bring the sound of a song and the thrumming of an accordion from a
distant tavern, or a troika with bells would pass quickly by the
seminary fence. That would be quite enough to fill not only my breast
with a sense of happiness, but my stomach, legs, and hands. As I heard
the sound of the accordion or the bells fading away, I would see myself
a doctor and paint pictures, one more glorious than another. And, you
see, my dreams came true. There were more things I dared to dream of. I
have been a favourite professor thirty years, I have had excellent
friends and an honourable reputation. I loved and married when I was
passionately in love. I had children. Altogether, when I look back the
whole of my life seems like a nice, clever composition. The only thing I
have to do now is not to spoil the finale. For this, I must die like a
man. If death is really a danger then I must meet it as becomes a
teacher, a scholar, and a citizen of a Christian State. But I am
spoiling the finale. I am drowning, and I run to you and beg for help,
and you say: 'Drown. It's your duty.'"
At this point a ring at the bell sounds in the hall. Katy and I both
recognise it and say:
"That must be Mikhail Fiodorovich."
And indeed in a minute Mikhail Fiodorovich, my colleague, the
philologist, enters. He is a tall, well-built man about fifty years old,
clean shaven, with thick grey hair and black eyebrows. He is a good man
and an admirable friend. He belongs to an old aristocratic family, a
prosperous and gifted house which has played a notable rôle in the
history of our literature and education. He himself is clever, gifted,
and highly educated, but not without his eccentricities. To a certain
extent we are all eccentric, queer fellows, but his eccentricities have
an element of the exceptional, not quite safe for his friends. Among the
latter I know not a few who cannot see his many merits clearly because
of his eccentricities.
As he walks in he slowly removes his gloves and says in his velvety
bass:
"How do you do? Drinking tea. Just in time. It's hellishly cold."
Then he sits down at the table, takes a glass of tea and immediately
begins to talk. What chiefly marks his way of talking is his invariably
ironical tone, a mixture of philosophy and jest, like Shakespeare's
grave-diggers. He always talks of serious matters; but never seriously.
His opinions are always acid and provocative, but thanks to his tender,
easy, jesting tone, it somehow happens that his acidity and
provocativeness don't tire one's ears, and one very soon gets used to
it. Every evening he brings along some half-dozen stories of the
university life and generally begins with them when he sits down at the
table.
"O Lord," he sighs with an amusing movement of his black eyebrows,
"there are some funny people in the world."
"Who?" asks Katy.
"I was coming down after my lecture to-day and I met that old idiot N----
on the stairs. He walks along, as usual pushing out that horse jowl of
his, looking for some one to bewail his headaches, his wife, and his
students, who won't come to his lectures. 'Well,' I think to myself,
'he's seen me. It's all up--no hope for And so on in the same strain. Or
he begins like this,
"Yesterday I was at Z's public lecture. Tell it not in Gath, but I do
wonder how our alma mater dares to show the public such an ass, such a
double-dyed blockhead as Z. Why he's a European fool. Good Lord, you
won't find one like him in all Europe--not even if you looked in daytime,
and with a lantern. Imagine it: he lectures as though he were sucking a
stick of barley-sugar--su--su--su. He gets a fright because he can't make
out his manuscript. His little thoughts will only just keep moving,
hardly moving, like a bishop riding a bicycle. Above all you can't make
out a word he says. The flies die of boredom, it's so terrific. It can
only be compared with the boredom in the great Hall at the
Commemoration, when the traditional speech is made. To hell with it!"
Immediately an abrupt change of subject.
"I had to make the speech; three years ago. Nicolai Stiepanovich will
remember. It was hot, close. My full uniform was tight under my arms,
tight as death. I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half,
two hours. 'Well,' I thought, 'thank God I've only ten pages left.' And
I had four pages of peroration that I needn't read at all. 'Only six
pages then,' I thought. Imagine it. I just gave a glance in front of me
and saw sitting next to each other in the front row a general with a
broad ribbon and a bishop. The poor devils were bored stiff. They were
staring about madly to stop themselves from going to sleep. For all that
they are still trying to look attentive, to make some appearance of
understanding what I'm reading, and look as though they like it. 'Well,'
I thought, 'if you like it, then you shall have it. I'll spite you.' So
I set to and read the four pages, every word."
When he speaks only his eyes and eyebrows smile as it is generally with
the ironical. At such moments there is no hatred or malice in his eyes
but a great deal of acuteness and that peculiar fox-cunning which you
can catch only in very observant people. Further, about his eyes I have
noticed one more peculiarity. When he takes his glass from Katy, or
listens to her remarks, or follows her with a glance as she goes out of
the room for a little while, then I catch in his look something humble,
prayerful, pure....
The maid takes the samovar away and puts on the table a big piece of
cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne, a thoroughly bad
wine which Katy got to like when she lived in the Crimea. Mikhail
Fiodorovich takes two packs of cards from the shelves and sets them out
for patience. If one may believe his assurances, some games of patience
demand a great power of combination and concentration. Nevertheless
while he sets out the cards he amuses himself by talking continually.
Katy follows his cards carefully, helping him more by mimicry than
words. In the whole evening she drinks no more than two small glasses of
wine, I drink only a quarter of a glass, the remainder of the bottle
falls to Mikhail Fiodorovich, who can drink any amount without ever
getting drunk.
During patience we solve all kinds of questions, mostly of the lofty
order, and our dearest love, science, comes off second best.
"Science, thank God, has had her day," says Mikhail Fiodorovich very
slowly. "She has had her swan-song. Ye-es. Mankind has begun to feel the
desire to replace her by something else. She was grown from the soil of
prejudice, fed by prejudices, and is now the same quintessence of
prejudices as were her bygone grandmothers: alchemy, metaphysics and
philosophy. As between European scholars and the Chinese who have no
sciences at all the difference is merely trifling, a matter only of
externals. The Chinese had no scientific knowledge, but what have they
lost by that?"
"Flies haven't any scientific knowledge either," I say; "but what does
that prove?"
"It's no use getting angry, Nicolai Stiepanich. I say this only between
ourselves. I'm more cautious than you think. I shan't proclaim it from
the housetops, God forbid! The masses still keep alive a prejudice that
science and art are superior to agriculture and commerce, superior to
crafts. Our persuasion makes a living from this prejudice. It's not for
you and me to destroy it. God forbid!"
During patience the younger generation also comes in for it.
"Our public is degenerate nowadays," Mikhail Fiodorovich sighs. "I don't
speak of ideals and such things, I only ask that they should be able to
work and think decently. 'Sadly I look at the men of our time'--it's
quite true in this connection."
"Yes, they're frightfully degenerate," Katy agrees. "Tell me, had you
one single eminent person under you during the last five or ten years?"
"I don't know how it is with the other professors,--but somehow I don't
recollect that it ever happened to me."
"In my lifetime I've seen a great many of your students and young
scholars, a great many actors.... What happened? I never once had the
luck to meet, not a hero or a man of talent, but an ordinarily
interesting person. Everything's dull and incapable, swollen and
pretentious...."
All these conversations about degeneracy give me always the impression
that I have unwittingly overheard an unpleasant conversation about my
daughter. I feel offended because the indictments are made wholesale and
are based upon such ancient hackneyed commonplaces and such penny-
dreadful notions as degeneracy, lack of ideals, or comparisons with the
glorious past. Any indictment, even if it's made in a company of ladies,
should be formulated with all possible precision; otherwise it isn't an
indictment, but an empty calumny, unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, and have served for the last thirty years; but I don't
see any sign either of degeneracy or the lack of ideals. I don't find it
any worse now than before. My porter, Nicolas, whose experience in this
case has its value, says that students nowadays are neither better nor
worse than their predecessors.
If I were asked what was the thing I did not like about my present
pupils, I wouldn't say offhand or answer at length, but with a certain
precision. I know their defects and there's no need for me to take
refuge in a mist of commonplaces. I don't like the way they smoke, and
drink spirits, and marry late; or the way they are careless and
indifferent to the point of allowing students to go hungry in their
midst, and not paying their debts into "The Students' Aid Society." They
are ignorant of modern languages and express themselves incorrectly in
Russian. Only yesterday my colleague, the hygienist, complained to me
that he had to lecture twice as often because of their incompetent
knowledge of physics and their complete ignorance of meteorology. They
are readily influenced by the most modern writers, and some of those not
the best, but they are absolutely indifferent to classics like
Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Pascal; and their worldly
unpracticality shows itself mostly in their inability to distinguish
between great and small. They solve all difficult questions which have a
more or less social character (emigration, for instance) by getting up
subscriptions, but not by the method of scientific investigation and
experiment, though this is at their full disposal, and, above all,
corresponds to their vocation. They readily become house-doctors,
assistant house-doctors, clinical assistants, or consulting doctors, and
they are prepared to keep these positions until they are forty, though
independence, a sense of freedom, and personal initiative are quite as
necessary in science, as, for instance, in art or commerce. I have
pupils and listeners, but I have no helpers or successors. Therefore I
love them and am concerned for them, but I'm not proud of them ... and
so on.
However great the number of such defects may be, it's only in a cowardly
and timid person that they give rise to pessimism and distraction. All
of them are by nature accidental and transitory, and are completely
dependent on the conditions of life. Ten years will be enough for them
to disappear or give place to new and different defects, which are quite
indispensable, but will in their turn give the timid a fright. Students'
shortcomings often annoy me, but the annoyance is nothing in comparison
with the joy I have had these thirty years in speaking with my pupils,
lecturing to them, studying their relations and comparing them with
people of a different class.
Mikhail Fiodorovich is a slanderer. Katy listens and neither of them
notices how deep is the pit into which they are drawn by such an
outwardly innocuous recreation as condemning one's neighbours. They
don't realise how a simple conversation gradually turns into mockery and
derision, or how they both begin even to employ the manners of calumny.
"There are some queer types to be found," says Mikhail Fiodorovich.
"Yesterday I went to see our friend Yegor Pietrovich. There I found a
student, one of your medicos, a third-year man, I think. His face ...
rather in the style of Dobroliubov--the stamp of profound thought on his
brow. We began to talk. 'My dear fellow--an extraordinary business. I've
just read that some German or other--can't remember his name--has
extracted a new alkaloid from the human brain--idiotine.' Do you know he
really believed it, and produced an expression of respect on his face,
as much as to say, 'See, what a power we are.'"
"The other day I went to the theatre. I sat down. Just in front of me in
the next row two people were sitting: one, 'one of the chosen,'
evidently a law student, the other a whiskery medico. The medico was as
drunk as a cobbler. Not an atom of attention to the stage. Dozing and
nodding. But the moment some actor began to deliver a loud monologue, or
just raised his voice, my medico thrills, digs his neighbour in the
ribs. 'What's he say? Something noble?' 'Noble,' answers 'the chosen.'
"'Brrravo!' bawls the medico. 'No--ble. Bravo.' You see the drunken
blockhead didn't come to the theatre for art, but for something noble.
He wants nobility."
Katy listens and laughs. Her laugh is rather strange. She breathes out
in swift, rhythmic, and regular alternation with her inward breathing.
It's as though she were playing an accordion. Of her face, only her
nostrils laugh. My heart fails me. I don't know what to say. I lose my
temper, crimson, jump up from my seat and cry:
"Be quiet, won't you? Why do you sit here like two toads, poisoning the
air with your breath? I've had enough."
In vain I wait for them to stop their slanders. I prepare to go home.
And it's time, too. Past ten o'clock.
"I'll sit here a little longer," says Mikhail Fiodorovich, "if you give
me leave, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?"
"You have my leave," Katy answers.
"Bene. In that case, order another bottle, please."
Together they escort me to the hall with candles in their hands. While
I'm putting on my overcoat, Mikhail Fiodorovich says:
"You've grown terribly thin and old lately. Nicolai Stiepanovich. What's
the matter with you? Ill?
"Yes, a little."
"And he will not look after himself," Katy puts in sternly.
"Why don't you look after yourself? How can you go on like this? God
helps those who help themselves, my dear man. Give my regards to your
family and make my excuses for not coming. One of these days, before I
go abroad, I'll come to say good-bye. Without fail. I'm off next week."
I came away from Katy's irritated, frightened by the talk about my
illness and discontented with myself. "And why," I ask myself,
"shouldn't I be attended by one of my colleagues?" Instantly I see how
my friend, after sounding me, will go to the window silently, think a
little while, turn towards me and say, indifferently, trying to prevent
me from reading the truth in his face: "At the moment I don't see
anything particular; but still, cher confrère, I would advise you to
break off your work...." And that will take my last hope away.
Who doesn't have hopes? Nowadays, when I diagnose and treat myself, I
sometimes hope that my ignorance deceives me, that I am mistaken about
the albumen and sugar which I find, as well as about my heart, and also
about the anasarca which I have noticed twice in the morning. While I
read over the therapeutic text-books again with the eagerness of a
hypochondriac, and change the prescriptions every day, I still believe
that I will come across something hopeful. How trivial it all is!
Whether the sky is cloudy all over or the moon and stars are shining in
it, every time I come back home I look at it and think that death will
take me soon. Surely at that moment my thoughts should be as deep as the
sky, as bright, as striking ... but no! I think of myself, of my wife,
Liza, Gnekker, the students, people in general. My thoughts are not
good, they are mean; I juggle with myself, and at this moment my
attitude towards life can be expressed in the words the famous Arakheev
wrote in one of his intimate letters: "All good in the world is
inseparably linked to bad, and there is always more bad than good."
Which means that everything is ugly, there's nothing to live for, and
the sixty-two years I have lived out must be counted as lost. I surprise
myself in these thoughts and try to convince myself they are accidental
and temporary and not deeply rooted in me, but I think immediately:
"If that's true, why am I drawn every evening to those two toads." And I
swear to myself never to go to Katy any more, though I know I will go to
her again to-morrow.
As I pull my door bell and go upstairs, I feel already that I have no
family and no desire to return to it. It is plain my new, Arakheev
thoughts are not accidental or temporary in me, but possess my whole
being. With a bad conscience, dull, indolent, hardly able to move my
limbs, as though I had a ten ton weight upon me, I lie down in my bed
and soon fall asleep.
And then--insomnia. IV
The summer comes and life changes.
One fine morning Liza comes in to me and says in a joking tone:
"Come, Your Excellency. It's all ready."
They lead My Excellency into the street, put me into a cab and drive me
away. For want of occupation I read the signboards backwards as I go.
The word "Tavern" becomes "Nrevat." That would do for a baron's name:
Baroness Nrevat. Beyond, I drive across the field by the cemetery, which
produces no impression upon me whatever, though I'll soon lie there.
After a two hours' drive, My Excellency is led into the ground-floor of
the bungalow, and put into a small, lively room with a light-blue paper.
Insomnia at night as before, but I am no more wakeful in the morning and
don't listen to my wife, but lie in bed. I don't sleep, but I am in a
sleepy state, half-forgetfulness, when you know you are not asleep, but
have dreams. I get up in the afternoon, and sit down at the table by
force of habit, but now I don't work any more but amuse myself with
French yellow-backs sent me by Katy. Of course it would be more
patriotic to read Russian authors, but to tell the truth I'm not
particularly disposed to them. Leaving out two or three old ones, all
the modern literature doesn't seem to me to be literature but a unique
home industry which exists only to be encouraged, but the goods are
bought with reluctance. The best of these homemade goods can't be called
remarkable and it's impossible to praise it sincerely without a saving
"but"; and the same must be said of all the literary novelties I've read
during the last ten or fifteen years. Not one remarkable, and you can't
dispense with "but." They have cleverness, nobility, and no talent;
talent, nobility and no cleverness; or finally, talent, cleverness, but
no nobility.
I would not say that French books have talent, cleverness, and nobility.
Nor do they satisfy me. But they are not so boring as the Russian; and
it is not rare to find in them the chief constituent of creative
genius--the sense of personal freedom, which is lacking to Russian
authors. I do not recall one single new book in which from the very
first page the author did not try to tie himself up in all manner of
conventions and contracts with his conscience. One is frightened to
speak of the naked body, another is bound hand and foot by psychological
analysis, a third must have "a kindly attitude to his fellow-men," the
fourth heaps up whole pages with descriptions of nature on purpose to
avoid any suspicion of a tendency.... One desires to be in his books a
bourgeois at all costs, another at all costs an aristocrat.
Deliberation, cautiousness, cunning: but no freedom, no courage to write
as one likes, and therefore no creative genius.
All this refers to belles-lettres, so-called.
As for serious articles in Russian, on sociology, for instance, or art
and so forth, I don't read them, simply out of timidity. For some reason
in my childhood and youth I had a fear of porters and theatre
attendants, and this fear has remained with me up till now. Even now I
am afraid of them. It is said that only that which one cannot understand
seems terrible. And indeed it is very difficult to understand why hall-
porters and theatre attendants are so pompous and haughty and
importantly polite. When I read serious articles, I have exactly the
same indefinable fear. Their portentous gravity, their playfulness, like
an archbishop's, their over-familiar attitude to foreign authors, their
capacity for talking dignified nonsense--"filling a vacuum with
emptiness"--it is all inconceivable to me and terrifying, and quite
unlike the modesty and the calm and gentlemanly tone to which I am
accustomed when reading our writers on medicine and the natural
sciences. Not only articles; I have difficulty also in reading
translations even when they are edited by serious Russians. The
presumptuous benevolence of the prefaces, the abundance of notes by the
translator (which prevents one from concentrating), the parenthetical
queries and sics, which are so liberally scattered over the book or the
article by the translator--seem to me an assault on the author's person,
as well as on my independence as a reader.
Once I was invited as an expert to the High Court. In the interval one
of my fellow-experts called my attention to the rude behaviour of the
public prosecutor to the prisoners, among whom were two women
intellectuals. I don't think I exaggerated at all when I replied to my
colleague that he was not behaving more rudely than authors of serious
articles behave to one another. Indeed their behaviour is so rude that
one speaks of them with bitterness. They behave to each other or to the
writers whom they criticise either with too much deference, careless of
their own dignity, or, on the other hand, they treat them much worse
than I have treated Gnekker, my future son-in-law, in these notes and
thoughts of mine. Accusations of irresponsibility, of impure intentions,
of any kind of crime even, are the usual adornment of serious articles.
And this, as our young medicos love to say in their little
articles--quite ultima ratio. Such an attitude must necessarily be
reflected in the character of the young generation of writers, and
therefore I'm not at all surprised that in the new books which, have
been added to our belles lettres in the last ten or fifteen years, the
heroes drink a great deal of vodka and the heroines are not sufficiently
chaste.
I read French books and look out of the window, which is open--I see the
pointed palings of my little garden, two or three skinny trees, and
there, beyond the garden, the road, fields, then a wide strip of young
pine-forest. I often delight in watching a little boy and girl, both
white-haired and ragged, climb on the garden fence and laugh at my
baldness. In their shining little eyes I read, "Come out, thou bald-
head." These are almost the only people who don't care a bit about my
reputation or my title.
I don't have visitors everyday now. I'll mention only the visits of
Nicolas and Piotr Ignatievich. Nicolas comes to me usually on holidays,
pretending to come on business, but really to see me. He is very
hilarious, a thing which never happens to him in the winter.
"Well, what have you got to say?" I ask him, coming out into the
passage.
"Your Excellency!" he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking
at me with a lover's rapture. "Your Excellency! So help me God! God
strike me where I stand! Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus."
And he kisses me eagerly on the shoulders, on my sleeves, and buttons.
"Is everything all right over there?" I ask.
"Your Excellency! I swear to God...."
He never stops swearing, quite unnecessarily, and I soon get bored, and
send him to the kitchen, where they give him dinner. Piotr Ignatievich
also comes on holidays specially to visit me and communicate his
thoughts to me. He usually sits by the table in my room, modest, clean,
judicious, without daring to cross his legs or lean his elbows on the
table, all the while telling me in a quiet, even voice what he considers
very piquant items of news gathered from journals and pamphlets.
These items are all alike and can be reduced to the following type: A
Frenchman made a discovery. Another--a German--exposed him by showing that
this discovery had been made as long ago as 1870 by some American. Then
a third--also a German--outwitted them both by showing that both of them
had been confused, by taking spherules of air under a microscope for
dark pigment. Even when he wants to make me laugh, Piotr Ignatievich
tells his story at great length, very much as though he were defending a
thesis, enumerating his literary sources in detail, with every effort to
avoid mistakes in the dates, the particular number of the journal and
the names. Moreover, he does not say Petit simply but inevitably, Jean
Jacques Petit. If he happens to stay to dinner, he will tell the same
sort of piquant stories and drive all the company to despondency. If
Gnekker and Liza begin to speak of fugues and counter-fugues in his
presence he modestly lowers his eyes, and his face falls. He is ashamed
that such trivialities should be spoken of in the presence of such
serious men as him and me.