * * * *
A Government official wears on his chest the portrait of the
Governor's wife; he feeds a turkey on nuts and makes her a present of
it.
* * * * *
One should be mentally clear, morally pure, and physically tidy.
* * * * *
It was said of a certain lady that she had a cat's factory; her lover
tortured the cats by treading on their tails.
* * * * *
An officer and his wife went to the baths together, and both were
bathed by the orderly, whom they evidently did not consider a man.
* * * * *
"And now he appeared with all his decorations."
"And what decorations has he got?"
"He has a bronze medal for the census of 1897."
* * * * *
A government clerk gave his son a thrashing because he had only
obtained five marks in all his subjects at school. It seemed to him
not good enough. When he was told that he was in the wrong, that five
is the highest mark obtainable, he thrashed his son again--out of
vexation with himself.
* * * * *
A very good man has such a face that people take him for a detective;
he is suspected of having stolen shirt-studs.
* * * * *
A serious phlegmatic doctor fell in love with a girl who danced very
well, and, to please her, he started to learn a mazurka.
* * * * *
The hen sparrow believes that her cock sparrow is not chirping but
singing beautifully.
* * * * *
When one is peacefully at home, life seems ordinary, but as soon as
one walks into the street and begins to observe, to question women,
for instance, then life becomes terrible. The neighborhood of
Patriarshi Prudy (a park and street in Moscow) looks quiet and
peaceful, but in reality life there is hell.
* * * * *
These red-faced young and old women are so healthy that steam seems to
exhale from them.
* * * * *
The estate will soon be brought under the hammer; there is poverty all
round; and the footmen are still dressed like jesters.
* * * * *
There has been an increase not in the number of nervous diseases and
nervous patients, but in the number of doctors able to study those
diseases.
* * * * *
The more refined the more unhappy.
* * * * *
Life does not agree with philosophy: there is no happiness which is
not idleness and only the useless is pleasurable.
* * * * *
The grandfather is given fish to eat, and if it does not poison him
and he remains alive, then all the family eat it.
* * * * *
A correspondence. A young man dreams of devoting himself to literature
and constantly writes to his father about it; at last he gives up
the civil service, goes to Petersburg, and devotes himself to
literature--he becomes a censor.
* * * * *
First class sleeping car. Passengers numbers 6, 7, 8 and 9. They
discuss daughters-in-law. Simple people suffer from mothers-in-law,
intellectuals from daughters-in-law.
"My elder son's wife is educated, arranges Sunday schools and
libraries, but she is tactless, cruel, capricious, and physically
revolting. At dinner she will suddenly go off into sham hysterics
because of some article in the newspaper. An affected thing." Another
daughter-in-law: "In society she behaves passably, but at home she
is a dolt, smokes, is miserly, and when she drinks tea, she keeps the
sugar between her lips and teeth and speaks at the same time."
* * * * *
Miss Mieschankina.
* * * * *
In the servants' quarters Roman, a more or less dissolute peasant,
thinks it his duty to look after the morals of the women servants.
* * * * *
A large fat barmaid--a cross between a pig and white sturgeon.
* * * * *
At Malo-Bronnaya (a street in Moscow). A little girl who has never
been in the country feels it and raves about it, speaks about
jackdaws, crows and colts, imagining parks and birds on trees.
* * * * *
Two young officers in stays.
* * * * *
A certain captain taught his daughter the art of fortification.
* * * * *
New literary forms always produce new forms of life and that is why
they are so revolting to the conservative human mind.
* * * * *
A neurasthenic undergraduate comes home to a lonely country-house,
reads French monologues, and finds them stupid.
* * * * *
People love talking of their diseases, although they are the most
uninteresting things in their lives.
* * * * *
An official, who wore the portrait of the Governor's wife, lent money
on interest; he secretly becomes rich. The late Governor's wife, whose
portrait he has worn for fourteen years, now lives in a suburb, a poor
widow; her son gets into trouble and she needs 4,000 roubles. She goes
to the official, and he listens to her with a bored look and says: "I
can't do anything for you, my lady."
* * * * *
Women deprived of the company of men pine, men deprived of the company
of women become stupid.
* * * * *
A sick innkeeper said to the doctor: "If I get ill, then for the love
of God come without waiting for a summons. My sister will never
call you in, whatever happens; she is a miser, and your fee is three
roubles a visit." A month or two later the doctor heard that the
innkeeper was seriously ill, and while he was making his preparations
to go and see him, he received a letter from the sister saying: "My
brother is dead." Five days later the doctor happened to go to the
village and was told there that the innkeeper had died that morning.
Disgusted he went to the inn. The sister dressed in black stood in the
corner reading a psalm book. The doctor began to upbraid her for her
stinginess and cruelty. The sister went on reading the psalms, but
between every two sentences she stopped to quarrel with him--"Lots
of your like running about here.... The devils brought you here." She
belongs to the old faith, hates passionately and swears desperately.
* * * * *
The new governor made a speech to his clerks. He called the merchants
together--another speech. At the annual prize-giving of the
secondary school for girls--a speech on true enlightenment. To the
representatives of the press a speech. He called the Jews together:
"Jews, I have summoned you." ... A month or two passes--he does
nothing. Again he calls the merchants together--a speech. Again the
Jews: "Jews, I have summoned you."... He has wearied them all. At last
he says to his Chancellor: "No, the work is too much for me, I shall
have to resign."
* * * * *
A student at a village theological school was learning Latin by heart.
Every half-hour he runs down to the maids' room and, closing his eyes,
feels and pinches them; they scream and giggle; he returns to his book
again. He calls it "refreshing oneself."
* * * * *
The Governor's wife invited an official, who had a thin voice and
was her adorer, to have a cup of chocolate with her, and for a week
afterwards he was in bliss. He had saved money and lent it but not on
interest. "I can't lend you any, your son-in-law would gamble it away.
No, I can't." The son-in-law is the husband of the daughter who once
sat in a box in a boa; he lost at cards and embezzled Government
money. The official, who was accustomed to herring and vodka, and who
had never before drunk chocolate, felt sick after the chocolate. The
expression on the lady's face: "Aren't I a darling?"; she spent any
amount of money on dresses and looked forward to making a display of
them--so she gave parties.
* * * * *
Going to Paris with one's wife is like going to Tula[1] with one's
samovar.
[Footnote 1: Tula is a Russian city where samovars are manufactured.]
* * * * *
The young do not go in for literature, because the best of them work
on steam engines, in factories, in industrial undertakings. All of
them have now gone into industry, and industry is making enormous
progress.
* * * * *
Families where the woman is bourgeoise easily breed adventurers,
swindlers, and brutes without ideals.
* * * * *
A professor's opinion: not Shakespeare, but the commentaries on him
are the thing.
* * * * *
Let the coming generation attain happiness; but they surely ought to
ask themselves, for what did their ancestors live and for what did
they suffer.
* * * * *
Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred
for something.
* * * * *
13th December. I saw the owner of a mill, the mother of a family, a
rich Russian woman, who has never seen a lilac bush in Russia.
* * * * *
In a letter: "A Russian abroad, if not a spy, is a fool." The neighbor
goes to Florence to cure himself of love, but at a distance his love
grows stronger.
* * * * *
Yalta. A young man, interesting, liked by a lady of forty. He is
indifferent to her, avoids her. She suffers and at last, out of spite,
gets up a scandal about him.
* * * * *
Pete's mother even in her old age beaded her eyes.
* * * * *
Viciousness is a bag with which man is born.
* * * * *
B. said seriously that he is the Russian Maupassant. And so did S.
* * * * *
A Jewish surname: Cap.
* * * * *
A lady looking like a fish standing on its head; her mouth like a
slit, one longs to put a penny in it.
* * * * *
Russians abroad: the men love Russia passionately, but the women don't
like her and soon forget her.
* * * * *
Chemist Propter.
* * * * *
Rosalie Ossipovna Aromat.
* * * * *
It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
* * * * *
And she began to engage in prostitution, got used to sleeping on the
bed, while her aunt, fallen into poverty, used to lie on the little
carpet by her side and jumped up each time the bell rang; when they
left, she would say mindingly, with a pathetic grimace; "Something for
the chamber-maid." And they would tip her sixpence.
* * * * *
Prostitutes in Monte Carlo, the whole tone is prostitutional; the palm
trees, it seems, are prostitutes, and the chickens are prostitutes.
* * * * *
A big dolt, Z., a qualified nurse, of the Petersburg Rozhdestvensky
School, having ideals, fell in love with X., a teacher, and believed
him to be ideal, a public spirited worker after the manner of novels
and stories of which she was so fond. Little by little she found
him out, a drunkard, an idler, good-natured and not very clever.
Dismissed, he began to live on his wife, sponged on her. He was an
excrescence, a kind of sarcoma, who wasted her completely. She was
once engaged to attend some intellectual country people, she went to
them every day; they felt it awkward to give her money--and, to her
great vexation, gave her husband a suit as a present. He would drink
tea for hours and this infuriated her. Living with her husband she
grew thin, ugly, spiteful, stamped her foot and shouted at him: "Leave
me, you low fellow." She hated him. She worked, and people paid the
money to him, for, being a Zemstvo worker, she took no money, and it
enraged her that their friends did not understand him and thought him
ideal.
* * * * *
A young man made a million marks, lay down on them, and shot himself.
* * * * *
"That woman." ... "I married when I was twenty; I have not drunk a
glass of vodka all my life, haven't smoked a single cigarette." After
he had run off with another woman, people got to like him more and
to believe him more, and, when he walked in the street, he began to
notice that they had all become kinder and nicer to him--because he
had fallen.
* * * * *
A man and woman marry because both of them don't know what to do with
themselves.
* * * * *
The power and salvation of a people lie in its intellegentsia, in the
intellectuals who think honestly, feel, and can work.
* * * * *
A man without a mustache is like a woman with a mustache.
* * * * *
A man who cannot win a woman by a kiss will not win her by a blow.
* * * * *
For one sensible person there are a thousand fools, and for one
sensible word there are a thousand stupid ones; the thousand
overwhelms the one, and that is why cities and villages progress so
slowly. The majority, the mass, always remain stupid; it will always
overwhelm; the sensible man should give up hope of educating and
lifting it up to himself; he had better call in the assistance of
material force, build railways, telegraphs, telephones--in that way he
will conquer and help life forward.
* * * * *
Really decent people are only to be found amongst men who have
definite, either conservative or radical, convictions; so-called
moderate men are much inclined to rewards, commissions, orders,
promotions.
* * * * *
"What did your uncle die of?"
"Instead of fifteen Botkin drops,[1] as the doctor prescribed, he took
sixteen."
[Footnote 1: A very harmless purgative.]
* * * * *
A young philologist, who has just left the University, comes home to
his native town. He is elected churchwarden. He does not believe in
God, but goes to church regularly, makes the sign of the cross when
passing near a church or chapel, thinking that that sort of thing is
necessary for the people and that the salvation of Russia is bound up
with it. He is elected chairman of the Zemstvo board and a Justice of
the Peace, he wins orders and medals; he does not notice that he has
reached the age of forty-five; then suddenly he realizes that all the
time he has been acting and making a fool of himself, but it is now
too late to change his way of life. Once in his sleep he suddenly
hears like the report of a gun the words: "What are you doing?"--and
he starts up all in a sweat.
* * * * *
One cannot resist evil, but one can resist good.
* * * * *
He flatters the authorities like a priest.
* * * * *
Instead of sheets--dirty tablecloths.
* * * * *
A Jewish surname: Perchik (little pepper).
* * * * *