talking. I am no prophet, but I know what she will talk about. Every
morning it is exactly the same thing. Usually, after anxious inquiries
concerning my health, she suddenly mentions our son who is an officer
serving at Warsaw. After the twentieth of each month we send him fifty
roubles, and that serves as the chief topic of our conversation.
"Of course it is difficult for us," my wife would sigh, "but until he is
completely on his own feet it is our duty to help him. The boy is among
strangers, his pay is small.... However, if you like, next month we
won't send him fifty, but forty. What do you think?"
Daily experience might have taught my wife that constantly talking of
our expenses does not reduce them, but my wife refuses to learn by
experience, and regularly every morning discusses our officer son, and
tells me that bread, thank God, is cheaper, while sugar is a halfpenny
dearer--with a tone and an air as though she were communicating
interesting news.
I listen, mechanically assent, and probably because I have had a bad
night, strange and inappropriate thoughts intrude themselves upon me. I
gaze at my wife and wonder like a child. I ask myself in perplexity, is
it possible that this old, very stout, ungainly woman, with her dull
expression of petty anxiety and alarm about daily bread, with eyes
dimmed by continual brooding over debts and money difficulties, who can
talk of nothing but expenses and who smiles at nothing but things
getting cheaper--is it possible that this woman is no other than the
slender Varya whom I fell in love with so passionately for her fine,
clear intelligence, for her pure soul, her beauty, and, as Othello his
Desdemona, for her "sympathy" for my studies? Could that woman be no
other than the Varya who had once borne me a son?
I look with strained attention into the face of this flabby, spiritless,
clumsy old woman, seeking in her my Varya, but of her past self nothing
is left but her anxiety over my health and her manner of calling my
salary "our salary," and my cap "our cap." It is painful for me to look
at her, and, to give her what little comfort I can, I let her say what
she likes, and say nothing even when she passes unjust criticisms on
other people or pitches into me for not having a private practice or not
publishing text-books.
Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife suddenly remembers
with dismay that I have not had my tea.
"What am I thinking about, sitting here?" she says, getting up. "The
samovar has been on the table ever so long, and here I stay gossiping.
My goodness! how forgetful I am growing!"
She goes out quickly, and stops in the doorway to say:
"We owe Yegor five months' wages. Did you know it? You mustn't let the
servants' wages run on; how many times I have said it! It's much easier
to pay ten roubles a month than fifty roubles every five months!"
As she goes out, she stops to say:
"The person I am sorriest for is our Liza. The girl studies at the
Conservatoire, always mixes with people of good position, and goodness
knows how she is dressed. Her fur coat is in such a state she is ashamed
to show herself in the street. If she were somebody else's daughter it
wouldn't matter, but of course every one knows that her father is a
distinguished professor, a privy councillor."
And having reproached me with my rank and reputation, she goes away at
last. That is how my day begins. It does not improve as it goes on.
As I am drinking my tea, my Liza comes in wearing her fur coat and her
cap, with her music in her hand, already quite ready to go to the
Conservatoire. She is two-and-twenty. She looks younger, is pretty, and
rather like my wife in her young days. She kisses me tenderly on my
forehead and on my hand, and says:
"Good-morning, papa; are you quite well?"
As a child she was very fond of ice-cream, and I used often to take her
to a confectioner's. Ice-cream was for her the type of everything
delightful. If she wanted to praise me she would say: "You are as nice
as cream, papa." We used to call one of her little fingers "pistachio
ice," the next, "cream ice," the third "raspberry," and so on. Usually
when she came in to say good-morning to me I used to sit her on my knee,
kiss her little fingers, and say:
"Creamy ice... pistachio... lemon...."
And now, from old habit, I kiss Liza's fingers and mutter: "Pistachio...
cream... lemon..." but the effect is utterly different. I am cold as ice
and I am ashamed. When my daughter comes in to me and touches my
forehead with her lips I start as though a bee had stung me on the head,
give a forced smile, and turn my face away. Ever since I have been
suffering from sleeplessness, a question sticks in my brain like a nail.
My daughter often sees me, an old man and a distinguished man, blush
painfully at being in debt to my footman; she sees how often anxiety
over petty debts forces me to lay aside my work and to walk up and down
the room for hours together, thinking; but why is it she never comes to
me in secret to whisper in my ear: "Father, here is my watch, here are
my bracelets, my earrings, my dresses.... Pawn them all; you want
money..."? How is it that, seeing how her mother and I are placed in a
false position and do our utmost to hide our poverty from people, she
does not give up her expensive pleasure of music lessons? I would not
accept her watch nor her bracelets, nor the sacrifice of her lessons--God
forbid! That isn't what I want.
I think at the same time of my son, the officer at Warsaw. He is a
clever, honest, and sober fellow. But that is not enough for me. I think
if I had an old father, and if I knew there were moments when he was put
to shame by his poverty, I should give up my officer's commission to
somebody else, and should go out to earn my living as a workman. Such
thoughts about my children poison me. What is the use of them? It is
only a narrow-minded or embittered man who can harbour evil thoughts
about ordinary people because they are not heroes. But enough of that!
At a quarter to ten I have to go and give a lecture to my dear boys. I
dress and walk along the road which I have known for thirty years, and
which has its history for me. Here is the big grey house with the
chemist's shop; at this point there used to stand a little house, and in
it was a beershop; in that beershop I thought out my thesis and wrote my
first love-letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil, on a page headed
"Historia morbi." Here there is a grocer's shop; at one time it was kept
by a little Jew, who sold me cigarettes on credit; then by a fat peasant
woman, who liked the students because "every one of them has a mother";
now there is a red-haired shopkeeper sitting in it, a very stolid man
who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are the gloomy gates of
the University, which have long needed doing up; I see the bored porter
in his sheep-skin, the broom, the drifts of snow.... On a boy coming
fresh from the provinces and imagining that the temple of science must
really be a temple, such gates cannot make a healthy impression.
Altogether the dilapidated condition of the University buildings, the
gloominess of the corridors, the griminess of the walls, the lack of
light, the dejected aspect of the steps, the hat-stands and the benches,
take a prominent position among predisposing causes in the history of
Russian pessimism.... Here is our garden... I fancy it has grown neither
better nor worse since I was a student. I don't like it. It would be far
more sensible if there were tall pines and fine oaks growing here
instead of sickly-looking lime-trees, yellow acacias, and skimpy pollard
lilacs. The student whose state of mind is in the majority of cases
created by his surroundings, ought in the place where he is studying to
see facing him at every turn nothing but what is lofty, strong and
elegant.... God preserve him from gaunt trees, broken windows, grey
walls, and doors covered with torn American leather!
When I go to my own entrance the door is flung wide open, and I am met
by my colleague, contemporary, and namesake, the porter Nikolay. As he
lets me in he clears his throat and says:
"A frost, your Excellency!"
Or, if my great-coat is wet:
"Rain, your Excellency!"
Then he runs on ahead of me and opens all the doors on my way. In my
study he carefully takes off my fur coat, and while doing so manages to
tell me some bit of University news. Thanks to the close intimacy
existing between all the University porters and beadles, he knows
everything that goes on in the four faculties, in the office, in the
rector's private room, in the library. What does he not know? When in an
evil day a rector or dean, for instance, retires, I hear him in
conversation with the young porters mention the candidates for the post,
explain that such a one would not be confirmed by the minister, that
another would himself refuse to accept it, then drop into fantastic
details concerning mysterious papers received in the office, secret
conversations alleged to have taken place between the minister and the
trustee, and so on. With the exception of these details, he almost
always turns out to be right. His estimates of the candidates, though
original, are very correct, too. If one wants to know in what year some
one read his thesis, entered the service, retired, or died, then summon
to your assistance the vast memory of that soldier, and he will not only
tell you the year, the month and the day, but will furnish you also with
the details that accompanied this or that event. Only one who loves can
remember like that.
He is the guardian of the University traditions. From the porters who
were his predecessors he has inherited many legends of University life,
has added to that wealth much of his own gained during his time of
service, and if you care to hear he will tell you many long and intimate
stories. He can tell one about extraordinary sages who knew everything,
about remarkable students who did not sleep for weeks, about numerous
martyrs and victims of science; with him good triumphs over evil, the
weak always vanquishes the strong, the wise man the fool, the humble the
proud, the young the old. There is no need to take all these fables and
legends for sterling coin; but filter them, and you will have left what
is wanted: our fine traditions and the names of real heroes, recognized
as such by all.
In our society the knowledge of the learned world consists of anecdotes
of the extraordinary absentmindedness of certain old professors, and two
or three witticisms variously ascribed to Gruber, to me, and to Babukin.
For the educated public that is not much. If it loved science, learned
men, and students, as Nikolay does, its literature would long ago have
contained whole epics, records of sayings and doings such as,
unfortunately, it cannot boast of now.
After telling me a piece of news, Nikolay assumes a severe expression,
and conversation about business begins. If any outsider could at such
times overhear Nikolay's free use of our terminology, he might perhaps
imagine that he was a learned man disguised as a soldier. And, by the
way, the rumours of the erudition of the University porters are greatly
exaggerated. It is true that Nikolay knows more than a hundred Latin
words, knows how to put the skeleton together, sometimes prepares the
apparatus and amuses the students by some long, learned quotation, but
the by no means complicated theory of the circulation of the blood, for
instance, is as much a mystery to him now as it was twenty years ago.
At the table in my study, bending low over some book or preparation,
sits Pyotr Ignatyevitch, my demonstrator, a modest and industrious but
by no means clever man of five-and-thirty, already bald and corpulent;
he works from morning to night, reads a lot, remembers well everything
he has read--and in that way he is not a man, but pure gold; in all else
he is a carthorse or, in other words, a learned dullard. The carthorse
characteristics that show his lack of talent are these: his outlook is
narrow and sharply limited by his specialty; outside his special branch
he is simple as a child.
"Fancy! what a misfortune! They say Skobelev is dead."
Nikolay crosses himself, but Pyotr Ignatyevitch turns to me and asks:
"What Skobelev is that?"
Another time--somewhat earlier--I told him that Professor Perov was dead.
Good Pyotr Ignatyevitch asked:
"What did he lecture on?"
I believe if Patti had sung in his very ear, if a horde of Chinese had
invaded Russia, if there had been an earthquake, he would not have
stirred a limb, but screwing up his eye, would have gone on calmly
looking through his microscope. What is he to Hecuba or Hecuba to him,
in fact? I would give a good deal to see how this dry stick sleeps with
his wife at night.
Another characteristic is his fanatical faith in the infallibility of
science, and, above all, of everything written by the Germans. He
believes in himself, in his preparations; knows the object of life, and
knows nothing of the doubts and disappointments that turn the hair of
talent grey. He has a slavish reverence for authorities and a complete
lack of any desire for independent thought. To change his convictions is
difficult, to argue with him impossible. How is one to argue with a man
who is firmly persuaded that medicine is the finest of sciences, that
doctors are the best of men, and that the traditions of the medical
profession are superior to those of any other? Of the evil past of
medicine only one tradition has been preserved--the white tie still worn
by doctors; for a learned--in fact, for any educated man the only
traditions that can exist are those of the University as a whole, with
no distinction between medicine, law, etc. But it would be hard for
Pyotr Ignatyevitch to accept these facts, and he is ready to argue with
you till the day of judgment.
I have a clear picture in my mind of his future. In the course of his
life he will prepare many hundreds of chemicals of exceptional purity;
he will write a number of dry and very accurate memoranda, will make
some dozen conscientious translations, but he won't do anything
striking. To do that one must have imagination, inventiveness, the gift
of insight, and Pyotr Ignatyevitch has nothing of the kind. In short, he
is not a master in science, but a journeyman.
Pyotr Ignatyevitch, Nikolay, and I, talk in subdued tones. We are not
quite ourselves. There is always a peculiar feeling when one hears
through the doors a murmur as of the sea from the lecture-theatre. In
the course of thirty years I have not grown accustomed to this feeling,
and I experience it every morning. I nervously button up my coat, ask
Nikolay unnecessary questions, lose my temper.... It is just as though I
were frightened; it is not timidity, though, but something different
which I can neither describe nor find a name for.
Quite unnecessarily, I look at my watch and say: "Well, it's time to go
in."
And we march into the room in the following order: foremost goes
Nikolay, with the chemicals and apparatus or with a chart; after him I
come; and then the carthorse follows humbly, with hanging head; or, when
necessary, a dead body is carried in first on a stretcher, followed by
Nikolay, and so on. On my entrance the students all stand up, then they
sit down, and the sound as of the sea is suddenly hushed. Stillness
reigns.
I know what I am going to lecture about, but I don't know how I am going
to lecture, where I am going to begin or with what I am going to end. I
haven't a single sentence ready in my head. But I have only to look
round the lecture-hall (it is built in the form of an amphitheatre) and
utter the stereotyped phrase, "Last lecture we stopped at..." when
sentences spring up from my soul in a long string, and I am carried away
by my own eloquence. I speak with irresistible rapidity and passion, and
it seems as though there were no force which could check the flow of my
words. To lecture well--that is, with profit to the listeners and without
boring them--one must have, besides talent, experience and a special
knack; one must possess a clear conception of one's own powers, of the
audience to which one is lecturing, and of the subject of one's lecture.
Moreover, one must be a man who knows what he is doing; one must keep a
sharp lookout, and not for one second lose sight of what lies before
one.
A good conductor, interpreting the thought of the composer, does twenty
things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer,
makes a motion sideways, first to the drum then to the wind-instruments,
and so on. I do just the same when I lecture. Before me a hundred and
fifty faces, all unlike one another; three hundred eyes all looking
straight into my face. My object is to dominate this many-headed
monster. If every moment as I lecture I have a clear vision of the
degree of its attention and its power of comprehension, it is in my
power. The other foe I have to overcome is in myself. It is the infinite
variety of forms, phenomena, laws, and the multitude of ideas of my own
and other people's conditioned by them. Every moment I must have the
skill to snatch out of that vast mass of material what is most important
and necessary, and, as rapidly as my words flow, clothe my thought in a
form in which it can be grasped by the monster's intelligence, and may
arouse its attention, and at the same time one must keep a sharp lookout
that one's thoughts are conveyed, not just as they come, but in a
certain order, essential for the correct composition of the picture I
wish to sketch. Further, I endeavour to make my diction literary, my
definitions brief and precise, my wording, as far as possible, simple
and eloquent. Every minute I have to pull myself up and remember that I
have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In short, one has
one's work cut out. At one and the same minute one has to play the part
of savant and teacher and orator, and it's a bad thing if the orator
gets the upper hand of the savant or of the teacher in one, or vice
versa.
You lecture for a quarter of an hour, for half an hour, when you notice
that the students are beginning to look at the ceiling, at Pyotr
Ignatyevitch; one is feeling for his handkerchief, another shifts in his
seat, another smiles at his thoughts.... That means that their attention
is flagging. Something must be done. Taking advantage of the first
opportunity, I make some pun. A broad grin comes on to a hundred and
fifty faces, the eyes shine brightly, the sound of the sea is audible
for a brief moment.... I laugh too. Their attention is refreshed, and I
can go on.
No kind of sport, no kind of game or diversion, has ever given me such
enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I been able to abandon
myself entirely to passion, and have understood that inspiration is not
an invention of the poets, but exists in real life, and I imagine
Hercules after the most piquant of his exploits felt just such
voluptuous exhaustion as I experience after every lecture.
That was in old times. Now at lectures I feel nothing but torture.
Before half an hour is over I am conscious of an overwhelming weakness
in my legs and my shoulders. I sit down in my chair, but I am not
accustomed to lecture sitting down; a minute later I get up and go on
standing, then sit down again. There is a dryness in my mouth, my voice
grows husky, my head begins to go round.... To conceal my condition from
my audience I continually drink water, cough, often blow my nose as
though I were hindered by a cold, make puns inappropriately, and in the
end break off earlier than I ought to. But above all I am ashamed.
My conscience and my intelligence tell me that the very best thing I
could do now would be to deliver a farewell lecture to the boys, to say
my last word to them, to bless them, and give up my post to a man
younger and stronger than me. But, God, be my judge, I have not manly
courage enough to act according to my conscience.
Unfortunately, I am not a philosopher and not a theologian. I know
perfectly well that I cannot live more than another six months; it might
be supposed that I ought now to be chiefly concerned with the question
of the shadowy life beyond the grave, and the visions that will visit my
slumbers in the tomb. But for some reason my soul refuses to recognize
these questions, though my mind is fully alive to their importance. Just
as twenty, thirty years ago, so now, on the threshold of death, I am
interested in nothing but science. As I yield up my last breath I shall
still believe that science is the most important, the most splendid, the
most essential thing in the life of man; that it always has been and
will be the highest manifestation of love, and that only by means of it
will man conquer himself and nature. This faith is perhaps naive and may
rest on false assumptions, but it is not my fault that I believe that
and nothing else; I cannot overcome in myself this belief.
But that is not the point. I only ask people to be indulgent to my
weakness, and to realize that to tear from the lecture-theatre and his
pupils a man who is more interested in the history of the development of
the bone medulla than in the final object of creation would be
equivalent to taking him and nailing him up in his coffin without
waiting for him to be dead.
Sleeplessness and the consequent strain of combating increasing weakness
leads to something strange in me. In the middle of my lecture tears
suddenly rise in my throat, my eyes begin to smart, and I feel a
passionate, hysterical desire to stretch out my hands before me and
break into loud lamentation. I want to cry out in a loud voice that I, a
famous man, have been sentenced by fate to the death penalty, that
within some six months another man will be in control here in the
lecture-theatre. I want to shriek that I am poisoned; new ideas such as
I have not known before have poisoned the last days of my life, and are
still stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at that moment my position
seems to me so awful that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to
leap up from their seats and to rush in panic terror, with desperate
screams, to the exit.
It is not easy to get through such moments.
II
After my lecture I sit at home and work. I read journals and monographs,
or prepare my next lecture; sometimes I write something. I work with
interruptions, as I have from time to time to see visitors.
There is a ring at the bell. It is a colleague come to discuss some
business matter with me. He comes in to me with his hat and his stick,
and, holding out both these objects to me, says:
"Only for a minute! Only for a minute! Sit down, collega! Only a couple
of words."
To begin with, we both try to show each other that we are
extraordinarily polite and highly delighted to see each other. I make
him sit down in an easy-chair, and he makes me sit down; as we do so, we
cautiously pat each other on the back, touch each other's buttons, and
it looks as though we were feeling each other and afraid of scorching
our fingers. Both of us laugh, though we say nothing amusing. When we
are seated we bow our heads towards each other and begin talking in
subdued voices. However affectionately disposed we may be to one
another, we cannot help adorning our conversation with all sorts of
Chinese mannerisms, such as "As you so justly observed," or "I have
already had the honour to inform you"; we cannot help laughing if one of
us makes a joke, however unsuccessfully. When we have finished with
business my colleague gets up impulsively and, waving his hat in the
direction of my work, begins to say good-bye. Again we paw one another
and laugh. I see him into the hall; when I assist my colleague to put on
his coat, while he does all he can to decline this high honour. Then
when Yegor opens the door my colleague declares that I shall catch cold,
while I make a show of being ready to go even into the street with him.
And when at last I go back into my study my face still goes on smiling,
I suppose from inertia.