Kuzma crossed himself with a grand flourish when, at last, he escaped
from that slavery. But he was already nearly thirty years of age; his
hair was noticeably grey; he had become more sober, more serious;
he had abandoned his verses, had abandoned reading; he had become
accustomed to eating-houses, to drinking-bouts. He served for a year
less a week with a drover near Eletz, went to Moscow on his employer’s
business--and left his service. Long before that time he had begun a
love affair in Voronezh, with a married woman, and he longed to go
thither. So he knocked about in Voronezh for nearly ten years, busying
himself with the purchase of grain, horse-trading, and writing articles
about the grain trade for the newspapers, bewildering--or, to speak
more correctly, poisoning--his mind with the articles of Tolstoy and
the satires of Saltykoff. And, all the while, he was overwhelmed with
the conviction that he was wasting--had wasted--his life.
“There, now,” he said, as he recalled those years, “that’s what it
signifies--that knowledge without education!”
In the early ’nineties Balashkin died of hernia, and Kuzma saw him, for
the last time, not long before his death. And what an interview it was!
“I must write,” complained one, gloomily and angrily. “One withers away
like a burdock in the field.”
“Yes, yes,” boomed the other. The squint of his dying eye was already
drowsy, and his jaws moved with difficulty, and the coarse tobacco
did not fall as it should have done on his cigarette paper. “As the
saying runs: learn every hour, think every hour, look about you at
all our poverty and wretchedness--” Then, with a shame-faced grin, he
laid aside his cigarette and thrust his hand into the breast of his
coat. “Here,” he mumbled, rummaging in a package of tattered papers
and clippings from newspapers. “Here, my friend, is a pile of stuff of
some value. There was a great famine, curse it. And I read everything
about it, and wrote it all down. When I die, ’twill be of some use to
you, this devil’s material. Nothing but scurvy and typhus, typhus and
scurvy. In one county all the small children died; in another all the
dogs were eaten up. God is my witness that I am telling no lie! Here,
wait a minute, I’ll find it for you immediately--”
But he rummaged and rummaged and did not find it, hunted for his
spectacles, began in alarm to search through his pockets, to look under
the counter, got tired, and gave it up. And, as soon as he gave up the
search, he began to drowse and waggle his head.
“But no, no--don’t you dare to touch on that yet. You are still
uneducated, a weak-minded fellow. Cut a tree to suit your powers.
Have you written anything on that subject I suggested to you--about
Sukhonosy? Not yet? Well, so you are an ass’s jaw, as I said, after
all. What a subject that was!”
“I ought to write about the village, about the populace,” said Kuzma.
“For you yourself are always saying: ‘Russia, Russia--’”
“Well, and isn’t Sukhonosy the populace? isn’t it Russia? _All Russia
is nothing but a village: get that firmly fixed in your noddle!_
Look about you: is this a town, in your opinion? The flocks jam the
streets every evening--they kick up such a dust that you can’t see
your next-door neighbour. But you call it a ‘town’! Ugh, you dull
clodhopper--’tis plain that one might drive a stake into your head, and
still you would never write anything.”
And Kuzma understood clearly and conclusively that Balashkin had
spoken the sacred truth: he was not destined to write. There was
Sukhonosy. For many years that repulsive old man of the Suburb had
never been out of his mind--an old man whose sole property consisted
of a mattress infested with bugs and a woman’s moth-eaten cloak which
he had inherited from his wife. He begged, fell ill, starved, roosted
for fifty kopeks a month in one corner of a cottage occupied by a
woman trader in the “gluttons’ row,” and, in her opinion, might very
well set his affairs straight by selling his inheritance. But he
prized it as the apple of his eye--and, of course, not in the least
because of tender feelings toward the late lamented: it afforded
him the consciousness that he owned incomparably more property than
other folks. It seemed to him that it was worth a devilishly high
price: “Nowadays such cloaks are not to be had at all!” He was not
disinclined, not in the least disinclined, to sell it. But he asked
such an outrageous price that would-be purchasers were dazed. And Kuzma
understood this tragedy of the Suburb perfectly. But when he began to
consider how it should be expressed, he began to live through the whole
complicated life of the Suburb, through recollections of his childhood,
of his youth--and he became confused, drowned Sukhonosy in the
abundance of the pictures which besieged his memory, and dropped his
hands in despair, crushed by the necessity of expressing his own soul,
of setting forth everything which had crippled his own life. And the
most terrible thing about that life was the fact that it was a simple,
everyday life, which broke up into petty details with incomprehensible
rapidity. Yes, and what was more, he did not know how to write: he did
not even know how to think regularly or long; he suffered like a puppy
in a bed of straw when he took up a pen. And Balashkin’s death-bed
prophecy brought him to his senses; ’twas not for him to write stories!
So the first thought which flashed through his mind was, to write “The
Sum-Total,” a stern, harsh epitaph on himself and--on Russia.