Short Stories by Anton Chekhov

THE DEATH OF A CLERK

One fine evening the no less fine office manager Ivan Dmitrich Cherviakov¹ was sitting in the second row of the stalls, watching The Bells of Corneville² through opera glasses. He watched and felt himself at the height of bliss. But suddenly … This "but suddenly" occurs often in stories. The authors are right: life is so full of the unexpected! But suddenly his face wrinkled, his eyes rolled, his breath stopped … he put down the opera glasses, bent forward, and … ah-choo!!! As you see, he sneezed. Sneezing is not prohibited to anyone anywhere. Peasants sneeze, police chiefs sneeze, sometimes even privy councillors sneeze. Everybody sneezes. Cherviakov, not embarrassed in the least, wiped his nose with his handkerchief and, being a polite man, looked around to see whether his sneezing had disturbed anyone. And now he did become embarrassed. He saw that the little old man sitting in front of him in the first row of the stalls was carefully wiping his bald head and neck with his glove and muttering something. Cherviakov recognized the little old man as General Brizzhalov,³ who served in the Department of Transportation.

"I sprayed him!" thought Cherviakov. "He's not my superior, he serves elsewhere, but still it's awkward. I must apologize."

Cherviakov coughed, leaned forward, and whispered in the general's ear:

"Excuse me, Yr'xcellency, I sprayed you … I accidentally …"

"Never mind, never mind …"

"For God's sake, excuse me. I … I didn't mean it!"

"Ah, do sit down, please! Let me listen!"

Cherviakov became embarrassed, smiled stupidly, and began looking at the stage. He looked, but felt no more bliss. Anxiety began to torment him. In the intermission he went up to Brizzhalov, walked around him, and, overcoming his timidity, murmured:

"I sprayed you, Yr'xcellency … Forgive me … I … it's not that I …"

"Ah, come now… I've already forgotten, and you keep at it!" said the general, impatiently twitching his lower lip.

"Forgotten, but there's malice in his eyes," thought Cherviakov, glancing suspiciously at the general. "He doesn't even want to talk. I must explain to him that I really didn't mean it … that it's a law of nature, otherwise he'll think I wanted to spit. If he doesn't think so now, he will later! …"

On returning home, Cherviakov told his wife about his rudeness. His wife, it seemed to him, treated the incident much too lightly. She merely got frightened, but then, on learning that Brizzhalov served "elsewhere," she calmed down.

"But all the same you should go and apologize," she said. "He might think you don't know how to behave in public!"

"That's just it! I apologized, but he was somehow strange … Didn't say a single sensible word. And then there was no time to talk."

The next day Cherviakov put on a new uniform, had his hair cut, and went to Brizzhalov to explain … Going into the general's reception room, he saw many petitioners there, and among them was the general himself, who had already begun to receive petitions. Having questioned several petitioners, the general raised his eyes to Cherviakov.

"Yesterday, in the Arcadia, if you recall, Yr'xcellency," the office manager began, "I sneezed, sir, and … accidentally sprayed you … Forg …"

"Such trifles … God knows! Can I be of help to you?" the general addressed the next petitioner.

"He doesn't want to talk!" thought Cherviakov, turning pale. "That means he's angry … No, it can't be left like this … I'll explain to him …"

When the general finished his discussion with the last petitioner and headed for the inner rooms, Cherviakov followed him and murmured:

"Yr'xcellency! If I venture to trouble Yr'xcellency, it's precisely, I might say, from a feeling of repentance! … It wasn't on purpose, you know that yourself, sir!"

The general made a tearful face and waved his hand.

"You must be joking, my dear sir!" he said, disappearing behind the door.

"What kind of joke is it?" thought Cherviakov. "This is no kind of joke at all! A general, yet he can't understand! If that's the way it is, I won't apologize to the swaggerer any more! Devil take him! I'll write him a letter, but I won't come myself! By God, I won't!"

So Cherviakov thought, walking home. He wrote no letter to the general. He thought and thought, and simply could not think up that letter. So the next day he had to go himself and explain.

"I came yesterday to trouble Yr'xcellency," he began to murmur, when the general raised his questioning eyes to him, "not for a joke, as you were pleased to say. I was apologizing for having sneezed and sprayed you, sir … and I never even thought of joking. Would I dare joke with you? If we start joking, soon there won't be any respect for persons … left…"

"Get out!!" barked the general, suddenly turning blue and shaking.

"What, sir?" Cherviakov asked in a whisper, sinking with terror.

"Get out!!" the general repeated, stamping his feet.

Something in Cherviakov's stomach snapped. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, he backed his way to the door, went out, and plodded off… Reaching home mechanically, without taking off his uniform, he lay down on the sofa and … died.
JULY 1883

SMALL FRY

Dear sir, father and benefactor!" the clerk Nevyrazimov¹ wrote in the draft of a letter of congratulations. "May you spend this bright day,² and many more to come, in good health and prosperity And may your fam …"

The lamp, which was running out of kerosene, smoked and stank of burning. On the table, near Nevyrazimov's writing hand, a stray cockroach was anxiously running about. Two rooms away from the duty-room, the hall porter Paramon was polishing his Sunday boots for the third time, and with such energy that his spitting and the noise of the shoe brush could be heard in all the rooms.

"What else shall I write to the scoundrel?" Nevyrazimov reflected, raising his eyes to the sooty ceiling.

On the ceiling he saw a dark circle—the shadow of the lampshade. Further down were dusty cornices; still further down—walls that had once been painted a bluish-brown color. And the duty-room looked like such a wasteland to him that he felt pity not only for himself but even for the cockroach …

"I'll finish my duty and leave, but he'll spend his whole cockroach life on duty here," he thought, stretching. "Agony! Shall I polish my boots, or what?"

And, stretching once more, Nevyrazimov trudged lazily to the porter's lodge. Paramon was no longer polishing his boots … Holding the brush in one hand and crossing himself with the other, he was standing by the open vent window,³ listening …

"They're ringing!" he whispered to Nevyrazimov, looking at him with fixed, wide-open eyes. "Already, sir!"

Nevyrazimov put his ear to the vent and listened. Through the vent, together with the fresh spring air, the ringing of the Easter bells came bursting into the room. The booming of the bells mingled with the noise of carriages, and all that stood out from the chaos of sounds was a pert tenor ringing in the nearest church and someone's loud, shrill laughter.

"So many people!" sighed Nevyrazimov, looking down the street, where human shadows flitted one after another past the lighted lamps. "Everybody's running to church … Our fellows must've had a drink by now and be hanging around the city. All that laughter and talking! I'm the only one so wretched as to have to sit here on such a day. And every year I have to do it!"

"Who tells you to get yourself hired? You weren't on duty today, it was Zastupov hired you to replace him. Whenever there's a holiday, you get yourself hired … It's greed!"

"The devil it's greed! What's there to be greedy about: two roubles in cash, plus a necktie … It's need, not greed! And, you know, it would be nice to go with them all to church now, and then break the fast⁴… Have a drink, a bite to eat, then hit the sack … You sit at the table, the kulich⁵ has been blessed, and there's a hissing samovar, and some little object beside you … You drink a glass, chuck her under the chin, and it feels good … you feel you're a human being … Ehh … life's gone to hell! There's some rogue driving by in a carriage, and you just sit here thinking your thoughts …"

"To each his own, Ivan Danilych. God willing, you'll get promoted, too, and drive around in carriages."

"Me? No, brother, that I won't. I'll never get beyond titular councillor,⁶ even if I burst… I'm uneducated."

"Our general hasn't got any education either, and yet …"

"Well, the general, before he amounted to all that, stole a hundred thousand. And his bearing is nothing like mine, brother … With my bearing you don't get far! And my name is so scoundrelly: Nevyrazimov! In short, brother, the situation's hopeless. Live like that if you want, and if you don't—go hang yourself…"

Nevyrazimov left the vent window and began pacing the rooms in anguish. The booming of the bells grew louder and louder … It was no longer necessary to stand by the window in order to hear it. And the clearer the sound of the ringing, the noisier the clatter of the carriages, the darker seemed the brownish walls and sooty cornices, and the worse the smoking of the lamp.

"Maybe I'll skip work?" thought Nevyrazimov.

But escape did not promise anything worthwhile … After leaving the office and loitering around town, Nevyrazimov would go to his place, and his place was still grayer and worse than the duty-room … Suppose he spent that day nicely, in comfort, what then? The same gray walls, the same work for hire and letters of congratulations …

Nevyrazimov stopped in the middle of the duty-room and pondered.

The need for a new, better life wrung his heart with unbearable anguish. He passionately longed to find himself suddenly in the street, to merge with the living crowd, to take part in the festivity, in honor of which the bells were all booming and the carriages clattering. He wanted something he used to experience in childhood: the family circle, the festive faces of his relatives, the white table cloth, light, warmth … He remembered the carriage in which a lady had just passed by, the overcoat in which the office manager strutted about, the gold chain adorning the secretary's chest … He remembered a warm bed, a Stanislas,⁷ new boots, a uniform with no holes in the elbows … remembered, because he did not have any of it …

"Maybe try stealing?" he thought. "Stealing's not hard, I suppose, but the problem is hiding it … They say people run away to America with what they steal, but, devil knows, where is this America? In order to steal, you also have to have education."

The ringing stopped. Only the distant noise of a carriage was heard, and Paramon's coughing, and Nevyrazimov's sadness and spite grew stronger and more unbearable. The office clock struck half-past midnight.

"Maybe write a denunciation? Proshkin denounced somebody and started rising in the world …"

Nevyrazimov sat down at his desk and pondered. The lamp, which had completely run out of kerosene, was smoking badly now and threatening to go out. The stray cockroach still scurried about the table and found no shelter …

"I could denounce somebody, but how write it out! It has to be with all those equivocations and dodges, like Proshkin … Not me! I'll write something and get in trouble for it myself. A complete nitwit, devil take me!"

And Nevyrazimov, racking his brain for some way out of his hopeless situation, stared at the draft of the letter he had written. The letter was to a man he hated and feared with all his soul, and from whom he had been trying for ten years to obtain a transfer from a sixteen-rouble post to an eighteen-rouble …

"Ah … running about here, you devil!" With the palm of his hand he spitefully swatted the cockroach, which had had the misfortune of catching his eye. "What vileness!"

The cockroach fell on its back and desperately waved its legs … Nevyrazimov took it by one leg and threw it into the lamp. The lamp flared and crackled …

And Nevyrazimov felt better.
MARCH 1885

THE HUNTSMAN

Asultry and stifling day. Not a cloud in the sky … The sun-scorched grass looks bleak, hopeless: there may be rain, but it will never be green again … The forest stands silent, motionless, as if its treetops were looking off somewhere or waiting for something.

A tall, narrow-shouldered man of about forty, in a red shirt, patched gentleman's trousers, and big boots, lazily saunters along the edge of the clearing. He saunters down the road. To his right are green trees, to his left, all the way to the horizon, stretches a golden sea of ripe rye … His face is red and sweaty. A white cap with a straight jockey's visor, apparently the gift of some generous squire, sits dashingly on his handsome blond head. Over his shoulder hangs a game bag with a crumpled black grouse in it. The man is carrying a cocked double-barreled shotgun and squinting his eyes at his old, skinny dog, who runs ahead, sniffing about in the bushes. It is quiet, not a sound anywhere … Everything alive is hiding from the heat.

"Yegor Vlasych!" the hunter suddenly hears a soft voice.

He gives a start and turns around, scowling. Beside him, as if sprung from the ground, stands a pale-faced woman of about thirty with a sickle in her hand. She tries to peer into his face and smiles shyly.

"Ah, it's you, Pelageya!" says the hunter, stopping and slowly un-cocking his gun. "Hm! … How did you turn up here?"

"The women from our village are working here, so I'm here with them … Hired help, Yegor Vlasych."

"So-o …" Yegor Vlasych grunts and slowly goes on.

Pelageya follows him. They go about twenty steps in silence.

"I haven't seen you for a long time, Yegor Vlasych …" says Pelageya, gazing tenderly at the hunter's moving shoulders and shoulder blades. "You stopped by our cottage for a drink of water on Easter day, and we haven't seen you since … You stopped for a minute on Easter day, and that God knows how … in a drunken state … You swore at me, beat me, and left … I've been waiting and waiting … I've looked my eyes out waiting for you … Eh, Yegor Vlasych, Yegor Vlasych! If only you'd come one little time!"

"What's there for me to do at your place?"

"There's nothing to do there, of course, just … anyway there's the household … Things to be seen to … You're the master … Look at you, shot a grouse, Yegor Vlasych! Why don't you sit down and rest …"

As she says all this, Pelageya laughs like a fool and looks up at Yegor's face … Her own face breathes happiness …

"Sit down? Why not …" Yegor says in an indifferent tone and picks a spot between two pine saplings. "Why are you standing? Sit down, too!"

Pelageya sits down a bit further away in a patch of sun and, ashamed of her joy, covers her smiling mouth with her hand. Two minutes pass in silence.

"If only you'd come one little time," Pelageya says softly.

"What for?" sighs Yegor, taking off his cap and wiping his red forehead with his sleeve. "There's no need. To stop by for an hour or two—dally around, get you stirred up—and my soul can't stand living all the time in the village … You know I'm a spoiled man … I want there to be a bed, and good tea, and delicate conversation … I want to have all the degrees, and in the village there you've got poverty, soot … I couldn't even live there a day. Suppose they issued a decree that I absolutely had to live with you, I'd either burn down the cottage or lay hands on myself. From early on I've been spoiled like this, there's no help for it."

"Where do you live now?"

"At the squire Dmitri Ivanych's, as a hunter. I furnish game for his table, but it's more like … he keeps me because he's pleased to."

"It's not a dignified thing to do, Yegor Vlasych … For people it's just toying, but for you it's like a trade … a real occupation …"

"You don't understand, stupid," says Yegor, dreamily looking at the sky. "In all your born days you've never understood and never will understand what kind of a man I am … To you, I'm a crazy, lost man, but for somebody who understands, I'm the best shot in the whole district. The gentlemen feel it and even printed something about me in a magazine. Nobody can match me in the line of hunting … And if I scorn your village occupations, it's not because I'm spoiled or proud. Right from infancy, you know, I've never known any occupation but guns and dogs. Take away my gun, I'll get a fishing pole, take away the fishing pole, I'll hunt bare-handed. Well, and I also did some horse-trading, roamed around the fairs whenever I had some money, and you know yourself, if any peasant gets in with hunters or horse traders, it's good-bye to the plough. Once a free spirit settles in a man, there's no getting it out of him. It's like when a squire goes to the actors or into some other kind of artistry, then for him there's no being an official or a landowner. You're a woman, you don't understand, and it takes understanding."

"I understand, Yegor Vlasych."

"Meaning you don't understand, since you're about to cry …"

"I … I'm not crying …" says Pelageya, turning away. "It's a sin, Yegor Vlasych! You could spend at least one little day with me, poor woman. It's twelve years since I married you, and … and never once was there any love between us! … I … I'm not crying.

"Love …" Yegor mutters, scratching his arm. "There can't be any love. It's just in name that we're man and wife, but is it really so? For you I'm a wild man, and for me you're a simple woman, with no understanding. Do we make a couple? I'm free, spoiled, loose, and you're a barefoot farm worker, you live in dirt, you never straighten your back. I think like this about myself, that I'm first in the line of hunting, but you look at me with pity … What kind of couple are we?"

"But we were married in church, Yegor Vlasych!" Pelageya sobs.

"Not freely… Did you forget? You can thank Count Sergei Pavlych … and yourself. The count was envious that I was a better shot than he was, kept me drunk for a whole month, and a drunk man can not only be married off but can even be seduced into a different faith. In revenge he up and married me to you … A huntsman to a cow girl. You could see I was drunk, why did you marry me? You're not a serf, you could have told him no! Of course, a cow girl's lucky to marry a huntsman, but we need to be reasonable. Well, so now you can suffer and cry. It's a joke for the count, but you cry … beat your head on the wall …"

Silence ensues. Three wild ducks fly over the clearing. Yegor looks at them and follows them with his eyes until they turn into three barely visible specks and go down far beyond the forest.

"How do you live?" he asks, shifting his eyes from the ducks to Pelageya.

"I go out to work now, and in winter I take a baby from the orphanage and nurse him with a bottle. They give me a rouble and a half a month." So-o …

Again silence. From the harvested rows comes a soft song, which breaks off at the very beginning. It is too hot for singing …

"They say you put up a new cottage for Akulina," says Pelageya.

Yegor is silent.

"It means she's after your own heart …"

"That's just your luck, your fate!" says the hunter, stretching. "Bear with it, orphan. But, anyhow, good-bye, we've talked too much … I've got to make it to Boltovo by evening …"

Yegor gets up, stretches, shoulders his gun. Pelageya stands up.

"And when will you come to the village?" she asks softly.

"No point. I'll never come sober, and when I'm drunk there's not much profit for you. I get angry when I'm drunk … Good-bye!"

"Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych …"

Yegor puts his cap on the back of his head and, clucking for his dog, continues on his way. Pelageya stays where she is and looks at his back … She sees his moving shoulder blades, his dashing head, his lazy, nonchalant stride, and her eyes fill with sadness and a tender caress … Her gaze moves over the tall, skinny figure of her husband and caresses and fondles it … He seems to feel this gaze, stops, and looks back … He is silent, but Pelageya can see from his face, from his raised shoulders, that he wants to say something to her. She timidly goes up to him and looks at him with imploring eyes.

"For you!" he says, turning away

He hands her a worn rouble and quickly walks off.

"Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych!" she says, mechanically accepting the rouble.

He walks down the long road straight as a stretched-out belt … She stands pale, motionless as a statue, and catches his every step with her eyes. But now the red color of his shirt merges with the dark color of his trousers, his steps can no longer be seen, the dog is indistinguishable from his boots. Only his visored cap can still be seen, but … suddenly Yegor turns sharply to the right in the clearing and the cap disappears into the greenery.

"Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych!" Pelageya whispers and stands on tiptoe so as at least to see the white cap one more time.
JULY 1885

THE MALEFACTOR

Before the examining magistrate stands a puny, exceedingly scrawny little peasant in a calico shirt and patched trousers. His face is overgrown with hair and eaten with pockmarks, and his eyes, barely visible through his thick, beetling brows, have an expression of sullen sternness. On his head a whole mop of long-uncombed, matted hair, which endows him with a still greater spiderlike sternness. He is barefoot.

"Denis Grigoriev!" the magistrate begins. "Come closer and answer my questions. On the seventh day of July instant the railroad watchman Ivan Semyonovich Akinfov, proceeding along the line in the morning, at the ninety-first mile post found you unscrewing one of the nuts by means of which the rails are fastened to the ties. Here is that nut! … With which nut he also detained you. Is that how it went?"

"Wha?"

"Did it all go as Akinfov explains?"

"Sure it did."

"Good. Now, why were you unscrewing the nut?"

"Wha?"

"Drop this 'wha?' of yours and answer the question: why were you unscrewing the nut?"

"If I didn't need it, I wouldn't have been unscrewing it," croaks Denis, looking askance at the ceiling.

"And why did you need this nut?"

"That nut there? We make sinkers out of 'em …"

"We who?"

"Us folk … the Klimovo peasants, that is."

"Listen, brother, don't play the idiot here. Talk sense. There's no point in lying about sinkers!"

"Never lied in all my born days, so now I'm lying …" mumbles Denis, blinking his eyes. "Could we do without a sinker, Your Honor? If you put a live worm or a minnow on a hook, how'll it ever go down without a sinker? Lying …" Denis smirks. "Who the devil needs live bait if it floats up top! Your perch, your pike, your burbot always bites on the bottom, and if the bait floats up top, it's only good for catching gobies, and even that's rare … Gobies don't live in our river … It's a fish that likes space."

"What are you telling me about gobies for?"

"Wha? But you asked yourself! The gentry here fish the same way, too. Not even the merest lad would go fishing without a sinker. Of course, if somebody's got no sense at all, he'll try and fish without a sinker. A fool is as a fool does …"

"So you tell me that you were unscrewing this nut in order to make a sinker out of it?"

"What else? Can't play knucklebones with it!"

"But you could use a bit of lead for a sinker, a bullet … a nail of some sort…"

"You won't find lead lying about, you've got to buy it, and a nail's no good. There nothing better than a nut … It's heavy, and it's got a hole in it."

"He pretends to be such a fool! As if he was born yesterday or fell from the moon! Don't you understand, dunderhead, what this unscrewing leads to? If the watchman hadn't spotted it, a train might have gone off the rails, people might have been killed! You'd have killed people!"

"God forbid, Your Honor! Why kill? Are we heathens or villains of some kind? Thank the Lord, my good sir, we've lived our life without any killing, such thoughts never even enter our head … Queen of Heaven, save us and have mercy … How could you, sir!"

"And what do you think causes train accidents? Unscrew two or three nuts, and you've got yourself an accident!"

Denis smirks and squints his eyes mistrustfully at the magistrate.

"Well! All these years the whole village has been unscrewing nuts and the Lord's preserved us, so now it's an accident … killing people … If I took away the rail or, let's say, put a log across the tracks, well, then the train might go off, but this … pah! a nut!"

"But you must understand, the nuts fasten the rail to the tie!"

"We understand that … We don't unscrew all of them … we leave some … We don't do it mindlessly … we understand …"

Denis yawns and makes a cross over his mouth.

"Last year a train went off the rails here," says the magistrate, "now I see why …"

"Beg pardon, sir?"

"Now, I said, I see why a train went off the rails last year … I understand!"

"That's what you get educated for, so you'll understand, most merciful judges … The Lord knew who to give understanding to … And here you've considered how and what, but a watchman's the same as a peasant, he's got no understanding, he just grabs you by the scruff of the neck and drags you off… Reason first, and then drag! Like they say—peasant head, peasant thoughts … Write this down, too, Your Honor, that he hit me twice in the teeth and the chest."

"When they searched your place, they found a second nut … When and where did you unscrew it?"

"You mean the one that was under the little red trunk?"

"I don't know where it was, I only know they found it. When did you unscrew it?"

"I didn't unscrew it, it was Ignashka, the son of one-eyed Semyon, gave it to me. I mean the one that was under the little trunk, and the one that was in the sledge in the yard I unscrewed along with Mitrofan."

"Which Mitrofan?"

"Mitrofan Petrov … You've never heard of him? He makes nets and sells them to the gentry. He needs a lot of these same nuts. Reckon maybe a dozen for each net …"

"Listen … Article one thousand and eighty-one of the Criminal Code says that any deliberate damage to the railways, in case it endangers the transport availing itself of those railways, and with the perpetrator's knowledge that the consequences thereof will be an accident—understand? knowledge! And you couldn't help knowing what this unscrewing would lead to—will be punishable by a term at hard labor."

"Of course, you know best … We're ignorant folk … what do we understand?"

"You understand everything! You're lying and dissembling!"

"Why lie? Ask in the village, if you don't believe me … Without a sinker you only get bleak. You won't even get gudgeon, the worst of the lot, without a sinker."

"Next you'll be talking about gobies again!" the magistrate smiles.

"We've got no gobies here … If we fish on top without a sinker, using butterflies for bait, we get chub, and even that's rare."

"Well, be quiet …"

Silence ensues. Denis shifts from one foot to the other, stares at the table covered with green baize, and blinks his eyes strenuously, as if what he sees before him is not baize but the sun. The magistrate is writing rapidly.

"Can I go?" asks Denis, after some silence.

"No. I must put you under arrest and send you to prison."

Denis stops blinking and, raising his thick eyebrows, looks questioningly at the official.

"That is, how do you mean—to prison? Your Honor! I haven't got time, I have to go to the fair, and also get three roubles from Yegor for the lard …"

"Quiet, don't disturb me …"

"To prison … If it was for something, I'd go, but like this … for a fleabite … Why? Seems I didn't steal, I didn't fight … And if you've got doubts about the arrears, Your Honor, don't believe the headman … Better ask mister permanent member … An ungodly fellow, that headman …"

"Quiet!"

"I'm quiet as it is …" mutters Denis. "I'll swear an oath the headman's accounts are a pack of lies … We're three brothers: Kuzma Grigoriev, that is, and Yegor Grigoriev, and me, Denis Grigoriev…"

"You're disturbing me … Hey, Semyon!" shouts the magistrate. "Take him away!"

"We're three brothers," mutters Denis, as two stalwart soldiers take him and lead him from the chamber. "Brother's not answerable for brother. Kuzma doesn't pay and you, Denis, have to answer … Judges! Our late master, the general, died, may he rest in peace, otherwise he'd show you judges something … You've got to judge knowingly, not just anyhow… Give a whipping, even, but so as it's for a reason, in all fairness …"
JULY 1885

PANIKHIDA

In the church of the Mother of God Hodigitria,¹ the one in the village of Verkhnie Zaprudy, the morning liturgy has just ended. People have begun moving and pouring out of the church. The only one who does not stir is the shopkeeper Andrei Andreich, the Verkhnie Zaprudy intellectual and old-timer. He leans his elbow on the railing of the choir to the right and waits. His clean-shaven, fat face, bumpy from former pimples, on this occasion expresses two opposite feelings: humility before inscrutable destiny, and a dumb, boundless haughtiness before all those passing kaftans and motley kerchiefs. He is smartly dressed for Sunday. He is wearing a flannel coat with yellow ivory buttons, dark blue, straight-legged trousers, and stout galoshes, the same huge, clumsy galoshes that are met with only on the feet of people who are positive, sensible, and have firm religious convictions.

His swollen, lazy eyes are turned to the iconostasis.² He sees the long-familiar faces of the saints, the caretaker Matvei puffing his cheeks to blow out the candles, the darkened icon stands, the worn rug, the beadle Lopukhov, who rushes from the sanctuary and brings the warden a prosphora³ … All this he has seen over and over again, like his own five fingers … One thing, however, is somewhat strange and unusual: Father Grigory is standing by the north door, still in his vestments, blinking angrily with his thick eyebrows.

"Who is he blinking at, God be with him?" thinks the shopkeeper. "Ah, now he's beckoning with his finger! And, mercy me, stamping his foot … Holy Mother, what a thing! Who is it at?"

Andrei Andreich turns around and sees that the church is already quite empty There are about a dozen people crowding at the door, and with their backs turned to the sanctuary

"Come when you're called! Why are you standing there like a statue?" he hears the angry voice of Father Grigory "It's you I'm calling!"

The shopkeeper looks at the red, wrathful face of Father Grigory and only now realizes that the blinking of the eyebrows and beckoning of the finger may be addressed to him. He gives a start, separates himself from the choir, and, stamping his stout galoshes, goes hesitantly towards the sanctuary.

"Andrei Andreich, was it you who sent in a note about the departed Maria?" the priest asks, angrily looking up at his fat, sweaty face.

"It was."

"So, then, it was you who wrote this? You?"

And Father Grigory angrily thrusts a little note into his eyes. And in this note, which Andrei Andreich sent in with a prosphora for the proskomedia,⁴ there is written in big, unsteady-looking letters:

"For the departed servant of God, the harlot Maria."

"It was … I wrote it, sir …" the shopkeeper replies.

"But how did you dare to write that?" the priest draws out in a whisper, and in his hoarse whisper both wrath and fear can be heard.

The shopkeeper gazes at him in dumb astonishment, becomes perplexed and frightened himself: never before has Father Grigory spoken in that tone with the Verkhnie Zaprudy intellectual! For a moment the two are silent, peering into each other's eyes. The shopkeeper's perplexity is so great that his fat face spreads in all directions like spilled batter.

"How did you dare?" the priest repeats.

"Wh … what, sir?" Andrei Andreich's perplexity continues.

"You don't understand?!" Father Grigory whispers, stepping back in amazement and clasping his hands. "What's that on your shoulders—a head, or some other object? You send a note in to the sanctuary and write a word on it that is even indecent to say in the street! Why are you goggling your eyes? Don't you know the meaning of this word?"

"That is, concerning the harlot, sir?" murmurs the shopkeeper, blushing and blinking his eyes. "But the Lord, in his goodness, I mean … that is, he forgave the harlot … and prepared a place for her, and from the life of the blessed Mary of Egypt⁵ we can see, in that same sense of the word, begging your pardon …"

The shopkeeper wants to give some further argument as an excuse, but gets confused and wipes his mouth with his sleeve.

"So that's how you understand it!" Father Grigory clasps his hands. "But the Lord forgave—you understand?—forgave, and you judge, denounce, call someone an indecent name—and who? Your own departed daughter! Not only in sacred, but even in secular writings you cannot find such a sin! I repeat to you, Andrei: don't get too clever! Yes, brother, don't get too clever! God may have given you a searching mind, but if you can't control it, you'd better give up thinking … Give up thinking and keep quiet!"

"But she was a sort of… begging your pardon … a play-actress!" pronounces the stunned Andrei Andreich.

"A play-actress! But whoever she was, you must forget it all after her death, and not go writing it in your notes!"

"That's so …" agrees the shopkeeper.

"You ought to have a penance laid on you." From inside the sanctuary comes the bass voice of the deacon, who looks contemptuously at Andrei Andreich's abashed face. "Then you'd stop acting smart! Your daughter was a famous artiste. Her death was even reported in the newspapers … Philosophizer!"

"That, of course … in fact …" mutters the shopkeeper, "is not a suitable word, but it wasn't by way of judging, Father Grigory, but to make it godly-like … so you could see better who to pray for. People do write different titles for commemoration, like, say, the child Ioann, the drowned Pelageya, the warrior Yegor, the murdered Pavel, and such like … That's what I wanted."

"None too bright, Andrei! God will forgive you, but next time watch out. Above all, don't get clever, just think as others do. Make ten bows and go."

"Yes, sir," says the shopkeeper, happy that the admonishment is over, and again giving his face an expression of gravity and importance. "Ten bows? Very good, sir, I understand. And now, Father, allow me to make a request … Because, since I'm her father, after all … you know, and she, whatever she was, she's my daughter, after all, I sort of… begging your pardon, I'd like to ask you to serve a panikhida⁶ today And I'd like to ask you, too, Father Deacon!"

"Now, that's good!" says Father Grigory, taking off his vestments. "I praise you for it. Meets my approval … Well, go! We'll come out at once."

Andrei Andreich gravely walks away from the sanctuary and stops in the middle of the church, flushed, with a solemnly panikhidal expression on his face. The caretaker Matvei places a little table with kolivo⁷ before him, and in a short time the panikhida begins.

The church is quiet. There is only the metallic sound of the censer and the drawn-out singing … Beside Andrei Andreich stands the caretaker Matvei, the midwife Makaryevna, and her boy Mitka with the paralyzed arm. There is no one else. The beadle sings poorly, in an unpleasant, hollow bass, but the melody and the words are so sad that the shopkeeper gradually loses his grave expression and is plunged in sorrow. He remembers his little Mashutka. He recalls that she was born while he was still working as a servant for the master of Verkhnie Zaprudy Owing to the bustle of his servant's life, he did not notice his girl growing up. For him the long period during which she formed into a graceful being with a blond little head and pensive eyes as big as kopecks went unnoticed. She was brought up, like all children of favorite servants, pampered, together with the young ladies. The gentlefolk, having nothing to do, taught her to read, write, and dance, and he did not interfere with her upbringing. Only rarely, accidentally, meeting her somewhere by the gate or on the landing of the stairs, did he remember that she was his daughter, and he began, as far as his time allowed, to teach her prayers and sacred history. Oh, even then he had a reputation for knowing the services and the holy scriptures! The girl, however grim and solemn her father's face, listened to him willingly. She yawned repeating prayers after him, but on the other hand, when he began telling her stories, stammering and adding flowery embellishments, she turned all ears. At Esau's mess of pottage, the punishment of Sodom, and the ordeals of the little boy Joseph,⁸ she grew pale and opened her blue eyes wide.

Later, when he quit being a servant and opened a village shop with the money he had saved, Mashutka left for Moscow with the master's family.

Three years before her death, she came to see her father. He barely recognized her. She was a slender young woman with the manners of a lady and dressed like gentlefolk. She spoke cleverly, as if from a book, smoked tobacco, slept till noon. When Andrei Andreich asked her what she was, she boldly looked him straight in the eye and said: "I am an actress!" Such frankness seemed to the former servant the height of cynicism. Mashutka began boasting of her successes and of her artistic life, but seeing that her father only turned purple and spread his arms, she fell silent. And thus silently, without looking at each other, they spent some two weeks, until she left. Before leaving, she persuaded her father to go for a stroll with her along the embankment. Terrified though he was of going for a stroll with his actress daughter in broad daylight, in front of all honest people, he yielded to her entreaties …

"What wonderful places you have here!" she admired as they strolled. "Such dells and marshes! God, how beautiful my birthplace is!"

And she wept.

"These places only take up room …" thought Andrei Andreich, gazing stupidly at the dells and failing to understand his daughter's admiration. "They're about as useful as teats on a bull."

But she wept, wept and breathed greedily with her whole breast, as if sensing that she did not have long to breathe …

Andrei Andreich tosses his head like a stung horse and, to stifle the painful memories, starts crossing himself rapidly …

"Remember, O Lord," he murmurs, "the departed servant of God, the harlot Maria, and forgive her transgressions both voluntary and involuntary …"

The indecent word again escapes his mouth, but he does not notice it: what is stuck fast in his consciousness will not be dug out of it even by a nail, still less by Father Grigory's admonitions! Makaryevna sighs and whispers something, sucking in air. Mitka with the paralyzed arm ponders something …

"… where there is no sickness, sorrow or sighing …" drones the beadle, putting his hand to his right cheek.

Bluish smoke streams from the censer and bathes in a wide, slanting ray of sunlight that crosses the gloomy, lifeless emptiness of the church. And it seems that, together with the smoke, the soul of the departed woman herself hovers in the ray of sunlight. The streams of smoke, looking like a child's curls, twist, rush upwards to the window and seem to shun the dejection and grief that fill this poor soul.
FEBRUARY 1886

ANYUTA

In the cheapest furnished rooms of the Hotel Lisbon, the third- year medical student, Stepan Klochkov, paced up and down and diligently ground away at his medicine. The relentless, strenuous grinding made his mouth dry, and sweat stood out on his forehead. By the window, coated at the edges with icy designs, his roommate Anyuta sat on a stool. She was a small, thin brunette of about twenty-five, very pale, with meek gray eyes. Her back bent, she was embroidering the collar of a man's shirt with red thread. It was an urgent job … The clock in the corridor hoarsely struck two, but the room had not yet been tidied. A crumpled blanket, scattered pillows, books, clothes, a large, dirty basin filled with soapy swill, in which cigarette butts floated, litter on the floor—it all looked as if it had been piled in a heap, purposely confused, crumpled …

"The right lung consists of three sections …" repeated Klochkov. "The boundaries! The upper section reaches the fourth or fifth rib on the front wall of the chest, the fourth rib at the side … the spina scapulae in the back …"

Klochkov, straining to visualize what he had just read, raised his eyes to the ceiling. Getting no clear impression, he began feeling his own upper ribs through his waistcoat.

"These ribs are like piano keys," he said. "To avoid confusion in counting them, one absolutely must get used to them. I'll have to study it with a skeleton and a living person … Come here, Anyuta, let me try to get oriented!"

Anyuta stopped embroidering, took off her blouse, and straightened up. Klochkov sat down facing her, frowned, and began counting her ribs.

"Hm … The first rib can't be felt … It's behind the collarbone … Here's the second rib … Right … Here's the third … Here's the fourth … Hm … Right … Why are you flinching?"

"Your fingers are cold!"

"Well, well … you won't die, don't fidget. So then, this is the third rib, and this is the fourth … You're so skinny to look at, yet I can barely feel your ribs. The second … the third … No, I'll get confused this way and won't have a clear picture … I'll have to draw it … Where's my charcoal?"

Klochkov took a piece of charcoal and drew several parallel lines with it on Anyuta's chest, corresponding to the ribs.

"Excellent. All just like the palm of your hand … Well, and now we can do some tapping. Stand up!"

Anyuta stood up and lifted her chin. Klochkov started tapping and got so immersed in this occupation that he did not notice that Anyuta's lips, nose, and fingers had turned blue with cold. Anyuta was shivering and feared that the medical student, noticing her shivering, would stop drawing with charcoal and tapping, and would perhaps do poorly at the examination.

"Now it's all clear," said Klochkov, and he stopped tapping. "You sit like that, without wiping off the charcoal, while I go over it a little more."

And the medical student again began pacing and repeating. Anyuta, as if tattooed, black stripes on her chest, shrunken with cold, sat and thought. She generally spoke very little, was always silent and kept thinking, thinking …

In all her six or seven years of wandering through various furnished rooms, she had known some five men like Klochkov. Now they had all finished their studies, had made their way in life, and, of course, being decent people, had long forgotten her. One of them lived in Paris, two had become doctors, the fourth an artist, and the fifth was even said to be a professor already. Klochkov was the sixth … Soon he, too, would finish his studies and make his way. The future would no doubt be beautiful, and Klochkov would probably become a great man, but the present was thoroughly bad: Klochkov had no tobacco, no tea, and there were only four pieces of sugar left. She had to finish her embroidery as quickly as possible, take it to the customer, and, with the twenty-five kopecks she would get, buy tea and tobacco.

"Can I come in?" came from outside the door.

Anyuta quickly threw a woolen shawl over her shoulders. The painter Fetisov came in.

"I've come to you with a request," he began, addressing Klochkov and looking ferociously from under the hair hanging on his forehead. "Be so good as to lend me your beautiful maiden for an hour or two! I'm working on a painting, and I can't do without a model!"

"Ah, with pleasure!" Klochkov agreed. "Go on, Anyuta."

"What business do I have there?" Anyuta said softly.

"Well, really! The man's asking for the sake of art, not for some trifle. Why not help if you can?"

Anyuta began to dress.

"And what are you painting?" asked Klochkov.

"Psyche. A nice subject, but it somehow won't come out right. I have to use different models all the time. Yesterday there was one with blue feet. Why are your feet blue? I ask. My stockings ran, she says. And you keep grinding away! Lucky man, you've got patience."

"Medicine's that sort of thing, you have to grind away at it."

"Hm … I beg your pardon, Klochkov, but you live like an awful swine. Devil knows how you can live this way!"

"How do you mean? I can't live any other way … I get only twelve roubles a month from the old man, and it's a real trick to live decently on that."

"So it is …" said the artist, wincing squeamishly, "but all the same you could live better … A developed man absolutely must be an aesthete. Isn't that true? And here you've got devil knows what! The bed isn't made, there's swill, litter … yesterday's kasha on a plate … pah!"

"That's true," said the medical student, and he became embarrassed, "but Anyuta didn't manage to tidy up today. She's busy all the time."

When the artist and Anyuta left, Klochkov lay down on the sofa and began to study lying down, then accidentally fell asleep, woke up an hour later, propped his head on his fists and pondered gloomily. He remembered the artist's words, that a developed man absolutely must be an aesthete, and his room indeed seemed disgusting, repulsive to him now. It was as if he foresaw the future with his mental eye, when he would receive patients in his office, have tea in a spacious dining room in company with his wife, a respectable woman—and now this basin of swill with cigarette butts floating in it looked unbelievably vile. Anyuta, too, seemed homely, slovenly, pitiful … And he decided to separate from her, at once, whatever the cost.

When she came back from the artist's and began taking off her coat, he stood up and said to her seriously:

"The thing is this, my dear … Sit down and listen to me. We have to separate! In short, I don't wish to live with you anymore."

Anyuta had come back from the artist's so tired, so worn out. She had posed for so long that her face had become pinched, thin, and her chin had grown sharper. She said nothing in reply to the medical student's words, only her lips began to tremble.

"You must agree that we'll have to separate sooner or later anyway," said the medical student. "You're good, kind, and not stupid—you'll understand …"

Anyuta put her coat back on, silently wrapped her embroidery in paper, gathered up her needles and thread; she found the little packet with four pieces of sugar in it on the windowsill and put it on the table near the books.

"It's yours … some sugar …" she said softly and turned away to hide her tears.

"Well, what are you crying for?" asked Klochkov.

He walked across the room in embarrassment and said:

"You're strange, really … You know yourself that we have to separate. We can't be together forever."

She had already picked up all her bundles and turned to him to say good-bye, but he felt sorry for her.

"Why not let her stay another week?" he thought. "Yes, indeed, let her stay, and in a week I'll tell her to leave."

And, annoyed at his own lack of character, he shouted at her sternly:

"Well, why are you standing there! If you're going, go, and if you don't want to, take your coat off and stay! Stay!"

Silently, quietly, Anyuta took off her coat, then blew her nose, also quietly, gave a sigh, and noiselessly went to her permanent post—the stool by the window.

The student drew the textbook towards him and again began pacing up and down.

"The right lung consists of three sections …" he ground away. "The upper section reaches the fourth or fifth rib on the front wall of the chest …"

And someone in the corridor shouted at the top of his voice:

"Gr-r-rigory, the samovar!"
FEBRUARY 1886

EASTER NIGHT

I was standing on the bank of the Goltva and waiting for the ferry from the other side. Ordinarily the Goltva is a middling sort of stream, silent and pensive, sparkling meekly through the thick bulrushes, but now a whole lake was spread before me. The spring waters had broken loose, overflowed both banks and flooded far out on both sides, covering kitchen gardens, hayfields and marshes, so that you often came upon poplars and bushes sticking up solitarily above the surface of the water, looking like grim rocks in the darkness.

The weather seemed magnificent to me. It was dark, but I could still see trees, water, people … The world was lit by the stars, which were strewn massively across the sky. I do not recall ever having seen so many stars. You literally could not put a finger between them. There were some as big as goose eggs, some as tiny as hempseed … For the sake of the festive parade, all of them, from small to large, had come out in the sky, washed, renewed, joyful, and all of them to the last one quietly moved their rays. The sky was reflected in the water; the stars bathed in the dark depths and trembled with their light rippling. The air was warm and still … Far away on the other side, in the impenetrable darkness, a few scattered fires burned bright red …

Two steps away from me darkened the silhouette of a peasant in a tall hat and with a stout, knotty stick.

"There's been no ferry for a long while now," I said.

"It's time it came," the silhouette replied.

"Are you also waiting for the ferry?"

"No, I'm just …" the peasant yawned, "waiting for the lumination. I'd have gone, but, to tell the truth, I haven't got the five kopecks for the ferry"

"I'll give you five kopecks."

"No, thank you kindly … You use those five kopecks to light a candle for me in the monastery … That'll be curiouser, and I'll just stay here. Mercy me, no ferry! As if it sank!"

The peasant went right down to the water, took hold of the cable, and called out:

"Ieronym! Ierony-y-ym!"

As if in answer to his shout, the drawn-out tolling of a big bell came from the other side. The tolling was dense, low, as from the thickest string of a double bass: it seemed that the darkness itself had groaned. All at once a cannon shot rang out. It rolled through the darkness and ended somewhere far behind my back. The peasant took off his hat and crossed himself.

"Christ is risen!"¹ he said.

Before the waves from the first stroke of the bell congealed in the air, a second was heard, and immediately after it a third, and the darkness was filled with an incessant, trembling sound. New lights flared up by the red fires, and they all started moving, flickering restlessly.

"Ierony-y-ym!" a muted, drawn-out call was heard.

"They're calling from the other side," said the peasant. "That means the ferry's not there either. Our Ieronym's asleep."

The lights and the velvety ringing of the bell were enticing … I was beginning to lose patience and become agitated, but then, finally, as I peered into the dark distance, I saw the silhouette of something that looked very much like a gallows. It was the long-awaited ferry. It was moving so slowly that if it had not been for the gradual sharpening of its outline, one might have thought it was standing in place or moving towards the other shore.

"Quick! Ieronym!" my peasant shouted. "A gentleman's waiting!"

The ferry crept up to the bank, lurched, and creaked to a stop. On it, holding the cable, stood a tall man in a monk's habit and a conical hat.

"Why so long?" I asked, jumping aboard the ferry.

"Forgive me, for the sake of Christ," Ieronym said softly. "Is there anybody else?"

"Nobody …"

Ieronym took hold of the cable with both hands, curved himself into a question mark, and grunted. The ferry creaked and lurched. The silhouette of the peasant in the tall hat slowly began to recede from me—which meant that the ferry was moving. Soon Ieronym straightened up and began working with one hand. We were silent and looked at the bank towards which we were now moving. There the "lumination" which the peasant had been waiting for was already beginning. At the water's edge, barrels of pitch blazed like huge bonfires. Their reflection, crimson as the rising moon, crept to meet us in long, wide stripes. The burning barrels threw light on their own smoke and on the long human shadows that flitted about the fire; but further to the sides and behind them, where the velvet ringing rushed from, was the same impenetrable darkness. Suddenly slashing it open, the golden ribbon of a rocket soared skywards; it described an arc and, as if shattering against the sky, burst and came sifting down in sparks. On the bank a noise was heard resembling a distant "hoorah."

"How beautiful!" I said.

"It's even impossible to say how beautiful!" sighed Ieronym. "It's that kind of night, sir! At other times you don't pay any attention to rockets, but now any vain thing makes you glad. Where are you from?"

I told him where I was from.

"So, sir … a joyful day this is …" Ieronym went on in a weak, gasping tenor, the way convalescents speak. "Heaven and earth and under the earth rejoice. The whole of creation celebrates. Only tell me, good sir, why is it that even amidst great joy a man can't forget his griefs?"

It seemed to me that this unexpected question was an invitation to one of those "longanimous," soul-saving conversations that idle and bored monks love so much. I was not in the mood for much talking and therefore merely asked:

"And what are your griefs, my good man?"

"Ordinary ones, like all people have, Your Honor, but this day a particular grief happened in the monastery: at the liturgy itself, during the Old Testament readings, the hierodeacon Nikolai died …"

"Then it's God's will!" I said, shamming a monkish tone. "We all must die. In my opinion you should even be glad … They say whoever dies on the eve of Easter or on Easter day will surely get into the Kingdom of Heaven."

"That's so."

We fell silent. The silhouette of the peasant in the tall hat merged with the outline of the bank. The pitch barrels flared up more and more.

"And scripture clearly points out the vanity of grief and the need for reflection," Ieronym broke the silence, "but what makes the soul grieve and refuse to listen to reason? What makes you want to weep bitterly?"

Ieronym shrugged his shoulders, turned to me, and began talking quickly:

"If it was I who died or somebody else, maybe it wouldn't be so noticeable, but it was Nikolai who died! Nobody else but Nikolai! It's even hard to believe he's no longer in the world! I stand here on the ferry and keep thinking his voice will come from the bank any minute. He always came down to the bank and called out to me so that I wouldn't feel scared on the ferry. He got out of bed in the middle of the night especially for that. A kind soul! God, what a kind and merciful soul! Some people's mothers are not to them like this Nikolai was to me! Lord, save his soul!"

Ieronym took hold of the cable, but at once turned to me again.

"And such a bright mind, Your Honor!" he said in a sing-song voice. "Such sweet, good-sounding speech! Exactly like what they're about to sing in the matins: 'O how loving-kind! O how most sweet is thy word!'² Besides all the other human qualities, he also had an extraordinary gift!"

"What gift?" I asked.

The monk looked me up and down and, as if having assured himself that I could be entrusted with secrets, laughed gaily.

"He had the gift of writing akathists³ …" he said. "A wonder, sir, and nothing but! You'll be amazed if I explain it to you! Our father archimandrite⁴ is from Moscow, our father vicar graduated from the Kazan theological academy, there are intelligent hieromonks and elders among us, and yet, just imagine, not a single one of them could write akathists, but Nikolai, a simple monk, a hierodeacon, never studied anywhere and even had no external appeal, and yet he wrote! A wonder. A real wonder!"

Ieronym clasped his hands and, forgetting all about the cable, went on enthusiastically:

"Our father vicar has difficulty composing sermons; when he was writing the history of the monastery, he got all the brothers into a sweat and went to town ten times, but Nikolai wrote akathists! Akathists! A sermon or a history is nothing next to that!"

"So it's really difficult to write akathists?" I asked.

"There's enormous difficulty…" Ieronym wagged his head. "Wisdom and holiness won't do anything here, if God doesn't give you the gift. Monks who don't understand about it reckon you only need to know the life of the saint you're writing to, and then follow the other akathists. But that's not right, sir. Of course, a man who writes an akathist has to know the life extremely well, to the last little point. Well, and also to follow the other akathists, how to begin and what to write about. To give you an example, the first kontakion begins every time with 'the victorious' or 'the chosen' … The first ikos always has to begin with angels. In the akathist to the Most Sweet Jesus, if you're interested, it begins like this: 'Creator of angels and lord of hosts,' in the akathist to the Most Holy Mother of God: 'An angel was sent from heaven to stand before,' to Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker:⁵ 'An angel in appearance, but of earthly nature,' and so on. There's always an angel at the beginning. Of course, you can't do without following, but the main thing is not in the life, not in the correspondence with the others, but in the beauty and sweetness. It all has to be shapely, brief, and thorough. There should be softness, gentleness, and tenderness in every little line, so that there's not a single coarse, harsh, or unsuitable word. It has to be written so that the one who is praying will rejoice and weep in his heart, but shake and be in awe in his mind. In the akathist to the Mother of God there are the words: 'Rejoice, height unattainable to human reason; rejoice, depth invisible to the eyes of angels!' In another place in the same akathist it says: 'Rejoice, tree of the bright fruit on which the faithful feed, rejoice, tree of good-shading leaves in which many find shelter!'"

Ieronym, as if frightened or embarrassed at something, covered his face with his hands and shook his head.

"Tree of the bright fruit … tree of good-shading leaves …" he murmured. "He really finds such words! The Lord gave him that ability! He puts many words and thoughts into one brief phrase, and it all comes out so smooth and thorough! 'Light-proffering lamp to those …' he says in the akathist to the Most Sweet Jesus. 'Light-proffering!' There's no such word in our speech, or in our books, and yet he thought it up, he found it in his mind! Besides smoothness and eloquence, sir, it's necessary that every little line be adorned in all ways, to have flowers in it, and lightning, and wind, and sun, and all things of the visible world. And every exclamation should be composed so that it's smooth and easy on the ear. 'Rejoice, lily of paradisal blossoming!' it says in the akathist to Nicholas the Wonderworker. It doesn't say simply 'lily of paradise,' but 'lily of paradisal blossoming'! It's sweeter and smoother on the ear. And that's precisely how Nikolai wrote! Precisely like that! I can't even express to you how he wrote!"

"In that case, it's a pity he died," I said. "However, my good man, let's get moving, otherwise we'll be late …"

Ieronym recovered himself and rushed to the cable. On the bank all the bells were ringing away. Probably the procession was already going around the monastery, because the whole dark space behind the pitch barrels was now strewn with moving lights.⁶

"Did Nikolai publish his akathists?" I asked Ieronym.

"Where could he publish them?" he sighed. "And it would be strange to publish them. What for? In our monastery nobody's interested in them. They don't like it. They knew Nikolai wrote them, but they paid no attention. Nowadays, sir, nobody respects new writings!"

"Are they prejudiced against them?"

"Exactly so. If Nikolai had been an elder, the brothers might have been curious, but he wasn't even forty years old. There were some who laughed and even considered his writings a sin."

"Then why did he write?"

"More for his own delight. Of all the brothers, I was the only one who read his akathists. I used to come to him on the quiet, so that the others wouldn't see, and he was glad I was interested. He embraced me, stroked my head, called me tender words as if I were a little child. He would close the door, sit me down next to him, and start reading …"

Ieronym left the cable and came over to me.

"We were like friends, he and I," he whispered, looking at me with shining eyes. "Wherever he went, I went, too. He missed me when I wasn't there. And he loved me more than the others, and all because I wept from his akathists. It moves me to remember it! Now I'm like an orphan or a widow. You know, in our monastery the people are all good, kind, pious, but … there's no softness and delicacy in any of them, they're all like low-class people. They talk loudly, stamp their feet when they walk, make noise, cough, but Nikolai always spoke quietly, gently, and if he noticed that anyone was asleep or praying, he would pass by like a gnat or a mosquito. His face was tender, pitiful …"

Ieronym sighed deeply and took hold of the cable. We were nearing the bank. Out of the darkness and silence of the river we gradually floated into an enchanted kingdom, filled with suffocating smoke, sputtering lamps, and tumult. People could be seen clearly moving about the pitch barrels. The flashing of the fire lent their red faces and figures a strange, almost fantastic expression. Occasionally, among the heads and faces, horses' muzzles appeared, motionless, as if cast in red copper.

"They're about to start the Easter canon …" said Ieronym, "and Nikolai isn't here, there's no one to grasp it … For him there was no writing sweeter than this canon. He used to grasp every word of it! You'll be there, sir, try to grasp what they sing: it will take your breath away!"

"And you won't be in church?"

"I can't be, sir … I have to take people across."

"But won't they relieve you?"

"I don't know … I should have been relieved between eight and nine, but as you see, I haven't been! … And, to tell the truth, I'd like to be in church …"

"Are you a monk?"

"Yes, sir … that is, I'm a novice."

The ferry ran into the bank and stopped. I gave Ieronym a five-kopeck piece for the ride and jumped onto dry land. At once a cart with a boy and a sleeping woman drove creaking onto the ferry. Ieronym, faintly colored by the lights, leaned on the cable, curved his body, and pushed the ferry off…

I took a few steps through the mud, but further on I had to follow a soft, freshly trampled path. This path led to the dark, cave-like gates of the monastery, through clouds of smoke, through a disorderly crowd of people, unharnessed horses, carts, britzkas. It was all creaking, snorting, laughing, and over it all flashed crimson light and wavy shadows of smoke … A veritable chaos! And in this turmoil they still found room to load the little cannon and sell gingerbreads!

There was no less bustle on the other side of the wall, in the churchyard, but there was more ceremoniousness and order to be observed. Here there was a smell of juniper and incense. There was loud talk, but no laughter or snorting. People with kulichi⁷ and bundles huddled together among the tombstones and crosses. Obviously many of them had come a long way to have their kulichi blessed and were now tired. Over the cast-iron slabs that lay in a strip from the gates to the church door, busy young novices ran, loudly stamping their boots. In the bell tower there was also scurrying and shouting.

"What a restless night!" I thought. "How good!"

One would have liked to see this restlessness and sleeplessness in all of nature, beginning with the night's darkness and ending with the slabs, the graveyard crosses, and the trees, under which people bustled about. But nowhere did the excitement and restlessness tell so strongly as in the church. At the entrance an irrepressible struggle went on between ebb and flow. Some went in, others came out and soon went back again, to stand for a little while and then move again. People shuttle from place to place, loiter, and seem to be looking for something. The wave starts at the entrance and passes through the whole church, even disturbing the front rows where the solid and weighty people stand. To concentrate on prayer is out of the question. There are no prayers, but there is a sort of massive, childishly instinctive joy that is only seeking an excuse to burst and pour itself out in some sort of movement, be it only an unabashed swaying and jostling.

The same extraordinary mobility strikes one's eye in the paschal service itself. The royal doors⁸ in all the chapels are wide open, dense clouds of incense smoke float in the air around the big candle stand; everywhere one looks there are lights, brilliance, the sputtering of candles … There are no readings in this service; the busy and joyful singing goes on till the very end; after every ode of the canon the clergy change vestments and come out to cense the church, and this is repeated every ten minutes.

I had just managed to take my place when a wave surged from the front and threw me back. Before me passed a tall, sturdy deacon with a long red candle; behind him the gray-haired archimandrite in a golden mitre hurried with a censer. When they disappeared from view, the crowd pushed me back to my former place. But ten minutes had not gone by before a new wave surged and the deacon appeared again. This time he was followed by the father vicar, the one who, according to Ieronym, was writing a history of the monastery.

As I merged with the crowd and became infected with the general joyful excitement, I felt unbearably pained for Ieronym. Why did they not relieve him? Why did someone less sensitive and impressionable not go to the ferry?

"Cast thine eyes about thee, O Zion, and behold …" sang the choir, "for lo! from the West and from the North, and from the sea, and from the East, as to a light by God illumined, have thy children assembled unto thee …"⁹

I looked at the faces. They all bore lively, festive expressions; but not one person listened to or tried to grasp what was being sung, and no one had their "breath taken away." Why did they not relieve Ieronym? I could picture this Ieronym to myself, humbly standing somewhere near the wall, bending forward and eagerly seizing upon the beauty of the holy phrase. All that was now slipping past the hearing of the people standing about me, he would be eagerly drinking in with his sensitive soul, he would get drunk to the point of ecstasy, of breathlessness, and there would be no happier man in the whole church. But now he was going back and forth across the dark river and pining for his dead brother and friend.

A wave surged from behind. A stout, smiling monk, playing with his beads and glancing over his shoulder, squeezed past me sideways, making way for some lady in a hat and velvet coat. In the lady's wake came a monastery server, holding a chair up over our heads.

I left the church. I wanted to look at the dead Nikolai, the unknown writer of akathists. I strolled near the churchyard fence where a row of monks' cells stretched along the wall, peered through several windows and, seeing nothing, went back. Now I do not regret not having seen Nikolai; God knows, perhaps if I had seen him I would have lost the image my imagination now paints for me. This sympathetic, poetic man, who came at night to call out to Ieronym and who strewed his akathists with flowers, stars, and rays of sunlight, lonely and not understood, I picture to myself as timid, pale, with gentle, meek, and sad features. In his eyes, alongside intelligence, tenderness should shine, and that barely restrained, childlike exaltation I could hear in Ieronym's voice when he quoted the akathists to me.

When we left the church after the liturgy, it was no longer night. Morning was coming. The stars had faded and the sky was gray-blue, sullen. The cast-iron slabs, the tombstones, and the buds on the trees were covered with dew. There was a sharp feeling of freshness in the air. Outside the churchyard there was no more of that animation I had seen at night. Horses and people seemed tired, sleepy, they barely moved, and all that was left of the pitch barrels was heaps of black ashes. When a man is tired and wants to sleep, it seems to him that nature is in the same state. It seemed to me that the trees and young grass were asleep. It seemed that even the bells did not ring as loudly and gaily as at night. The restlessness was over, and all that was left of the excitement was a pleasant languor, a desire for sleep and warmth.

Now I could see the river with both its banks. Hills of light mist hovered over it here and there. The water breathed out cold and severity. When I jumped aboard the ferry, someone's britzka already stood there, and some twenty men and women. The damp and, as it seemed to me, sleepy cable stretched far across the wide river and in places disappeared in the white mist.

"Christ is risen! Is there anybody else?" a quiet voice asked.

I recognized the voice of Ieronym. Now the darkness of night did not prevent me from seeing the monk. He was a tall, narrow-shouldered man of about thirty-five, with large, rounded features, half-closed, lazy-looking eyes, and a disheveled, wedge-shaped beard. He looked extraordinarily sad and weary.

"They still haven't relieved you?" I was surprised.

"Me, sir?" he asked, turning his chilled, dew-covered face to me and smiling. "Now there won't be anyone to relieve me till morning. They'll all go to the father archimandrite's to break the fast, sir."¹⁰

He and some little peasant in a red fur hat that looked like the bast pots they sell honey in, leaned on the cable, gave a concerted grunt, and the ferry moved off.

We floated along, disturbing the lazily rising mist as we went. Everyone was silent. Ieronym mechanically worked with one hand. For a long time he looked us over with his meek, dull eyes, then rested his gaze on the rosy, black-browed face of a young merchant's wife, who stood next to me on the ferry and silently shrank away from the mist that embraced her. He did not take his eyes off her face all the while we crossed.

This prolonged gaze had little of the masculine in it. It seems to me that in the woman's face Ieronym was seeking the soft and tender features of his deceased friend.
APRIL 1886

VANKA

Vanka Zhukov, a nine-year-old boy, sent three months earlier to be apprenticed to the shoemaker Aliakhin, did not go to bed on Christmas eve. He waited till master and apprentices went to church, then took a bottle of ink and a pen with a rusty nib from the master's cupboard, spread out a rumpled sheet of paper in front of him, and began to write. Before tracing the first letter, he looked fearfully several times at the doors and windows, cast a sidelong glance at the dark icon, surrounded on both sides by long shelves of shoe lasts, and heaved a choking sigh. The paper lay on a bench, and he himself knelt down by the bench.

"Dear grandpa, Konstantin Makarych!" he wrote. "So I'm writing you a letter. I wish you a Merry Christmas and all good things from the Lord God. I have no father or mother, you are the only one I have left."

Vanka's eyes moved to the dark window, in which the reflection of his candle flickered, and vividly imagined his grandfather, Konstantin Makarych, who worked as a night watchman at the Zhivarevs'. He was a small, skinny, but remarkably nimble and lively old fellow of about sixty-five, with an eternally laughing face and drunken eyes. He spent his days sleeping in the servants' quarters or bantering with the kitchen maids, and during the night, wrapped in a roomy winter coat, he walked around the estate beating on his clapper.¹ Behind him, their heads hanging, trotted the old bitch Chestnut and little Eel, so called because of his black color and long, weasel-like body. This Eel was remarkably respectful and gentle, looked with equal tenderness on his own people and on strangers, but enjoyed no credit. His respectfulness and humility concealed a most Jesuitical insidiousness. No one knew better than he how to sneak up and nip you on the leg, how to get into the cellar or steal a peasant's chicken. He had been beaten to pulp more than once, twice he had been hung, every week he was thrashed till he was half dead, but he always recovered.

His grandfather is probably standing by the gate now, squinting his eyes at the bright red windows of the village church, stamping his felt boots, and bantering with the servants. His clapper hangs from his belt. He clasps his hands, hunches up from the cold, and, with an old man's titter, pinches a maid or a kitchen girl.

"How about a little snuff?" he says, offering his snuffbox to the women.

The women take snuff and sneeze. His grandfather goes into indescribable raptures, dissolves in merry laughter, and shouts:

"Tear it off, it's frozen!"

They also give snuff to the dogs. Chestnut sneezes, turns her nose away, and goes off feeling offended. But Eel, being respectful, does not sneeze and wags his tail. And the weather is magnificent. The air is still, transparent, and fresh. The night is dark, but the whole village can be seen, the white roofs with little curls of smoke coming from the chimneys, the trees silvered with hoarfrost, the snowdrifts. The whole sky is strewn with merrily twinkling stars, and the Milky Way is as clearly outlined as if it had been washed and scoured with snow for the feast …

Vanka sighed, dipped his pen, and went on writing:

"And yesterday they gave me what-for. The master dragged me out to the yard by the hair and thrashed me with a belt, because I was rocking their baby in the cradle and accidentally fell asleep. And last week the mistress told me to clean a herring, and I started with the tail, so she took the herring and began shoving its head into my mug. The apprentices poke fun at me, send me to the pothouse for vodka, and tell me to steal pickles from the master, and the master beats me with whatever he can find. And there's nothing to eat. They give me bread in the morning, kasha for dinner, and bread again in the evening, and as for tea or cabbage soup, that the masters grub up themselves. And they make me sleep in the front hall, and when their baby cries I don't sleep at all, I rock the cradle. Dear grandpa, do me this mercy, take me home to the village, I just can't stand it … I go down on my knees to you, and I'll pray to God eternally for you, take me away from here or I'll die …"

Vanka twisted his lips, rubbed his eyes with his black fist, and gave a sob.

"I'll rub your tobacco for you," he went on, "pray to God for you, and if there's ever any reason, you can whip me like a farmer's goat. And if you think there'll be no work for me, I'll ask the steward for Christ's sake to let me polish the boots or go instead of Fedka to help the shepherd. Dear grandpa, I can't stand it, it's simply killing me. I thought of running away on foot to the village, but I have no boots, I'm afraid of freezing. And when I grow up, I'll feed you for it, and I won't let anybody harm you, and when you die, I'll pray for the repose of your soul, as I do for my mama Pelageya.

"And Moscow is a big city. All the houses are manors, there are lots of horses, but no sheep, and the dogs aren't fierce. There's no children's procession with the star² here, and they don't let anybody sing in the choir,³ and once in the window of a shop I saw hooks for sale with lines for all kinds of fish, really worth it, there was even one hook that would hold a thirty-pound sheatfish. And I saw shops selling all kind of guns like our squire's, worth maybe a hundred roubles each … And in the butcher shops there are blackcock, and hazel grouse, and hares, but where they go to hunt them the shop clerks won't tell.

"Dear grandpa, when the masters have a Christmas tree party with treats, take a gilded nut for me and hide it in the green chest. Ask the young miss, Olga Ignatievna, and tell her it's for Vanka."

Vanka sighed spasmodically and again stared at the window. He remembered how his grandfather always went to the forest to fetch a Christmas tree for the masters and took his grandson with him. They had a merry time! His grandfather grunted, and the frost grunted, and, looking at them, Vanka also grunted. Usually, before cutting down the tree, his grandfather smoked his pipe or took a long pinch of snuff, while he chuckled at the freezing Vaniushka … The young fir trees, shrouded in hoarfrost, stand motionless, waiting to see which of them is to die. Out of nowhere, a hare shoots like an arrow across the snowdrifts … His grandfather cannot help shouting:

"Catch him, catch him … catch him! Ah, the short-tailed devil!"

The cut-down tree would be lugged to the master's house, and there they would start decorating it … The young miss, Olga Ignatievna, Vanka's favorite, was the busiest of all. When Vanka's mother Pelageya was still alive and worked in the master's house as a maid, Olga Ignatievna used to give Vanka fruit drops and, having nothing to do, taught him to read, to write, to count to a hundred, and even to dance the quadrille. But when Pelageya died, the orphaned Vanka was packed off to his grandfather in the servants' kitchen, and from the kitchen to Moscow, to the shoemaker Aliakhin …

"Come, dear grandpa," Vanka went on, "by Christ God I beg you, take me away from here. Have pity on me, a wretched orphan, because everybody beats me, and I'm so hungry, and it's so dreary I can't tell you, I just cry all the time. And the other day the master hit me on the head with a last, so that I fell down and barely recovered. My life is going bad, worse than any dog's … And I also send greetings to Alyona, to one-eyed Yegorka, and to the coachman, and don't give my harmonica away to anybody. I remain your grandson, Ivan Zhukov, dear grandpa, come."

Vanka folded the written sheet in four and put it into an envelope he had bought the day before for a kopeck … After thinking a little, he dipped his pen and wrote the address:

To Grandpa in the Village.

Then he scratched his head, reflected, and added: "Konstantin Makarych." Pleased that he had not been disturbed at his writing, he put on his hat and, without getting into his coat, ran outside in just his shirt …

The clerks at the butcher shop, whom he had asked the day before, had told him that letters are put in mailboxes, and from the mailboxes are carried all over the world on troikas of post-horses with drunken drivers and jingling bells. Vanka ran over to the nearest mailbox and put the precious letter into the slot …

Lulled by sweet hopes, an hour later he was fast asleep … He dreamed of a stove. On the stove sits his grandfather, his bare feet hanging down. He is reading Vanka's letter to the kitchen maids … Eel walks around the stove, wagging his tail …
DECEMBER 1886

SLEEPY

Night. The nanny Varka, a girl of about thirteen, is rocking a cradle in which a baby lies, and murmuring barely audibly:

Hush-a-bye, baby,I'll sing you a song …

A green oil lamp is burning before an icon; a rope is stretched across the whole room from corner to corner, with swaddling clothes and large black trousers hanging on it. A big green spot from the icon lamp falls on the ceiling, and the swaddling clothes and trousers cast long shadows on the stove, the cradle, and Varka … When the icon lamp begins to flicker, the spot and the shadows come alive and start moving as if in the wind. It is stuffy. There is a smell of cabbage soup and shoemaker's supplies.

The baby is crying. He became hoarse and exhausted from crying long ago, but he goes on howling, and no one knows when he will quiet down. And Varka is sleepy. Her eyes close, her head droops down, her neck aches. She cannot move her eyelids or her lips, and it seems to her that her face has become dry and stiff and her head is as small as the head of a pin.

"Hush-a-bye, baby," she murmurs, "I'll feed you by and by …"

A cricket chirps from the stove. In the next room, behind the door, the master and his apprentice Afanasy are snoring … The cradle creaks pitifully, Varka herself is murmuring—and all this merges into the lulling night music that is so sweet to hear when you are going to bed. But now this music is only vexing and oppressive, because it makes her drowsy, yet she cannot sleep. God forbid that Varka should fall asleep, or the masters will give her a beating.

The icon lamp flickers. The green spot and the shadows begin to move, getting into Varka's fixed, half-open eyes and forming dim reveries in her half-sleeping brain. She sees dark clouds chasing each other across the sky and crying like babies. But now the wind has blown, the clouds have vanished, and Varka sees a broad highway covered with liquid mud. Down the highway stretches a string of carts, people trudge along with bundles on their backs, and some sort of shadows flit back and forth. Forest can be seen on both sides through the cold, harsh fog. Suddenly the shadows and the people with bundles drop down in the liquid mud. "Why is that?" asks Varka. "To sleep, to sleep," comes the answer. And they fall fast asleep, sleep sweetly, and crows and magpies sit on the telegraph wires, crying like babies, trying to wake them up.

"Hush-a-bye, baby, I'll sing you a song …" murmurs Varka, and now she sees herself in a dark, stuffy cottage.

Her late father, Yefim Stepanov, is thrashing on the floor. She does not see him, but she hears him moaning and rolling on the floor in pain. His rupture, as he puts it, "is acting up." The pain is so intense that he cannot utter a single word and only sucks in air, his teeth chattering like a drum roll:

"Rat-a-tat-tat-tat …"

Her mother Pelageya has run to the manor to tell the masters that Yefim is dying. She has been gone for a long time and ought to be back. Varka lies on the stove, awake, and listens to her father's "rat-a-tat-tat." But now she hears someone drive up to the cottage. The masters have sent the young doctor, who came from town for a visit. The doctor enters the cottage. He cannot be seen in the darkness, but she hears him cough and clack the door.

"Light a lamp," he says.

"Rat-a-tat-tat …" answers Yefim.

Pelageya rushes to the stove and starts looking for the crock of matches. A minute passes in silence. The doctor feels in his pockets and lights his own match.

"One moment, good man, one moment," says Pelageya, rushing out of the cottage and coming back shortly with a candle end.

Yefim's cheeks are pink, his eyes shine, and his gaze is somehow sharp, as if Yefim can see through both the cottage and the doctor.

"Well, so? What's this you're up to?" the doctor says, bending over him. "Aha! Have you had it long?"

"What, sir? It's time to die, Your Honor … I'm done living …"

"Enough of that nonsense … We'll cure you!"

"As you like, Your Honor, my humble thanks, only we do understand … Since death has come, there's no use."

The doctor fusses over Yefim for a quarter of an hour. Then he gets up and says:

"I can do nothing … You must go to the hospital, they'll do surgery on you. Go right now … Go without fail! It's a bit late, everybody's asleep there, but never mind, I'll give you a note. Do you hear me?"

"How is he going to get there, good man?" says Pelageya. "We have no horse."

"Never mind, I'll ask the masters, they'll give you a horse."

The doctor leaves, the candle goes out, and again she hears "rat-a-tat-tat" … Half an hour later somebody drives up to the cottage. The masters have sent a gig to go to the hospital. Yefim gets ready and goes …

Now comes a fine, clear morning. Pelageya is not home: she has gone to the hospital to find out what is happening with Yefim. Somewhere a baby is crying, and Varka hears someone singing with her own voice:

"Hush-a-bye, baby, I'll sing you a song …"

Pelageya comes back. She crosses herself and whispers:

"They set it during the night, but by morning he gave up his soul to God … The kingdom of heaven, eternal rest … They say they caught it too late … He should have come earlier …"

Varka goes to the woods and weeps there, but suddenly somebody hits her on the back of the head so hard that she bumps her forehead against a birch. She lifts her eyes and sees before her the shoemaker, her master.

"What's this, you mangy girl?" he says. "The little one's crying, and you sleep?"

He twists her ear painfully, and she shakes her head, rocks the cradle, and murmurs her song. The green spot and the shadows of the trousers and swaddling clothes ripple, wink at her, and soon invade her brain again. Again she sees the highway covered with liquid mud. Shadows and people with bundles on their backs sprawl about, fast asleep. Looking at them, Varka passionately longs to sleep; it would be such a pleasure to lie down, but her mother Pelageya walks beside her and hurries her. They are hastening to town to find work.

"Give alms, for Christ's sake!" her mother asks passersby "Show God's mercy, merciful people."

"Give me the baby!" somebody's familiar voice answers her. "Give me the baby!" the same voice repeats, angrily and sharply now. "Sleeping, you slut?"

Varka jumps up and, looking around her, understands what is the matter: there is no road, no Pelageya, no passersby, but only her mistress standing in the middle of the room, come to nurse her baby. While the fat, broad-shouldered mistress nurses and quiets the baby, Varka stands and looks at her, waiting till she is finished. Outside the windows the air is turning blue, the shadows and the green spot on the ceiling are becoming noticeably paler. It will soon be morning.

"Take him!" says the mistress, buttoning her nightshirt over her breasts. "He's crying. Must be the evil eye."

Varka takes the baby, lays him in the cradle, and again begins to rock. The green spot and the shadows gradually disappear, and there is nothing left to get into her head and cloud her brain. And she is as sleepy as before, so terribly sleepy! Varka lays her head on the edge of the cradle and rocks with her whole body, so as to overcome sleep, but her eyes keep closing all the same and her head is heavy.

"Varka, light the stove!" the master's voice comes from behind the door.

That means it is time to get up and start working. Varka leaves the cradle and runs to the shed to fetch firewood. She is glad. When you run and walk, you do not feel so sleepy as when you are in a sitting position. She brings the firewood, lights the stove, and feels how her stiffened face relaxes and her thoughts become clear.

"Varka, set up the samovar!" cries the mistress.

Varka splits some splinters, and has barely had time to light them and put them under the samovar when she hears a new order.

"Varka, clean the master's galoshes!"

She sits on the floor, cleans the galoshes, and thinks how good it would be to put her head into a big, deep galosh and have a nap there … Suddenly the galosh grows, swells, fills the whole room. Varka drops the brush, but immediately shakes her head, rolls her eyes, and tries to look at things in such a way that they do not grow and move as she looks.

"Varka, wash the front steps, it's shameful for the customers!"

Varka washes the steps, tidies the rooms, then lights the other stove and runs to the grocer's. There is much work, and not a free moment.

But nothing is harder than to stand in one spot at the kitchen table and peel potatoes. Her head droops on the table, potatoes flash in her eyes, the knife keeps falling from her hand, and around her paces the fat, angry mistress, with her sleeves rolled up, talking so loudly that it makes her ears ring. It is also a torment to serve at the table, do the laundry, sew. There are moments when she longs to forget everything, collapse on the floor, and sleep.

The day passes. Looking at the darkening windows, Varka clutches her stiffening temples and smiles, not knowing why herself. The evening darkness caresses her closing eyes, promising a sound sleep soon. In the evening her masters have guests.

"Varka, set up the samovar!" cries the mistress.

Their samovar is small, and before the guests have had enough tea, she has to heat it some five times. After tea, Varka stands in one spot for a whole hour, looking at the guests and awaiting orders.

"Varka, run and fetch three bottles of beer!"

She tears herself from the spot and tries to run faster so as to drive sleep away.

"Varka, run and fetch vodka! Varka, where's the corkscrew? Varka, clean the herring!"

But now, finally, the guests have gone, the lights are put out, the masters go to sleep.

"Varka, rock the baby!" comes the last order.

A cricket chirps from the stove. The green spot on the ceiling and the shadows of the trousers and swaddling clothes again get into Varka's half-closed eyes, flicker, and cloud her head.

"Hush-a-bye, baby," she murmurs, "I'll sing you a song …"

And the baby cries and gets exhausted from crying. Again Varka sees the muddy highway, the people with bundles, Pelageya, her father Yefim. She understands everything, recognizes everyone, but through her half sleep she simply cannot understand what power binds her hand and foot, oppresses her, and keeps her from living.

She looks around, seeking this power in order to rid herself of it, but she cannot find it. Finally, worn out, she strains all her powers and her vision, looks up at the flickering green spot, and, hearing the crying, locates the enemy that keeps her from living.

That enemy is the baby.

She laughs. It amazes her: how is it that she was unable to understand such a simple thing before? The green spot, the shadows, and the cricket, too, seem to laugh and be amazed.

A false notion takes hold of Varka. She gets up from the stool and, smiling broadly, without blinking her eyes, walks about the room. She is pleased and tickled by the thought that she is about to rid herself of the baby that binds her hand and foot … To kill the baby, and then sleep, sleep, sleep …

Laughing, winking, and shaking her finger at the green spot, Varka steals up to the cradle and bends over the baby. After strangling him, she quickly lies down on the floor, laughing with joy that she can sleep, and a moment later is already fast asleep, like the dead …
JANUARY 1888

A BORING STORYFROM AN OLD MAN'S NOTES

There is in Russia an honored professor named Nikolai Stepanovich So-and-so, a privy councillor and chevalier. He has so many Russian and foreign decorations that when he has to wear them all, the students call him "the iconostasis."¹ His acquaintances are of the most aristocratic sort; at least for the last twenty-five or thirty years in Russia there is not and has not been a single famous scholar with whom he has not been closely acquainted. Now he has no one to be friends with, but if we speak of the past, the long list of his glorious friends ends with such names as Pirogov, Kavelin and the poet Nekrasov,² who offered him the warmest and most sincere friendship. He is a member of all the Russian and three foreign universities. And so on and so forth. All this and many other things that might be said constitute what is known as my name.

This name of mine is popular. In Russia it is known to every literate person, and abroad it is mentioned from podiums with the addition of well-known and esteemed. It is one of those few fortunate names which it is considered bad tone to abuse or take in vain, in public or in print. And so it should be. For my name is closely connected with the notion of a man who is famous, richly endowed, and unquestionably useful. I'm as staunch and hardworking as a camel, which is important, and I'm talented, which is still more important. Besides that, be it said in passing, I'm a well-bred, modest, and honorable fellow. Never have I poked my nose into literature and politics, or sought popularity in polemics with ignoramuses, or given speeches either at dinners or over the graves of my colleagues … Generally, there is not a single blot on my learned name, and it has nothing to complain of. It is happy.

The bearer of this name, that is, myself, has the look of a sixty-two-year-old man with a bald head, false teeth, and an incurable tic. As my name is brilliant and beautiful, so I myself am dull and ugly. My head and hands shake from weakness; my neck, as with one of Turgenev's heroines,³ resembles the fingerboard of a double bass, my chest is sunken, my shoulders narrow. When I speak or read, my mouth twists to one side; when I smile, my whole face is covered with an old man's deathly wrinkles. There is nothing imposing in my pathetic figure; except perhaps that when I have my tic, I acquire some peculiar expression, which evokes in anyone looking at me the stern and imposing thought: "This man will evidently die soon."

I still lecture fairly well; I can hold the attention of my listeners for two hours at a stretch, as I used to. My passion, the literary quality of my exposition, and my humor make almost unnoticeable the defects of my voice, which is dry, shrill, and sing-song, like a hypocrite's. But I write badly. The part of my brain in charge of writing ability refuses to work. My memory has weakened, my thoughts lack consistency, and each time I set them down on paper it seems to me that I've lost the intuition of their organic connection, the constructions are monotonous, the phrasing impoverished and timid. I often write something other than what I mean; when I get to the end, I no longer remember the beginning. I often forget ordinary words, and always have to waste much energy avoiding superfluous phrases and unnecessary parenthetical clauses in my writing—both clearly witnessing to a decline of mental activity. And, remarkably, the simpler the writing, the more excruciating is the strain. With a learned article I feel myself far more free and intelligent than with a letter of congratulations or a report. Another thing: it's easier for me to write in German or English than in Russian.

As for my present way of life, first of all I must make note of the insomnia from which I've been suffering lately. If I were to be asked: What now constitutes the main and fundamental feature of your existence? I would answer: Insomnia. As before, out of habit, I get undressed and go to bed exactly at midnight. I fall asleep quickly, but I wake up again before two o'clock, and with a feeling as if I haven't slept at all. I have to get up and light the lamp. For an hour or two I pace the room from corner to corner and gaze at the long-familiar paintings and photographs. When I get tired of pacing, I sit down at my desk. I sit motionless, not thinking about anything and not feeling any desires; if there's a book lying in front of me, I mechanically draw it towards me and read without any interest. Thus, recently, in a single night I mechanically read an entire novel with the strange title What the Swallow Sang.⁴ Or else, to occupy my attention, I make myself count to a thousand or picture the face of one of my colleagues and begin recalling: in what year and under what circumstances did he take up his post? I like listening to sounds. Two doors away my daughter Liza says something rapidly in her sleep, or my wife crosses the living room with a candle and unfailingly drops the box of matches, or a cupboard creaks from dryness, or the lamp flame suddenly starts to hum—and for some reason all these sounds trouble me.

Not to sleep during the night means to be aware every moment of your abnormality, and therefore I wait impatiently for morning and daylight, when I have the right not to sleep. A long, wearisome time goes by before the cock crows in the yard. He is my first bearer of good tidings. Once he crows, I know that in an hour the hall porter will wake up below and, coughing gruffly, come upstairs for something. And then little by little the air outside the windows will turn pale, voices will be heard in the street …

My day begins with the coming of my wife. She enters my room in a petticoat, her hair not yet done, but already washed, smelling of flower cologne, and with the air of having come in by chance, and each time she says one and the same thing:

"Excuse me, I'll only stay a moment … You didn't sleep again?"

Then she puts out the lamp, sits down by the desk and begins to talk. I'm no prophet, but I know beforehand what the talk will be about. It is the same every morning. Usually, after anxious inquiries about my health, she suddenly remembers our son, an officer serving in Warsaw. After the twentieth of each month we send him fifty roubles—that mainly serves as the theme of our conversation.

"Of course, it's difficult for us," my wife sighs, "but until he finally gets on his feet, it's our duty to help him. The boy is in a foreign land, his pay is small … However, if you like, next month we'll send him not fifty but forty What do you think?"

Everyday experience might have convinced my wife that expenses are not diminished by our frequent talking about them, but my wife does not recognize experience and tells me regularly each morning about our officer, and that the price of bread has gone down, thank God, but sugar has gone up two kopecks—and all this in such a tone as if she were telling me some news.

I listen, mechanically saying yes, and strange, useless thoughts come over me, probably because I haven't slept all night. I look at my wife and am astonished, like a child. In perplexity, I ask myself: Can it be that this old, very stout, ungainly woman with a dull expression of petty care and fear over a crust of bread, with eyes clouded by constant thoughts of debt and poverty, only capable of talking about expenses and only smiling at bargains—can it be that this woman was once that same slender Varya whom I passionately loved for her good, clear mind, her pure soul, her beauty, and, as Othello loved Desdemona, "that she did pity" my science? Can this be that same wife Varya who once bore me a son?

I peer intently into the flabby, ungainly old woman's face, searching for my Varya in her, but nothing has survived from the past except 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 comfort her at least a little I let her say whatever she likes, and even say nothing when she judges people unfairly or chides me for not having a practice or publishing textbooks.

Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife suddenly remembers that I have not had my tea yet and becomes alarmed.

"What am I doing sitting here?" she says, getting up. "The samovar has long been on the table, and I sit here chattering. Lord, I've become so forgetful!"

She goes out quickly but stops in the doorway to say:

"We owe Yegor for five months. Do you know that? It won't do to fall behind with the servants' pay, I've said so many times! Paying ten roubles a month is much easier than going five months and paying fifty!"

She gets through the door, stops again, and says:

"There's no one I pity so much as our poor Liza. The girl studies at the conservatory, she's always in good society, and she's dressed God knows how. It's shameful to go out in such a coat. If she were someone else's daughter, it would be nothing, but everybody knows her father is a famous professor, a privy councillor!"

And, having reproached me with my name and rank, she finally leaves. So my day begins. The sequel is no better.

While I'm having tea, my Liza comes in with her coat and hat on, holding some scores, all ready to go to the conservatory. She's twenty-two years old. She looks younger, is pretty, and slightly resembles my wife when she was young. She kisses me tenderly on the temple and on the hand, and says:

"Good morning, papa. Are you well?"

As a child she was very fond of ice cream, and I often took her to the pastry shop. For her, ice cream was the measure of all that was beautiful. If she wanted to praise me, she would say: "You're ice cream, papa." One little finger was named pistachio, another vanilla, another raspberry, and so on. Usually, when she came and said good morning to me, I would take her on my knee and, kissing her fingers, repeat:

"Vanilla … pistachio … lemon …"

And now, for old times' sake, I kiss Liza's fingers, murmuring: "Pistachio … vanilla … lemon …" but it turns out all wrong. I'm cold as ice cream and feel ashamed. When my daughter comes to me and brushes my temple with her lips, I give a start as if I'd been stung by a bee, smile tensely, and turn my face away. Ever since I began to suffer from insomnia, a question has been lodged in my brain like a nail: my daughter often sees me, an old man, a celebrity, blush painfully because I owe money to a servant; she sees how often the worry over petty debts makes me abandon my work and spend whole hours pacing back and forth, pondering, but why has she never once come to me, in secret from her mother, and whispered: "Father, here is my watch, my bracelets, my earrings, my dresses … Pawn it all, you need money …"? Why, seeing how her mother and I, surrendering to a false feeling, try to hide our poverty from people, does she not give up the expensive pleasure of studying music? Not that I'd accept any watch, or bracelets, or sacrifices, God forbid—I don't need that.

And then I also remember my son, the officer in Warsaw. He's an intelligent, honest, and sober man. But I don't find that enough. I think if I had an old father and if I knew that he had moments when he was ashamed of his poverty, I would give my officer's post to someone else and go to do day labor. Such thoughts about my children poison me. What's the point? To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for a narrow-minded or embittered man. But enough of that.

At a quarter to ten I must go to my dear boys and give a lecture. I get dressed and follow a road that has been familiar to me for thirty years now and has its own history for me. Here is a big gray house with a pharmacy; a small house once stood there, and in it there was a beer parlor; in that beer parlor I thought over my dissertation and wrote my first love letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil, on a page with the heading "Historia morbi."⁵ Here is the grocery shop; it was formerly run by a little Jew who sold me cigarettes on credit, then by a fat woman who loved students because "each of them has a mother"; now there's a red-haired shopkeeper sitting there, a very indifferent man, who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are the gloomy university gates, which have long needed repair; the bored caretaker in a sheepskin coat, his besom, the heaps of snow … Such gates cannot make a healthy impression on a fresh boy, come from the provinces, who imagines that the temple of learning really is a temple. In the history of Russian pessimism, the general decrepitude of the university buildings, the gloomy corridors, the grimy walls, the inadequate light, the dismal look of the stairs, cloakrooms and benches, occupy one of the foremost places in the series of causes predisposing … And here is our garden. It seems to have become neither better nor worse since I was a student. I don't like it. It would be much smarter if, instead of consumptive lindens, yellow acacias, and sparse trimmed lilacs, there were tall pines and handsome oaks growing here. The student, whose mood is largely created by the surroundings of his place of learning, should see at every step only the lofty, the strong, the graceful … God save him from scrawny trees, broken windows, gray walls, and doors upholstered with torn oilcloth.

When I come to my entrance, the door opens wide, and I am met by my old colleague, coeval, and namesake, the porter Nikolai. Letting me in, he grunts and says:

"Freezing, Your Excellency!"

Or else, if my coat is wet:

"Raining, Your Excellency!"

Then he runs ahead of me and opens all the doors on my way. In the office, he carefully helps me off with my coat, and meanwhile manages to tell me some university news. Owing to the close acquaintance that exists among all university porters and caretakers, he knows everything that goes on in the four faculties, in the chancellery, in the rector's office, in the library What doesn't he know! For instance, when the latest news is the retirement of the rector or a dean, I hear him name the candidates as he talks with the young caretakers, and explain straight off that so-and-so will not be approved by the minister, that so-and-so will decline, and then go into fantastic detail about some mysterious papers received in the chancellery, about a secret talk that supposedly took place between the minister and a member of the board, and so on. Generally, apart from these details, he almost always turns out to be right. The character references he gives for each candidate are original, but also correct. If you need to know in which year someone defended his thesis, or took up his post, or retired, or died, avail yourself of the vast memory of this old soldier, and he will tell you not only the year, the month, and the day, but also the details that accompanied this or that circumstance. Only one who loves can remember so well.

He is the guardian of university tradition. From his porter predecessors he has inherited many legends of university life, has added to this wealth a considerable quantity of his own goods, acquired during his service, and, if you wish, will tell you many tales both long and short. He can tell of extraordinary wise men who knew all, of remarkably hard workers who didn't sleep for weeks at a time, of numerous martyrs and victims of science; with him good triumphs over evil, the weak always overcome the strong, the wise the stupid, the humble the proud, the young the old … There is no need to take all these legends and tall tales at face value, but sift them and what you need will be left in the filter: our good traditions and the names of true heroes recognized by all.

In our society all information about the world of scholars is summed up in anecdotes about the extraordinary absentmindedness of old professors and two or three quips ascribed to Gruber, or to me, or to Babukhin.⁶ For educated society that is not enough. If it loved learning, scholars and students as much as Nikolai does, its literature would long have had whole epics, sagas, and saints' lives, such as it unfortunately does not have now.

Having told me the news, Nikolai puts a solemn expression on his face, and we begin to talk business. If at that moment some outsider should hear how freely Nikolai handles terminology, he might think that he was a scholar disguised as a soldier. Incidentally, the rumors about the learnedness of university caretakers are greatly exaggerated. True, Nikolai knows more than a hundred Latin names, can assemble a skeleton, prepare a slide on occasion, make the students laugh with some long, learned citation, but so unsophisticated a thing as the theory of the circulation of the blood is as obscure for him now as twenty years ago.

At the table in my office, bending low over a book or a slide, sits my prosector Pyotr Ignatievich, a hardworking, humble, but untalented man of about thirty-five, already bald and with a big stomach. He works from morning to night, reads voluminously, remembers everything he reads excellently—and in that respect he's not a man, he's pure gold; in all the rest he's a cart horse, or, to put it differently, an educated dolt. The characteristic features that distinguish the cart horse from a talented man are these: his horizon is narrow and sharply limited by his profession; outside his profession he is as naïve as a child. I remember coming into the office one morning and saying:

"Imagine, what a misfortune! They say Skobelev⁷ is dead."

Nikolai crossed himself, but Pyotr Ignatievich turned to me and asked:

"Which Skobelev is that?"

Another time—this was a little earlier—I announced that Professor Perov⁸ had died. Dear old Pyotr Ignatievich asked:

"What did he teach?"

I believe if Patti⁹ started singing right in his ear, if hordes of Chinese invaded Russia, even if there was an earthquake, he wouldn't stir a single limb and would quite calmly go on peering with his screwed-up eye into his microscope. In short, Hecuba is nothing to him.¹⁰ I'd pay dearly to see how that dry crust sleeps with his wife.

Another feature: a fanatical faith in the infallibility of science and above all of everything the Germans write. He's sure of himself, of his slides, he knows the goal of life, and is totally unacquainted with the doubts and disappointments that turn talented heads gray. A slavish worship of authority and a lack of any need for independent thinking. To talk him out of anything is difficult, to argue with him is impossible. Try arguing with a person who is profoundly convinced that the best science is medicine, the best people are doctors, the best traditions are medical traditions. The nefarious past of medicine has survived only in one tradition—the white tie now worn by doctors; for the scientist and for the educated man in general, only university-wide traditions can exist, with no divisions into medical, legal, and so on, but Pyotr Ignatievich finds it hard to agree with that, and he is prepared to argue with you till doomsday

His future I can picture clearly In his lifetime he will prepare several hundred slides of an extraordinary neatness, write a lot of dry but quite decent papers, make a dozen or so conscientious translations, but he won't set the world on fire. To set the world on fire, you need fantasy, inventiveness, intuition, and Pyotr Ignatievich has nothing of the sort. To put it briefly, in science he is not a master, but a servant.

Pyotr Ignatievich, Nikolai and I are talking in low voices. We're slightly ill at ease. You feel something peculiar when the auditorium murmurs like the sea behind the door. In thirty years I've never gotten used to that feeling, and I experience it every morning. I nervously button my frock coat, ask Nikolai unnecessary questions, get angry … It looks as if I turn coward, yet this is not cowardice, but something else I can neither name nor describe.

I needlessly look at my watch and say:

"Well, we must go."

And we proceed in the following order: in front walks Nikolai with the slides or atlases, I come after him, and after me, his head humbly lowered, strides the cart horse; or else, if necessary, a cadaver is carried in first, after the cadaver walks Nikolai, and so on. At my appearance, the students rise, then sit down, and the murmur of the sea suddenly grows still. Calm ensues.

I know what I will lecture about, but I don't know how I will lecture, what I will begin with and where I will end. There is not a single ready-made phrase in my head. But I have only to look over the auditorium (it is built as an amphitheater) and pronounce the stereotypical "In the last lecture we stopped at …" for a long string of phrases to come flying out of my soul and—there the province goes scrawling!¹¹ I speak irrepressibly quickly, passionately, and it seems no power can stem the flow of my speech. To lecture well, that is, not boringly and with some profit for your listeners, you must have not only talent but a certain knack and experience, you must possess a very clear notion of your own powers, of those to whom you are lecturing, and of what makes up the subject of your talk. Besides that, you must be self-possessed, keenly observant, and not lose your field of vision even for a second.

A good conductor, as he conveys a composer's thought, does twenty things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer, gestures now towards the drum, now towards the French horn, and so on. It is the same with me when I lecture. Before me are a hundred and fifty faces, no two alike, and three hundred eyes looking me straight in the face. My goal is to conquer this many-headed hydra. If, as I lecture, I have at every moment a clear notion of the degree of its attention and the power of its comprehension, then it is in my control. My other adversary sits inside myself. It is the infinite diversity of forms, phenomena, and laws, and the host of thoughts, my own and other people's, that they call forth. At every moment I must be adroit enough to snatch what is most important and necessary from this vast material and, in pace with my speech, to clothe my thinking in such form as will be accessible to the hydra's understanding and arouse its attention, and at the same time I must observe keenly that the thoughts are conveyed, not as they accumulate, but in a certain order necessary for the correct composition of the picture I wish to paint. Furthermore, I try to make my speech literary, my definitions brief and precise, my phrasing as simple and elegant as possible. At every moment I must rein myself in and remember that I have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In short, it's no little work. I have to figure at one and the same time as a scientist, a pedagogue, and an orator, and it's a bad business if the orator in you overwhelms the pedagogue and scientist, or the other way round.

You lecture for a quarter, a half hour, and then you notice that the students have started looking up at the ceiling, at Pyotr Ignatievich, one feels for his handkerchief, another tries to settle more comfortably, a third smiles at his own thoughts … This means their attention is flagging. Measures must be taken. Availing myself of the first opportunity, I make some quip. All hundred and fifty faces smile broadly, eyes shine merrily, there is a momentary murmur of the sea … I, too, laugh. Attention has been refreshed, and I can go on.

No argument, no amusement or game ever gave me such pleasure as lecturing. Only while lecturing could I give myself entirely to passion and understand that inspiration is not an invention of poets but exists in reality. And I imagine that Hercules, after the most piquant of his great deeds, did not feel such sweet exhaustion as I experienced each time after a lecture.

That was before. Now lectures are nothing but torture for me. Before half an hour has gone by, I begin to feel an insuperable weakness in my legs and shoulders; I sit down in a chair, but I'm not accustomed to lecturing while seated; after a minute I get up, go on standing, then sit down again. My mouth is dry, my voice is hoarse, my head spins … To conceal my condition from my listeners, I keep drinking water, cough, blow my nose frequently, as if I were bothered by a cold, produce inappropriate quips, and in the end announce the break sooner than I should. But the main thing is that I'm ashamed.

My conscience and intelligence tell me that the best thing I could do now is give the boys a farewell lecture, speak my last words to them, bless them, and yield my place to a man who is younger and stronger than I. But, God be my judge, I lack the courage to follow my conscience.

Unfortunately, I'm not a philosopher and not a theologian. I know very well that I have no more than another six months to live; it would seem I should now be most occupied with questions about the darkness beyond the grave and the visions that will haunt my sepulchral sleep. But for some reason my soul rejects those questions, though my mind is aware of all their importance. As twenty or thirty years ago, so now in the face of death I am interested only in science. Breathing my last, I will still believe that science is the most important, the most beautiful and necessary thing in man's life, that it has always been and always will be the highest manifestation of love, and that only by science will man conquer nature and himself. This faith may be naïve and incorrect in its foundations, but it is not my fault that I believe thus and not otherwise; in myself I cannot overcome this faith.

But that is not the point. I only ask indulgence for my weakness and the understanding that to tear away from his lectern and his students a man who has greater interest in the fate of bone marrow than in the final goal of the universe, is tantamount to having him nailed up in his coffin without waiting till he's dead.

From insomnia and as a result of the intense struggle against mounting weakness, something strange is happening to me. In the midst of a lecture, tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch my arms out and complain loudly. I want to cry in a loud voice that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to capital punishment, and that in six months or so another man will be master of this auditorium. I want to cry out that I've been poisoned; new thoughts such as I have never known before have poisoned the last days of my life and go on stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at such times my situation seems so terrible that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to jump up from their seats and, in panic fear, rush for the exit with a desperate cry.

It is not easy to live through such moments.

After the lecture I sit at home and work. I read journals or dissertations, or prepare the next lecture, or sometimes I write something. I work with many breaks, because I'm obliged to receive visitors.

The bell rings. It's a colleague stopping by to talk shop. He comes into my room with his hat and stick, hands me the one and the other, and says:

"For a moment, a moment! Sit down, collega ! Just a couple of words!"

At first we try to show each other that we are both extraordinarily polite and very glad to see each other. I offer him an armchair, and he offers me an armchair; as we do so we cautiously stroke each other's waists, touch each other's buttons, and it looks as if we're palpating each other and are afraid of getting burnt. We both laugh, though we haven't said anything funny. Sitting down, we lean our heads towards each other and begin talking in low voices. Cordially disposed as we are to each other, we can't help gilding our talk with all sorts of Orientalia, like: "As you were pleased to observe so justly," or "As I have already had the honor of telling you," nor can we help laughing if one of us produces some witticism, even an unfortunate one. Having finished his shop talk, my colleague abruptly stands up and, waving his hat in the direction of my work, starts taking his leave. Again we palpate each other and laugh. I see him to the front hall; there I help my colleague into his coat, but he does everything to avoid this high honor. Then as Yegor opens the door, my colleague assures me that I am going to catch cold, as I make a show of even being ready to follow him outside. And when I finally return to my study, my face goes on smiling, probably from inertia.

A short while later the bell rings again. Someone comes into the front hall, spends a long time removing his things, coughs. Yegor announces that a student has appeared. Show him in, I order. A moment later a pleasant-looking young man comes in. It's already a year since our relations became strained: he gives me execrable answers at examinations, and I give him F's. Every year I wind up with about seven of these fine fellows, whom, to use student language, I grill or flunk. Those who can't pass the examination owing to inability or illness usually bear their cross patiently and don't bargain with me; those who do bargain and come to see me at home are the broad, sanguine natures, whose failure at an examination spoils their appetite and interferes with their regular attendance at the opera. The former I treat benignly; the latter I grill for the whole year.

"Sit down," I say to the visitor. "What do you have to say?"

"Excuse me for bothering you, Professor …" he begins, stammering and not looking in my face. "I wouldn't have ventured to bother you if it hadn't been … I've taken your examination five times and … and failed. I beg you, be so kind as to pass me, because …"

The argument that all lazy students give in their own favor is ever the same: they have passed all their courses splendidly and failed only mine, which is the more surprising since they have always studied my subject most diligently and have an excellent knowledge of it; if they have failed, it is owing to some inexplicable misunderstanding.

"Excuse me, my friend," I say to the visitor, "but I cannot pass you. Go read over the lectures and come back. Then we'll see."

A pause. The urge comes over me to torment the student a bit for liking beer and the opera more than science, and I say with a sigh:

"In my opinion, the best thing you can do now is abandon the study of medicine entirely. If, with your abilities, you cannot manage to pass the examination, then you obviously have neither the desire nor the vocation for being a doctor."

The sanguine fellow pulls a long face.

"Excuse me, Professor," he grins, "but that would be strange on my part, to say the least. To study for five years and suddenly … quit!"

"Why, yes! It's better to waste five years than to spend your whole life afterwards doing something you don't like."

But I feel sorry for him at once and hasten to say:

"However, you know best. So, do a little more reading and come back."

"When?" the lazy fellow asks in a hollow voice.

"Whenever you like. Even tomorrow."

And in his kindly eyes I read: "Yes, I can come, but you'll throw me out again, you brute!"

"Of course," I say, "you won't acquire any more knowledge by taking the examination with me another fifteen times, but it will season your character. And thanks be for that."

Silence ensues. I get up and wait for the visitor to leave, but he stands there, looks out the window, pulls at his little beard, and thinks. It becomes boring.

The sanguine fellow's voice is pleasant, juicy, his eyes are intelligent, mocking, his face is good-natured, somewhat flabby from frequent consumption of beer and prolonged lying on the sofa; clearly he could tell me a lot of interesting things about the opera, about his amorous adventures, about friends he likes, but, unfortunately, to speak of such things isn't done. And I'd have listened eagerly.

"Professor! I give you my word of honor that if you pass me, I'll…"

As soon as it comes to the "word of honor," I wave my hands and sit down at my desk. The student thinks a moment longer and says dejectedly:

"In that case, good-bye … Excuse me."

"Good-bye, my friend. Be well."

He walks irresolutely to the front hall, slowly puts his coat on, and, as he goes out, again probably thinks for a long time. Having come up with nothing to apply to me except "the old devil," he goes to a bad restaurant, drinks beer and has dinner, and then goes home to sleep. May you rest in peace, honest laborer!

A third ring. A young doctor comes in, wearing a new black two-piece suit, gold-rimmed spectacles, and, sure enough, a white tie. He introduces himself. I invite him to sit down and ask what I can do for him. Not without excitement, the young priest of science begins telling me that he passed his doctoral examination this year and that the only thing he has left to do is write a dissertation. He would like to work for a while with me, under my guidance, and I would greatly oblige him if I gave him a topic for a dissertation.

"I would be very glad to be of use, collega," I say, "but let's first agree on what a dissertation is. In the accepted understanding, the word refers to a piece of writing that represents a product of independent work. Isn't that so? A piece of writing on someone else's topic, produced under someone else's guidance, goes by a different name …"

The doctoral candidate is silent. I flare up and jump to my feet.

"Why do you all come to me? I don't understand it," I shout angrily. "Am I running a shop or something? I don't deal in topics! For the thousand and first time I beg you all to leave me in peace! Forgive my indelicacy, but I'm finally sick of it!"

The doctoral candidate is silent, only a slight color appears around his cheekbones. His face expresses profound respect for my famous name and learning, but by his eyes I can see that he despises my voice, and my pathetic figure, and my nervous gestures. I seem odd to him in my wrath.

"I'm not running a shop!" I say angrily. "And it's an astonishing thing! Why don't you want to be independent? Why are you so against freedom?"

I talk a lot, but he remains silent. In the end I gradually calm down and, of course, give in. The doctoral candidate will get a topic from me that isn't worth a brass farthing, will write under my guidance a dissertation that nobody needs, will stand with dignity through a boring defense, and receive a learned degree that he has no use for.

The rings could follow one another endlessly, but here I'll limit myself to only four. The bell rings a fourth time, and I hear familiar footsteps, the rustle of a dress, a dear voice …

Eighteen years ago my oculist colleague died, leaving a seven-year-old daughter, Katya, and sixty thousand roubles. In his will he appointed me her guardian. Katya lived in my family till she was ten, then was sent to boarding school and spent only the summer months in my house, during vacations. I had no time to occupy myself with her upbringing, I observed her only in snatches and therefore can say very little about her childhood.

The first thing I remember and love in my memories is this—the extraordinary trustfulness with which she came into my home, and let herself be treated by doctors, and which always shone on her little face. She might be sitting somewhere out of the way, with a bandaged cheek, but she was sure to be looking attentively at something; if just then she should see me writing or looking through a book, or my wife bustling about, or the cook in the kitchen peeling potatoes, or the dog playing, her eyes would invariably express the same thing—namely: "All that goes on in this world is beautiful and wise." She was inquisitive and liked very much to talk with me. She would sit at the desk facing me, following my movements, and ask questions. She was interested in knowing what I read, what I did at the university, whether I was afraid of cadavers, what I did with my salary.

"Do the students fight at the university?" she would ask.

"Yes, they do, dear."

"Do you make them stand on their knees?"

"I do."

And she thought it was funny that the students fought and that I made them stand on their knees, and she laughed. She was a meek, patient, and kind child. Not seldom I happened to see how things were taken from her, or she was punished for no reason, or her curiosity went unsatisfied; at those moments the constant expression of trustfulness on her face would be mixed with sadness—and that was all. I wasn't able to intercede for her, but only felt a longing, when I saw her sadness, to draw her to me and pity her in the tone of an old nanny: "My dear little orphan!"

I also remember that she liked to dress well and sprinkle herself with scent. In that respect she was like me. I, too, like fine clothes and good scent.

I regret that I had no time or wish to follow the beginning and development of the passion that already filled Katya by the time she was fourteen or fifteen years old. I'm referring to her passionate love for the theater. When she came home from boarding school for vacation and lived with us, she spoke of nothing else with such pleasure and such ardor as of plays and actors. She wore us out with her constant talk about the theater. My wife and children didn't listen to her. I was the only one who lacked the courage to deny her my attention. When she had a wish to share her raptures, she would come to my study and say in a pleading voice:

"Nikolai Stepanych, let me talk with you about the theater!"

I would point to the clock and say:

"I'll give you half an hour. Go on."

Later she started bringing home dozens of portraits of the actors and actresses she adored; then she tried a few times to take part in amateur productions, and finally, when she finished school, she announced to me that she was born to be an actress.

I never shared Katya's theatrical infatuation. I think, if a play is good, there's no need to bother with actors for it to make the proper impression; it's enough simply to read it. And if a play is bad, no performance will make it good.

In my youth I often went to the theater, and now my family reserves a box twice a year and takes me for an "airing." Of course, that is not enough to give one the right to judge about the theater, but I will say a little about it. In my opinion, the theater has become no better than it was thirty or forty years ago. As before, I can never find a glass of clean water either in the corridors or in the theater lobby. As before, the ushers fine me twenty kopecks for my coat, though there's nothing reprehensible about wearing warm clothes in winter. As before, they needlessly play music during the intermissions, adding to the impression of the play a new and unwanted one. As before, men go to the buffet during intermissions to drink alcoholic beverages. If no progress is to be seen in small things, it would be futile to start looking for it in major things. When an actor, bound from head to foot in theatrical traditions and preconceptions, tries to read the simple, ordinary monologue "To be or not to be" not simply, but for some reason with an inevitable hissing and convulsing of his whole body, or when he tries to convince me by one means or another that Chatsky, who talks so much with fools and loves a foolish woman, is a very intelligent man, and that Woe from Wit¹² is not a boring play, I feel the same routine wafting from the stage that I already found boring forty years ago, when I was treated to a classical howling and beating of the breast. And I leave the theater each time more conservative than when I entered it.

The sentimental and gullible crowd may be convinced that the theater in its present form is a school. But no one acquainted with school in the true sense can be caught on that hook. I don't know what will happen in fifty or a hundred years, but in the present circumstances the theater can serve only as entertainment. But this entertainment is too expensive for us to go on resorting to it. It robs the country of thousands of young, healthy, and talented men and women, who, if they had not devoted themselves to the theater, might have been good doctors, tillers of the soil, teachers, army officers; it robs the public of the evening hours—the best hours for mental labor and friendly conversation. To say nothing of the money spent and of the moral losses suffered by the spectator, who sees murder, adultery, and slander incorrectly interpreted on stage.

But Katya was of quite a different opinion. She assured me that the theater, even in its present state, was higher than the auditorium, higher than books, higher than anything in the world. The theater was a force that united all the arts in itself, and actors were missionaries. No art or science by itself was capable of having so strong and so sure an effect on the human soul as the stage, and it was not without reason that an actor of the average sort enjoyed far greater popularity in the country than the best scholar or artist. And no public activity could afford such pleasure and satisfaction as that of the stage.

And one fine day Katya joined a troupe and left—for Ufa, I think—taking with her a lot of money, a host of bright expectations, and aristocratic views of the matter.

Her first letters from the road were extraordinary. I read them and was simply amazed that those small pages could contain so much youth, inner purity, holy innocence, together with subtle, sensible opinions that would have done credit to a sound male mind. The Volga, nature, the towns she visited, her comrades, her successes and failures—she did not so much describe as sing them; every line breathed the trustfulness I was accustomed to seeing in her face—and with all that, a mass of grammatical errors and an almost total lack of punctuation.

Before half a year went by, I received a highly poetical and rapturous letter, beginning with the words: "I am in love." Enclosed in this letter was a photograph showing a young, clean-shaven man in a broad-brimmed hat, with a plaid thrown over his shoulder. The letters that followed this one were as splendid as before, but punctuation marks appeared in them, the grammatical errors disappeared, and they gave off a strong male smell. Katya began writing to me about how good it would be to build a big theater somewhere on the Volga, as a stock company, to be sure, and to attract rich merchants and shipowners to the enterprise; there would be lots of money, enormous receipts, the actors would perform on cooperative principles … Maybe it was all indeed good, but it seemed to me that such ideas could only proceed from a man's head.

Be that as it may, for a year or two everything appeared to prosper. Katya was in love, believed in her work, and was happy; but then I began to notice clear signs of a decline in her letters. It began with Katya complaining to me about her comrades—that was the first and most ominous symptom. If a young scholar or writer begins his activity by complaining bitterly about scholars or writers, it means he's already worn out and not fit for work. Katya wrote to me that her comrades did not attend rehearsals and never learned their parts; that the preposterous plays they produced and the way they behaved on stage betrayed in each of them a total lack of respect for the public; in the interest of the box office, which was all they talked about, dramatic actresses lowered themselves to singing chansonettes, and tragic actors sang ditties making fun of cuckolded husbands and the pregnancies of unfaithful wives, and so on. Generally, it was a wonder that provincial theater had not died out yet, and that it could hold on by such a thin and rotten little thread.

In reply I sent Katya a long and, I confess, very boring letter. Among other things, I wrote to her: "I have not infrequently had occasion to exchange words with old actors, the noblest of people, who accorded me their sympathy; from talking with them I was able to see that their activity is directed not so much by their own reason and freedom as by fashion and the mood of society; the best of them had been obliged, during their lives, to play in tragedies, and in operettas, and in Parisian farces, and in fairy pageants, yet they always had the same feeling of following a straight path and being useful. And so, as you see, the cause of the evil must be sought not in actors, but deeper, in the art itself and how the whole society relates to it." This letter only annoyed Katya. She replied to me: "You and I are singing in different operas. I wrote to you not about the noblest of people, who accorded you their sympathy, but about a band of swindlers who have nothing in common with nobility. They're a herd of wild people, who wound up on the stage only because they wouldn't have been accepted anywhere else, and who call themselves artists only out of insolence. Not a single talent, but a lot of giftless people, drunkards, intriguers, and gossips. I can't tell you how bitter it is for me that the art I love so much has fallen into the hands of people I find hateful; how bitter that the best people see evil only from a distance, do not want to come closer, and, instead of intervening, write heavy-handed commonplaces and totally needless moral pronouncements …" and so on, all in the same vein.

A little more time went by, and I received this letter: "I have been brutally deceived. I cannot live any longer. You may dispose of my money as you see fit. I loved you as a father and my only friend. Forgive me."

It turned out that her he also belonged to the "herd of wild people." Later I was able to guess from certain hints that there had been an attempt at suicide. It seems Katya tried to poison herself. It must be supposed that she was seriously ill afterwards, because the next letter I received was from Yalta, where, in all likelihood, the doctors had sent her. Her last letter to me contained a request to send her a thousand roubles in Yalta as soon as possible, and it ended like this: "Excuse me for such a gloomy letter. Yesterday I buried my baby." After spending about a year in the Crimea, she returned home.

She had been away for about four years, and for all those four years, I must confess, I played a rather strange and unenviable role in regard to her. When she had announced to me earlier that she was going to become an actress, and then wrote to me about her love, when she was periodically possessed by a spirit of prodigality and I had time and again to send her, on her demand, now a thousand, now two thousand roubles, when she wrote to me about her intention to die and then about the death of the baby, I was at a loss each time and all my concern for her fate expressed itself only in my thinking a lot and writing long, boring letters, which I might as well not have written. And yet I had taken the place of her real father and loved her like a daughter!

Now Katya lives half a mile from me. She has rented a five-room apartment, and has furnished it quite comfortably and in her own taste. If anyone should undertake to depict her furnishings, the predominant mood of the picture would be indolence. Soft couches, soft seats for an indolent body, carpets for indolent feet, pale, dull, or matte colors for indolent eyes; for an indolent soul, an abundance of cheap fans on the walls and little pictures in which an originality of execution dominates content, a superfluity of little tables and shelves filled with totally useless and worthless objects, shapeless rags for curtains … All that, along with the fear of bright colors, symmetry, and open space, testifies not only to inner indolence but also to a perversion of natural taste. For whole days Katya lies on a couch and reads books, mostly novels and stories. She leaves the house only once a day, in the afternoon, to come and see me.

I'm working, and Katya is sitting not far away on the sofa, silent and wrapped in a shawl, as if she felt cold. Either because I find her sympathetic, or because I became accustomed to her frequent visits when she was still a little girl, her presence does not keep me from concentrating. From time to time I mechanically ask her some question, and she gives me a very brief answer; or, to rest for a moment, I turn to her and watch her pensively looking through some medical journal or newspaper. And then I notice that her face no longer has its former trustful expression. Her expression is cold now, indifferent, distracted, as with passengers who have to wait a long time for a train. She still dresses beautifully and simply, but carelessly; you can see that her clothes and hair have to put up with a lot from the couches and rocking chairs she lies in all day long. And she's not as curious as she used to be. She asks me no questions now, as if she has already experienced everything in life and doesn't expect to hear anything new.

Towards four o'clock there begins to be movement in the hall and the drawing room. Liza has come home from the conservatory and brought some girlfriends with her. They can be heard playing the piano, trying out their voices, and laughing. Yegor is setting the table in the dining room and clattering the dishes.

"Good-bye," says Katya. "I won't see your family today. They must excuse me. I have no time. Come by."

As I see her off to the front door, she looks me up and down sternly and says in vexation:

"And you keep losing weight! Why don't you see a doctor? I'll go and invite Sergei Fyodorovich. Let him examine you."

"There's no need, Katya."

"I don't understand where your family is looking! Good ones they are!"

She puts her coat on impetuously, and as she does so, two or three hairpins are bound to fall from her carelessly done hair. She's too lazy to put it right, and she has no time; she awkwardly tucks the loose strands under her hat and leaves.

When I go into the dining room, my wife asks me:

"Was Katya with you just now? Why didn't she stop and see us? It's even strange …"

"Mama!" Liza says to her reproachfully. "If she doesn't want to, God be with her. We're not going to kneel to her."

"As you like, but it's disdainful. To sit in your study for three hours and not give us a thought! However, as she likes."

Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is incomprehensible to me, and one probably has to be a woman to understand it. I'll bet my life that of the hundred and fifty-odd young men I see almost every day in my auditorium, and the hundred older ones I have to meet each week, it would be hard to find even one who is able to understand their hatred and loathing for Katya's past—that is, for her pregnancy out of wedlock and her illegitimate child; and at the same time I simply cannot recall even one woman or girl among those I know who would not consciously or instinctively share those feelings. And that is not because women are purer or more virtuous than men: purity and virtue scarcely differ from vice, if they're not free of malice. I explain it simply by the backwardness of women. The dejected feeling of compassion and pained conscience experienced by a contemporary man at the sight of misfortune speak much more to me of culture and moral development than do hatred and loathing. Contemporary women are as tearful and coarse of heart as in the Middle Ages. And, in my opinion, those who advise that they be educated like men are quite reasonable.

My wife also dislikes Katya for having been an actress, for her ingratitude, for her pride, for her eccentricity, and for a whole host of vices that one woman is always able to find in another.

Besides my family and myself, we also have dining with us two or three of my daughter's girlfriends, and Alexander Adolfovich Gnekker, Liza's admirer and the pretender to her hand. He is a blond young man, no more than thirty, of average height, very stout, broad-shouldered, with red side-whiskers at his ears and a waxed little mustache that gives his plump, smooth face a sort of toylike expression. He is wearing a very short jacket, a bright-colored waistcoat, trousers of a large checked pattern, very wide above and very narrow below, and yellow shoes without heels. He has prominent crayfish eyes, his tie resembles a crayfish tail, and it seems to me that the whole of the young man exudes a smell of crayfish soup. He calls on us every day, but no one in my family knows what his origins are, where he studied, or what he lives on. He neither plays nor sings, but is somehow connected with music and singing, sells somebody's grand pianos somewhere, is often at the conservatory, is acquainted with all the celebrities, and takes a hand in concerts. He pronounces on music with great authority, and I've noticed that everybody willingly agrees with him.

Rich people are always surrounded by spongers; so are people of science and art. It seems no science or art in the world is free of the presence of "foreign bodies" like this Mr. Gnekker. I'm not a musician, and may be mistaken concerning this Gnekker, whom, moreover, I know only slightly. But his authority, and the dignity with which he stands by the piano and listens while someone sings or plays, strike me as all too suspicious.

You can be a gentleman and a privy councillor a hundred times over, but if you have a daughter, nothing can protect you from the bourgeois vulgarity that is often introduced into your house and into your state of mind by courtships, proposals, and weddings. I, for instance, am quite unable to reconcile myself to the solemn expression my wife acquires each time Gnekker sits down with us, nor can I be reconciled to the bottles of Lafite, port, and sherry that are served only for his sake, to give him ocular evidence of the luxury and largesse of our life. I also can't stand Liza's jerky laughter, which she learned at the conservatory, or her way of narrowing her eyes when we have gentleman visitors. And above all I simply cannot understand why it is that I am visited every day by and have dinner every day with a being who is totally alien to my habits, my learning, the whole mode of my life, and who is totally different from the people I like. My wife and the servants whisper mysteriously that he is "the fiancé," but even so I don't understand his presence; it arouses the same perplexity in me as if a Zulu were seated at my table. And it also seems strange to me that my daughter, whom I am accustomed to consider a child, should love that necktie, those eyes, those soft cheeks …

Formerly I either liked dinner or was indifferent to it, but now it arouses nothing but boredom and vexation in me. Ever since I became an Excellency¹³ and was made dean of the faculty, my family has for some reason found it necessary to change our menu and dining habits. Instead of the simple dishes I became accustomed to as a student and a doctor, I'm now fed puréed soup with some sort of white icicles floating in it, and kidneys in Madeira. Renown and the rank of general have deprived me forever of cabbage soup, and tasty pies, and goose with apples, and bream with kasha.¹⁴ They have also deprived me of the maid Agasha, a talkative old woman, quick to laugh, instead of whom the dinner is now served by Yegor, a dumb and arrogant fellow with a white glove on his right hand. The intermissions are short, but they seem far too long, because there is nothing to fill them. Gone are the former gaiety, unconstrained conversation, jokes, laughter, gone is the mutual tenderness and joy that animated my children, my wife and myself when we used to come together in the dining room; for a busy man like me, dinner was a time to rest and see my wife and children, and for them it was a festive time—short, it's true, but bright and joyful— when they knew that for half an hour I belonged not to science, not to my students, but to them alone and no one else. No more the ability to get drunk on a single glass, no more Agasha, no more bream with kasha, no more the noise produced by small dinner scandals, like a fight between the cat and dog under the table or the bandage falling from Katya's cheek into her plate of soup.

Describing our present-day dinners is as unappetizing as eating them. My wife's face has an expression of solemnity, an assumed gravity, and her usual worry. She glances uneasily over our plates and says: "I see you don't like the roast … Tell me: don't you really?" And I have to answer: "You needn't worry, my dear, the roast is quite delicious." And she: "You always stand up for me, Nikolai Stepanych, and never tell the truth. Why, then, has Alexander Adolfovich eaten so little?" and it goes on in the same vein throughout the meal. Liza laughs jerkily and narrows her eyes. I look at the two of them, and only now, at dinner, does it become perfectly clear to me that their inner life escaped my observation long ago. I have the feeling that once upon a time I lived at home with a real family, but now I'm the dinner guest of someone who is not my real wife and am looking at someone who is not the real Liza. An abrupt change has taken place in them both, I missed the long process by which this change came about, and it's no wonder I don't understand anything. Why did the change take place? I don't know. Maybe the whole trouble is that God gave my wife and daughter less strength than He gave me. Since childhood I've been accustomed to standing up to external circumstances, and I've become rather seasoned; such catastrophes in life as renown, the rank of general, the change from well-being to living beyond one's means, acquaintance with the nobility, and so on, have barely touched me, and I've remained safe and sound; but on my weak, unseasoned wife and Liza it all fell like a big block of snow, and crushed them.

The young ladies and Gnekker are talking about fugues, counterpoint, about singers and pianists, about Bach and Brahms, and my wife, afraid to be suspected of musical ignorance, smiles at them sympathetically and murmurs: "That's lovely … Really? You don't say …" Gnekker eats gravely, cracks jokes gravely, and listens condescendingly to the young ladies' observations. Every once in a while he feels a desire to speak bad French, and then for some reason he finds it necessary to address me as votre excellence.

And I am morose. Obviously I inhibit them all, and they inhibit me. Never before have I been closely acquainted with class antagonism, but now I'm tormented precisely by something of that sort. I try to find only bad features in Gnekker, quickly find them, and am tormented that in the suitor's place there sits a man not of my circle. His presence affects me badly in yet another respect. Usually, when I'm by myself or in the company of people I like, I never think of my own merits, and if I do begin to think of them, they seem as insignificant to me as if I had become a scientist only yesterday; but in the presence of people like Gnekker, my merits seem like a lofty mountain, its peak disappearing into the clouds, while at its foot, barely visible to the eye, the Gnekkers shift about.

After dinner I go to my study and there light my pipe, the only one of the whole day, a leftover from a long-past bad habit of puffing smoke from morning till night. While I'm smoking, my wife comes in and sits down to talk with me. Just as in the morning, I know beforehand what the talk will be about.

"I must have a serious talk with you, Nikolai Stepanych," she begins. "It's about Liza … Why aren't you paying attention?"

"Meaning what?"

"You make it seem as if you don't notice anything, but that's not good. It's impossible to be unconcerned … Gnekker has intentions towards Liza … What do you say?"

"That he's a bad man I cannot say, since I don't know him, but that I dislike him, I've already told you a thousand times."

"But this is impossible … impossible …"

She gets up and paces in agitation.

"It's impossible to deal this way with such a serious step …" she says. "When it's a question of your daughter's happiness, you must set aside everything personal. I know you dislike him … Very well … If we reject him now, break it all off, what assurance do you have that Liza won't complain about us for the rest of her life? There aren't so many suitors nowadays, and it may so happen that no other party comes along … He loves Liza very much, and she apparently likes him … Of course, he has no definite position, but what can we do? God willing, he'll get himself established somewhere in time. He's from a good family and he's rich."

"How do you know that?"

"He said so. His father has a big house in Kharkov and an estate near Kharkov. In short, Nikolai Stepanych, you absolutely must go to Kharkov."

"What for?"

"You can make inquiries … You have acquaintances among the professors there, they'll help you. I'd go myself, but I'm a woman. I can't …"

"I won't go to Kharkov," I say morosely.

My wife gets alarmed, and an expression of tormenting pain appears on her face.

"For God's sake, Nikolai Stepanych!" she implores me, sobbing. "For God's sake, relieve me of this burden! I'm suffering!"

It's becoming painful to look at her.

"Very well, Varya," I say tenderly. "If you wish, so be it, I'll go to Kharkov and do whatever you like."

She presses her handkerchief to her eyes and goes to her room to cry. I remain alone.

A little later a lamp is brought in. Familiar shadows I've long since grown weary of are cast on the walls and floor by the chairs and the lamp shade, and when I look at them, it seems to me that it's already night and that my cursed insomnia is beginning. I lie down, then get up and pace the room, then lie down again … Usually after dinner, before evening, my nervous agitation reaches its highest pitch. I start weeping for no reason and hide my head under the pillow. In those moments I'm afraid somebody may come in, afraid I may die suddenly; I'm ashamed of my tears, and generally there is something unbearable in my soul. I feel that I can no longer stand the sight of my lamp, the books, the shadows on the floor, or the sound of voices coming from the drawing room. Some invisible and incomprehensible force is roughly pushing me out of the house. I jump up, hastily put on my coat and hat, and cautiously, so that the family won't notice, go outside. Where to?

The answer to that question has long been sitting in my brain: to Katya.

III

As usual, she's lying on a Turkish divan or couch and reading something. On seeing me, she raises her head indolently, sits up, and gives me her hand.

"And you're always lying down," I say, after pausing briefly to rest. "That's unhealthy. You ought to find something to do!"

"Eh?"

"I said, you ought to find something to do."

"What? A woman can only be a menial worker or an actress."

"Well, then? If you can't be a worker, be an actress."

Silence.

"Why don't you get married?" I say half jokingly.

"There's nobody to marry. And no reason to."

"You can't live like this."

"Without a husband? A lot it matters! There are men all over, if anybody's interested."

"That's not nice, Katya."

"What's not nice?"

"What you just said."

Noticing that I'm upset, and wishing to smooth over the bad impression, Katya says:

"Come. Over here. Look."

She leads me to a small, very cozy room and says, pointing to the writing table:

"Look … I've made it ready for you. You can work here. Come every day and bring your work. At home they only bother you. Will you work here? Do you want to?"

To avoid upsetting her by saying no, I reply that I will work in her place and that I like the room very much. Then the two of us sit down in this cozy room and begin to talk.

The warmth, the cozy atmosphere, and the presence of a sympathetic person now arouse in me not a feeling of contentment, as before, but a strong urge to complain and grumble. For some reason it seems to me that if I murmur and complain a bit I'll feel better.

"Things are bad, my dear!" I begin with a sigh. "Very bad …"

"What's wrong?"

"The thing is this, my friend. The best and most sacred right of kings is the right to show mercy. And I always felt myself a king, because I made boundless use of that right. I never judged, I was tolerant, I willingly forgave everybody right and left. Where others protested and were indignant, I merely advised and persuaded. All my life I tried only to make my company bearable for my family, students, colleagues, and servants. And this attitude of mine towards people, I know, was an education to all those around me. But now I'm no longer a king. Something is going on inside me that is fit only for slaves: spiteful thoughts wander through my head day and night, and feelings such as I've never known before are nesting in my soul. I hate and despise, I feel indignant, outraged, afraid. I've become excessively severe, demanding, irritable, ungracious, suspicious. Even something that before would have given me an occasion for one more quip and a good-natured laugh, now produces a heavy feeling in me. My logic has also changed in me: before I only despised money, now I harbor a spiteful feeling not for money but for the rich, as if they were to blame; before I hated violence and tyranny, but now I hate the people who use violence, as if they alone were to blame and not all of us, because we're unable to educate each other. What does it mean? If my new thoughts and feelings proceed from a change of convictions, where could that change have come from? Has the world become worse and I better, or was I blind and indifferent before? And if this change has proceeded from a general decline of physical and mental powers—I'm sick and losing weight every day—then my situation is pathetic: it means that my new thoughts are abnormal, unhealthy, that I should be ashamed of them and consider them worthless …"

"Sickness has nothing to do with it," Katya interrupts me. "It's simply that your eyes have been opened, that's all. You've seen something that for some reason you didn't want to notice before. In my opinion, you must first of all break with your family and leave."

"What you're saying is absurd."

"You don't love them, so why this duplicity? And is that a family? Nonentities! They could die today, and tomorrow nobody would notice they were gone."

Katya despises my wife and daughter as much as they hate her. In our day one can hardly talk of people's right to despise each other. But if one takes Katya's point of view and acknowledges that such a right exists, one can see that after all she has the same right to despise my wife and Liza as they have to hate her.

"Nonentities!" she repeats. "Did you have dinner today? How is it they didn't forget to call you to the dining room? How is it they still remember your existence?"

"Katya," I say sternly, "I ask you to be quiet."

"And do you think I enjoy talking about them? I'd be glad not to know them at all. Listen to me, my dear: drop everything and leave. Go abroad. The sooner the better."

"What nonsense! And the university?"

"The university, too. What is it to you? There's no sense in it anyway. You've been lecturing for thirty years now, and where are your disciples? Have you produced many famous scientists? Count them up! And to multiply the number of doctors who exploit ignorance and make hundreds of thousands, there's no need to be a good and talented man. You're superfluous."

"My God, how sharp you are!" I say, horrified. "How sharp you are! Be quiet, or I'll leave! I don't know how to reply to your sharpness!"

The maid comes in and invites us to have tea. At the samovar our conversation changes, thank God. Since I've already complained, I want to give free rein to my other old man's weakness— reminiscence. I tell Katya about my past and, to my great astonishment, inform her of such details as I didn't even suspect were still preserved in my memory. And she listens to me with tenderness, with pride, with bated breath. I especially like telling her how I once studied at the seminary¹⁵ and dreamed of going to university.

"I used to walk in our seminary garden …" I tell her. "The squeak of an accordion and a song from a far-off tavern would come on the wind, or a troika with bells would race past the seminary fence, and that was already quite enough for a sense of happiness suddenly to fill not only my breast, but even my stomach, legs, arms … I'd listen to the accordion or to the fading sound of the bells, and imagine myself a doctor and paint pictures—one better than the other. And so, as you see, my dreams have come true. I've received more than I dared dream of. For thirty years I've been a beloved professor, have had excellent colleagues, have enjoyed honorable renown. I've loved, married for passionate love, had children. In short, looking back, my whole life seems to me like a beautiful composition, executed with talent. Now it only remains for me not to ruin the finale. For that I must die like a human being. If death is indeed a danger, I must meet it as befits a teacher, a scientist, and the citizen of a Christian country: cheerfully and with a peaceful soul. But I'm ruining the finale. I'm drowning, I run to you asking for help, and you say to me: drown, that's how it should be."

But here the bell rings in the front hall. Katya and I recognize it and say:

"That must be Mikhail Fyodorovich."

And, indeed, a moment later in comes my colleague, the philologist Mikhail Fyodorovich, a tall, well-built man of around fifty, clean-shaven, with thick gray hair and black eyebrows. He is a kind man and an excellent comrade. He comes from an old aristocratic family, very fortunate and talented, which has played a notable role in the history of our literature and education. He himself is intelligent, talented, very cultivated, but not without his oddities. To a certain degree we're all odd, we're all eccentrics, but his oddities seem to his acquaintances to be something exceptional and not entirely harmless. Among those acquaintances I know not a few who are totally unable to see his many virtues through his oddities.

He comes into the room, slowly removes his gloves, and says in a velvety bass:

"Good evening. Having tea? That's quite appropriate. It's hellishly cold."

Then he sits at the table, takes a glass, and immediately starts talking. The most characteristic thing in his manner of talking is his permanently jocular tone, a sort of blend of philosophy and banter, as with Shakespeare's gravediggers. He always talks about serious things, but never talks seriously. His opinions are always sharp, abusive, but owing to his soft, smooth, jocular tone, it somehow turns out that his sharpness and abuse do not grate on the ear, and you quickly get used to them. Every evening he brings along five or six anecdotes from university life, and when he sits at the table, he usually begins with them.

"Oh, Lord!" he sighs, with a mocking movement of his black eyebrows. "Such comedians there are in the world!"

"And so?" asks Katya.

"I'm leaving after my lecture, and on the stairs I meet that old idiot of ours, X … He's walking along with his horse's jaw thrust out as usual, looking for somebody to complain to about his migraine, his wife, and the students, who don't want to attend his lectures. Well, I think, he's seen me—that's it, I'm lost…"

And so on in the same vein. Or else he begins like this:

"Yesterday I was at our Y's public lecture. It surprises me that our alma mater—not to speak of the devil—ventures to show the public such patent oafs and dimwits as this Y. He's a fool on a European scale! Good heavens, you wouldn't find another like him in all of Europe, not even with a candle in broad daylight! He lectures, if you can imagine, just as if he's sucking a candy: ssk-ssk-ssk … He gets cold feet, can't make out his own notes, his wretched little thoughts barely move, like a monk on a bicycle, and above all there's no way to tell what he's trying to say. Flies die of boredom. The boredom can only be compared with what we have in our big auditorium at commencement, when the traditional speech is being read, devil take it."

And at once a sharp transition:

"Some three years ago, as our Nikolai Stepanych remembers, I had to deliver that speech. Hot, stuffy, uniform tight under the arms—you could die! I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half, two hours … Well, I think, thank God, only ten pages left. And at the conclusion there were four pages I could omit altogether, so I counted on not reading them. That leaves only six, I thought. Then, imagine, I glance up and see some beribboned general and a bishop sitting next to each other in the front row. The poor souls are stiff with boredom, they roll their eyes so as not to fall asleep, and yet they still try to keep an attentive look on their faces and pretend that they like and understand my lecture. Well, I think, since you like it, you're going to get it! For spite! And I up and read all four pages."

When he talks, only his eyes and eyebrows smile, as generally with people given to mockery. There is no hatred or spite in his eyes at these moments, but a good deal of sharpness and that peculiar foxy cunning that is seen only in very observant people. To go on about his eyes, I've noticed another peculiarity in them. When he takes a glass from Katya, or listens to some remark of hers, or follows her with his eyes when she momentarily leaves the room for some reason, I notice in his glance something meek, prayerful, pure …

The maid removes the samovar and puts a big piece of cheese and some fruit on the table, along with a bottle of Crimean champagne, a rather bad wine that Katya came to like when she lived in the Crimea. Mikhail Fyodorovich takes two decks of cards from the shelf and lays out a game of patience. According to him, some varieties of patience call for considerable cleverness and concentration, but he still never stops entertaining himself with talk, even while he plays. Katya follows the cards attentively and helps him more with looks than with words. She drinks no more than two glasses of wine all evening, I drink a quarter of a glass; the rest of the bottle falls to Mikhail Fyodorovich, who can drink a lot and never gets drunk.

Over patience we resolve various questions, mostly of a higher order, and what gets the most punishment from us is what we love most—that is, science.

"Science has outlived itself, thank God," Mikhail Fyodorovich says measuredly "Its song has been sung. Yes, sir. Mankind is already beginning to feel the need to replace it with something else. It sprang from the soil of superstition, was nourished by superstition, and is now as much the quintessence of superstition as the grandmothers it has outlived: alchemy, metaphysics, and philosophy. And what, indeed, has it given people? The difference between learned Europeans and the Chinese, who have no science themselves, is quite negligible and purely external. The Chinese don't know science, but what have they lost because of it?"

"Flies don't know science either," I say, "but what of that?"

"You needn't get angry, Nikolai Stepanych. I'm saying it here, among us … I'm more cautious than you think, and am not about to say it publicly, God forbid! The superstition persists among the masses that science and the arts are higher than agriculture and trade, higher than the handicrafts. Our sect feeds on that superstition, and it's not for you or me to destroy it. God forbid!"

Over patience the younger generation also comes in for rough treatment.

"Our public has become paltry these days," sighs Mikhail Fyodorovich. "I'm not even talking about ideals and all that, but they don't even know how to work or think properly! It's precisely: 'In sorrow I gaze upon our generation.'"¹⁶

"Yes, terribly paltry," Katya agrees. "Tell me, have you had at least one outstanding student in the last five or ten years?"

"I don't know about other professors, but I don't remember any among mine."

"I've seen lots of students in my time, and your young scientists, and lots of actors … And what? Never once was I deemed worthy of meeting not only a hero or a talent, but even simply an interesting human being. They're all gray, giftless, puffed up with pretensions …"

All these conversations about paltriness give me the feeling each time of having accidentally overheard some nasty conversation about my own daughter. It offends me that the accusations are so sweeping and built on such worn-out commonplaces, such bogeys, as paltriness, lack of ideals, or references to the beautiful past. Any accusation, even if it's spoken in the company of ladies, must be formulated as definitely as possible, otherwise it's not an accusation but empty maligning, unworthy of decent people.

I'm an old man, I've been teaching for thirty years, but I don't see any paltriness or lack of ideals, nor do I find it worse now than before. My porter Nikolai, whose experience in this case is valid, says that today's students are no better or worse than before.

If I were asked what I do not like in my present students, I would not answer at once or at length, but I would be sufficiently definite. I know their shortcomings and therefore have no need to resort to a fog of commonplaces. I do not like it that they smoke, use alcoholic beverages, and marry late; that they are careless and often indifferent to such a degree that they suffer people to go hungry in their midst and do not pay into the student aid society. They don't know modern languages and speak Russian incorrectly; just yesterday a colleague of mine, a hygienist, complained to me that he had to lecture twice as long, because they have a poor knowledge of physics and are totally unacquainted with meteorology. They willingly submit to the influence of modern writers, and not even the best of them, but are completely indifferent to such classics as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability to distinguish great from small betrays most of all their everyday impracticality All difficult questions of a more or less social character (resettlement, for instance) they solve by subscriptions, and not by means of scientific research and experiment, though the latter are entirely at their disposal and best correspond to their purposes. They willingly become orderlies, assistants, laboratory technicians, adjuncts, and are ready to occupy those positions till the age of forty, though independence, a sense of freedom, and personal initiative are no less necessary in science than, for instance, in art or in trade. I have students and auditors, but no helpers or heirs, and therefore, though I feel love and tenderness for them, I am not proud of them. And so on and so forth.

Such shortcomings, numerous though they are, can produce a pessimistic or abusive spirit only in a fainthearted and timid man. They all have an accidental, transient character and are totally dependent on life's circumstances; some ten years are enough for them to disappear or yield their place to new and different shortcomings, which it is impossible to do without and which, in their turn, will frighten the fainthearted. I'm often vexed by my students' sins, but this vexation is nothing compared with the joy I've experienced for thirty years, when I talk with my students, lecture to them, study their relations, and compare them with people in other circles.

Mikhail Fyodorovich maligns, Katya listens, and neither notices what a deep abyss this apparently innocent amusement of judging their neighbors draws them into. They don't feel how their simple conversation gradually turns into jeering and scoffing, and how they both even start using slanderous methods.

"Some specimens are killingly funny," says Mikhail Fyodorovich. "Yesterday I come to our Yegor Petrovich and find a studiosus, one of your medics, in his third year, I think. A face in the … the Dobrolyubov¹⁷ style, the stamp of profundity on his brow. We get to talking. 'Thus and so, young man,' I say. 'I read that some German—I forget his name—has obtained a new alkaloid, idiotine, from the human brain.' And what do you think? He believed me and his face even showed respect: That's our boys for you! Then the other day I come to the theater. I sit down. In the row just in front of me these two are sitting: one of 'our boyth,' apparently doing law, the other all disheveled—a medic. The medic is drunk as a cobbler. Pays zero attention to the stage. Keeps dozing and nodding his head. But as soon as some actor starts loudly reciting a monologue or simply raises his voice, my medic gives a start, nudges his neighbor in the side, and asks: 'What's he saying? Something no-o-oble?' 'Something noble,' answers the one from our boyth. 'Brrravo!' bawls the medic. 'Something no-o-oble! Bravo!' You see, the drunken blockhead has come to the theater not for art but for nobility. He's after nobility."

And Katya listens and laughs. Her laughter is somehow strange: her inhalations alternate quickly and in regular rhythm with her exhalations, as if she were playing the harmonica, and yet all that laughs on her face are her nostrils. I'm dispirited and don't know what to say. Beside myself, I explode, jump up from my place and shout:

"Be quiet, finally! What are you doing sitting here like two toads poisoning the air with your breath? Enough!"

And without waiting for them to finish their maligning, I prepare to go home. And it's high time: past ten o'clock.

"I'll stay a little longer," says Mikhail Fyodorovich. "May I, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?"

"You may," Katya answers.

"Bene. In that case tell them to serve another little bottle."

The two of them see me off to the front door with candles, and while I'm putting my coat on, Mikhail Fyodorovich says:

"You've grown terribly thin and old recently, Nikolai Stepanych. What's the matter? Are you ill?"

"Yes, I'm a bit ill."

"And he won't be treated …" Katya puts in glumly.

"Why won't you be treated? My dear man, the Lord helps those who help themselves. Regards to your family and my apologies for not visiting them. One of these days, before I go abroad, I'll stop and say good-bye. Without fail! I leave next week."

I go out of Katya's annoyed, frightened by the talk of my illness, and displeased with myself. I ask myself: should I not, indeed, consult one of my colleagues? And I immediately imagine how my colleague, having auscultated me, goes silently to the window, ponders, then turns to me, and, trying to keep me from reading the truth on his face, says in an indifferent tone: "So far I see nothing special, but all the same, collega, I'd advise you to stop working …" And that will deprive me of my last hope.

Who doesn't have hopes? Now, diagnosing myself and treating myself, there are moments when I hope that my own ignorance is deceiving me, that I'm also mistaken about the protein and sugar I find in myself, and about my heart, and about the swelling I've noticed twice now in the morning; re-reading the manuals on therapy with the zeal of a hypochondriac and changing my medications daily, I keep thinking I'll hit on something comforting. It's all paltry

Whether the sky is covered with clouds, or the moon and stars are shining in it, each time I return home, I look up at it and think that death will soon take me. One would think that at such moments my thoughts should be deep as the sky, bright, striking … But no! I think about myself, my wife, Liza, Gnekker, my students, people in general; my thoughts are bad, paltry, I'm tricking myself, and in those moments my worldview can be expressed in the words which the famous Arakcheev¹⁸ said in one of his private letters: "Nothing good in the world can be without bad, and there is always more bad than good." That is, everything is muck, there is nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years I've lived should be considered a waste. I catch myself in these thoughts and try to convince myself that they are accidental, temporary, and not lodged deeply in me, but at once I think:

"If so, then what is it that draws you to those two toads every evening?"

And I swear to myself that I will not go to Katya's anymore, though I know I'll go to her again tomorrow.

Ringing my doorbell and then going up the stairs, I feel that I no longer have a family and have no wish to return to it. Clearly, the new Arakcheevian thoughts are not lodged in me accidentally or temporarily, but govern my whole being. With a sick conscience, dejected, indolent, barely moving my limbs, as if a thousand pounds had been added to my weight, I lie down in bed and soon fall asleep.

And then—insomnia …

Summer comes, and life changes.

One fine morning Liza enters my room and says in a joking tone:

"Let's go, Your Excellency. Everything's ready."

My Excellency is taken outside, put into a carriage, and driven somewhere. I ride along and, having nothing better to do, read the signboards from right to left. The word "pothouse" comes out "esuohtop." That would suit an ancient Egyptian: the pharaoh Esuohtop. I go on over a field past the cemetery, which makes precisely no impression on me at all, though I'll soon be lying in it; then I go through a woods and another field. Nothing interesting. After a two-hour drive, My Excellency is led into the bottom floor of a summer house and installed in a very cheerful little room with light blue wallpaper.

At night there's the usual insomnia, but in the morning I'm not awake and listening to my wife, but lying in bed. I don't sleep, but experience that drowsy, half-oblivious state when you know you're not asleep, and yet have dreams. At noon I get up and, out of habit, sit at my desk, but I don't work now, I entertain myself with the French books in yellow covers that Katya sends me. Of course, it would be more patriotic to read Russian authors, but I confess I'm not especially in favor of them. Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products. Even the best products of handicraft cannot be called remarkable and cannot be praised without a "but." The same can be said of all the literary novelties I've read over the last ten or fifteen years: not one is remarkable, and there's no avoiding a "but." Intelligent, noble, but not talented; talented, noble, but not intelligent; or, finally, talented, intelligent, but not noble.

I'm not saying that French books are talented, and intelligent, and noble. They don't satisfy me either. But they're less boring than the Russian ones, and not seldom one finds in them the main element of creative work—a sense of personal freedom, which Russian authors don't have. I can't remember a single new book in which the author doesn't do his best, from the very first page, to entangle himself in all possible conventions and private deals with his conscience. One is afraid to speak of the naked body, another is bound hand and foot by psychological analysis, a third must have "a warm attitude towards humanity," a fourth purposely wallows for whole pages in descriptions of nature, lest he be suspected of tendentiousness … One insists on being a bourgeois in his work, another an aristocrat, etc. Contrivance, caution, keeping one's own counsel, but no freedom nor courage to write as one wishes, and therefore no creativity.

All this refers to so-called belles-lettres.

As for serious Russian articles, for instance on sociology, art, and so on, I avoid reading them out of sheer timidity. In my childhood and youth I was for some reason afraid of doormen and theater ushers, and that fear has stayed with me. I'm afraid of them even now. They say we fear only what we don't understand. And, indeed, it's very hard to understand why doormen and ushers are so important, so arrogant, and so majestically impolite. When I read serious articles I feel exactly the same vague fear. The extraordinary importance, the facetiously pontifical tone, the familiar treatment of foreign authors, the knack of augustly pouring from empty into void—I find it all incomprehensible, frightening, and nothing like the modesty and gentlemanly calm tone I'm accustomed to in reading what doctors and natural scientists write. Not only articles, it's even painful for me to read the translations done or edited by serious Russian people. The conceited, benevolent tone of the prefaces, the abundance of translator's notes, which disturb my concentration, the parenthetical question marks and sic's that the translator generously scatters through the article or book, are for me like an encroachment both upon the person of the author and upon my independence as a reader.

I was once invited to the circuit court as an expert; during a break, one of my fellow experts drew my attention to the prosecutor's rude treatment of the defendants, among whom were two women of the intelligentsia. I don't think I was exaggerating in the least when I answered my colleague that this treatment was no more rude than that displayed towards each other by the authors of serious articles. Indeed, it is such rude treatment that one cannot speak of it without pain. Either they treat each other and the authors they criticize with excessive deference, forgetting all dignity, or the reverse, they handle them with greater boldness than I use in these notes, and in my thoughts, towards my future son-in-law Gnekker. Accusations of irresponsibility, of impure intentions, and of all sorts of criminality are the usual adornments of serious articles. And that, as young doctors like to put it in their articles, is the ultima ratio !¹⁹ Such relations cannot fail to be reflected in the morals of the younger generation of writers, and therefore I'm not surprised in the least that in the new books our literature has acquired over the last ten or fifteen years, the heroes drink gallons of vodka and the heroines are insufficiently chaste.

I read my French books and keep glancing out the window, which is open; I see the teeth of my fence, two or three scrawny trees, and beyond the fence a road, a field, then a wide strip of evergreen forest. I often admire how a certain little boy and girl, both towheaded and ragged, climb up the fence and laugh at my bald head. In their bright little eyes I read: "Go up, thou bald head!"²⁰They're probably the only people who care nothing about my rank and renown.

Now I don't have visitors every day. I will mention only the visits of Nikolai and Pyotr Ignatievich. Nikolai usually comes on feast days,²¹ seemingly on business, but more just to see me. He arrives rather tipsy, which never happens with him in the winter.

"What's up?" I ask, coming to meet him in the front hall.

"Your Excellency!" he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking at me with the rapture of a lover. "Your Excellency! May God punish me! May I be struck by lightning on this very spot! Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus !"²²

And he greedily kisses me on the shoulders, sleeves, buttons.

"Is everything all right with you there?" I ask him.

"Your Excellency! As God lives …"

He won't stop swearing needlessly by God, I soon get sick of him and send him to the kitchen, where they serve him dinner. Pyotr Ignatievich also comes on feast days, especially to see how I am and to share his thoughts with me. He usually sits by my desk, modest, neat, sensible, not daring to cross his legs or lean on his elbow; and all the while, in his soft, even little voice, smoothly and bookishly, he tells me what he thinks are various extremely interesting and spicy bits of news that he has come across in journals and books. These items are all alike and boil down to this: a certain Frenchman made a discovery; another man—a German—caught him out, by proving that this discovery had already been made in 1870 by some American; and a third—also a German—outwitted them both, proving that they were a pair of dupes who mistook air bubbles for dark pigment under the microscope. Even when he wants to make me laugh, Pyotr Ignatievich tells everything at length, thoroughly, as if defending a thesis, with a detailed list of his printed sources, trying not to make any mistakes in the dates, or in the numbers of the journals, or in names, and he never simply says Petit, but always Jean-Jacques Petit. Occasionally he stays for dinner with us, and then he tells the same spicy stories all through dinner, which plunges everyone at the table into gloom. If Gnekker and Liza start talking about fugues and counterpoint, about Brahms and Bach, he modestly looks down and gets embarrassed; he's ashamed that such banalities should be talked about in the presence of such serious people as he and I.

In my present mood five minutes are enough to make me as sick of him as if I'd seen and heard him for all eternity I hate the wretched fellow. I wither from his soft, even voice and bookish language, I grow dumb from his stories … He has the best feelings for me and talks with me only to give me pleasure, and I pay him back by looking at him point-blank, as if I wanted to hypnotize him, and thinking: "Go away, go away, go away …" But he doesn't succumb to my mental suggestion and stays, stays, stays …

All the while he stays with me, I'm unable to rid myself of the thought: "It's quite possible that when I die, he'll be appointed to replace me," and in my imagination my poor auditorium looks like an oasis in which the spring has dried up, and I'm unpleasant, silent, and sullen with Pyotr Ignatievich, as if he were to blame for these thoughts and not I myself. When he begins his habitual praise of German scientists, I no longer joke good-naturedly, as before, but mutter sullenly:

"Your Germans are asses …"

This is like the episode when the late professor Nikita Krylov, swimming at Revel²³ once with Pirogov, got angry with the water for being very cold and swore: "Scoundrelly Germans!" I behave badly with Pyotr Ignatievich, and only when he leaves, and I see his gray hat flash outside the window, beyond the fence, do I want to call out to him and say: "Forgive me, my dear fellow!"

Our dinners are more boring than in winter. The same Gnekker, whom I now hate and despise, dines with us almost every day. Formerly I suffered his presence silently, but now I send little barbs at him, which make my wife and Liza blush. Carried away by spiteful feeling, I often say simply stupid things and don't know why I say them. It happened once that I gave Gnekker a long, scornful look and then, out of nowhere, fired off at him:

Eagles may fly lower than the hen,But no hen ever soared into the clouds … ²⁴

And the most vexing thing is that the hen Gnekker proves to be much smarter than the eagle professor. Knowing that my wife and daughter are on his side, he sticks to the following tactics: he responds to my barbs with an indulgent silence (the old man's cracked, what's the point of talking to him?), or good-naturedly makes fun of me. It's astonishing how paltry a man can become! I'm capable of dreaming all through dinner of how Gnekker will turn out to be an adventurer, and how Liza and my wife will realize their mistake, and how I will taunt them—to have such absurd dreams when I've got one foot in the grave!

Misunderstandings also happen now which I knew before only from hearsay Ashamed as I am, I'll describe one that occurred the other day after dinner.

I'm sitting in my room smoking my pipe. My wife comes in as usual, sits down, and begins saying how nice it would be now, while it's still warm and I have free time, to go to Kharkov and there find out what sort of man our Gnekker is.

"All right, I'll go …" I agree.

My wife, pleased with me, gets up and goes to the door, but comes back at once and says:

"Incidentally, one more request. I know you'll be angry, but it is my duty to warn you … Forgive me, Nikolai Stepanych, but there has begun to be talk among all our neighbors and acquaintances that you visit Katya rather often. She's intelligent, educated, I don't dispute it, one may enjoy spending time with her, but at your age and with your social position, you know, it's somehow strange to find pleasure in her company … Besides, her reputation is such that …"

All the blood suddenly drains from my brain, sparks shoot from my eyes, I jump up and, clutching my head, stamping my feet, shout in a voice not my own:

"Leave me! Leave me! Get out!"

My face is probably terrible, my voice strange, because my wife suddenly turns pale and cries out loudly in a desperate voice, also somehow not her own. At our cries, Liza, Gnekker, then Yegor come running in …

"Leave me!" I shout. "Get out! Out!"

My legs go numb, as if they're not there, I feel myself fall into someone's arms, briefly hear someone weeping, and sink into a swoon that lasts for two or three hours.

Now about Katya. She calls on me every day towards evening, and, of course, neighbors and acquaintances cannot fail to notice it. She comes for just a minute and takes me for a ride with her. She has her own horse and a new charabanc, bought this summer. Generally, she lives in grand style: she has rented an expensive separate summer house with a big garden and moved all her town furniture into it; keeps two maids, a coachman … I often ask her:

"Katya, how are you going to live when you've squandered all your father's money?"

"We'll see then," she replies.

"That money deserves a more serious attitude, my friend. A good man earned it by honest labor."

"You already told me about that. I know."

First we drive through the field, then through the evergreen forest that can be seen from my window. I still find nature beautiful, though a demon whispers to me that none of these pines and firs, birds and white clouds in the sky will notice my absence when I die three or four months from now. Katya enjoys driving the horse and is pleased that the weather is nice and that I'm sitting beside her. She's in fine spirits and doesn't say anything sharp.

"You're a very good man, Nikolai Stepanych," she says. "You're a rare specimen, and there's no actor who could play you. Even a bad actor could play me, or Mikhail Fyodorych, for instance, but no one could play you. And I envy you, envy you terribly! Because what am I the picture of? What?"

She thinks for a moment and asks:

"I'm a negative phenomenon—right, Nikolai Stepanych?"

"Right," I answer.

"Hm … What am I to do?"

What answer can I give her? It's easy to say "work," or "give what you have to the poor," or "know yourself," and because it's easy to say, I don't know how to answer.

My general-practitioner colleagues, when they teach medical treatment, advise one "to individualize each particular case." One need only follow that advice to be convinced that the remedies recommended by textbooks as the best and wholly suitable for the standard case, prove completely unsuitable in particular cases. The same is true for moral illnesses.

But answer I must, and so I say:

"You have too much free time, my friend. You must occupy yourself with something. Why indeed don't you become an actress again, since you have the calling?"

"I can't."

"Your tone and manner make it seem that you're a victim. I don't like that, my friend. It's your own fault. Remember, you started by getting angry at people and their ways, but you did nothing to make them better. You didn't fight the evil, you got tired, and you are the victim not of the struggle, but of your own weakness. Well, of course, you were young then, inexperienced, but now everything might go differently. Really, try it again! You'll work and serve holy art …"

"Don't dissemble, Nikolai Stepanych," Katya interrupts me. "Let's agree once and for all: we can talk about actors, about actresses, or writers, but we'll leave art alone. You're a wonderful, rare person, but you don't understand art well enough to regard it in good conscience as holy. You have neither the feel nor the ear for art. You've been busy all your life, and you've had no time to acquire the feel for it. Generally … I don't like these conversations about art!" she goes on nervously. "I really don't! It has been trivialized enough, thank you!"

"Trivialized by whom?"

"Some have trivialized it by drunkenness, the newspapers by familiarity, clever people by philosophy."

"Philosophy has nothing to do with it."

"Yes, it has. If anybody starts philosophizing, it means he doesn't understand."

To keep things from turning sharp, I hasten to change the subject and then remain silent for a long time. Only when we come out of the forest and turn towards Katya's place do I come back to the former conversation and ask:

"You still haven't answered me: why don't you want to be an actress?"

"Nikolai Stepanych, this is cruel, finally!" she cries out and suddenly blushes all over. "You want me to speak the truth aloud? All right, if that … if that's your pleasure! I have no talent! No talent and … and enormous vanity! There!"

Having made this confession, she turns her face away from me and grips the reins hard to hide the trembling of her hands.

As we approach her place, we can already see Mikhail Fyodorovich in the distance, strolling about the gate, impatiently waiting for us.

"Again this Mikhail Fyodorych!" Katya says with vexation. "Rid me of him, please! I'm sick of him, he's played out … Enough of him!"

Mikhail Fyodorovich should have gone abroad long ago, but he keeps postponing his departure each week. Certain changes have taken place in him lately: he has become somehow pinched, wine now makes him tipsy, which never happened before, and his black eyebrows have begun to turn gray When our charabanc stops at the gate, he doesn't conceal his joy and impatience. He bustles about, helps me and Katya out of the carriage, hurriedly asks questions, laughs, rubs his hands, and that meek, prayerful, pure something that I noticed only in his eyes before is now spread all over his face. He's glad, and at the same time ashamed of his gladness, ashamed of this habit of visiting Katya every evening, and he finds it necessary to motivate his coming by some obvious absurdity, such as: "I was passing by on business, thought why don't I stop for a moment."

The three of us go in; first we have tea, then on the table appear the two long-familiar decks of cards, the big piece of cheese, the fruit, and the bottle of Crimean champagne. Our topics of conversation are not new, they're all the same as in the winter. The university, students, literature, theater all come in for it; the air gets thicker and stuffier with malignant gossip, it is poisoned by the breath not of two toads now, as in the winter, but of all three. Besides the velvety baritone laugh and the laugh that resembles a harmonica, the maid who serves us also hears an unpleasant, cracked laughter, like that of a vaudeville general: haw, haw, haw …

There are terrible nights of thunder, lightning, rain, and wind, which among the people are known as sparrow nights. There was one such sparrow night in my personal life …

I wake up past midnight and suddenly jump out of bed. It seems to me for some reason that I'm suddenly just about to die. Why does it seem so? There's not a feeling in my body that would point to an imminent end, but my soul is oppressed by such terror as if I had suddenly seen some enormous, sinister glow.

I quickly light the lamp, drink water straight from the carafe, then rush to the open window. The weather outside is magnificent. There's a smell of hay and of something else very good. I can see the teeth of the fence, the sleepy, scrawny trees by the window, the road, the dark strip of the forest; a calm, very bright moon in the sky, and not a single cloud. Silence, not a leaf stirs. I feel as if everything is looking at me and listening in on how I'm going to die …

Eerie. I close the window and run to my bed. I feel my pulse and, not finding it in my wrist, search for it in my temples, then under my chin, then again in my wrist, and it's all cold, clammy with sweat. My breath comes quicker and quicker, my body trembles, all my insides are stirred up, my face and bald head feel as if they're covered with cobwebs.

What to do? Call the family? No, no need. I don't know what my wife and Liza will do if they come to me.

I hide my head under the pillow, close my eyes, and wait, wait … My back is cold, it's as if it were being drawn into me, and I have the feeling that death will surely come at me from behind, on the sly …

"Kee-wee, kee-wee!" a piping suddenly sounds in the silence of the night, and I don't know where it is—in my breast, or outside?

"Kee-wee, kee-wee!"

My God, how frightening! I'd drink more water, but I'm scared to open my eyes and afraid to raise my head. The terror I feel is unconscious, animal, and I'm unable to understand why I'm frightened: is it because I want to live, or because a new, still unknown pain awaits me?

Upstairs, through my ceiling, someone either moans or laughs … I listen. Shortly afterwards I hear footsteps on the stairs. Someone hurriedly comes down, then goes back up. A moment later there are footsteps downstairs again; someone stops by my door, listening.

"Who's there?" I cry.

The door opens, I boldly open my eyes and see my wife. Her face is pale and her eyes tearful.

"You're not asleep, Nikolai Stepanych?" she asks.

"What is it?"

"For God's sake, go and look at Liza. Something's the matter with her …"

"All right … with pleasure …" I mutter, very pleased that I'm not alone. "All right… this minute."

I follow my wife, listen to what she tells me, and understand nothing in my agitation. Bright spots from her candle leap over the steps of the stairway, our long shadows quiver, my legs get tangled in the skirts of my dressing gown, I'm out of breath, and it seems to me as if something is pursuing me and wants to seize me by the back. "I'm going to die right now, here on the stairs," I think. "Right now …" But the stairs and the dark corridor with the Italian window are behind us, and we go into Liza's room. She's sitting on her bed in nothing but her nightgown, her bare feet hanging down, and moaning.

"Oh, my God … oh, my God!" she murmurs, squinting at our candle. "I can't, I can't …"

"Liza, my child," I say. "What's wrong?"

Seeing me, she cries out and throws herself on my neck.

"My kind papa …" she sobs, "my good papa … My dearest little papa … I don't know what's wrong with me … I'm so sick at heart!"

She embraces me, kisses me, and babbles tender words such as I heard from her when she was a little girl.

"Calm yourself, my child, God be with you," I say. "You mustn't cry. I'm sick at heart, too."

I try to cover her with a blanket, my wife gives her a drink, the two of us fuss confusedly around the bed; my shoulder brushes her shoulder, and in that moment the recollection comes to me of how we used to bathe our children together.

"Help her, help her!" my wife implores. "Do something!"

But what can I do? I can't do anything. The girl has some burden on her heart, but I don't know or understand anything, and can only murmur:

"Never mind, never mind… It will go away… Sleep, sleep …

As if on purpose, a dog's howling suddenly comes from our yard, first soft and uncertain, then loud, in two voices. I've never ascribed any particular significance to such omens as the howling of dogs or the hooting of owls, but now my heart is painfully wrung and I hasten to explain this howling to myself.

"Nonsense …" I think. "The influence of one organism on another. My intense nervous strain transmitted itself to my wife, to Liza, to the dog, that's all … This sort of transmission explains presentiments, premonitions …"

When I go back to my room a little later to write a prescription for Liza, I no longer think I'll die soon, I simply feel a heaviness, a tedium, in my soul, so that I'm even sorry I didn't die suddenly. I stand motionless for a long time in the middle of the room, trying to think up something to prescribe for Liza, but the moaning through the ceiling quiets down, and I decide not to prescribe anything, and still I stand there …

There's a dead silence, such a silence that, as some writer has said, it even rings in your ears. Time moves slowly, the strips of moonlight on the windowsill don't change their position, as if frozen … Dawn is still far off

But now the gate in the fence creaks, someone steals up and, breaking a branch from one of the scrawny trees, cautiously taps on the window with it.

"Nikolai Stepanych!" I hear a whisper. "Nikolai Stepanych!"

I open the window, and think I'm dreaming: by the window, pressing herself to the wall, stands a woman in a black dress, brightly lit by the moon, gazing at me with big eyes. The moon makes her face look pale, stern, and fantastic, as if made of marble. Her chin trembles.

"It's me …" she says. "Me … Katya!"

In the moonlight all women's eyes look big and black, people look taller and paler, which is probably why I didn't recognize her at first.

"What's the matter?"

"Forgive me," she says. "For some reason I felt unbearably sick at heart … I couldn't stand it and came here … There was light in your window and … and I decided to knock … Excuse me … Oh, if only you knew how sick at heart I am! What are you doing now?"

"Nothing … Insomnia."

"I had a sort of presentiment. Anyhow, it's nonsense."

Her eyebrows rise, her eyes glisten with tears, and her whole face lights up with that familiar, long-absent expression of trustfulness.

"Nikolai Stepanych!" she says imploringly, reaching out to me with both arms. "My dear, I beg you … I implore you … If you don't disdain my friendship and my respect for you, agree to do what I ask you!"

"What is it?"

"Take my money from me!"

"Well, what will you think up next! Why should I need your money?"

"You'll go somewhere for a cure … You need a cure. Will you take it? Yes? Yes, my dearest?"

She peers greedily into my face and repeats:

"You'll take it? Yes?"

"No, my friend, I won't…" I say. "Thank you."

She turns her back to me and hangs her head. I probably refused her in such a tone as to prohibit any further discussion of money.

"Go home to bed," I say. "We'll see each other tomorrow."

"So you don't consider me your friend?" she asks glumly.

"I didn't say that. But your money is of no use to me now."

"Forgive me …" she says, lowering her voice a whole octave. "I understand you … To be indebted to a person like me … a retired actress … Anyhow, good-bye …"

And she leaves so quickly that I don't even have time to say good-bye to her.

I'm in Kharkov.

Since it would be useless, and beyond my strength, to struggle with my present mood, I've decided that the last days of my life will be irreproachable at least in the formal sense; if I'm not right in my attitude towards my family, which I'm perfectly aware of, I will try to do what they want me to do. If it's go to Kharkov, I go to Kharkov. Besides, I've become so indifferent to everything lately that it makes absolutely no difference to me where I go, to Kharkov, to Paris, or to Berdichev.²⁵

I arrived here around noon and put up at a hotel not far from the cathedral. On the train I got seasick and suffered from the drafts, so now I'm sitting on the bed, holding my head and waiting for my tic. I ought to go and see the professors I know here, but I haven't the urge or the strength.

The old servant on my floor comes to ask whether I have bed linen. I keep him for about five minutes and ask him several questions about Gnekker, on whose account I've come here. The servant turns out to be a native of Kharkov, knows it like the palm of his hand, but doesn't remember a single house that bears the name of Gnekker. I ask about country estates—same answer.

The clock in the corridor strikes one, then two, then three … These last months of my life, as I wait for death, seem to me far longer than my whole life. And never before was I able to be so reconciled to the slowness of time as now. Before, when I waited at the station for a train or sat at an examination, a quarter of an hour seemed like an eternity, but now I can spend the whole night sitting motionless on my bed and think with perfect indifference that tomorrow the night will be just as long and colorless, and the night after …

In the corridor it strikes five o'clock, six, seven … It's getting dark.

There's a dull pain in my cheek—the tic is beginning. To occupy myself with thoughts, I put myself in my former point of view, when I was not indifferent, and ask: why am I, a famous man, a privy councillor, sitting in this small hotel room, on this bed with its strange gray blanket? Why am I looking at this cheap tin washbasin and listening to the trashy clock clanking in the corridor? Can all this be worthy of my fame and my high station among people? And my response to these questions is a smile. The naïveté with which, in my youth, I exaggerated the importance of renown and the exclusive position celebrities supposedly enjoy, strikes me as ridiculous. I'm well known, my name is spoken with awe, my portrait has been published in Niva and World Illustrated,²⁶ I've even read my own biography in a certain German magazine—and what of it? I'm sitting all alone in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my palm … Family squabbles, merciless creditors, rude railway workers, the inconvenience of the passport system,²⁷ expensive and unwholesome food in the buffets, universal ignorance and rudeness of behavior—all that and many other things it would take too long to enumerate, concern me no less than any tradesman known only in the lane where he lives. How, then, does the exclusiveness of my position manifest itself? Suppose I'm famous a thousand times over, that I'm a hero and the pride of my motherland; all the newspapers publish bulletins about my illness, expressions of sympathy come to me by mail from colleagues, students, the public; but all that will not prevent me from dying in a strange bed, in anguish, in utter solitude … No one's to blame for that, of course, but, sinner that I am, I dislike my popular name. It seems to me that it has betrayed me.

Around ten o'clock I fall asleep and, despite my tic, sleep soundly and would go on sleeping for a long time if no one woke me up. Shortly after one o'clock there is a sudden knock at the door.

"Who's there?"

"Telegram!"

"You might have brought it tomorrow," I grumble as I take the telegram from the servant. "Now I won't fall back to sleep."

"Sorry, sir. You had a light burning, I thought you weren't asleep."

I open the telegram and look at the signature first: from my wife. What does she want?

"Yesterday Gnekker and Liza secretly married. Come back."

I read this telegram and am frightened for a moment. What frightens me is not what Gnekker and Liza have done, but the indifference with which I receive the news of their marriage. They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

I lie down in bed again and begin inventing thoughts to occupy myself with. What to think about? It seems everything has already been thought through, and there's nothing now that is capable of stirring my mind.

When dawn comes I'm sitting in bed with my arms around my knees and, since I have nothing to do, am trying to know myself. "Know yourself"²⁸—what splendid and useful advice; too bad the ancients never thought of showing how to use this advice.

Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.

And now I examine myself: what do I want?

I want our wives, children, friends, and students to love in us not the name, not the brand or label, but the ordinary person. What else? I'd like to have helpers and heirs. What else? I'd like to wake up in a hundred years and have at least a glimpse of what's happened with science. I'd like to live another ten years or so … And what more?

Nothing more. I think, I think for a long time, and can't think up anything else. And however much I think, however widely my thought ranges, it's clear to me that my wishes lack some chief thing, some very important thing. In my predilection for science, in my wish to live, in this sitting on a strange bed and trying to know myself, in all the thoughts, feelings, and conceptions I form about everything, something general is lacking that would unite it all into a single whole. Each feeling and thought lives separately in me, and in all my opinions about science, the theater, literature, students, and in all the pictures drawn by my imagination, even the most skillful analyst would be unable to find what is known as a general idea or the god of the living man.

And if there isn't that, there's nothing.

Given such poverty, a serious illness, the fear of death, the influence of circumstances or of people, would be enough to overturn and smash to pieces all that I used to consider my worldview, and in which I saw the meaning and joy of my life. And therefore it's not at all surprising that I should darken the last months of my life with thoughts and feelings worthy of a slave and a barbarian, and that I'm now indifferent and do not notice the dawn. When a man lacks that which is higher and stronger than any external influence, a good cold really is enough to make him lose his balance and begin to see an owl in every bird and hear a dog's howl in every sound. And at that moment all his pessimism or optimism, together with his thoughts great and small, have the significance of mere symptoms and nothing more.

I am defeated. If so, there's no point in continuing to think, no point in talking. I'll sit and silently wait for what comes.

In the morning the servant brings me tea and a copy of the local newspaper. I mechanically read through the announcements on the first page, the editorial, the excerpts from other newspapers and magazines, the news reports … In the news I find, among other things, the following item: "Yesterday our famous scientist, the acclaimed professor Nikolai Stepanovich So-and-so, arrived in Kharkov on the express train and is staying at such-and-such hotel."

Evidently, great names are created so as to live by themselves, apart from their bearers. Now my name is peacefully going about Kharkov; in some three months, inscribed in gold letters on a tombstone, it will shine like the sun itself—while I'm already covered with moss …

A light tap at the door. Someone wants me.

"Who's there? Come in!"

The door opens and I step back in surprise, hastily closing the skirts of my dressing gown. Katya stands before me.

"Good morning," she says, breathing heavily after climbing the stairs. "You didn't expect me? I … I've come here, too."

She sits down and continues, stammering and not looking at me.

"Why don't you wish me good morning? I've come, too … today … I found out you were in this hotel and looked you up."

"I'm very glad to see you," I say, shrugging my shoulders, "but I'm surprised … It's as if you dropped from the sky. Why are you here?"

"Me? I … simply up and came."

Silence. Suddenly she gets up impetuously and steps towards me.

"Nikolai Stepanych!" she says, turning pale and clasping her hands to her breast. "Nikolai Stepanych! I can't live like this any longer! I can't! For the love of God, tell me quickly, this very moment: what am I to do? Tell me, what am I to do?"

"But what can I say?" I'm perplexed. "There's nothing."

"Tell me, I implore you!" she goes on, choking and trembling all over. "I swear to you, I can't live like this any longer! It's beyond my strength!"

She drops into a chair and begins to sob. She throws her head back, wrings her hands, stamps her feet; her hat has fallen off her head and dangles from an elastic, her hair is disheveled.

"Help me! Help me!" she implores. "I can't go on!"

She takes a handkerchief from her traveling bag, and along with it pulls out several letters that fall from her knees onto the floor. I pick them up from the floor and on one of them recognize Mikhail Fyodorovich's handwriting, and unintentionally read a bit of one word—"passionat …"

"There's nothing I can tell you, Katya," I say.

"Help me!" she sobs, seizing my hand and kissing it. "You're my father, my only friend! You're intelligent, educated, you've lived a long time! You've been a teacher! Tell me: what am I to do?"

"In all conscience, Katya, I don't know …"

I'm at a loss, embarrassed, touched by her sobbing, and barely able to keep my feet.

"Let's have breakfast, Katya," I say with a forced smile. "Enough crying!"

And I add at once in a sinking voice:

"I'll soon be no more, Katya …"

"Just one word, one word!" she weeps, holding her arms out to me. "What am I to do?"

"You're a strange one, really …" I murmur. "I don't understand! Such a clever girl and suddenly—there you go, bursting into tears! …

Silence ensues. Katya straightens her hair, puts her hat on, then crumples the letters and stuffs them into her bag—and all this silently and unhurriedly Her face, breast, and gloves are wet with tears, but the expression of her face is already dry, severe … I look at her and feel ashamed that I'm happier than she is. I've noticed the absence in me of what my philosopher colleagues call a general idea only shortly before death, in the twilight of my days, but the soul of this poor thing has known and will know no refuge all her life, all her life!

"Let's have breakfast, Katya," I say.

"No, thank you," she replies coldly.

Another minute passes in silence.

"I don't like Kharkov," I say. "Much too gray. A gray sort of city."

"Yes, perhaps so … Not pretty … I won't stay long … Passing through. I'm leaving today."

"Where for?"

"The Crimea … I mean, the Caucasus."

"Ah. For long?"

"I don't know."

Katya gets up and, smiling coldly, gives me her hand without looking at me.

I want to ask: "So you won't be at my funeral?" But she doesn't look at me, her hand is cold, like a stranger's. I silently walk with her to the door … Now she has left my room and walks down the long corridor without looking back. She knows I'm following her with my eyes and will probably look back from the turn.

No, she didn't look back. The black dress flashed a last time, the footsteps faded away … Farewell, my treasure!
NOVEMBER 1889

GUSEV

It has grown dark, it will soon be night.

Gusev, a discharged private, sits up on his cot and says in a low voice:

"Can you hear, Pavel Ivanych? A soldier in Suchan told me their ship ran over a big fish as it went and broke a hole in its bottom."

The man of unknown status whom he is addressing and whom everyone in the ship's sick bay calls Pavel Ivanych, says nothing, as if he has not heard.

And again there is silence … The wind plays in the rigging, the propeller thuds, the waves splash, the cots creak, but the ear is long accustomed to it all, and it seems as if everything around is asleep and still. It is boring. The other three patients—two soldiers and a sailor—who played cards all day long, are now asleep and muttering to themselves.

It seems the ship is beginning to toss. The cot under Gusev slowly goes up and down, as if sighing—it does it once, twice, a third time … Something hits the floor with a clank: a mug must have fallen.

"The wind has snapped its chain …" says Gusev, listening.

This time Pavel Ivanych coughs and replies irritably:

"First you've got a ship running over a fish, then the wind snaps its chain … Is the wind a beast that it can snap its chain?"

"That's how Christian folk talk."

"And Christian folk are as ignorant as you are … What else do they say? You have to keep your head on your shoulders and think. Senseless man."

Pavel Ivanych is subject to seasickness. When the ship tosses, he usually gets angry and the least trifle irritates him. But there is, in Gusev's opinion, absolutely nothing to get angry about. What is so strange or tricky, for instance, even in the fish, or in the wind snapping its chain? Suppose the fish is as big as a mountain, and its back is as hard as a sturgeon's; suppose, too, that at the world's end there are thick stone walls, and the angry winds are chained to the walls … If they have not snapped their chains, why are they rushing about like crazy all over the sea and straining like dogs? If they do not get chained up, where do they go when it is still?

Gusev spends a long time thinking about fish as big as mountains and thick, rusty chains, then he gets bored and begins thinking about his homeland, to which he is now returning after serving for five years in the Far East. He pictures an enormous pond covered with snow … On one side of the pond, a porcelain factory the color of brick, with a tall smokestack and clouds of black smoke; on the other side, a village … Out of a yard, the fifth from the end, drives a sleigh with his brother Alexei in it; behind him sits his boy Vanka in big felt boots and the girl Akulka, also in felt boots. Alexei is tipsy, Vanka is laughing, and Akulka's face cannot be seen—she is all wrapped up.

"Worse luck, he'll get the kids chilled …" thinks Gusev. "Lord, send them good sense," he whispers, "to honor their parents and not be cleverer than their mother and father …"

"You need new soles there," the sick sailor mutters in a bass voice while he sleeps. "Aye-aye!"

Gusev's thoughts break off, and instead of a pond, a big, eyeless bull's head appears out of nowhere, and the horse and sleigh are no longer driving but are whirling in the black smoke. But all the same he is glad to have seen his family. Joy takes his breath away, gives him gooseflesh all over, quivers in his fingers.

"God has granted me to see them!" he says in his sleep, but at once opens his eyes and feels for water in the darkness.

He drinks and lies down, and again the sleigh is driving, then again the eyeless bull's head, the smoke, the clouds … And so it goes till dawn.

First a blue circle outlines itself in the darkness—it is a round window; then Gusev gradually begins to distinguish the man on the cot next to his, Pavel Ivanych. This man sleeps in a sitting position, because when he lies down he suffocates. His face is gray, his nose long, sharp, his eyes, owing to his great emaciation, are enormous; his temples are sunken, his little beard is thin, the hair on his head is long … Looking into his face, it is hard to tell what he is socially: a gentleman, a merchant, or a peasant? Judging by his expression and his long hair, he seems to be an ascetic, a monastery novice, but when you listen to what he says—it turns out that he may not be a monk. Coughing, stuffiness, and his illness have exhausted him, he breathes heavily and moves his dry lips. Noticing Gusev looking at him, he turns his face to him and says:

"I'm beginning to guess … Yes … Now I understand it all perfectly."

"What do you understand, Pavel Ivanych?"

"Here's what … I kept thinking it was strange that you gravely ill people, instead of staying in a quiet place, wound up on a ship, where the stuffiness, and the heat, and the tossing—everything, in short, threatens you with death, but now it's all clear to me … Yes … Your doctors put you on a ship to get rid of you. They're tired of bothering with you, with brutes … You don't pay them anything, you're a bother to them, and you ruin their statistics for them by dying—which means you're brutes! And it's not hard to get rid of you … For that it's necessary, first, to have no conscience or brotherly love, and, second, to deceive the ship's authorities. The first condition doesn't count, in that respect we're all artists, and the second always works if you have the knack. In a crowd of four hundred healthy soldiers and sailors, five sick men don't stand out; so they herded you onto the ship, mixing you in with the healthy ones, counted you up quickly, and in the turmoil didn't notice anything wrong, but when the ship got under way what did they see: paralytics and terminal consumptives lying around on deck …"

Gusev does not understand Pavel Ivanych; thinking that he is being reprimanded, he says, to justify himself:

"I lay on the deck because I had no strength. When they unloaded us from the barge onto the ship, I caught a bad chill."

"Outrageous!" Pavel Ivanych goes on. "Above all, they know perfectly well you won't survive this long passage, and yet they put you here! Well, suppose you get as far as the Indian Ocean, but what then? It's terrible to think … And this is their gratitude for loyal, blameless service!"

Pavel Ivanych makes angry eyes, winces squeamishly, and gasps out:

"There are some who ought to be thrashed in the newspapers till the feathers fly"

The two sick soldiers and the sailor are awake and already playing cards. The sailor is half lying on a cot, the soldiers are sitting on the floor in the most uncomfortable positions. One soldier has his right arm in a sling and a whole bundle wrapped around his wrist, so he holds his cards under his right armpit or in the crook of his arm and plays with his left hand. The ship is tossing badly. It is impossible to stand up, or have tea, or take medicine.

"You served as an orderly?" Pavel Ivanych asks Gusev.

"Yes, sir, as an orderly."

"My God, my God!" says Pavel Ivanych, shaking his head ruefully. "To tear a man out of his native nest, drag him ten thousand miles away, then drive him to consumption, and … and all that for what, you may ask? To make him the orderly of some Captain Kopeikin or Midshipman Dyrka.¹ Mighty logical!"

"The work's not hard, Pavel Ivanych! You get up in the morning, polish his boots, prepare the samovar, tidy his rooms, and then there's nothing to do. The lieutenant draws his plans all day, and you can pray to God if you want, read books if you want, go out if you want. God grant everybody such a life."

"Yes, very good! The lieutenant draws his plans, and you sit in the kitchen all day, longing for your homeland … Plans … It's a man's life that counts, not plans! Life can't be repeated, it must be cherished."

"That's sure, Pavel Ivanych, a bad man's cherished nowhere, not at home, not in the service, but if you live right, obey orders, then who has any need to offend you? The masters are educated people, they understand … In five years I was never once locked up, and I was beaten, if I remember right, no more than once …"

"What for?"

"For fighting. I've got a heavy fist, Pavel Ivanych. Four Chinks came into our yard, bringing firewood or something—I don't remember. Well, I was feeling bored, so I roughed them up, gave one a bloody nose, curse him … The lieutenant saw it through the window, got angry, and cuffed me on the ear."

"You're a foolish, pathetic man …" whispers Pavel Ivanych. "You don't understand anything."

He is totally exhausted by the tossing and closes his eyes; his head gets thrown back, then falls on his chest. He tries several times to lie down, but nothing comes of it: suffocation prevents him.

"And why did you beat the four Chinks?" he asks after a while.

"Just like that. They came into the yard, and I beat them."

And silence ensues … The cardplayers play for a couple of hours, with passion and cursing, but the tossing wearies them, too; they abandon the cards and lie down. Again Gusev pictures the big pond, the factory, the village … Again the sleigh is driving, again Vanka laughs, and foolish Akulka has opened her coat and shows her legs: "Look, good people, my boots aren't like Vanka's, they're new."

"She's going on six and still has no sense!" Gusev says in his sleep. "Instead of sticking your legs up, you'd better bring your soldier uncle some water. I'll give you a treat."

Here Andron, a flintlock on his shoulder, comes carrying a hare he has shot, and after him comes the decrepit Jew Isaichik and offers him a piece of soap in exchange for the hare; here is a black heifer in the front hall, here is Domna, sewing a shirt and weeping about something, and here again is the eyeless bull's head, the black smoke …

Someone overhead gives a loud shout, several sailors go running; it seems as if something bulky is being dragged across the deck or something has cracked. Again there is running. Has there been an accident? Gusev raises his head, listens, and sees: the two soldiers and the sailor are playing cards again; Pavel Ivanych is sitting and moving his lips. It is stifling, he does not have strength enough to breathe, he wants to drink, but the water is warm, disgusting … The tossing will not let up.

Suddenly something strange happens to one of the cardplaying soldiers … He calls hearts diamonds, mixes up his score and drops his cards, then gives a frightened, stupid smile and gazes around at them all.

"Just a minute, brothers …" he says and lies down on the floor.

They are all perplexed. They call out to him, he does not answer.

"Maybe you're not well, Stepan? Eh?" asks the other soldier with his arm in a sling. "Maybe we should call the priest? Eh?"

"Drink some water, Stepan …" says the sailor. "Here, brother, drink."

"Well, why shove the mug in his teeth?" Gusev says crossly. "Can't you see, dunderhead?"

"What?"

"What!" Gusev repeats mockingly. "There's no breath in him! He's dead! That's 'what' for you! Such senseless folk, Lord God! …"

III

There is no tossing, and Pavel Ivanych has cheered up. He is no longer angry. The look on his face is boastful, perky, and mocking. As if he wants to say: "Yes, now I'm going to tell you such a joke that you'll split your sides with laughing." The round window is open, and a soft breeze is blowing on Pavel Ivanych. Voices are heard, the splashing of oars in the water … Just under the window somebody is whining in a thin, disgusting little voice: it must be a Chinaman singing.

"So we're in harbor," says Pavel Ivanych with a mocking smile. "Another month or so and we'll be in Russia. Yes, my esteemed gentlemen soldiers. I'll get to Odessa, and from there go straight to Kharkov. In Kharkov I have a friend who is a writer. I'll go to him and say: 'Well, brother, abandon for a bit your vile stories about female amours and the beauties of nature, and start exposing these two-legged scum … Here are some stories for you …'"

He thinks about something for a moment, then says:

"Do you know how I tricked them, Gusev?"

"Who, Pavel Ivanych?"

"Them … You see, there's only first and third class on this ship, and the only ones allowed to travel third class are peasants—that is, boors. If you're wearing a suit or look like a gentleman or a bourgeois, from a distance at least, then kindly travel first class. You dish up five hundred roubles, even if it kills you. 'Why have you set up such rules?' I ask. 'Do you hope to raise the prestige of the Russian intelligentsia?' 'Not in the least. We won't let you in there, because a decent man cannot travel third class: it's much too nasty and vile.' 'Really, sir? Thank you for being so concerned for decent people. But in any case, whether it's nasty or not there, I don't have five hundred roubles. I haven't robbed the treasury, haven't exploited the racial minorities, haven't engaged in smuggling or flogged anyone to death, so you decide: do I have the right to be installed in first class and, what's more, to count myself among the Russian intelligentsia?' But you can't get them with logic … I had to resort to trickery. I dressed up in a peasant kaftan and big boots, put on a drunken, boorish mug, and went to the ticket agent: 'Gimme a little ticket, Your Honor …'"

"And what estate are you from?" asks the sailor.

"Clerical. My father was an honest priest. He always told the truth in the faces of the great ones of the world, and for that he suffered a lot."

Pavel Ivanych is out of breath and tired of talking, but he goes on all the same:

"Yes, I always tell the truth in people's teeth … I'm not afraid of anybody or anything. In that sense there's an enormous difference between me and you. You are ignorant, blind, downtrodden people, you don't see anything, and what you do see you don't understand … You're told that the wind can snap its chain, that you are brutes, Pechenegs,² and you believe it; you get it in the neck, and kiss the man's hand; some animal in a raccoon coat robs you, then tosses you a fifteen-kopeck tip, and you say: 'Allow me, sir, to kiss your hand.' You're pathetic people, pariahs … With me it's different. I live consciously, I see everything, like an eagle or a hawk when it flies over the earth, and I understand everything. I am protest incarnate. When I see tyranny, I protest. When I see a bigot and hypocrite, I protest. When I see a triumphant pig, I protest. And I'm invincible, no Spanish inquisition can silence me. No … Cut out my tongue and I'll protest with gestures. Wall me up in a cellar and I'll shout so loud it will be heard a mile away, or I'll starve myself to death, so there'll be another fifty pounds on their black consciences. Kill me and I'll come back as a ghost. My acquaintances all tell me: 'You're a most insufferable man, Pavel Ivanych!' I'm proud of that reputation. I served for three years in the Far East and left a memory behind that will last a hundred years: I quarreled with everybody. My friends write me from Russia: 'Don't come back!' But I will, I'll come back just to spite them … Yes … That's life, as I understand it. That's what can be called life."

Gusev is not listening, he is looking out the window. A boat, all flooded with blinding, hot sunlight, is rocking on the transparent, soft turquoise water. Naked Chinamen are standing in it, holding up cages of canaries and shouting:

"He sing! He sing!"

Another boat knocks against this boat, a steam-launch passes by. And here is a third boat: in it sits a fat Chinaman, eating rice with chopsticks. The water ripples lazily, white seagulls fly lazily over it.

"Be nice to give that fat one a punch …" thinks Gusev, gazing at the fat Chinaman and yawning.

He dozes off, and it seems to him that the whole of nature is dozing. Time runs fast. The day passes imperceptibly, darkness comes imperceptibly … The ship is no longer standing still, but going on somewhere.

Two days pass. Pavel Ivanych is not sitting now, but lying down; his eyes are closed, his nose seems to have grown sharper.

"Pavel Ivanych!" Gusev calls to him. "Hey, Pavel Ivanych!"

Pavel Ivanych opens his eyes and moves his lips.

"Are you unwell?"

"Not at all …" Pavel Ivanych gasps. "Not at all, on the contrary … I'm better … You see, I can lie down now … It's eased off…"

"Well, thank God, Pavel Ivanych."

"When I compare myself with you, I feel sorry for you … wretches. My lungs are good, and this is a stomach cough … I can endure hell, not just the Red Sea! Besides, I take a critical attitude both towards my sickness and towards medications. But you … you're in the dark … It's hard for you—very, very hard!"

There is no tossing, it is calm, but on the other hand it is stifling and hot as a steambath; not only talking, but even listening is difficult. Gusev has put his arms around his knees, laid his head on them, and is thinking of his homeland. My God, in such stifling heat what a delight it is to think of snow and cold! You are riding in a sleigh; suddenly the horses get frightened by something and bolt … Heedless of roads, ditches, ravines, they race madly through the whole village, across the pond, past the factory, then over the fields … "Stop them!" factory workers and passersby shout at the top of their lungs. "Stop them!" But why stop them? Let the sharp, cold wind lash your face and nip at your hands, let the lumps of snow flung up by the horses' hooves fall on your hat, on your neck behind the collar, on your chest, let the runners squeal and the harness and swingletree snap, devil take it all! And what a delight when the sleigh turns over and you go flying headlong into a snowdrift, your face right in the snow, and then you get up all white, icicles on your mustache; no hat, no mittens, your belt undone … People laugh, dogs bark …

Pavel Ivanych half opens one eye, looks at Gusev with it, and asks softly:

"Gusev, did your commander steal?"

"Who knows, Pavel Ivanych! We don't know, it doesn't get to us."

And then a long time passes in silence. Gusev thinks, mutters, sips water every so often; it is hard for him to speak, hard for him to listen, and he is afraid someone may start talking to him. An hour passes, another, a third; evening comes, then night, but he does not notice it and goes on sitting and thinking about frost.

He seems to hear somebody come into the sick bay, there are voices, but another five minutes pass and everything quiets down.

"The Kingdom of Heaven and eternal rest to him," says the soldier with his arm in a sling. "He was a restless man!"

"What?" asks Gusev. "Who's that?"

"He died. They just took him topside."

"Well, so there," Gusev mutters, yawning. "God rest his soul."

"What do you think, Gusev?" the soldier with the sling asks after some silence. "Will God rest his soul or not?"

"Who do you mean?"

"Pavel Ivanych."

"He will … he suffered long. And another thing, he was from the clerical estate, and priests have big families. They'll pray for him."

The soldier with the sling sits down on Gusev's cot and says in a low voice:

"And you, Gusev, you're not long for this world. You won't make it to Russia."

"Was it the doctor or his assistant that told you?" asks Gusev.

"It's not that anyone says it, but you can see … You can see at once when a man's going to die soon. You don't eat, you don't drink, you've grown so thin it's frightening to look at you. Consumption, in short. I say it not to alarm you, but in case you may want to take communion and be anointed.³ And if you have any money, you should place it with a senior officer."

"I haven't written home …" sighs Gusev. "I'll die and they won't know."

"They'll know," the sick sailor says in a bass voice. "When you die, they'll record it in the ship's log, in Odessa they'll give an extract to the military commander, and he'll send it to the local office or wherever …"

Gusev feels eerie after such a conversation and begins to suffer from some sort of yearning. He drinks water—it's not that; he leans to the round window and breathes the hot, humid air—it's not that; he tries thinking about his homeland, about the frost—it's not that … In the end it seems to him that if he spends another minute in the sick bay, he will surely suffocate.

"It's bad, brothers …" he says. "I'm going topside. Take me topside, for Christ's sake!"

"All right," the soldier with the sling consents. "You won't make it, I'll carry you. Hold on to my neck."

Gusev puts his arm around the soldier's neck, the soldier grasps him with his good arm and carries him topside. Discharged soldiers and sailors are lying asleep on deck; there are so many of them that it is hard to pick your way.

"Stand on your feet," the soldier with the sling says softly. "Follow me slowly, hold on to my shirt …"

It is dark. There are no lights on deck, nor on the masts, nor on the surrounding sea. Right at the bow the man on watch stands motionless, like a statue, and it looks as if he, too, is asleep. As if the ship has been left to its own will and is going wherever it likes.

"They'll throw Pavel Ivanych into the water now…" says the soldier with the sling. "In a sack and into the water."

"Yes. That's how it's done."

"It's better to lie in the ground at home. At least your mother can come to the grave and cry a little."

"That's a fact."

There is a smell of dung and hay. Oxen are standing along the rail, their heads hanging. One, two, three … eight head! And here is a little horse. Gusev reaches out to stroke it, but it tosses its head, bares its teeth, and tries to bite his sleeve.

"Cur-r-rse you …" Gusev says angrily.

The two of them, he and the soldier, quietly make their way to the bow, then stand side by side and silently look up, then down. Above them is the deep sky, bright stars, peace and quiet—exactly as at home in the village—but below is darkness and disorder. The high waves roar for no known reason. Each wave, whichever you look at, tries to rise higher than all, and pushes and drives out the last; and noisily sweeping towards it, its white mane gleaming, comes a third just as fierce and hideous.

The sea has no sense or pity. If the ship were smaller and not made of thick iron, the waves would break it up without mercy and devour all the people, saints and sinners alike. The ship, too, has a senseless and cruel expression. This beaked monster pushes on and cuts through millions of waves as it goes; it fears neither darkness, nor wind, nor space, nor solitude, it cares about nothing, and if the ocean had its own people, this monster would also crush them, saints and sinners alike.

"Where are we now?" asks Gusev.

"I don't know. Must be the ocean."

"There's no land to be seen …"

"Land, hah! They say it'll be seven days before we see land."

The two soldiers look at the white foam gleaming with phosphorus, and think silently. Gusev is the first to break the silence.

"There's nothing frightening," he says. "It's just eerie, like sitting in a dark forest, but if, say, they lowered a boat now, and the officer told me to go fifty miles out to sea and start fishing—I'd go. Or say a Christian fell into the water now—I'd fall in after him. I wouldn't go saving a German⁴ or a Chink, but I'd go in after a Christian."

"But isn't it frightening to die?"

"It is. I'm sorry about our farm. My brother at home, you know, he's not a steady man: he gets drunk, beats his wife for nothing, doesn't honor his parents. Without me it'll all be lost, and my father and the old woman, for all I know, may have to go begging. Anyhow, brother, my legs won't hold me up, and it's stifling here … Let's go to bed."

Gusev goes back to the sick bay and lies down on his cot. As before he suffers from some vague yearning, and he cannot figure out what he wants. There is a weight on his chest, a throbbing in his head, his mouth is so dry that he can hardly move his tongue. He dozes and mutters and, tormented by nightmares, coughing, and stuffiness, falls fast asleep towards morning. He dreams that they have just taken the bread out of the oven in the barracks, and he gets into the oven and has a steambath, lashing himself with birch branches. He sleeps for two days, and on the third day two sailors come from topside and carry him out of the sick bay.

He is sewn up in canvas and, to weight him down, two iron bars are put in with him. Sewn up in canvas, he comes to resemble a carrot or a black radish, wide at the head, narrow towards the foot … Before sunset he is taken out on deck and laid on a plank; one end of the plank rests on the rail, the other on a box placed on a stool. Discharged soldiers and the ship's crew stand around him with their hats off.

"Blessed is our God," the priest begins, "always, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages!"

"Amen!" sing three sailors.

The discharged soldiers and the crew cross themselves and keep looking askance at the waves. It is strange that a man has been sewn up in canvas and will presently be thrown into the waves. Can it really happen to anyone?

The priest sprinkles Gusev with some soil and bows. They sing "Memory Eternal."⁵

The man on watch lifts the end of the plank. Gusev slides off, falls head down, then turns over in the air and—splash! Foam covers him, and for a moment he seems to be wrapped in lace, but the moment passes—and he disappears into the waves.

He goes quickly towards the bottom. Will he get there? The bottom, they say, is three miles down. After some ten or twelve fathoms he begins to go slower and slower, sways rhythmically, as if pondering, and, borne by the current, drifts more quickly sideways than down.

But now he meets on his way a school of little fish, which are known as pilot fish. Seeing a dark body, the fish stop stock-still, and suddenly they all turn around at once and disappear. In less than a minute, swift as arrows, they rush back at Gusev, piercing the water in zigzags around him …

After that another dark body appears. It is a shark. Grandly and casually, as if not noticing Gusev, it swims under him, and he comes down on its back, then it turns belly up, basking in the warm, transparent water, and lazily opens its jaws with their twin rows of teeth. The pilot fish are delighted; they have stopped and wait to see what will happen. After playing with the body, the shark casually puts its jaws under it, touches it warily with its teeth, and the canvas rips open the whole length of the body, from head to foot; one of the bars falls out and, frightening the pilot fish, striking the shark on the side, quickly goes to the bottom.

And up above just then, on the side where the sun goes down, clouds are massing; one cloud resembles a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors … A broad green shaft comes from behind the clouds and stretches to the very middle of the sky; shortly afterwards a violet shaft lies next to it, then a golden one, then a pink one … The sky turns a soft lilac. Seeing this magnificent, enchanting sky, the ocean frowns at first, but soon itself takes on such tender, joyful, passionate colors as human tongue can hardly name.
DECEMBER 1890

PEASANT WOMEN

In the village of Raibuzh, just across the street from the church, stands a two-storied house with a stone foundation and an iron roof The owner, Filipp Ivanovich Kashin, nicknamed Dyudya, lives on the lower floor with his family, and on the upper floor, which is usually very hot in summer and very cold in winter, he lodges passing officials, merchants, and landowners. Dyudya rents out plots of land, runs a pothouse on the high road, trades in tar, honey, cattle, and sable, and has already saved up some eight thousand, which he has sitting in the bank in town.

His elder son Fyodor works as a senior mechanic in a factory and, as the peasants say of him, has risen so high in the world that nobody can touch him. Fyodor's wife Sofya, a homely and sickly woman, lives in her father-in-law's house, weeps all the time, and goes to the clinic for treatment every Sunday. Dyudya's second son, hunchbacked Alyoshka, lives in his father's house. He was recently married to Varvara, who was taken from a poor family: she is a young woman, beautiful, healthy, and smartly dressed. When officials and merchants stop there, they always ask that the samovar be served and the beds be made by no one but Varvara.

On one June evening, when the sun was setting and the air smelled of hay, warm manure, and fresh milk, a simple cart drove into Dyudya's yard carrying three people: a man of about thirty in a cotton suit, beside him a seven- or eight-year-old boy in a long black frock coat with big bone buttons, and a young fellow in a red shirt as driver.

The fellow unharnessed the horses and went to walk them up and down in the street, and the traveler washed, prayed facing the church, then spread out a rug by the cart and sat down with the boy to have supper; he ate unhurriedly, gravely, and Dyudya, who had seen many travelers in his day, recognized him by his manners as a practical and serious man who knew his own worth.

Dyudya sat on the porch in his waistcoat, without a hat, and waited for the traveler to speak. He was used to travelers telling all sorts of stories in the evening before bed, and he liked it. His old wife Afanasyevna and his daughter-in-law Sofya were milking the cows in the shed; the other daughter-in-law, Varvara, was sitting at an open window upstairs eating sunflower seeds.

"The boy would be your son, then?" Dyudya asked the traveler.

"No, he's adopted, an orphan. I took him in for the saving of my soul."

They fell to talking. The traveler turned out to be a garrulous and eloquent man, and Dyudya learned from the conversation that he was a tradesman from town, a house-owner, that his name was Matvei Savvich, that he was now on his way to look at the orchards he rented from German colonists, and that the boy's name was Kuzka. It was a hot and stuffy evening, and nobody felt like sleeping. When darkness came and pale stars twinkled here and there in the sky, Matvei Savvich began to tell where he got his Kuzka from. Afanasyevna and Sofya stood a little way off and listened. And Kuzka went to the gate.

"This, grandpa, is a detailed story in the extreme," Matvei Savvich began, "and if I was to tell you everything as it was, the night wouldn't be long enough. About ten years ago in our street, just next to my place, in a little house that's now a candle factory and a creamery, there lived an old widow named Marfa Simonovna Kapluntsev, and she had two sons: one worked as a conductor for the railway, and the other, Vasya, the same age as me, lived with his mother. The late old man Kapluntsev kept horses, five pair, and sent carters around town; his widow kept up the business and ordered the carters about no worse than the deceased, so that some days she cleared up to five roubles in profit. And the boy, too, made a bit of money. He bred pedigree pigeons and sold them to fanciers; he used to spend all his time on the roof, throwing a broom up and whistling, and his tumbler pigeons would fly up into the sky, but it wasn't high enough, he wanted them to fly still higher. He caught finches and starlings, made cages … A trifling thing, but the trifles would add up to ten roubles a month. Well, sir, after a while the old woman lost the use of her legs and took to her bed. Owing to that fact, the house was left without a mistress, and that's the same as a man without an eye. The old woman stirred herself and decided to get her Vasya married. The matchmaker was sent for, this and that, women's talk, and our Vasya went to look himself up a bride. He picked out the widow Samokhvalikha's Mashenka. Without more ado the couple got blessed and the whole thing was put together in a week. The girl was young, about seventeen, short, scanty, but with a fair and pleasant face, and with all the qualities, like a young lady; and the dowry wasn't bad either—five hundred roubles in cash, a cow, linen … And three days after the wedding, as if her heart could sense it, the old woman departed for the heavenly Jerusalem, where there's no sickness or sighing.¹ The young couple paid her their respects and began life together. They lived in splendid fashion for about half a year, then suddenly a new woe. Misfortunes never come singly: Vasya was summoned to the office to draw lots. They took him, the dear heart, as a soldier and didn't even shorten his term. They shaved his head and drove him to the Kingdom of Poland. It was God's will, nothing to be done. He was all right as he took leave of his wife in the yard, but when he gave a last look at the hayloft with his pigeons, he dissolved in floods of tears. It was a pity to see. At first, so as not to be bored, Mashenka took in her mother; the mother stayed till this Kuzka was born, then went to Oboyan to her other daughter, also married, and Mashenka was left alone with the baby. Five carters, all drunken folk, mischievous; horses, wagons, then a fence would collapse, or the soot would catch fire in the chimney—not a woman's business, so she started turning to me, in neighborly fashion, for every trifle. Well, I'd come and take care of it, give her advice … You know, there was nothing for it but to go in, have some tea, talk a bit. I was a young man, of a mental sort, liked to talk about various subjects, and she was educated and polite, too. She dressed neatly, went about with a parasol in summer. I'd start on divinity or politics with her, and she'd be flattered and treat me to tea and preserves … In short, not to embroider on it, I'll tell you, grandpa, that before a year was out the unclean spirit, the enemy of the human race, got me worked up. I began to notice that if I didn't go to her one day, I'd feel out of sorts, bored. And I kept inventing some reason to go to her. 'It's time you put your winter sashes in,' I'd say, and I'd spend the whole day loitering around her place, putting the sashes in and doing it so as there were two sashes left for the next day. 'I must count up Vasya's pigeons, to make sure none gets lost,' and the like. I kept talking with her over the fence, and in the end, to save going the long way round, I made a little gate in it. There's a lot of evil and all sorts of vileness in this world from the female sex. Not only us sinners but even holy men have been led astray. Mashenka didn't do anything to turn me away from her. Instead of remembering her husband and minding herself, she fell in love with me. I began to notice that she was bored, too, and kept walking near the fence and looking into my yard through the cracks. The brains in my head whirled with fantasy. On Thursday in Holy Week,² early, at daybreak, I went to the market, and as I passed her gate, the unclean one was right there. I looked—her gate had a little lattice at the top—and she was already up and standing in the middle of the yard feeding the ducks. I couldn't help myself and called to her. She came up and looked at me through the lattice. Fair little face, tender eyes, still sleepy … I liked her very much and began paying her compliments, as if we weren't by the gate but at a birthday party, and she blushed, laughed, and kept looking right into my eyes without blinking. I lost my mind and started explaining my amorous feelings to her … She opened the gate and let me in, and from that morning on we began to live as husband and wife."

Hunchbacked Alyoshka came into the yard from outside and, breathless, not looking at anyone, ran into the house; a moment later he came running out with an accordion, the copper money jingling in his pocket, and disappeared through the gate, cracking sunflower seeds as he ran.

"And who's that one?" asked Matvei Savvich.

"Our son, Alexei," Dyudya answered. "Gone carousing, the scoundrel. God wronged him with a hump, so we don't ask too much."

"And he keeps on carousing, carousing with the boys," Afanasyevna sighed. "We married him off before Lent, thinking he'd get better, but he got even worse."

"Useless. Just gave a stranger girl a stroke of good luck for nothing," said Dyudya.

Somewhere behind the church they started singing a magnificent, melancholy song. It was impossible to make out the words, only the voices could be heard: two tenors and a bass. Everyone began to listen, and it became very quiet in the yard … Two voices suddenly broke off the song with a peal of laughter, while the third, a tenor, went on singing and struck such a high note that everyone inadvertently looked up, as if the voice in its high pitch had reached to the very sky. Varvara came out of the house and, shielding her eyes with her hand as if from the sun, looked at the church.

"It's the priest's sons and the schoolmaster," she said.

Again the three voices sang together. Matvei Savvich sighed and went on.

"That's how it was, grandpa. About two years later a letter came from Vasya in Warsaw. He wrote that his superiors were sending him home to recuperate. He was sick. By then I'd gotten that silliness out of my head, and a good match had been found for me, and I only didn't know how to loose myself from this little love of mine. Every day I meant to talk with Mashenka, only I didn't know how to approach her so as to avoid any female screaming. The letter untied my hands. Mashenka and I read it, she turned white as snow, and I said: 'Thank God, now you'll be your husband's wife again.' And she to me: 'I won't live with him.' 'But he's your husband, isn't he?' I say. 'It's easy for you … I never loved him and married him against my will. My mother told me to.' 'Don't go dodging, foolish woman,' I say, 'tell me: were you married in church or not?' 'I was,' she says, 'but I love you and will live with you till I die. Let people laugh … I don't care…' 'You're pious,' I say, 'you read the Scriptures, and what does it say there?'"

"You married a husband, you must live with your husband," said Dyudya.

"Husband and wife are one flesh. 'You and I have sinned,' I say, 'and enough, we should be ashamed and fear God. Let's confess to Vasya,' I say, 'he's a peaceable man, timid—he won't kill us. And it's better,' I say, 'to suffer torment in this world from your lawful husband than gnash your teeth at the Last Judgment.' The woman won't hear any of it, she stands her ground, and that's that. 'I love you,' is all she says! Vasya came on Saturday, on the eve of the Trinity,³ early in the morning. I could see everything through the fence: he ran into the house, came out a moment later with Kuzka in his arms, laughing and crying and kissing Kuzka, and looking at the hayloft—he's sorry to leave Kuzka, but wants to see his pigeons. A tender man he was, a sensitive one. The day passed well, quietly and modestly. The bells rang for the evening vigil, and I think: tomorrow's the Trinity, why don't they decorate the gates and fence with greenery?⁴ Something's wrong, I think. I went over to them. I see him sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, his eyes wandering like a drunk man's, tears running down his cheeks, his hands shaking; he's taking pretzels, beads, gingerbread, and other treats from his bundle and scattering them around the floor. Kuzka—he was three years old then—is crawling around, chewing gingerbread, and Mashenka is standing by the stove, pale, trembling all over, and murmuring: 'I'm not your wife, I don't want to live with you'—and all sorts of foolishness. I bow down at Vasya's feet and say: 'We're guilty before you, Vassily Maximych, forgive us for Christ's sake!' Then I got up and said this to Mashenka: 'You, Marya Semyonovna,' I say, 'should wash Vassily Maximych's feet now and drink the dirty water. And be his obedient wife, and pray to God for me, that He in His mercy,' I say, 'may forgive me my trespass.' I was as if inspired by an angel in heaven, so I admonished her, and I spoke with such feeling that I was even moved to tears. A couple of days later, Vasya comes to me. 'I forgive you, Matyusha, you and my wife, God be with you,' he says. 'She's a soldier's wife, it's women's business, she's young, it's hard for her to mind herself. She's not the first, and she won't be the last. Only,' he says, 'I ask you to live as if there was nothing between you and never show anything, and I'll try to please her in everything,' he says, 'so she'll come to love me again.' He gave me his hand, had some tea, and left feeling cheerful. Well, I thought, thank God, and I was glad that everything had come out so well. But as soon as Vasya left, Mashenka came. A real punishment! She hangs on my neck, cries and begs: 'For God's sake, don't abandon me, I can't live without you.'"

"What a slut!" sighed Dyudya.

"I shouted at her, stamped my feet, dragged her to the front hall, and hooked the door. 'Go to your husband!' I shouted. 'Don't shame me in front of people, fear God!' And every day it's the same story. One morning I was standing in my yard near the stable, mending a bridle. Suddenly I see her running through the gate into my yard, barefoot, in nothing but her petticoat, and coming straight towards me. She took hold of the bridle, got all smeared with tar, was shaking and weeping … 'I can't live with the hateful man, it's beyond me! If you don't love me, you'd better kill me!' I got angry and hit her twice with the bridle, and at the same time Vasya comes running through the gate and shouts in a desperate voice: 'Don't beat her! Don't beat her!' And he ran up himself like a demented man, and swung and started beating her with his fists as hard as he could, then he threw her on the ground and started trampling her with his feet. I tried to protect her, but he took some reins and went at her with the reins. He's beating her and giving little shrieks all the while like a colt: hee, hee, hee!"

"They should take the reins and give it to you the same way …" Varvara grumbled, walking off. "You prey on women, curse you all …"

"Shut up!" Dyudya shouted at her. "You mare!"

"Hee, hee, hee!" Matvei Savvich went on. "A carter came running from his yard, I called my hired man, and the three of us took Mashenka away from him and led her home under the arms. The shame of it! That same evening I went to visit her. She was lying in bed, all wrapped up in compresses, only her eyes and nose visible, and staring at the ceiling. I say: 'Good evening, Marya Semyonovna!' Silence. And Vasya is sitting in the other room, holding his head and weeping: 'I'm a villain! I've ruined my life! Send me death, O Lord!' I sat by Mashenka for a little half hour and admonished her. Put a fright into her. 'The righteous,' I say, 'will go to Paradise in the other world, and you to the fiery Hyena⁵ along with all the harlots … Don't oppose your husband, go and bow at his feet.' Not a word from her, not even a blink, as if I'm talking to a post. Next day Vasya took sick with something like cholera, and by evening I heard he was dead. They buried him. Mashenka didn't go to the cemetery, didn't want to show people her shameless face and bruises. And talk soon spread among the townsfolk that Vasya hadn't died a natural death, that Mashenka had done him in. It came to the authorities. They dug Vasya up, cut him open, and found arsenic in his belly. The thing was clear as day; the police came and took Mashenka away, and penniless Kuzka along with her. She was put in prison. The woman had it coming, God punished her … Eight months later there was a trial. She sits on the bench, I remember, in a white kerchief and gray smock, so thin, so pale, sharp-eyed, a pity to see. Behind her a soldier with a gun. She wouldn't confess. At the trial some said she poisoned her husband, and some tried to prove that the husband poisoned himself from grief. I was one of the witnesses. When they asked me, I explained it all in good conscience. 'The sin is on her,' I said. 'There's no hiding it, she didn't love her husband, and she was temperamental…' The trial started in the morning, and that night they reached a verdict: to send her to hard labor in Siberia for thirteen years. After the verdict, Mashenka sat in our jail for three months. I used to visit her, and brought her tea and sugar out of human kindness. But when she saw me, she'd start shaking all over, waving her arms and muttering: 'Go away! Go away!' And she'd press Kuzka to her as if she was afraid I'd take him. 'This is what you've come to,' I say. 'Ah, Masha, Masha, you're a lost soul! You didn't listen to me when I taught you reason, so you can weep now. It's your own fault and nobody else's.' I'm admonishing her, and she says: 'Go away! Go away!'—and presses herself and Kuzka to the wall and trembles. When she was sent from here to the provincial capital, I went to see her off at the station and put a rouble into her bundle to save my soul. But she didn't get as far as Siberia … In the provincial capital she came down with a fever and died in jail."

"A dog's death for a dog," said Dyudya.

"Kuzka was brought back home … I thought a little and took him in. Why not? Though he's a jailbird's spawn, he's still a living soul, a Christian … It's a pity. I'll make him my manager, and if I don't have children of my own, I'll make a merchant out of him. Now, whenever I go somewhere, I take him with me—let him get used to it."

All the while Matvei Savvich was telling his story, Kuzka sat on a stone by the gate, his head propped in his hands, looking at the sky. From a distance, in the twilight, he looked like a little stump.

"Kuzka, go to bed!" Matvei Savvich shouted to him.

"Yes, it's time," said Dyudya, getting up. He yawned loudly and added: "They've just got to live by their own minds, not listening to anybody, and so they get what's coming to them."

The moon was already sailing in the sky above the yard; it raced quickly in one direction, while the clouds below it raced in the other; the clouds went on their way, but the moon could still be seen above the yard. Matvei Savvich prayed facing the church and, wishing everyone good night, lay down on the ground by the cart. Kuzka also said a prayer, lay down in the cart, and covered himself with his frock coat. To be more comfortable, he made a depression in the straw and curled up so that his elbows touched his knees. From the yard Dyudya could be seen lighting a candle in his downstairs room, putting his spectacles on, and standing in the corner with a book. He spent a long time reading and bowing.

The travelers fell asleep. Afanasyevna and Sofya went over to the cart and began looking at Kuzka.

"The little orphan's asleep," the old woman said. "So thin, so skinny, nothing but bones. He's got no mother, there's nobody to feed him properly."

"My Grishutka must be a couple of years older," said Sofya. "He lives at the factory, like a prisoner, without a mother. The master probably beats him. As I looked at this little lad today and remembered my Grishutka, my heart just bled."

A minute passed in silence.

"He surely doesn't remember his mother," said the old woman.

"How could he!"

Big tears poured from Sofya's eyes.

"All curled up …" she said, sobbing and laughing with tenderness and pity. "My poor orphan."

Kuzka gave a start and opened his eyes. He saw before him an ugly, wrinkled, tear-stained face, beside it another face, an old woman's, toothless, with a sharp chin and hooked nose, and above them the fathomless sky with racing clouds and the moon, and he cried out in terror. Sofya also cried out; an echo answered both of them, and anxiety passed through the stuffy air; the watchman rapped at the neighbor's, a dog barked. Matvei Savvich murmured something in his sleep and rolled over on his other side.

Late in the evening, when Dyudya and the old woman and the neighbor's watchman were already asleep, Sofya went out the gate and sat on a bench. She needed air, and her head ached from weeping. The street was wide and long; about two miles to the right, the same to the left, and no end to be seen. The moon had left the yard and stood behind the church. One side of the street was flooded with moonlight, and the other was black with shadow; the long shadows of poplars and birdhouses stretched across the whole street, and the shadow of the church, black and frightening, lay broadly, having swallowed up Dyudya's gate and half the house. The place was deserted and quiet. From time to time, barely audible music came from the end of the street; it must have been Alyoshka playing his accordion.

Someone was walking in the shadow by the church fence, and it was impossible to make out whether it was a man, or a cow, or perhaps no one at all, but only a big bird rustling in the trees. But then a figure emerged from the shadow, stopped and said something in a man's voice, then vanished into the lane by the church. A while later another figure appeared about five yards from the gate; it walked from the church straight towards the gate and, seeing Sofya on the bench, stopped.

"Varvara, is that you?" asked Sofya.

"And what if it is?"

It was Varvara. She stood for a moment, then came up to the bench and sat down.

"Where have you been?" asked Sofya.

Varvara did not answer.

"Watch out that you don't come to grief, girl, with your wanderings," said Sofya. "Did you hear how Mashenka got it with feet and reins? You may get yourself the same thing."

"Who cares."

Varvara laughed into her kerchief and said in a whisper:

"I've just been with the priest's son."

"You're babbling."

"By God."

"It's a sin!" Sofya whispered.

"Who cares … What's there to be sorry about? If it's a sin, it's a sin, but I'd rather be struck down by lightning than live such a life. I'm young, healthy, and my husband's hunchbacked, hateful, harsh, worse than that cursed Dyudya. Before I got married, I never had enough to eat, I went barefoot, so I left that wicked lot, got tempted by Alyoshka's riches, and got snared like a fish in a net, and it would be easier for me to sleep with a viper than with that mangy Alyoshka. And your life? I don't even want to look at it. Your Fyodor drove you away from the factory back to his father and found himself another woman; they took your boy from you and put him into bondage. You work like a horse and never hear a kind word. It's better to pine away unmarried all your life, better to take fifty kopecks from the priest's son, to beg for alms, better to go head first down a well …"

"It's a sin," Sofya whispered again.

"Who cares."

Somewhere behind the church the same three voices—two tenors and a bass—started up a melancholy song again. And again it was impossible to make out the words.

"Night owls …" laughed Varvara.

And she began to tell in a whisper how she spends nights out with the priest's son, and what he says to her, and what sorts of friends he has, and how she had spent time with traveling officials and merchants. The melancholy song called up a free life, Sofya began to laugh, she felt it was sinful, and scary, and sweet to listen, and she was envious and sorry that she had not sinned herself when she was young and beautiful …

In the old cemetery church it struck midnight.

"Time for bed," said Sofya, getting up, "or else Dyudya will catch us out."

The two women slowly went into the yard.

"I left and didn't hear what he told afterwards about Mashenka," said Varvara, making up a bed under the window.

"She died in jail, he says. Poisoned her husband."

Varvara lay down beside Sofya, thought a little, and said softly:

"I could do in my Alyoshka and not regret it."

"You're babbling, God help you."

As Sofya was falling asleep, Varvara pressed herself to her and whispered in her ear:

"Let's do in Dyudya and Alyoshka!"

Sofya gave a start but said nothing, then opened her eyes and gazed at the sky for a long time without blinking.

"People would find out," she said.

"No, they wouldn't. Dyudya's old already, it's time he died, and they'll say Alyoshka died of drink."

"It's scary … God would kill us."

"Who cares …"

The two women lay awake and thought silently.

"It's cold," said Sofya, beginning to tremble all over. "Must be nearly morning … Are you asleep?"

"No … Don't listen to me, dear heart," Varvara whispered. "I'm bitter against the cursed lot of them, and don't know what I'm saying myself. Sleep, dawn's already coming … Sleep …"

They both fell silent, calmed down, and soon went to sleep.

The old woman was the first to wake up. She roused Sofya, and they went to the shed to milk the cows. Hunchbacked Alyoshka came, thoroughly drunk, without his accordion; his chest and knees were covered with dust and straw—he must have fallen down on his way. Staggering, he went to the shed and, without undressing, dropped into a sledge and at once began to snore. When the rising sun flamed brightly on the crosses of the church and then on the windows, and the shadows of the trees and the well-sweep stretched across the yard over the dewy grass, Matvei Savvich jumped up and started bustling about.

"Kuzka, get up!" he cried. "It's time to harness the cart! Look lively!"

The morning turmoil began. A young Jewess in a brown dress with ruffles led a horse into the yard for watering. The well-sweep creaked pitifully, the bucket banged … Kuzka, sleepy, sluggish, covered with dew, sat in the cart, lazily putting on his frock coat and listening to the splashing of water from the bucket in the well, and he shuddered from the cold.

"Auntie," Matvei Savvich shouted to Sofya, "nudge my lad, so he'll go and harness up!"

And just then Dyudya shouted out the window:

"Sofya, take a kopeck from the Jewess for the watering! No keeping them away, mangy Yids."

In the street sheep were running up and down, bleating; women shouted at the shepherd, and he played his pipe, cracked his whip, or answered them in a heavy, hoarse bass. Three sheep ran into the yard and, unable to find the gate, poked about at the fence. The noise awakened Varvara, she gathered up her bedding and went to the house.

"You might at least drive the sheep out!" the old woman shouted at her. "A fine lady!"

"What else! I should start working for you Herods!" Varvara growled, going into the house.

They greased the cart and harnessed the horses. Dyudya came out of the house, an abacus in his hands, sat down on the porch, and began counting up how much the traveler owed for the night, the oats, and the watering.

"You're putting in a lot for oats, grandpa," said Matvei Savvich.

"If it's too much, don't take any, merchant. Nobody's forcing you."

When the travelers went to get into the cart and go, they were detained for a minute by one circumstance. Kuzka's hat had disappeared.

"Where'd you put it, little swine?" Matvei Savvich shouted angrily. "Where is it?"

Kuzka's face twisted in terror, he rushed around the cart and, not finding it there, ran to the gate, then to the shed. The old woman and Sofya helped him to look.

"I'll tear your ears off!" shouted Matvei Savvich. "You rascal, you!"

The hat was found at the bottom of the cart. Kuzka brushed it off with his sleeve, put it on, and timidly, still with a look of terror on his face, as if afraid of being hit from behind, climbed into the cart. Matvei Savvich crossed himself, the young fellow jerked the reins, the cart started moving and rolled out of the yard.
JUNE 1891

THE FIDGET

All of Olga Ivanovna's friends and good acquaintances were at her wedding.

"Look at him: there's something in him, isn't there?" she said to her friends, nodding towards her husband, as if she wished to explain why she had married this simple, very ordinary and in no way remarkable man.

Her husband, Osip Stepanych Dymov, was a doctor and held the rank of titular councillor.¹ He worked in two hospitals: as an intern in one, and as a prosector in the other. Every day from nine o'clock till noon he received patients and was busy with his ward, and in the afternoon he took a horse-tram to the other hospital, where he dissected dead patients. His private practice was negligible, some five hundred roubles a year. That was all. What more could be said of him? And yet Olga Ivanovna and her friends and good acquaintances were not exactly ordinary people. Each of them was remarkable for something and of some renown, already had a name and was considered a celebrity or, if not yet a celebrity, held out the brightest hopes. An actor in the theater, a big, long-recognized talent, a graceful, intelligent, and humble man and an excellent reader, who taught Olga Ivanovna recitation; an opera singer, a fat, good-natured man, who sighed as he assured Olga Ivanovna that she was ruining herself: that if she stopped being lazy and took herself in hand, she would become an excellent singer; then several artists, chief among them the genre, animal, and landscape painter Ryabovsky, a very handsome young man of about twenty-five, who was successful at exhibitions and whose last picture had sold for five hundred roubles; he corrected Olga Ivanovna's studies and said that something might come of her; then a cellist, whose instrument wept and who confessed sincerely that, of all the women he knew, Olga Ivanovna alone was able to accompany him; then a writer, young but already known, who wrote novellas, plays, and stories. Who else? Well, there was also Vassily Vassilyich, squire, landowner, dilettante illustrator and vignette painter, who had a strong feeling for the old Russian style, heroic song and epic; he literally performed miracles on paper, porcelain, and smoked glass. Amidst this artistic, free, and fate-pampered company, delicate and modest, true, but who remembered the existence of all these doctors only when they were sick, and for whom the name Dymov sounded as nondescript as Sidorov or Tarasov—amidst this company Dymov seemed foreign, superfluous, and small, though he was a tall and broad-shouldered man. It seemed as if he were wearing someone else's tailcoat and had a salesman's beard. However, if he had been a writer or an artist, they would have said his little beard made him look like Émile Zola.

The actor told Olga Ivanovna that in her wedding dress, and with her flaxen hair, she very much resembled a slender cherry tree in spring, when it is covered all over with tender white blossoms.

"No, listen!" Olga Ivanovna said to him, seizing his hand. "How could this suddenly happen? Listen, listen … I must tell you that my father worked in the same hospital as Dymov. When my poor father fell ill, Dymov spent whole days and nights watching at his bedside. Such self-sacrifice! Listen, Ryabovsky … And you, writer, you listen, too, it's very interesting. Come closer. So much self-sacrifice and genuine sympathy! I also stayed up nights, sitting by my father, and suddenly—hello! the fine fellow's conquered! My Dymov is smitten and head over heels in love. Really, fate is sometimes so whimsical. Well, after my father's death he called on me occasionally, or I'd meet him in the street, and one fine evening suddenly—bang!—he proposed … like a ton of snow on my head … I cried all night and fell infernally in love myself. And so, as you see, I've become a wife. There's something strong, brawny, bear-like in him, isn't there? His face is turned three-quarters to us now, and poorly lit, but when he turns this way, look at his forehead. Ryabovsky, what do you say of that forehead? Dymov, we're talking about you!" she called out to her husband. "Come here. Give your honest hand to Ryabovsky … That's it. Be friends."

Dymov, with a naïve and good-natured smile, gave Ryabovsky his hand and said:

"Delighted. I finished my studies with a man named Ryabovsky. Is he a relation of yours?"

Olga Ivanovna was twenty-two years old, Dymov thirty-one. They started life excellently after the wedding. Olga Ivanovna hung all the walls of the drawing room with her own and other people's studies, framed and unframed, and around the grand piano and furniture she arranged a beautiful clutter of Chinese parasols, easels, colorful rags, daggers, little busts, photographs … In the dining room she covered the walls with folk prints, hung up bast shoes and sickles, put a scythe and rake in the corner, and thus achieved a dining room in Russian style. In the bedroom, she draped the ceiling and walls with dark cloth to make it look like a cave, hung a Venetian lantern over the beds, and placed a figure with a halberd by the door. And everybody found that the young spouses had themselves a very sweet little corner.

Every day, getting out of bed at around eleven, Olga Ivanovna would play the piano or, if it was sunny, would paint something in oils. After that, between noon and one, she would go to her dressmaker. Since she and Dymov had very little money, barely enough, she and her dressmaker had to be very clever if she was to appear frequently in new dresses and amaze people with her outfits. Often an old, re-dyed dress, some worthless scraps of tulle, lace, plush, and silk, would be turned into a wonder, something enchanting, not a dress but a dream. From the dressmaker's, Olga Ivanovna usually went to see some actress she knew, to find out the theater news and incidentally try to get a ticket for the opening night of a new play or for a benefit performance. From the actress, she would have to go to an artist's studio or a picture exhibition, then to see some celebrity—to make an invitation or return a visit, or for a simple chat. And everywhere she was met gaily and amiably, and was assured that she was nice, sweet, rare … Those whom she called famous and great received her like one of themselves, like an equal, and in one voice prophesied that with her talents, taste, and intelligence, she would have great success if she did not disperse herself She sang, played the piano, painted, sculpted, took part in amateur theatricals, and all of it not just anyhow, but with talent; whether it was making lanterns for a fête, or putting on a disguise, or tying someone's tie—everything she did came out extraordinarily artistic, graceful, and pretty But nothing showed her talent so strikingly as her ability to become quickly acquainted and on close terms with celebrities. The moment anyone became the least bit famous and was talked about, she made his acquaintance, became his friend that same day, and invited him to her house. Every new acquaintance was a veritable feast for her. She idolized celebrities, took pride in them, and saw them every night in her dreams. She thirsted for them and was never able to quench her thirst. Old ones would go and be forgotten, new ones would come to replace them, but she would get used to them, too, or become disappointed in them, and begin searching greedily for more and more new great people, find them, and search again. Why?

Between four and five she had dinner at home with her husband. His simplicity, common sense, and good nature moved her to tenderness and delight. She kept jumping up, impulsively embracing his head, and showering it with kisses.

"You're an intelligent and noble person, Dymov," she said, "but you have one very important shortcoming. You're not interested in art. You reject music and painting."

"I don't understand them," he said meekly. "I've studied natural science and medicine all my life, and haven't had time to get interested in the arts."

"But this is terrible, Dymov!"

"Why? Your acquaintances don't know natural science and medicine, and yet you don't reproach them for it. To each his own. I don't understand landscapes and operas, but I think like this: if some intelligent people devote their entire lives to them, and other intelligent people pay enormous amounts of money for them, then it means they're needed. I don't understand them, but not to understand doesn't mean to reject."

"Allow me to shake your honest hand!"

After dinner Olga Ivanovna would visit some acquaintances, then go to the theater or a concert, and return home past midnight. And so it went every day.

On Wednesdays she had soirées. At these soirées the hostess and her guests did not play cards or dance, but entertained themselves with various arts. The actor recited, the singer sang, the artists did drawings in albums, of which Olga Ivanovna had many, the cellist played, and the hostess herself also drew, sculpted, sang, and accompanied. Between the recitations, music, and singing, they talked and argued about literature, the theater, and painting. There were no ladies, because Olga Ivanovna considered all ladies, except for actresses and her dressmaker, to be boring and banal. Not a single soirée went by without the hostess, giving a start at each ring of the bell, saying with a triumphant expression: "It's him!"—meaning by the word "him" some new celebrity she had invited. Dymov would not be in the drawing room, and no one remembered his existence. But at exactly half-past eleven, the door to the dining room would open, and Dymov would appear with his meek, good-natured smile and say, rubbing his hands:

"A bite to eat, gentlemen."

They would all go to the dining room, and each time would see the same things on the table: a plate of oysters, a ham or veal roast, sardines, cheese, caviar, mushrooms, vodka, and two carafes of wine.

"My sweet maître d'hôtel!" Olga Ivanovna would say, clasping her hands in delight. "You're simply charming! Gentlemen, look at his forehead! Dymov, turn in profile. Look, gentlemen: the face of a Bengal tiger, and an expression as kind and sweet as a deer's. Oh, my sweet!"

The guests ate and, looking at Dymov, thought: "A nice fellow, actually," but they soon forgot him and went on talking about the theater, music, and painting.

The young spouses were happy and their life went swimmingly. However, the third week of their honeymoon passed not altogether happily, even sadly. Dymov caught erysipelas in the hospital, spent six days in bed, and had to shave his beautiful black hair. Olga Ivanovna sat with him and wept bitterly, but when he felt better, she put a white scarf around his cropped head and began painting him as a Bedouin. And they both felt merry. About three days after he recovered and began going to the hospital again, he suffered another mishap.

"I have no luck, mama!" he said over dinner. "Today I had to do four dissections, and I cut myself on two fingers at once. And I only noticed it when I got home."

Olga Ivanovna became alarmed. He smiled and said it was nothing and that he often cut himself while doing dissections.

"I get carried away, mama, and don't pay attention."

Olga Ivanovna worriedly anticipated blood poisoning and prayed to God at night, but nothing bad happened. And again their peaceful, happy life flowed on without sorrows or alarms. The present was beautiful, and it would be replaced by the approaching spring, already smiling from afar and promising a thousand joys. There would be no end of happiness! In April, May, and June a dacha² far from town, walks, sketching, fishing, nightingales, and then, from July right till fall, an artists' trip to the Volga, and Olga Ivanovna would take part in that trip, too, as a permanent member of the société. She had already had two simple linen traveling outfits made, and had bought some paints, brushes, canvases, and a new palette to take along. Ryabovsky came to her almost every day, to see what progress she had made in painting. When she showed him her paintings, he thrust his hands deep into his pockets, pressed his lips tightly, sniffed, and said:

"Well, now … This cloud you've made too loud—it's not evening light. The foreground is somehow chewed up, and there's something off here, you see … And your little cottage is choking on something and squealing pitifully … this corner could be a bit darker. But in general it's not bad at all… My compliments."

And the more incomprehensibly he spoke, the more easily Olga Ivanovna understood him.

III

On the day after Pentecost, Dymov bought some snacks and sweets after dinner and went to his wife at the dacha. He had not seen her for two weeks and missed her sorely. Sitting on the train and then looking for his dacha in the big woods, he felt hungry and tired all the while, and dreamed of having a leisurely supper with his wife and then dropping off to sleep. And it cheered him to look at his bundle, with its wrapped-up caviar, cheese, and white salmon. By the time he found his dacha and recognized it, the sun was already setting. The old maid said that the lady was not at home but would probably be back soon. The dacha was very unattractive to look at, with low ceilings pasted over with writing paper and cracks between the uneven floorboards, and it consisted of only three rooms. In one room stood a bed, in the second there were canvases, brushes, greasy paper, and men's jackets and hats lying about on the chairs and windowsills, and in the third Dymov found three men he did not know. Two were dark-haired with little beards, and the third was clean-shaven and fat, apparently an actor. A samovar was boiling on the table.

"What can I do for you?" the actor asked in a bass voice, giving Dymov an unsociable look. "Is it Olga Ivanovna you want? Wait, she'll come soon."

Dymov sat down and began to wait. One of the dark-haired men, glancing at him sleepily and sluggishly, poured himself some tea and asked:

"Want some tea?"

Dymov wanted to drink and to eat, but he declined the tea so as not to spoil his appetite. Soon footsteps and familiar laughter were heard; the door banged, and Olga Ivanovna, in a broad-brimmed hat and carrying a paint box, ran into the room, followed by the gay, red-cheeked Ryabovsky with a big parasol and a folding chair.

"Dymov!" Olga Ivanovna cried out and blushed with joy. "Dymov!" she repeated, putting her head and both hands on his chest. "It's you! Why haven't you come for so long? Why? Why?"

"How could I, mama? I'm always busy, and whenever I'm free, it always turns out that the train schedule doesn't suit."

"But I'm so glad to see you! I dreamed of you all night, all night, and I was afraid you were sick. Ah, if only you knew how sweet you are, how timely you've come! You'll be my savior. You alone can save me! Tomorrow they're having the most original wedding here," she went on, laughing and knotting her husband's tie. "A young telegraphist from the train station, a certain Chikeldeev, is getting married. A handsome young man, well, and not at all stupid, and with something, you know, strong and bear-like in his face … He'd be a good model for a young Viking. All of us summer people sympathize with him and have given our word of honor to come to his wedding … He's a poor man, lonely, timid, and of course it would be a sin to deny him our sympathy. Imagine, after the liturgy there'll be the wedding, then we all go on foot from the church to the bride's place … you understand, the woods, the birds singing, patches of sun on the grass, and all of us like colored spots against the bright green background—most original, in the style of the French Impressionists. But, Dymov, what am I to wear to church?" Olga Ivanovna said, and made a tearful face. "I've got nothing here, literally nothing! No dress, no flowers, no gloves … You must save me. Since you've come, it means fate itself is telling you to save me. Take the keys, my dear, go home and get my pink dress from the wardrobe. You remember, it's hanging in front… Then, in the closet, on the floor to the right, you'll see two boxes. Open the top one and you'll see tulle, tulle, tulle, and all sorts of scraps, and flowers under them. Take all the flowers out carefully, darling, try not to crush them, I'll choose what I want later … And buy some gloves."

"All right," said Dymov. "I'll go tomorrow and send it all."

"Why tomorrow?" Olga Ivanovna asked and looked at him in surprise. "You won't have time tomorrow. The first train leaves at nine tomorrow, and the wedding's at eleven. No, dearest, it has to be today, absolutely today! If you can't come back tomorrow, send it with a courier. Well, go … The train must be coming right now. Don't be late, darling."

"All right."

"Ah, how sorry I am to let you go," said Olga Ivanovna, tears brimming her eyes. "And why was I such a fool as to give the telegraphist my word?"

Dymov quickly drank a cup of tea, took a pretzel, and, smiling meekly, went to the station. And the caviar, cheese, and white salmon were eaten by the two dark-haired gentlemen and the fat actor.

On a quiet, moonlit July night Olga Ivanovna stood on the deck of a Volga steamer and gazed now at the water, now at the beautiful banks. Beside her stood Ryabovsky, who was saying to her that the black shadows on the water were not shadows but a dream, that at the sight of this magical water with its fantastic gleam, at the sight of the fathomless sky and melancholy, pensive banks that speak of the vanity of our life and the existence of something lofty, eternal, blissful, it would be good to fall into oblivion, to die, to become a memory. The past is banal and uninteresting, the future insignificant, and this wondrous night, unique in their life, will soon end, will merge with eternity—why then live?

And Olga Ivanovna listened now to Ryabovsky's voice, now to the silence of the night, and thought she was immortal and would never die. The turquoise color of the water, such as she had never seen before, the sky, the banks, the black shadows, and the unaccountable joy that filled her heart, told her that she would become a great artist, and somewhere beyond the distance, beyond the moonlit night, in infinite space, success awaited her, fame, people's love … When she looked into the distance for a long time without blinking, she imagined crowds of people, lights, the festive sounds of music, shouts of delight, she herself in a white dress, and flowers pouring on her from all sides. She also thought that beside her, leaning his elbows on the bulwark, stood a truly great man, a genius, one of God's chosen … Everything he had created so far was beautiful, new, and extraordinary, and what he would create in time, when his rare talent was strengthened by maturity, would be astounding, immeasurably lofty, and this could be seen by his face, by his manner of expressing himself, and by his attitude towards nature. Of the shadows, the evening hues, the shining of the moon, he spoke somehow specially, in his own language, so that one inadvertently felt the charm of his power over nature. He himself was very handsome, original, and his life, independent, free, foreign to everything mundane, was like the life of a bird.

"It's getting cool," said Olga Ivanovna, shivering.

Ryabovsky wrapped his cloak around her and said sorrowfully:

"I feel I am in your power. I am a slave. What makes you so bewitching today?"

He gazed at her all the while, not tearing himself away, and his eyes were terrible, and she was afraid to look at him.

"I love you madly …" he whispered, breathing on her cheek. "Say one word to me, and I'll cease living, I'll abandon art …" he murmured in great agitation. "Love me, love …"

"Don't speak like that," said Olga Ivanovna, closing her eyes. "It's terrible. And Dymov?"

"What of Dymov? Why Dymov? What do I care about Dymov? The Volga, the moon, beauty, my love, my ecstasy, and there isn't any Dymov… Ah, I know nothing … I need no past, give me one instant… one moment."

Olga Ivanovna's heart was pounding. She wanted to think of her husband, but the whole of her past, with the wedding, with Dymov, with her soirées, seemed small to her, worthless, faded, unnecessary, and far, far away… What Dymov, indeed? Why Dymov? What did she care about Dymov? Did he really exist in nature, or was he merely a dream?

"For him, a simple and ordinary man, the happiness he has already received is enough," she thought, covering her face with her hands. "Let them condemn me there, let them curse me, and I'll just up and ruin myself, ruin myself to spite them all… One must experience everything in life. Oh, God, how scary and how good!"

"Well, what? What?" the artist murmured, embracing her and greedily kissing her hands, with which she tried weakly to push him away. "You love me? Yes? Yes? Oh, what a night! A wondrous night!"

"Yes, what a night!" she whispered, looking into his eyes, glistening with tears. Then she glanced around quickly, embraced him, and kissed him hard on the lips.

"Approaching Kineshma!" someone said on the other side of the deck.

Heavy footsteps were heard. It was a man from the buffet walking by.

"Listen," Olga Ivanovna said to him, laughing and crying from happiness, "bring us some wine."

The artist, pale with excitement, sat down on a bench, looked at Olga Ivanovna with adoring, grateful eyes, then closed his eyes and said, smiling languidly:

"I'm tired."

And he leaned his head against the bulwark.

The second day of September was warm and still, but gray. Early in the morning a light mist wandered over the Volga, and after nine a drizzling rain set in. And there was no hope that the sky would clear. Over tea Ryabovsky was saying to Olga Ivanovna that painting was the most ungrateful and boring of arts, that he was not an artist, and that only fools thought he had talent, and suddenly, out of the blue, he seized a knife and scratched the best of his studies. After tea he sat gloomily by the window and looked at the Volga. And the Volga was without a gleam, dull, lusterless, and cold-looking. Everything, everything recalled the approach of melancholy, dismal autumn. And it seemed as if nature now stripped the Volga of the luxurious green carpets on its banks, the diamond glints of the sun, the transparent blue distance, and all that was smart and showy, and packed it away in trunks till next spring, and the crows flew about the Volga, teasing her: "Bare! Bare!" Ryabovsky listened to their cawing and thought that he was already played out and had lost his talent, and that everything in this world was conventional, relative, and stupid, and that he should not have tied himself to this woman … In short, he was in a foul and splenetic mood.

Olga Ivanovna sat on the bed behind the partition and, fingering her beautiful flaxen hair, imagined herself now in the drawing room, now in the bedroom, now in her husband's study; her imagination carried her to the theater, to the dressmaker's, and to her famous friends. What were they doing now? Did they remember her? The season had already begun, and it was time to be thinking of soirées. And Dymov? Dear Dymov! How meekly and with what childlike plaintiveness he asked her in his letters to come home soon! Every month he sent her seventy-five roubles, and when she wrote to him that she owed the artists a hundred roubles, he sent her the hundred as well. What a kind, generous man! Olga Ivanovna was tired of traveling, she was bored and wanted to get away quickly from these peasants, from the smell of river dampness, and to shake off the feeling of physical uncleanness she had experienced all the while she had been living in peasant cottages and migrating from village to village. If Ryabovsky had not given the artists his word of honor that he would stay with them till the twentieth of September, they might have left that same day. And how good it would be!

"My God," moaned Ryabovsky, "but when will there finally be some sun? I can't go on working on a sunny landscape without the sun!…

"But you have a study with a cloudy sky," said Olga Ivanovna, appearing from behind the partition. "Remember, a woods to the right and a herd of cows or some geese to the left. You could finish it now."

"Eh!" the artist winced. "Finish it! Maybe you think I myself am so stupid that I don't know what I should do!"

"How you've changed towards me!" Olga Ivanovna sighed.

"Well, splendid."

Olga Ivanovna's face trembled, she went over to the stove and began to cry.

"Yes, we only lacked tears. Stop it! I have a thousand reasons to cry, but I don't cry."

"A thousand reasons!" Olga Ivanovna sobbed. "The main reason is that I'm already a burden to you. Yes!" she said, and burst into tears. "If the truth were told, you're ashamed of our love. You try to keep the artists from noticing it, though it's impossible to hide it and they've all known for a long time."

"Olga, I ask one thing of you," the artist said pleadingly, placing his hand on his heart, "just one thing: don't torture me! I don't need anything else from you!"

"But swear that you still love me!"

"This is torture!" the artist said through his teeth and jumped up. "It will end with me throwing myself into the Volga or losing my mind! Let me be!"

"Then kill me, kill me!" cried Olga Ivanovna. "Kill me!"

She burst into tears again and went behind the partition. Rain began to patter on the thatched roof of the cottage. Ryabovsky clutched his head and paced from corner to corner, then, with a resolute face, as if wishing to prove something to someone, he put on his cap, shouldered his gun, and walked out of the cottage.

After he left, Olga Ivanovna lay on the bed for a long time and cried. First she thought it would be good to poison herself, so that Ryabovsky would find her dead when he came back, then she was carried in her thoughts to the drawing room, to her husband's study, and she imagined herself sitting motionless beside Dymov, enjoying the physical peace and cleanness, and sitting in the theater in the evening listening to Mazzini.³ And the longing for civilization, for city noise and famous people, wrung her heart. A peasant woman came into the cottage and began unhurriedly to fire the stove in order to cook supper. There was a smell of burning, and the air turned blue with smoke. Artists in dirty high boots and with rain-wet faces came in, looked at their studies and said, to comfort themselves, that the Volga had its charm even in bad weather. And the cheap clock on the wall said: tick, tick, tick … Chilled flies crowded into the front corner by the icons and buzzed there, and cockroaches could be heard stirring in the fat portfolios under the benches …

Ryabovsky returned home as the sun was going down. He threw his cap on the table and, pale, worn out, in dirty boots, sank onto a bench and closed his eyes.

"I'm tired …" he said and moved his eyebrows in an effort to raise his eyelids.

To show her tenderness and let him know that she was not angry, Olga Ivanovna went over to him, kissed him silently, and passed her comb over his blond hair. She wanted to comb it for him.

"What's that?" he asked with a start, as if something cold had touched him, and he opened his eyes. "What's that? Leave me alone, I beg you."

He moved her aside with his hands and walked away, and it seemed to her that his face expressed disgust and vexation. Just then the woman was carefully carrying a plate of cabbage soup to him with both hands, and Olga Ivanovna saw her thumbs dip into the soup. The dirty woman with her cross-tied belly, and the soup that Ryabovsky began eating greedily, and the cottage, and that whole life, which she had liked so much at the beginning for its simplicity and artistic disorder, now seemed horrible to her. She suddenly felt offended and said coldly:

"We must part for a time, otherwise we may quarrel seriously out of boredom. I'm sick of it. I'll leave today."

"How? Riding on a stick?"

"Today is Thursday, which means the steamer will be coming at nine-thirty"

"Ah, yes, yes … Well, go then …" Ryabovsky said gently, wiping his mouth with a towel instead of a napkin. "You're bored here and have nothing to do, and one would have to be a great egoist to keep you here. Go, and we'll see each other after the twentieth."

Olga Ivanovna packed cheerfully, and her cheeks even burned with pleasure. Could it be true, she asked herself, that she would soon sit painting in a living room, and sleep in a bedroom, and dine on a tablecloth? Her heart felt relieved, and she was no longer angry with the artist.

"I'll leave the paints and brushes for you, Ryabusha," she said. "Bring back whatever's left … See that you don't get lazy here without me, or splenetic, but work. I think you're a fine fellow, Ryabusha."

At nine o'clock Ryabovsky kissed her good-bye, to avoid, as she thought, having to kiss her on the steamer, in front of the artists, and brought her to the wharf The steamer soon came and took her away

She arrived home two and a half days later. Not taking off her hat and waterproof, breathless with excitement, she went to the drawing room and from there to the dining room. Dymov, in his shirtsleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned, was sitting at the table and sharpening his knife on his fork; on a plate in front of him lay a grouse. As Olga Ivanovna was entering the apartment, she felt convinced that it was necessary to hide everything from her husband, and that she would have skill and strength enough to do it, but now, when she saw his broad, meek, happy smile and his shining, joyful eyes, she felt that to hide anything from this man was as base, as loathsome, and as impossible and beyond her strength, as to slander, steal, or kill, and she instantly resolved to tell him all that had happened. After letting him kiss and embrace her, she sank to her knees before him and covered her face.

"What? What is it, mama?" he asked tenderly. "You missed me?"

She raised her face, red with shame, and looked at him guiltily and imploringly, but fear and shame prevented her from telling the truth.

"Never mind …" she said. "I'm just so …"

"Let's sit down," he said, raising her up and sitting her at the table. "There … Have some grouse. You must be hungry, poor little thing."

She greedily breathed in the air of her home and ate the grouse, and he gazed at her lovingly and laughed with joy.

Apparently, by the middle of winter Dymov began to suspect that he was being deceived. As if his own conscience were not clean, he could no longer look his wife straight in the eye, did not smile joyfully when he met her, and, to avoid being alone with her, often brought to dinner his friend Korostelev, a crop-headed little man with a crumpled face, who, as he spoke with Olga Ivanovna, in his embarrassment would undo all the buttons of his jacket and button them up again, and then would start twisting his left mustache with his right hand. Over dinner the two doctors spoke of the irregular heartbeat that sometimes occurs if the diaphragm is positioned high, or of how multiple neuritis had become more prevalent lately, or how the day before, having dissected a corpse diagnosed as having "malignant anemia," Dymov had found cancer of the pancreas. And it looked as if the two men conducted a medical conversation only so that Olga Ivanovna could keep silent—that is, not lie. After dinner Korostelev sat down at the piano, and Dymov sighed and said to him:

"Eh, brother! Well, now! Play us something sad."

Hunching his shoulders and spreading his fingers wide, Korostelev played a few chords and began singing "Show me such a haven where the Russian muzhik does not groan"⁴ in a tenor voice, and Dymov sighed again, propped his head on his fist, and fell to thinking.

Lately Olga Ivanovna had been behaving very imprudently. She woke up every morning in a bad mood and with the thought that she no longer loved Ryabovsky, and thank God it was all over. But after coffee she would realize that Ryabovsky had taken her husband from her, and that she now had neither husband nor Ryabovsky; then she would recall what her acquaintances had said about Ryabovsky preparing something astounding for the exhibition, a mixture of landscape and genre painting in the style of Polenov,⁵ over which everyone who visited his studio was in ecstasies; but this, she thought, he had created under her influence, and generally, thanks to her influence, he had changed greatly for the better. Her influence was so beneficial and essential that, if she were to leave him, he might even perish. And she also recalled that he had come to her last time in some gray little frock coat with flecks and a new tie, and had asked languidly: "Am I handsome?" And, graceful, with his long hair and blue eyes, he was indeed very handsome (or perhaps only seemed so), and he was tender with her.

Having recalled and realized many things, Olga Ivanovna would get dressed and, in great agitation, go to see Ryabovsky in his studio. She would find him cheerful and delighted with his indeed magnificent painting; he would clown, hop about, and answer serious questions with jokes. Olga Ivanovna was jealous of the painting and hated it, but out of politeness she would stand silently before it for some five minutes and, sighing as one sighs before some sacred thing, say softly:

"Yes, you've never yet painted anything like that. You know, it's even frightening."

Then she would begin imploring him to love her, not to abandon her, to have pity on her, poor and unhappy as she was. She would weep, kiss his hands, demand that he swear his love for her, insist that without her good influence he would go astray and perish. And, having ruined his good spirits and feeling humiliated herself, she would go to her dressmaker or to some actress acquaintance to obtain a ticket.

If she did not find him in his studio, she would leave a note for him, in which she swore that if he did not come to her that day, she would certainly poison herself. He would get alarmed, come to her, and stay for dinner. Unembarrassed by her husband's presence, he would say impertinent things to her, and she would respond in kind. They both felt that they were hampering each other, that they were despots and enemies, and they were angry. And in their anger, they did not notice that they were being indecent, and that even crop-headed Korostelev understood everything. After dinner, Ryabovsky would hurriedly say good-bye and leave.

"Where are you going?" Olga Ivanovna would ask him in the front hall, looking at him with hatred.

Wincing and narrowing his eyes, he would name some lady of their acquaintance, and it was clear that he was making fun of her jealousy and wanted to vex her. She would go to her bedroom and lie down on the bed; from jealousy, vexation, a feeling of humiliation and shame, she would bite her pillow and begin crying loudly. Dymov would leave Korostelev in the drawing room, come to the bedroom, and, embarrassed and perplexed, say softly:

"Don't cry so loudly, mama … Why? You must keep it quiet … You mustn't show … You know you can't mend what's happened."

Not knowing how to suppress her painful jealousy, which even made her temples ache, and thinking that things could still be put right, she would wash, powder her tear-stained face, and fly to the lady acquaintance. Not finding Ryabovsky there, she would go to another, then a third … In the beginning she was ashamed of going around like that, but then she got used to it, and it would happen that in one evening she would visit all the ladies of her acquaintance, searching for Ryabovsky, and they all understood it.

She had once said of her husband to Ryabovsky:

"The man crushes me with his magnanimity!"

She liked the phrase so much that, whenever she met artists who knew about her affair with Ryabovsky, she would say of her husband, with an energetic gesture of the hand:

"The man crushes me with his magnanimity!"

The order of life was the same as the year before. There were soirées on Wednesdays. The actor recited, the artists painted, the cellist played, the singer sang, and at half-past eleven, unfailingly, the door to the dining room would open, and Dymov, smiling, would say:

"A bite to eat, gentlemen."

As before, Olga Ivanovna sought great people, found them and was unsatisfied, and sought again. As before, she returned home late every night, but Dymov would not be asleep, as last year, but sitting in his study and working on something. He would go to bed at around three and get up at eight.

One evening, as she was standing in front of the pier glass getting ready for the theater, Dymov came into the bedroom in a tailcoat and white tie. He was smiling meekly and, as before, looked joyfully straight into his wife's eyes. His face was beaming.

"I've just defended my thesis," he said, sitting down and patting his knees.

"Successfully?" asked Olga Ivanovna.

"Uh-huh!" he laughed and craned his neck so as to see his wife's face in the mirror, as she went on standing with her back to him, straightening her hair. "Uh-huh!" he repeated. "You know, it's very likely I'll be offered a post as assistant professor of general pathology. It's in the air."

It was clear from his blissfully beaming face that, if Olga Ivanovna could share his joy and triumph with him, he would forgive her anything, both present and future, and forget everything, but she did not understand what an assistant professor of general pathology was, and besides she was afraid to be late to the theater, and so she said nothing.

He sat for a couple of minutes, smiled guiltily, and left.

VII

This was a most troublesome day.

Dymov had a bad headache. He did not have tea in the morning, did not go to the hospital, and spent the whole time lying on the Turkish divan in his study. After twelve, as usual, Olga Ivanovna went to Ryabovsky to show him her study for a nature morte and ask him why he had not come the day before. The study was nothing to her, and she had painted it only so as to have a further pretext for calling on the artist.

She went in without ringing the bell, and as she was removing her galoshes in the front hall, she seemed to hear something run softly across the studio, a rustling as of a woman's dress, and when she hastened to peek into the studio, she saw just a bit of brown skirt flash for a moment and disappear behind a big painting which, together with its easel, was covered to the floor with black cloth. There was no possible doubt, it was a woman hiding. How often Olga Ivanovna herself had taken refuge behind that painting! Ryabovsky, obviously quite embarrassed, seemed surprised by her visit, gave her both hands, and said with a forced smile:

"A-a-ah! Very glad to see you. What's the good news?"

Olga Ivanovna's eyes filled with tears. She felt ashamed, bitter, and not for any amount would she have consented to speak in the presence of a strange woman, a rival, a liar, who was now standing behind the painting, probably tittering gleefully.

"I've brought you a study …" she said timidly, in a thin little voice, and her lips trembled, "a nature morte."

"A-a-ah … a study?"

The artist took the study and, as he examined it, went as if mechanically into the other room.

Olga Ivanovna obediently followed him.

"Nature morte… best sort," he muttered, choosing a rhyme, "resort… port… wart…"

Hurried footsteps were heard in the studio and the rustle of a dress. It meant she had gone. Olga Ivanovna wanted to shout loudly, hit the artist on the head with something heavy, and leave, but she could see nothing through her tears, was crushed by her shame, and felt herself no longer an Olga Ivanovna, nor an artist, but a little bug.

"I'm tired …" the artist said languidly, looking at the study and shaking his head to overcome his drowsiness. "It's sweet, of course, but it's a study today, and a study last year, and in a month another study … Aren't you bored? If I were you, I'd drop painting and take up something seriously, music or whatever. You're not an artist, you're a musician. Anyhow, I'm so tired! I'll have tea served … Eh?"

He left the room, and Olga Ivanovna heard him give some order to his servant. So as not to say good-bye, not to explain, and, above all, not to burst into tears, she quickly ran to the front hall before Ryabovsky came back, put on her galoshes, and went outside. There she breathed easily and felt herself free forever from Ryabovsky, and from painting, and from the heavy shame that had so oppressed her in the studio. It was all finished!

She went to her dressmaker, then to the actor Barnay,⁶ who had arrived the day before, from Barnay to a music shop, thinking all the while of how she was going to write Ryabovsky a cold, stern letter, filled with dignity, and how in the spring or summer she and Dymov would go to the Crimea, there definitively free themselves of the past, and start a new life.

She returned home late in the evening and, without changing her clothes, sat down in the drawing room to write the letter. Ryabovsky had told her that she was not an artist, and she, in revenge, would write to him that he painted the same thing every year and said the same thing every day, that he was stuck, and nothing would come from him except what had already come. She also wanted to write that he owed a lot to her good influence, and if he acted badly, it was only because her influence was paralyzed by various ambiguous persons, like the one who had been hiding behind the painting that day.

"Mama!" Dymov called from the study, without opening the door. "Mama!"

"What's the matter?"

"Mama, don't come in, just come to the door. The thing is … Two days ago I caught diphtheria in the hospital, and now … I'm not well. Send for Korostelev quickly."

Olga Ivanovna had always called her husband, as she did all the men she knew, not by his first but by his last name. She did not like his first name, Osip, because it reminded her of Gogol's Osip⁷ and of the tongue twister: "Osip's hoarse, his horse has pip." But now she cried out:

"Osip, it can't be!"

"Send quickly! I'm not well …" Dymov said behind the door, and she heard him go to the divan and lie down. "Send quickly!" came his muted voice.

"What does it mean?" thought Olga Ivanovna, turning cold with terror. "But this is dangerous!"

Quite unnecessarily she took a candle and went to her bedroom, and there, trying to think what she must do, she accidentally looked at herself in the pier glass. With a pale, frightened face, in a puff-sleeved jacket, yellow flounces on her breast, and an unusual pattern of stripes on her skirt, she appeared dreadful and vile to herself. She suddenly felt painfully sorry for Dymov, for his boundless love for her, for his young life, and even for this orphaned bed of his, in which he had not slept for a long time, and she remembered his usual meek, obedient smile. She wept bitterly and wrote an imploring letter to Korostelev. It was two o'clock in the morning.

VIII

As Olga Ivanovna, her head heavy after a sleepless night, her hair undone, looking guilty and unattractive, emerged from the bedroom at around eight in the morning, some black-bearded gentleman, apparently a doctor, passed her on his way to the front hall. There was a smell of medications. Korostelev stood by the door of the study, twisting his left mustache with his right hand.

"Sorry, I can't let you see him," he said glumly to Olga Ivanovna. "You might catch it. And in fact there's no need. He's delirious anyway."

"He has real diphtheria?" Olga Ivanovna asked in a whisper.

"Those who ask for trouble really should be taken to court," Korostelev muttered without answering Olga Ivanovna's question. "Do you know how he caught it? On Tuesday he sucked diphtherial membranes from a sick boy's throat with a tube. And what for? Stupid … Just like that, foolishly …"

"Is it dangerous? Very?" asked Olga Ivanovna.

"Yes, they say it's an acute form. In fact, we ought to send for Schreck."

A little red-headed man with a long nose and a Jewish accent came, then a tall one, stoop-shouldered, disheveled, looking like a protodeacon; then a young one, very fat, with a red face and in spectacles. They were doctors, come to attend their colleague's sickbed. Korostelev, having finished his turn, did not go home, but stayed and wandered like a shadow through all the rooms. The maid served tea to the attending doctors and kept running to the pharmacy, and there was no one to put the rooms in order. It was quiet and dismal.

Olga Ivanovna sat in her bedroom and thought that this was God punishing her for deceiving her husband. A silent, unprotesting, incomprehensible being, depersonalized by his own meekness, characterless, weak from excessive kindness, suffered mutely somewhere on his divan, and did not complain. And if he should complain, even in his delirium, the attending doctors would learn that it was not diphtheria alone that was to blame. They should ask Korostelev: he knew everything, and it was not without reason that he looked at his friend's wife with such eyes, as if she were the chief, the real villain, and diphtheria were only her accomplice. She no longer remembered the moonlit evening on the Volga, or the declarations of love, or the poetic life in the cottage, but remembered only that for an empty whim, an indulgence, she had become smeared all over, hands and feet, with something dirty, sticky, that could never be washed off…

"Ah, how terribly I lied!" she thought, remembering the turbulent love between her and Ryabovsky. "A curse on it all! …"

At four o'clock she had dinner with Korostelev. He ate nothing, only drank red wine and scowled. She also ate nothing. First she prayed mentally and vowed to God that if Dymov recovered, she would love him again and be a faithful wife. Then, oblivious for a moment, she gazed at Korostelev and thought: "Isn't it boring to be a simple, completely unremarkable and unknown man, with such a crumpled face and bad manners besides?" Then it seemed to her that God would kill her that very instant, because, for fear of catching the illness, she had not once gone near her husband's study. And generally there was a dull, dismal feeling and a certainty that life was already ruined and nothing could put it right …

After dinner it grew dark. When Olga Ivanovna went out to the drawing room, Korostelev was sleeping on a couch, with a gold-embroidered silk pillow under his head. "Khi-puah," he snored, "khi-puah."

And the doctors who came to attend the sick man and then left, did not notice this disorder. That there was a strange man sleeping in the drawing room and snoring, and the studies on the walls, and the whimsical furnishings, and that the hostess had her hair undone and was carelessly dressed—all that did not arouse the slightest interest now. One of the doctors accidentally laughed at something, and this laughter sounded somehow strange and timid, and even felt eerie.

The next time Olga Ivanovna came out to the drawing room, Korostelev was not asleep but sitting and smoking.

"He has diphtheria of the nasal cavity," he said in a low voice. "His heart is already not working very well. In fact, things are bad."

"Send for Schreck," said Olga Ivanovna.

"He's already been here. It was he who noticed that the diphtheria had passed into the nose. Eh, and what of Schreck! In fact, Schreck's nothing. He's Schreck, I'm Korostelev—nothing more."

The time dragged on terribly long. Olga Ivanovna lay on the bed, unmade since morning, and dozed. She imagined that the whole apartment, from floor to ceiling, was taken up by a huge piece of iron, and if only the iron could be taken away, everybody would be cheerful and light. Coming to herself, she remembered that this was not iron, but Dymov's illness.

"Nature morte, port …" she thought, sinking into oblivion again, "sport… resort… And how about Schreck? Schreck, wreck, vreck … creck. And where are my friends now? Do they know about our misfortune? Lord, save us … deliver us. Schreck, wreck …"

And again the iron … The time dragged on long, and the clock on the ground floor struck frequently. And the doorbell kept ringing all the time; doctors came … The maid came in with an empty cup on a tray and asked:

"Shall I make the bed, ma'am?"

And, receiving no answer, she left. The clock struck downstairs, she had been dreaming of rain on the Volga, and again someone came into the bedroom, a stranger, she thought. Olga Ivanovna jumped up and recognized Korostelev.

"What time is it?" she asked.

"Around three."

"Well, so?"

"So, I've come to tell you: he's going …"

He sobbed, sat down on the bed beside her, and wiped the tears with his sleeve. She did not understand at once, but turned all cold and slowly began to cross herself.

"He's going …" he repeated in a thin little voice and sobbed again. "He's dying, because he sacrificed himself… What a loss for science!" he said bitterly. "Compared to us all, he was a great, extraordinary man! So gifted! What hopes we all had in him!" Korostelev went on, wringing his hands. "Lord God, he'd have been a scientist such as you won't find anywhere now. Oska Dymov, Oska Dymov, what have you done! Ai, ai, my God!"

Korostelev covered his face with both hands in despair and shook his head.

"And what moral strength!" he went on, growing more and more angry with someone. "A kind, pure, loving soul—not a man, but crystal! He served science and died from science. And he worked like an ox, day and night, nobody spared him, and the young scientist, the future professor, had to look for patients, to do translations by night, in order to pay for these … mean rags!"

Korostelev looked hatefully at Olga Ivanovna, seized the sheet with both hands, and tore at it angrily, as if it were to blame.

"He didn't spare himself, and no one else spared him. Ah, there's nothing to say!"

"Yes, a rare person!" some bass voice said in the drawing room.

Olga Ivanovna recalled her whole life with him, from beginning to end, in all its details, and suddenly understood that he was indeed an extraordinary, rare man and, compared with those she knew, a great man. And, recalling the way her late father and all his fellow doctors had treated him, she understood that they had all seen a future celebrity in him. The walls, the ceiling, the lamp, and the rug on the floor winked at her mockingly, as if wishing to say: "You missed it! You missed it!" In tears, she rushed from the bedroom, slipped past some unknown man in the drawing room, and ran into her husband's study. He lay motionless on the Turkish divan, covered to the waist with a blanket. His face was terribly pinched, thin, and of a gray-yellow color such as living people never have; and only by his forehead, his black eyebrows, and the familiar smile could one tell that this was Dymov. Olga Ivanovna quickly touched his chest, forehead, and hands. His chest was still warm, but his forehead and hands were unpleasantly cold. And his half-open eyes looked not at Olga Ivanovna but down at the blanket.

"Dymov!" she called loudly. "Dymov!"

She wanted to explain to him that this was a mistake, that all was not lost yet, that life could still be beautiful and happy, that he was a rare, extraordinary, and great man, and that she would stand in awe of him all her life, worship him and feel a holy dread …

"Dymov!" she called to him, patting him on the shoulder and refusing to believe that he would never wake up. "Dymov, but, Dymov!"

And in the drawing room Korostelev was saying to the maid:

"What is there to ask? Go to the church caretaker and find out where the almshouse women live. They'll wash the body and prepare it—they'll do everything necessary."
JANUARY 1892