(FROM AN OLD MAN’S JOURNAL)
I
There lives in Russia an emeritus professor, Nicolai Stiepanovich ...
privy councillor and knight. He has so many Russian and foreign Orders
that when he puts them on the students call him “the holy picture.”
His acquaintance is most distinguished. Not a single famous scholar
lived or died during the last twenty-five or thirty years but he was
intimately acquainted with him. Now he has no one to be friendly with,
but speaking of the past the long list of his eminent friends would
end with such names as Pirogov, Kavelin, and the poet Nekrasov, who
bestowed upon him their warmest and most sincere friendship. He is a
member of all the Russian and of three foreign universities, et cetera,
et cetera. All this, and a great deal besides, forms what is known as
my name.
This name of mine is very popular. It is known to every literate person
in Russia; abroad it is mentioned from professorial chairs with the
epithets “eminent and esteemed.” It is reckoned among those fortunate
names which to mention in vain or to abuse in public or in the Press
is considered a mark of bad breeding. Indeed, it should be so; because
with my name is inseparably associated the idea of a famous, richly
gifted, and indubitably useful person. I am a steady worker, with
the endurance of a camel, which is important. I am also endowed with
talent, which is still more important. In passing, I would add that
I am a well-educated, modest, and honest fellow. I have never poked
my nose into letters or politics, never sought popularity in disputes
with the ignorant, and made no speeches either at dinners or at my
colleagues’ funerals. Altogether there is not a single spot on my
learned name, and it has nothing to complain of. It is fortunate.
The bearer of this name, that is myself, is a man of sixty-two, with a
bald head, false teeth and an incurable tic. My name is as brilliant
and prepossessing, as I, myself am dull and ugly. My head and hands
tremble from weakness; my neck, like that of one of Turgeniev’s
heroines, resembles the handle of a counter-bass; my chest is hollow
and my back narrow. When I speak or read my mouth twists, and when I
smile my whole face is covered with senile, deathly wrinkles. There is
nothing imposing in my pitiable face, save that when I suffer from the
tic, I have a singular expression which compels anyone who looks at me
to think: “This man will die soon, for sure.”
I can still read pretty well; I can still hold the attention of my
audience for two hours. My passionate manner, the literary form of
my exposition and my humour make the defects of my voice almost
unnoticeable, though it is dry, harsh, and hard like a hypocrite’s.
But I write badly. The part of my brain which governs the ability to
write refused office. My memory has weakened, and my thoughts are
too inconsequent; and when I expound them on paper, I always have a
feeling that I have lost the sense of their organic connection. The
construction is monotonous, and the sentence feeble and timid. I
often do not write what I want to, and when I write the end I cannot
remember the beginning. I often forget common words, and in writing a
letter I always have to waste much energy in order to avoid superfluous
sentences and unnecessary incidental statements; both bear clear
witness of the decay of my intellectual activity. And it is remarkable
that, the simpler the letter, the more tormenting is my effort. When
writing a scientific article I fed much freer and much more intelligent
than in writing a letter of welcome or a report. One thing more: it is
easier for me to write German or English than Russian.
As regards my present life, I must first of all note insomnia, from
which I have begun to suffer lately. If I were asked: “What is now
the chief and fundamental fact of your existence?” I would answer:
“Insomnia.” From habit, I still undress at midnight precisely and get
into bed. I soon fall asleep but wake just after one with the feeling
that I have not slept at all. I must get out of bed and light the
lamp. For an hour or two I walk about the room from corner to corner
and inspect the long familiar pictures. When I am weary of walking I
sit down to the table. I sit motionless thinking of nothing, feeling
no desires; if a book lies before me I draw it mechanically towards me
and read without interest. Thus lately in one night I read mechanically
a whole novel with a strange title, “Of What the Swallow Sang.” Or in
order to occupy my attention I make myself count to a thousand, or I
imagine the face of some one of my friends, and begin to remember in
what year and under what circumstances he joined the faculty. I love
to listen to sounds. Now, two rooms away from me my daughter Liza will
say something quickly, in her sleep; then my wife will walk through the
drawing-room with a candle and infallibly drop the box of matches. Then
the shrinking wood of the cupboard squeaks or the burner of the lamp
tinkles suddenly, and all these sounds somehow agitate me.
Not to sleep of nights confesses one abnormal; and therefore I wait
impatiently for the morning and the day, when I have the right not
to sleep. Many oppressive hours pass before the cock crows. He is my
harbinger of good. As soon as he has crowed I know that in an hour’s
time the porter downstairs will awake and for some reason or other go
up the stairs, coughing angrily; and later beyond the windows the air
begins to pale gradually and voices echo in the street.
The day begins with the coming of my wife. She comes in to me in a
petticoat, with her hair undone, but already washed and smelling of eau
de Cologne, and looking as though she came in by accident, saying the
same thing every time: “Pardon, I came in for a moment. You haven’t
slept again?” Then she puts the lamp out, sits by the table and begins
to talk. I am not a prophet but I know beforehand what the subject of
conversation will be, every morning the same. Usually, after breathless
inquiries after my health, she suddenly remembers our son, the officer,
who is serving in Warsaw. On the twentieth of each month we send him
fifty roubles. This is our chief subject of conversation.
“Of course it is hard on us,” my wife sighs. “But until he is finally
settled we are obliged to help him. The boy is among strangers; the
pay is small. But if you like, next month we’ll send him forty roubles
instead of fifty. What do you think?”
Daily experience might have convinced my wife that expenses do
not grow less by talking of them. But my wife does not acknowledge
experience and speaks about our officer punctually every day, about
bread, thank Heaven, being cheaper and sugar a half-penny dearer--and
all this in a tone as though it were news to me.
I listen and agree mechanically. Probably because I have not slept
during the night strange idle thoughts take hold of me. I look at my
wife and wonder like a child. In perplexity I ask myself: This old,
stout, clumsy woman, with sordid cares and anxiety about bread and
butter written in the dull expression of her face, her eyes tired with
eternal thoughts of debts and poverty, who can talk only of expenses
and smile only when things are cheap--was this once the slim Varya
whom I loved passionately for her fine clear mind, her pure soul, her
beauty, and as Othello loved Desdemona, for her “compassion” of my
science? Is she really the same, my wife Varya, who bore me a son?
I gaze intently into the fat, clumsy old woman’s face. I seek in her
my Varya; but from the past nothing remains but her fear for my health
and her way of calling my salary “our” salary and my hat “our” hat. It
pains me to look at her, and to console her, if only a little, I let
her talk as she pleases, and I am silent even when she judges people
unjustly, or scolds me because I do not practise and do not publish
text-books.
Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife suddenly
remembers that I have not yet had tea, and gives a start:
“Why am I sitting down?” she says, getting up. “The samovar has been on
the table a long while, and I sit chatting. How forgetful I am? Good
gracious!”
She hurries away, but stops at the door to say:
“We owe Yegor five months’ wages. Do you realise it? It’s a bad thing
to let the servants’ wages run on. I’ve said so often. It’s much easier
to pay ten roubles every month than fifty for five!”
Outside the door she stops again:
“I pity our poor Liza more than anybody. The girl studies at the
Conservatoire. She’s always in good society, and the Lord only knows
how she’s dressed. That fur-coat of hers! It’s a sin to show yourself
in the street in it. If she had a different father, it would do, but
everyone knows he is a famous professor, a privy councillor.”
So, having reproached me for my name and title, she goes away at last.
Thus begins my day. It does not improve.
When I have drunk my tea, Liza comes in, in a fur-coat and hat, with
her music, ready to go to the Conservatoire. She is twenty-two. She
looks younger. She is pretty, rather like my wife when she was young.
She kisses me tenderly on my forehead and my hand.
“Good morning, Papa. Quite well?”
As a child she adored ice-cream, and I often had to take her to a
confectioner’s. Ice-cream was her standard of beauty. If she wanted
to praise me, she used to say: “Papa, you are ice-creamy.” One finger
she called the pistachio, the other the cream, the third the raspberry
finger and so on. And when she came to say good morning, I used to lift
her on to my knees and kiss her fingers, and say:
“The cream one, the pistachio one, the lemon one.”
And now from force of habit I kiss Liza’s fingers and murmur:
“Pistachio one, cream one, lemon one.” But it does not sound the same.
I am cold like the ice-cream and I feel ashamed. When my daughter comes
in and touches my forehead with her lips I shudder as though a bee had
stung my forehead, I smile constrainedly and turn away my face. Since
my insomnia began a question has been driving like a nail into my
brain. My daughter continually sees how terribly I, an old man, blush
because I owe the servant his wages; she sees how often the worry of
small debts forces me to leave my work and to pace the room from corner
to corner for hours, thinking; but why hasn’t she, even once, come to
me without telling her mother and whispered: “Father, here’s my watch,
bracelets, earrings, dresses.... Pawn them all.... You need money”?
Why, seeing how I and her mother try to hide our poverty, out of false
pride--why does she not deny herself the luxury of music lessons? I
would not accept the watch, the bracelets, or her sacrifices--God
forbid!--I do not want that.
Which reminds me of my son, the Warsaw officer. He is a clever, honest,
and sober fellow. But that doesn’t mean very much. If I had an old
father, and I knew that there were moments when he was ashamed of his
poverty, I think I would give up my commission to someone else and
hire myself out as a navvy. These thoughts of the children poison me.
What good are they? Only a mean and irritable person can take refuge
in thinking evil of ordinary people because they are not heroes. But
enough of that.
At a quarter to ten I have to go and lecture to my dear boys. I dress
myself and walk the road I have known these thirty years. For me it has
a history of its own. Here is a big grey building with a chemist’s shop
beneath. A tiny house once stood there, and it was a beer-shop. In this
beer-shop I thought out my thesis, and wrote my first love-letter to
Varya. I wrote it in pencil on a scrap of paper that began “Historia
Morbi.” Here is a grocer’s shop. It used to belong to a little Jew who
sold me cigarettes on credit, and later on to a fat woman who loved
students “because every one of them had a mother.” Now a red-headed
merchant sits there, a very nonchalant man, who drinks tea from a
copper tea-pot. And here are the gloomy gates of the University that
have not been repaired for years; a weary porter in a sheepskin coat, a
broom, heaps of snow ... Such gates cannot produce a good impression on
a boy who comes fresh from the provinces and imagines that the temple
of science is really a temple. Certainly, in the history of Russian
pessimism, the age of university buildings, the dreariness of the
corridors, the smoke-stains on the walls, the meagre light, the dismal
appearance of the stairs, the clothes-pegs and the benches, hold one of
the foremost places in the series of predisposing causes. Here is our
garden. It does not seem to have grown any better or any worse since I
was a student. I do not like it. It would be much more sensible if tall
pine-trees and fine oaks grew there instead of consumptive lime-trees,
yellow acacias and thin clipped lilac. The student’s mood is created
mainly by every one of the surroundings in which he studies; therefore
he must see everywhere before him only what is great and strong and
exquisite. Heaven preserve him from starveling trees, broken windows,
and drab walls and doors covered with torn oilcloth.
As I approach my main staircase the door is open wide. I am met by
my old friend, of the same age and name as I, Nicolas the porter. He
grunts as he lets me in:
“It’s frosty, Your Excellency.”
Or if my coat is wet:
“It’s raining a bit, Your Excellency.”
Then he runs in front of me and opens all the doors on my way. In the
study he carefully takes off my coat and at the same time manages
to tell me some university news. Because of the close acquaintance
that exists between all the University porters and keepers, he knows
all that happens in the four faculties, in the registry, in the
chancellor’s cabinet, and the library. He knows everything. When, for
instance, the resignation of the rector or dean is under discussion,
I hear him talking to the junior porters, naming candidates and
explaining offhand that so and so will not be approved by the Minister,
so and so will himself refuse the honour; then he plunges into
fantastic details of some mysterious papers received in the registry,
of a secret conversation which appears to have taken place between the
Minister and the curator, and so on. These details apart, he is almost
always right. The impressions he forms of each candidate are original,
but also true. If you want to know who read his thesis, joined the
staff, resigned or died in a particular year, then you must seek the
assistance of this veteran’s colossal memory. He will not only name you
the year, month, and day, but give you the accompanying details of this
or any other event. Such memory is the privilege of love.
He is the guardian of the university traditions. From the porters
before him he inherited many legends of the life of the university. He
added to this wealth much of his own and if you like he will tell you
many stories, long or short. He can tell you of extraordinary savants
who knew _everything,_ of remarkable scholars who did not sleep for
weeks on end, of numberless martyrs to science; good triumphs over evil
with him. The weak always conquer the strong, the wise man the fool,
the modest the proud, the young the old. There is no need to take all
these legends and stories for sterling; but filter them, and you will
find what you want in your filter, a noble tradition and the names of
true heroes acknowledged by all.
In our society all the information about the learned world consists
entirely of anecdotes of the extraordinary absent-mindedness of old
professors, and of a handful of jokes, which are ascribed to Guber
or to myself or to Baboukhin. But this is too little for an educated
society. If it loved science, savants and students as Nicolas loves
them, it would long ago have had a literature of whole epics, stories,
and biographies. But unfortunately this is yet to be.
The news told, Nicolas looks stern and we begin to talk business. If
an outsider were then to hear how freely Nicolas uses the jargon, he
would be inclined to think that he was a scholar, posing as a soldier.
By the way, the rumours of the university-porter’s erudition are very
exaggerated. It is true that Nicolas knows more than a hundred Latin
tags, can put a skeleton together and on occasion make a preparation,
can make the students laugh with a long learned quotation, but the
simple theory of the circulation of the blood is as dark to him now as
it was twenty years ago.
At the table in my room, bent low over a book or a preparation, sits
my dissector, Peter Ignatievich. He is a hardworking, modest man of
thirty-five without any gifts, already bald and with a big belly.
He works from morning to night, reads tremendously and remembers
everything he has read. In this respect he is not merely an excellent
man, but a man of gold; but in all others he is a cart-horse, or if you
like a learned blockhead. The characteristic traits of a cart-horse
which distinguish him from a creature of talent are these. His outlook
is narrow, absolutely bounded by his specialism. Apart from his own
subject he is as naive as a child. I remember once entering the room
and saying:
“Think what bad luck! They say, Skobielev is dead.”
Nicolas crossed himself; but Peter Ignatievich turned to me:
“Which Skobielev do you mean?”
Another time,--some time earlier--I announced that Professor Pierov was
dead. That darling Peter Ignatievich asked:
“What was his subject?”
I imagine that if Patti sang into his ear, or Russia were attacked by
hordes of Chinamen, or there was an earthquake, he would not lift
a finger, but would go on in the quietest way with his eye screwed
over his microscope. In a word: “What’s Hecuba to him?” I would give
anything to see how this dry old stick goes to bed with his wife.
Another trait: a fanatical belief in the infallibility of science,
above all in everything that the Germans write. He is sure of himself
and his preparations, knows the purpose of life, is absolutely ignorant
of the doubts and disillusionments that turn talents grey,--a slavish
worship of the authorities, and not a shadow of need to think for
himself. It is hard to persuade him and quite impossible to discuss
with him. Just try a discussion with a man who is profoundly convinced
that the best science is medicine, the best men doctors, the best
traditions--the medical! From the ugly past of medicine only one
tradition has survived,--the white necktie that doctors wear still.
For a learned, and more generally for an educated person there can
exist only a general university tradition, without any division into
traditions of medicine, of law, and so on. But it’s quite impossible
for Peter Ignatievich to agree with that; and he is ready to argue it
with you till doomsday.
His future is quite plain to me. During the whole of his life he will
make several hundred preparations of extraordinary purity, will write
any number of dry, quite competent, essays, will make about ten
scrupulously accurate translations; but he won’t invent gunpowder.
For gunpowder, imagination is wanted, inventiveness, and a gift for
divination, and Peter Ignatievich has nothing of the kind. In short, he
is not a master of science but a labourer.
Peter Ignatievich, Nicolas, and I whisper together. We are rather
strange to ourselves. One feels something quite particular, when the
audience booms like the sea behind the door. In thirty years I have not
grown used to this feeling, and I have it every morning. I button up my
frock-coat nervously, ask Nicolas unnecessary questions, get angry....
It is as though I were afraid; but it is not fear, but something else
which I cannot name nor describe.
Unnecessarily, I look at my watch and say:
“Well, it’s time to go.”
And we march in, in this order: Nicolas with the preparations or the
atlases in front, myself next, and after me, the cart-horse, modestly
hanging his head; or, if necessary, a corpse on a stretcher in front
and behind the corpse Nicolas and so on. The students rise when I
appear, then sit down and the noise of the sea is suddenly still. Calm
begins.
I know what I will lecture about, but I know nothing of how I will
lecture, where I will begin and where I will end. There is not a single
sentence ready in my brain. But as soon as I glance at the audience,
sitting around me in an amphitheatre, and utter the stereotyped “In
our last lecture we ended with....” and the sentences fly out of
my soul in a long line--then it is full steam ahead. I speak with
irresistible speed, and with passion, and it seems as though no earthly
power could check the current of my speech. In order to lecture well,
that is without being wearisome and to the listener’s profit, besides
talent you must have the knack of it and experience; you must have
a clear idea both of your own powers, of the people to whom you are
lecturing, and of the subject of your remarks. Moreover, you must be
quick in the uptake, keep a sharp eye open, and never for a moment lose
your field of vision.
When he presents the composer’s thought, a good conductor does twenty
things at once. He reads the score, waves his baton, watches the
singer, makes a gesture now towards the drum, now to the double-bass,
and so on. It is the same with me when lecturing. I have some hundred
and fifty faces before me, quite unlike each other, and three hundred
eyes staring me straight in the face. My purpose is to conquer this
many-headed hydra. If I have a clear idea how far they are attending
and how much they are comprehending every minute while I am lecturing,
then the hydra is in my power. My other opponent is within me. This
is the endless variety of forms, phenomena and laws, and the vast
number of ideas, whether my own or others’, which depend upon them.
Every moment I must be skilful enough to choose what is most important
and necessary from this enormous material, and just as swiftly as
my speech flows to clothe my thought in a form which will penetrate
the hydra’s understanding and excite its attention. Besides I must
watch carefully to see that my thoughts shall not be presented as
they have been accumulated, but in a certain order, necessary for the
correct composition of the picture which I wish to paint. Further, I
endeavour to make my speech literary, my definitions brief and exact,
my sentences as simple and elegant as possible. Every moment I must
hold myself in and remember that I have only an hour and forty minutes
to spend. In other words, it is a heavy labour. At one and the same
time you have to be a savant, a schoolmaster, and an orator, and it is
a failure if the orator triumphs over the schoolmaster in you or the
schoolmaster over the orator.
After lecturing for a quarter, for half an hour, I notice suddenly that
the students have begun to stare at the ceiling or Peter Ignatievich.
One will feel for his handkerchief, another settle himself comfortably,
another smile at his own thoughts. This means their attention is tried.
I must take steps. I seize the first opening and make a pun. All the
hundred and fifty faces have a broad smile, their eyes flash merrily,
and for a while you can hear the boom of the sea. I laugh too. Their
attention is refreshed and I can go on.
No sport, no recreation, no game ever gave me such delight as reading
a lecture. Only in a lecture could I surrender myself wholly to
passion and understand that inspiration is not a poet’s fiction, but
exists indeed. And I do not believe that Hercules, even after the
most delightful of his exploits, felt such a pleasant weariness as I
experienced every time after a lecture.
This was in the past. Now at lectures I experience only torture. Not
half an hour passes before I begin to feel an invincible weakness in
my legs and shoulders. I sit down in my chair, but I am not used to
lecture sitting. In a moment I am up again, and lecture standing. Then
I sit down again. Inside my mouth is dry, my voice is hoarse, my head
feels dizzy. To hide my state from my audience I drink some water now
and then, cough, wipe my nose continually, as though I was troubled
by a cold, make inopportune puns, and finally announce the interval
earlier than I should. But chiefly I feel ashamed.
Conscience and reason tell me that the best thing I could do now is to
read my farewell lecture to the boys, give them my last word, bless
them and give up my place to someone younger and stronger than I. But,
heaven be my judge, I have not the courage to act up to my conscience.
Unfortunately, I am neither philosopher nor theologian. I know quite
well I have no more than six months to live; and it would seem that
now I ought to be mainly occupied with questions of the darkness
beyond the grave, and the visions which will visit my sleep in the
earth. But somehow my soul is not curious of these questions, though
my mind grants every atom of their importance. Now before my death it
is just as it was twenty or thirty years ago. Only science interests
me.--When I take my last breath I shall still believe that Science is
the most important, the most beautiful, the most necessary thing in the
life of man; that she has always been and always will be the highest
manifestation of love, and that by her alone will man triumph over
nature and himself. This faith is, perhaps, at bottom naive and unfair,
but I am not to blame if this and not another is my faith. To conquer
this faith within me is for me impossible.
But this is beside the point. I only ask that you should incline to my
weakness and understand that to tear a man who is more deeply concerned
with the destiny of a brain tissue than the final goal of creation away
from his rostrum and his students is like taking him and nailing him up
in a coffin without waiting until he is dead.
Because of my insomnia and the intense struggle with my increasing
weakness a strange thing happens inside me. In the middle of my
lecture tears rise to my throat, my eyes begin to ache, and I have
a passionate and hysterical desire to stretch out my hands and moan
aloud. I want to cry out that fate has doomed me, a famous man, to
death; that in some six months here in the auditorium another will be
master. I want to cry out that I am poisoned; that new ideas that I
did not know before have poisoned the last days of my life, and sting
my brain incessantly like mosquitoes. At that moment my position seems
so terrible to me that I want all my students to be terrified, to jump
from their seats and rush panic-stricken to the door, shrieking in
despair.
It is not easy to live through such moments.