had one man of distinction among them for the last five or ten years?"
"I don't know how it is with the other professors, but I can't remember
any among mine."
"I have seen in my day many of your students and young scientific men
and many actors--well, I have never once been so fortunate as to meet--I
won't say a hero or a man of talent, but even an interesting man. It's
all the same grey mediocrity, puffed up with self-conceit."
All this talk of degeneration always affects me as though I had
accidentally overheard offensive talk about my own daughter. It offends
me that these charges are wholesale, and rest on such worn-out
commonplaces, on such wordy vapourings as degeneration and absence of
ideals, or on references to the splendours of the past. Every
accusation, even if it is uttered in ladies' society, ought to be
formulated with all possible definiteness, or it is not an accusation,
but idle disparagement, unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, I have been lecturing for thirty years, but I notice
neither degeneration nor lack of ideals, and I don't find that the
present is worse than the past. My porter Nikolay, whose experience of
this subject has its value, says that the students of today are neither
better nor worse than those of the past.
If I were asked what I don't like in my pupils of today, I should answer
the question, not straight off and not at length, but with sufficient
definiteness. I know their failings, and so have no need to resort to
vague generalities. I don't like their smoking, using spirituous
beverages, marrying late, and often being so irresponsible and careless
that they will let one of their number be starving in their midst while
they neglect to pay their subscriptions to the Students' Aid Society.
They don't know modern languages, and they don't express themselves
correctly in Russian; no longer ago than yesterday my colleague, the
professor of hygiene, complained to me that he had to give twice as many
lectures, because the students had a very poor knowledge of physics and
were utterly ignorant of meteorology. They are readily carried away by
the influence of the last new writers, even when they are not first-
rate, but they take absolutely no interest in classics such as
Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability
to distinguish the great from the small betrays their ignorance of
practical life more than anything. All difficult questions that have
more or less a social character (for instance the migration question)
they settle by studying monographs on the subject, but not by way of
scientific investigation or experiment, though that method is at their
disposal and is more in keeping with their calling. They gladly become
ward-surgeons, assistants, demonstrators, external teachers, and are
ready to fill such posts until they are forty, though independence, a
sense of freedom and personal initiative, are no less necessary in
science than, for instance, in art or commerce. I have pupils and
listeners, but no successors and helpers, and so I love them and am
touched by them, but am not proud of them. And so on, and so on....
Such shortcomings, however numerous they may be, can only give rise to a
pessimistic or fault-finding temper in a faint-hearted and timid man.
All these failings have a casual, transitory character, and are
completely dependent on conditions of life; in some ten years they will
have disappeared or given place to other fresh defects, which are all
inevitable and will in their turn alarm the faint-hearted. The students'
sins often vex me, but that vexation is nothing in comparison with the
joy I have been experiencing now for the last thirty years when I talk
to my pupils, lecture to them, watch their relations, and compare them
with people not of their circle.
Mihail Fyodorovitch speaks evil of everything. Katya listens, and
neither of them notices into what depths the apparently innocent
diversion of finding fault with their neighbours is gradually drawing
them. They are not conscious how by degrees simple talk passes into
malicious mockery and jeering, and how they are both beginning to drop
into the habits and methods of slander.
"Killing types one meets with," says Mihail Fyodorovitch. "I went
yesterday to our friend Yegor Petrovitch's, and there I found a studious
gentleman, one of your medicals in his third year, I believe. Such a
face!... in the Dobrolubov style, the imprint of profound thought on his
brow; we got into talk. 'Such doings, young man,' said I. 'I've read,'
said I, 'that some German--I've forgotten his name--has created from the
human brain a new kind of alkaloid, idiotine.' What do you think? He
believed it, and there was positively an expression of respect on his
face, as though to say, 'See what we fellows can do!' And the other day
I went to the theatre. I took my seat. In the next row directly in front
of me were sitting two men: one of 'us fellows' and apparently a law
student, the other a shaggy-looking figure, a medical student. The
latter was as drunk as a cobbler. He did not look at the stage at all.
He was dozing with his nose on his shirt-front. But as soon as an actor
begins loudly reciting a monologue, or simply raises his voice, our
friend starts, pokes his neighbour in the ribs, and asks, 'What is he
saying? Is it elevating?' 'Yes,' answers one of our fellows. 'B-r-r-
ravo!' roars the medical student. 'Elevating! Bravo!' He had gone to the
theatre, you see, the drunken blockhead, not for the sake of art, the
play, but for elevation! He wanted noble sentiments."
Katya listens and laughs. She has a strange laugh; she catches her
breath in rhythmically regular gasps, very much as though she were
playing the accordion, and nothing in her face is laughing but her
nostrils. I grow depressed and don't know what to say. Beside myself, I
fire up, leap up from my seat, and cry:
"Do leave off! Why are you sitting here like two toads, poisoning the
air with your breath? Give over!"
And without waiting for them to finish their gossip I prepare to go
home. And, indeed, it is high time: it is past ten.
"I will stay a little longer," says Mihail Fyodorovitch. "Will you allow
me, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?"
"I will," answers Katya.
"Bene! In that case have up another little bottle."
They both accompany me with candles to the hall, and while I put on my
fur coat, Mihail Fyodorovitch says:
"You have grown dreadfully thin and older looking, Nikolay Stepanovitch.
What's the matter with you? Are you ill?"
"Yes; I am not very well."
"And you are not doing anything for it..." Katya puts in grimly.
"Why don't you? You can't go on like that! God helps those who help
themselves, my dear fellow. Remember me to your wife and daughter, and
make my apologies for not having been to see them. In a day or two,
before I go abroad, I shall come to say good-bye. I shall be sure to. I
am going away next week."
I come away from Katya, irritated and alarmed by what has been said
about my being ill, and dissatisfied with myself. I ask myself whether I
really ought not to consult one of my colleagues. And at once I imagine
how my colleague, after listening to me, would walk away to the window
without speaking, would think a moment, then would turn round to me and,
trying to prevent my reading the truth in his face, would say in a
careless tone: "So far I see nothing serious, but at the same time,
collega, I advise you to lay aside your work...." And that would deprive
me of my last hope.
Who is without hope? Now that I am diagnosing my illness and prescribing
for myself, from time to time I hope that I am deceived by my own
illness, that I am mistaken in regard to the albumen and the sugar I
find, and in regard to my heart, and in regard to the swellings I have
twice noticed in the mornings; when with the fervour of the
hypochondriac I look through the textbooks of therapeutics and take a
different medicine every day, I keep fancying that I shall hit upon
something comforting. All that is petty.
Whether the sky is covered with clouds or the moon and the stars are
shining, I turn my eyes towards it every evening and think that death is
taking me soon. One would think that my thoughts at such times ought to
be deep as the sky, brilliant, striking.... But no! I think about
myself, about my wife, about Liza, Gnekker, the students, people in
general; my thoughts are evil, petty, I am insincere with myself, and at
such times my theory of life may be expressed in the words the
celebrated Araktcheev said in one of his intimate letters: "Nothing good
can exist in the world without evil, and there is more evil than good."
That is, everything is disgusting; there is nothing to live for, and the
sixty-two years I have already lived must be reckoned as wasted. I catch
myself in these thoughts, and try to persuade myself that they are
accidental, temporary, and not deeply rooted in me, but at once I think:
"If so, what drives me every evening to those two toads?"
And I vow to myself that I will never go to Katya's again, though I know
I shall go next evening.
Ringing the bell at the door and going upstairs, I feel that I have no
family now and no desire to bring it back again. It is clear that the
new Araktcheev thoughts are not casual, temporary visitors, but have
possession of my whole being. With my conscience ill at ease, dejected,
languid, hardly able to move my limbs, feeling as though tons were added
to my weight, I get into bed and quickly drop asleep.
And then--insomnia!
IV
Summer comes on and life is changed.
One fine morning Liza comes in to me and says in a jesting tone:
"Come, your Excellency! We are ready."
My Excellency is conducted into the street, and seated in a cab. As I go
along, having nothing to do, I read the signboards from right to left.
The word "Traktir" reads "Ritkart"; that would just suit some baron's
family: Baroness Ritkart. Farther on I drive through fields, by the
graveyard, which makes absolutely no impression on me, though I shall
soon lie in it; then I drive by forests and again by fields. There is
nothing of interest. After two hours of driving, my Excellency is
conducted into the lower storey of a summer villa and installed in a
small, very cheerful little room with light blue hangings.
At night there is sleeplessness as before, but in the morning I do not
put a good face upon it and listen to my wife, but lie in bed. I do not
sleep, but lie in the drowsy, half-conscious condition in which you know
you are not asleep, but dreaming. At midday I get up and from habit sit
down at my table, but I do not work now; I amuse myself with French
books in yellow covers, sent me by Katya. Of course, it would be more
patriotic to read Russian authors, but I must confess I cherish no
particular liking for them. With the exception of two or three of the
older writers, all our literature of today strikes me as not being
literature, but a special sort of home industry, which exists simply in
order to be encouraged, though people do not readily make use of its
products. The very best of these home products cannot be called
remarkable and cannot be sincerely praised without qualification. I must
say the same of all the literary novelties I have read during the last
ten or fifteen years; not one of them is remarkable, and not one of them
can be praised without a "but." Cleverness, a good tone, but no talent;
talent, a good tone, but no cleverness; or talent, cleverness, but not a
good tone.
I don't say the French books have talent, cleverness, and a good tone.
They don't satisfy me, either. But they are not so tedious as the
Russian, and it is not unusual to find in them the chief element of
artistic creation--the feeling of personal freedom which is lacking in
the Russian authors. I don't remember one new book in which the author
does not try from the first page to entangle himself in all sorts of
conditions and contracts with his conscience. One is afraid to speak of
the naked body; another ties himself up hand and foot in psychological
analysis; a third must have a "warm attitude to man"; a fourth purposely
scrawls whole descriptions of nature that he may not be suspected of
writing with a purpose.... One is bent upon being middle-class in his
work, another must be a nobleman, and so on. There is intentionalness,
circumspection, and self-will, but they have neither the independence
nor the manliness to write as they like, and therefore there is no
creativeness.
All this applies to what is called belles-lettres.
As for serious treatises in Russian on sociology, for instance, on art,
and so on, I do not read them simply from timidity. In my childhood and
early youth I had for some reason a terror of doorkeepers and attendants
at the theatre, and that terror has remained with me to this day. I am
afraid of them even now. It is said that we are only afraid of what we
do not understand. And, indeed, it is very difficult to understand why
doorkeepers and theatre attendants are so dignified, haughty, and
majestically rude. I feel exactly the same terror when I read serious
articles. Their extraordinary dignity, their bantering lordly tone,
their familiar manner to foreign authors, their ability to split straws
with dignity--all that is beyond my understanding; it is intimidating and
utterly unlike the quiet, gentlemanly tone to which I am accustomed when
I read the works of our medical and scientific writers. It oppresses me
to read not only the articles written by serious Russians, but even
works translated or edited by them. The pretentious, edifying tone of
the preface; the redundancy of remarks made by the translator, which
prevent me from concentrating my attention; the question marks and "sic"
in parenthesis scattered all over the book or article by the liberal
translator, are to my mind an outrage on the author and on my
independence as a reader.
Once I was summoned as an expert to a circuit court; in an interval one
of my fellow-experts drew my attention to the rudeness of the public
prosecutor to the defendants, among whom there were two ladies of good
education. I believe I did not exaggerate at all when I told him that
the prosecutor's manner was no ruder than that of the authors of serious
articles to one another. Their manners are, indeed, so rude that I
cannot speak of them without distaste. They treat one another and the
writers they criticize either with superfluous respect, at the sacrifice
of their own dignity, or, on the contrary, with far more ruthlessness
than I have shown in my notes and my thoughts in regard to my future
son-in-law Gnekker. Accusations of irrationality, of evil intentions,
and, indeed, of every sort of crime, form an habitual ornament of
serious articles. And that, as young medical men are fond of saying in
their monographs, is the ultima ratio! Such ways must infallibly have an
effect on the morals of the younger generation of writers, and so I am
not at all surprised that in the new works with which our literature has
been enriched during the last ten or fifteen years the heroes drink too
much vodka and the heroines are not over-chaste.
I read French books, and I look out of the window which is open; I can
see the spikes of my garden-fence, two or three scraggy trees, and
beyond the fence the road, the fields, and beyond them a broad stretch
of pine-wood. Often I admire a boy and girl, both flaxen-headed and
ragged, who clamber on the fence and laugh at my baldness. In their
shining little eyes I read, "Go up, go up, thou baldhead!" They are
almost the only people who care nothing for my celebrity or my rank.
Visitors do not come to me every day now. I will only mention the visits
of Nikolay and Pyotr Ignatyevitch. Nikolay usually comes to me on
holidays, with some pretext of business, though really to see me. He
arrives very much exhilarated, a thing which never occurs to him in the
winter.
"What have you to tell me?" I ask, going out to him in the hall.
"Your Excellency!" he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking
at me with the ecstasy of a lover--"your Excellency! God be my witness!
Strike me dead on the spot! Gaudeamus egitur juventus!"
And he greedily kisses me on the shoulder, on the sleeve, and on the
buttons.
"Is everything going well?" I ask him.
"Your Excellency! So help me God!..."
He persists in grovelling before me for no sort of reason, and soon
bores me, so I send him away to the kitchen, where they give him dinner.
Pyotr Ignatyevitch comes to see me on holidays, too, with the special
object of seeing me and sharing his thoughts with me. He usually sits
down near my table, modest, neat, and reasonable, and does not venture
to cross his legs or put his elbows on the table. All the time, in a
soft, even, little voice, in rounded bookish phrases, he tells me
various, to his mind, very interesting and piquant items of news which
he has read in the magazines and journals. They are all alike and may be
reduced to this type: "A Frenchman has made a discovery; some one else,
a German, has denounced him, proving that the discovery was made in 1870
by some American; while a third person, also a German, trumps them both
by proving they both had made fools of themselves, mistaking bubbles of
air for dark pigment under the microscope." Even when he wants to amuse
me, Pyotr Ignatyevitch tells me things in the same lengthy,
circumstantial manner as though he were defending a thesis, enumerating
in detail the literary sources from which he is deriving his narrative,
doing his utmost to be accurate as to the date and number of the
journals and the name of every one concerned, invariably mentioning it
in full--Jean Jacques Petit, never simply Petit. Sometimes he stays to
dinner with us, and then during the whole of dinner-time he goes on
telling me the same sort of piquant anecdotes, reducing every one at
table to a state of dejected boredom. If Gnekker and Liza begin talking
before him of fugues and counterpoint, Brahms and Bach, he drops his
eyes modestly, and is overcome with embarrassment; he is ashamed that
such trivial subjects should be discussed before such serious people as
him and me.
In my present state of mind five minutes of him is enough to sicken me
as though I had been seeing and hearing him for an eternity. I hate the
poor fellow. His soft, smooth voice and bookish language exhaust me, and
his stories stupefy me.... He cherishes the best of feelings for me, and
talks to me simply in order to give me pleasure, and I repay him by
looking at him as though I wanted to hypnotize him, and think, "Go, go,
go!..." But he is not amenable to thought-suggestion, and sits on and on
and on....
While he is with me I can never shake off the thought, "It's possible
when I die he will be appointed to succeed me," and my poor lecture-hall
presents itself to me as an oasis in which the spring is died up; and I
am ungracious, silent, and surly with Pyotr Ignatyevitch, as though he
were to blame for such thoughts, and not I myself. When he begins, as
usual, praising up the German savants, instead of making fun of him
good-humouredly, as I used to do, I mutter sullenly:
"Asses, your Germans!..."
That is like the late Professor Nikita Krylov, who once, when he was
bathing with Pirogov at Revel and vexed at the water's being very cold,
burst out with, "Scoundrels, these Germans!" I behave badly with Pyotr
Ignatyevitch, and only when he is going away, and from the window I
catch a glimpse of his grey hat behind the garden-fence, I want to call
out and say, "Forgive me, my dear fellow!"
Dinner is even drearier than in the winter. Gnekker, whom now I hate and
despise, dines with us almost every day. I used to endure his presence
in silence, now I aim biting remarks at him which make my wife and
daughter blush. Carried away by evil feeling, I often say things that
are simply stupid, and I don't know why I say them. So on one occasion
it happened that I stared a long time at Gnekker, and, a propos of
nothing, I fired off:
"An eagle may perchance swoop down below a cock, But never will the fowl
soar upwards to the clouds..."
And the most vexatious thing is that the fowl Gnekker shows himself much
cleverer than the eagle professor. Knowing that my wife and daughter are
on his side, he takes up the line of meeting my gibes with condescending
silence, as though to say:
"The old chap is in his dotage; what's the use of talking to him?"
Or he makes fun of me good-naturedly. It is wonderful how petty a man
may become! I am capable of dreaming all dinner-time of how Gnekker will
turn out to be an adventurer, how my wife and Liza will come to see
their mistake, and how I will taunt them--and such absurd thoughts at the
time when I am standing with one foot in the grave!
There are now, too, misunderstandings of which in the old days I had no
idea except from hearsay. Though I am ashamed of it, I will describe one
that occurred the other day after dinner.
I was sitting in my room smoking a pipe; my wife came in as usual, sat
down, and began saying what a good thing it would be for me to go to
Harkov now while it is warm and I have free time, and there find out
what sort of person our Gnekker is.
"Very good; I will go," I assented.
My wife, pleased with me, got up and was going to the door, but turned
back and said:
"By the way, I have another favour to ask of you. I know you will be
angry, but it is my duty to warn you.... Forgive my saying it, Nikolay
Stepanovitch, but all our neighbours and acquaintances have begun
talking about your being so often at Katya's. She is clever and well-
educated; I don't deny that her company may be agreeable; but at your
age and with your social position it seems strange that you should find
pleasure in her society.... Besides, she has such a reputation that..."
All the blood suddenly rushed to my brain, my eyes flashed fire, I
leaped up and, clutching at my head and stamping my feet, shouted in a
voice unlike my own:
"Let me alone! let me alone! let me alone!"
Probably my face was terrible, my voice was strange, for my wife
suddenly turned pale and began shrieking aloud in a despairing voice
that was utterly unlike her own. Liza, Gnekker, then Yegor, came running
in at our shouts....
"Let me alone!" I cried; "let me alone! Go away!"
My legs turned numb as though they had ceased to exist; I felt myself
falling into someone's arms; for a little while I still heard weeping,
then sank into a swoon which lasted two or three hours.
Now about Katya; she comes to see me every day towards evening, and of
course neither the neighbours nor our acquaintances can avoid noticing
it. She comes in for a minute and carries me off for a drive with her.
She has her own horse and a new chaise bought this summer. Altogether
she lives in an expensive style; she has taken a big detached villa with
a large garden, and has taken all her town retinue with her--two maids, a
coachman... I often ask her:
"Katya, what will you live on when you have spent your father's money?"
"Then we shall see," she answers.
"That money, my dear, deserves to be treated more seriously. It was
earned by a good man, by honest labour."
"You have told me that already. I know it."
At first we drive through the open country, then through the pine-wood
which is visible from my window. Nature seems to me as beautiful as it
always has been, though some evil spirit whispers to me that these pines
and fir trees, birds, and white clouds on the sky, will not notice my
absence when in three or four months I am dead. Katya loves driving, and
she is pleased that it is fine weather and that I am sitting beside her.
She is in good spirits and does not say harsh things.
"You are a very good man, Nikolay Stepanovitch," she says. "You are a
rare specimen, and there isn't an actor who would understand how to play
you. Me or Mihail Fyodorovitch, for instance, any poor actor could do,
but not you. And I envy you, I envy you horribly! Do you know what I
stand for? What?"
She ponders for a minute, and then asks me:
"Nikolay Stepanovitch, I am a negative phenomenon! Yes?"
"Yes," I answer.
"H'm! what am I to do?"
What answer was I to make her? It is easy to say "work," or "give your
possessions to the poor," or "know yourself," and because it is so easy
to say that, I don't know what to answer.