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Leonid Andreyev
SHORT-STORY MASTERPIECES
VOLUME IV—RUSSIAN
DONE INTO ENGLISH BY JOHN COURNOS
INTRODUCTIONS BY J. BERG ESENWEIN
Editor of Lippincott’s Magazine
The Home Correspondence School
Springfield, Massachusetts
1913
Copyright 1912 and 1913—J. B. Lippincott Company
Copyright 1913—The Home Correspondence School
CONTENTS
VOLUME IV
|
PAGE |
Dostoevski, Apostle to the Lowly |
5 |
Story: The Tree and the Wedding |
17 |
|
Korolenko the Exile |
33 |
Story: The Old Bell-Ringer |
45 |
|
Garshin the Melancholiac |
57 |
Story: Four Days |
71 |
|
Chekhov, Recorder of Lost Illusions |
95 |
Story: In Exile |
113 |
|
Andreev: Apostle of the Terrible |
131 |
Story: Silence |
145 |
|
Gorki the Bitter |
169 |
Story: Comrades |
183 |
[Pg 5]
DOSTOEVSKI, APOSTLE TO THE
LOWLY
It is really a hopeless task to view within small
compass so prolific and so intense a novelist
as Féodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski. Indeed,
I long questioned the fitness of including him in
this series of brief studies, for his little fictions
are few; but Russian literature knows no more
vigorous novelist than this inartistic though
colossal figure, and any compendious treatment
of Russian writers would seem inadequate which
did not include the author of “Crime and
Punishment.” Apart from a few little stories,
Dostoevski’s short fictional creations are
chiefly episodes in his long and mostly rambling
novels—powerful and compact little
digressions often almost unrelated to the main
thread of the story, but worthy of existence
separately as pieces of impressionism.
No finer tribute could be paid to a man than to
recognize him as the apostle of humble folk—unless
it were to add that this apostolate was
free from the taint of demagoguery and solely
the vocation of a tender spirit. Fifty years ago,
in the Russia of the sixties, Dostoevski came
to the full enduement of his ministry for man.[Pg 6]
What Jean François Millet saw in the French
peasant, that the great Russian novelist felt in
the muzhik—the pathos of those who suffer
under burdens, the heart-break of hopeless toil,
the unexpected beauty gleaming in the midst of
ugliness, honey hidden in the carcass of the lion.
No man ever lived a selfless life of service but
his reward followed him—though often enough
too late to cheer the rigors of his way. So too
Dostoevski came to his own at last, but not
till after a life of suffering, banishment, disease,
disappointment, poverty, and debt; and he died
just when his voice was heard most impressively,
leaving his master-novel unfinished, and its
author wept by forty thousand mourners who
followed his bier as delegates, so to call them, of
the uncounted millions whose cries he had voiced.
We are all agreed that the function of literature
is to portray life, but when we have said that, we
have not begun at the beginning. What motive
must be back of the portrayal? Or must there
be no motive at all save that of picturing life
faithfully? Here is where opinions divide, as well
as upon that other question: Is all life proper
subject-matter for literary portrayal?
Russian literature especially furnishes ground
for such questionings, and the work of Dostoevski[Pg 7]
in particular; but to me it illustrates
the view which seems to be the true one.
The literary portrayal of life must have a motive
beyond that of mere faithful delineation, for it
is inevitable that the artist must foresee this
truth: the effect which the contemplation of
certain aspects of life had upon him will be the
effect upon the reader after having read his transcription.
So the desire to reproduce an effect—impressionism,
they call it in art—is in itself a
powerful motive, changing according to the greatness
or littleness of the effect to be produced.
Thus we have the whole range of possible
motives for the portrayal of life in literature—entertainment,
teaching, arousement, propagandum,
what-not. This variation of motive
naturally leads us to the question: Who should
read? Certainly not every one should read everything;
hence many books not bad in themselves
become bad influences when placed in wrong
hands. It is worth while remembering this in
forming our judgments.
The second question—Is all life proper subject-matter
for literary portrayal?—lies close beside
the former. If we could assume that certain
literary delineations would be held as material
sacred to the pathologist of soul, of mind, of body,
of society, we could unhesitatingly say “Yes”[Pg 8]
to this question. But when we consider that the
inevitable destiny of great writing is its free distribution
in periodical or book form, we are certain
that not all books are for all readers.
In discussing the work of Gorki in this series
this question is touched upon. Here we face
it also—Dostoevski is too true, too terrible,
at times too revolting, for every one to read. Let
no one read him who dreads to look upon scenes
sad, terrible, funereal; who fears to enter hospitals,
prisons, charnel houses, and the place of
knout and execution. The message of this precursor
of Bourget was not one of lyric sweetness,
he never dwelt in ecstasy upon the beauties of
forest and stream—man, not nature, was his
theme. With a wildly passionate understanding—perhaps
a diseased and certainly an abnormal
understanding—he showed the furies of crime,
the viciousness of those whom society has thrust
out, the dull brutality of the under dog, the
aborted egoism of those who haunt every dark
way—but in all he found goodness, for his eye
was full of pity, always full of pity. To him crime
was a misfortune more than a mark of sheer evil.
A dangerous view? Yes—and a gentle one.
No man can persistently look upon his fellow
men without awakening his own real self. Now,
see how this doctrine of expression works itself[Pg 9]
out when we give due value to the personal equation.
Here is a man who was born October 30,
1821, in a charity hospital in Warsaw, as the
second of seven children. His father, a poor
army surgeon, was of excellent birth, though his
family lived in but two rooms. Féodor went to
boarding-school when thirteen, was graduated
with honors from the Military School of Engineering
in St. Petersburg, received a good appointment,
but soon resigned to give himself to
literature.
His first novel, “Poor People” (1846), won him
the name of the “new Gogol,” but in 1849 he was
unjustly arrested for inciting to insurrection,
condemned to be shot, and reprieved after standing
on the executioner’s platform for twenty
minutes in freezing weather while almost naked.
Four terrible years in a Siberian prison nearly
completed the ruin which a sickly constitution,
shattered nerves, and epileptic attacks had begun.
Brückner puts it thus dramatically: “...for
no single moment, or at most when he collapsed
under his load of bricks, did he feel himself
a man.” Yet, quite in the wonderful way that
life often takes, this very prison era made the
man and the novelist.
When at length he was released from prison,
he served three years in the Siberian army, and[Pg 10]
finally was permitted to return home—to a
period of struggle with his little magazine, its
silly suppression by the censor, the ruin of his
family, the death of his dear ones, the exhausting
fight to bear the load of debt, the flight from
the debtors’ prison into foreign countries, the
ill-rewarded toil which forever harassed him, in
short, to a cycle of suffering which might well
have worn out the strongest. No wonder that
he had the sensation of being flayed alive—that
every breath of air held pains in store for him.
Now suppose that such a maddening plenitude
of experience should clamor for expression, why
should not the unfortunate epileptic indite with
his pen the diseased, the abnormal, the despairing,
sensations which piled upon him with terrific
weight year after year? He saw all with sympathy,
why should not his soul-cries rouse the
world to pity for what he saw?
There is an immeasurable area lying between
that morbid mind which loves to depict the
purlieus of life and that brave heart which reaches
down deep into the filthy and the sickening for
the sake of dragging somewhat of value up to the
light. Dostoevski conceived that Russia could
never energize her arm for saving service without
a wide knowledge of what existed in every place
of nameless horror. As a great natural pathologist,[Pg 11]
he understood the vagaries of the diseased
and the defective; in Siberia he perforce mingled
with the lowest criminals—the results he embodied
in a score of novels, four or five of them
great novels, for those to read who dare look in
the face the life of the shadowy alleys, for those
to avoid who prefer the light and airy high-paths.
What is more, no pleasant bucolic pipe can
rouse like a bugle-blast. Those who play the
notes of beauty will exalt or pacify the soul, but
those who would rouse the whole being must
choose sturdy instruments and various. To shift
the similitude, Russia needed no soothing unguents,
her festering sores called for the heroic
knife—first exact diagnosis, then the knife. And
Dostoevski showed always the truth—the
sordid, noisome, revolting, pitiful truth—and,
as this serene prophet saw that she would, Russia
herself is more and more bravely using the knife.
Yet beauty and sweetness and upper air are in
his stories, too, especially if one sees beneath the
surface.
Russia’s greatest novelists are really three:
Turgenev, the cosmopolitan, was an æsthete, an
artist, a polished littérateur; Tolstoi, the mystic,
was a brooding reformer, too self-centered to
realize his humanitarian ideals, but a majestic[Pg 12]
figure in literature as in life; Dostoevski, the
profoundly religious psychologist, was an unbalanced,
fiery apostle, winging among the highest,
stalking amidst the lowest, seeing visions not
given to common men.
Dostoevski’s novels are great not by reason
of their art, but from their artlessness, which is to
say their explosive sincerity, like the incoherent
violence of one who feels things too powerful for
orderly utterance. In this they reflect his life
only in that they reproduce what the seismograph
of his spirit recorded. Outwardly, he was quiet,
detached, even morose, his epileptic seizures
doubtless sending him into the companionship
of his own life; but his soul shook with the volcanic
terrors which he perforce beheld, from his
cradle in the charity hospital, through the turbulent
years of Siberia, Russia, and the continent,
down to the day of his too early taking-off at the
age of fifty-nine.
Not all of his novels are worth general reading,
even were they all available in English. He was
too much preoccupied with his struggle with
debt, his physical sufferings, his inner life, his
passion of pity, his profound analyses of the
characters about him, his tender religious faith,
to allow him to study the graces of expression.
In consequence, diffuseness and lack of compact,[Pg 13]
progressive plot—for he had no dramatic skill—characterize
his work, and when he does rise to
heights of beautiful utterance, which is not
seldom, it is the outbursting of sheer feeling, the
power of his theme, not the premeditated caperings
of the self-conscious stylist. The man and
his vehement message are far bigger than his
technique.
Seven of his works must here be dismissed in
as many paragraphs as they deserve chapters.
“Poor Folk,” strongly influenced by Gogol’s
“The Cloak,” was written when Dostoevski
was twenty-five. Though told in the handicapping
form of letters, it made an immediate
impression. Simplicity, human understanding,
and compression—and the last was not one of
his usual virtues—mark this spiritual history of
two lives. It is an effective book, though not a
great.
The years of Siberian torment yielded fruit in
that remarkable example of criminal psychology,
“Memories of a House of the Dead,” 1861-62.
Not Dickens, and certainly not Oscar Wilde,
approached this dispassionate record of a tremendously
passionate and passion-inspiring
theme, the inside of a terrible prison, which stirred
Europe just when Hugo was issuing “Les Miserables.”
“His calm account of their unblushing[Pg 14]
knavery is entirely free from either vindictive
malice or superior contempt. He loved them
because they were buried alive, he loved them
because of their wretchedness, with a love as far
removed from condescension as it was from secret
admiration of their bold wickedness.” These
words of Professor Phelps are singularly
illuminating.
“Crime and Punishment,” the best known to
English readers of the author’s works, is by many
considered his masterpiece. Notwithstanding
many waste places of digression, this book is a
lofty peak. No one could picture in a few words
the tremendous story of that other Eugene Aram—Raskolnikov—the
philosophical student of
crime, his double murder, his confession to the
courtesan Sonia, her great-hearted reception of
the news, her counsel that he confess his crime,
their life in Siberia, and the gradual regeneration
of both souls through the ministry of service.
Then, there are “The Gambler,” in which
Dostoevski’s own passion for the green table
is evidently recorded; and “The Idiot,” a prince
whose unworldly sweetness is notable, even under
the stress of epilepsy, and whose influence over
the lives of all about him is a genuine creation;
and “Possessed by Demons,” a portrayal of
Nihilism, largely written as a fling at Turgenev,[Pg 15]
whom Dostoevski never loved; and finally that
gigantic conception, “The Karamazov Brothers,”
which he did not live to complete—a terrible yet
sublime work that promised to be as soul-shaking
as interminable.
The business of grown-up life is too serious to
allow much space in Russian literature for that
most really serious subject, child-life. Dostoevski
is an exception. Though he has very
few strong and beautiful women characters, his
tender heart felt for every child, as witness the
penetrating anecdotal sketch which here follows.
Note its characteristic humor, tinged with satire;
see the pity of it—a pity of situation, not of overwrought
description; feel the essential right-mindedness
of it, written at a period when the
modern view of girlhood’s right to her own self
was yet unpreached. This one powerful plea—without
a word of homily, as it is—forms big
enough foundation for the building of this man’s
name for great-heartedness and ranks him in this
respect with Charles Dickens, whom he loved.
[Pg 16]
[Pg 17]
THE TREE AND THE WEDDING
By Féodor Dostoevski
A few days ago I saw a wedding....
But no! I had better tell you about a
Christmas tree. The wedding was fine in its way,
and it pleased me immensely; but the other
episode was more interesting. It is difficult to
say why, at the sight of the wedding, I recalled
the tree. This is how it happened.
Exactly five years ago, on New Year’s Eve, I
had been invited to a children’s party. The
personage who invited me was a well-known man
of affairs, with many connections, a wide acquaintance,
involved in intrigue; so it was quite
natural to suppose that this children’s party
served as a mere pretext for the parents to crowd
together and to discuss other interesting matters
in what seemed like an innocent, accidental, and
unpremeditated manner.
I was an outsider; I had little to talk about,
and I therefore passed the evening quite independently.
There was another gentleman present,
who was apparently of no particular importance,
and who, like myself, had stumbled
upon this domestic happiness. He, above all[Pg 18]
others, attracted my attention. He was a tall,
spare figure, quite serious in aspect and very neat
in dress. But it was evident that he was beyond
joyousness and domestic happiness. Once he
betook himself to a corner, he immediately ceased
to smile, but frowned with his dense, black brows.
Except for the host, he was unacquainted with a
single soul at the party. It was apparent that
he was terribly bored, and that he sustained
bravely until the end the rôle of a totally diverted
and happy individual. I learned later that this
gentleman was from the provinces, and had a
very important head-splitting affair to settle in
the capital; that he had a letter of recommendation
to our host, who was not at all disposed to
treat its bearer con amore, and had invited him
to the children’s party merely out of politeness.
He was not asked to join in a game of cards, nor
to help himself to a cigar; and no one thought to
enter into conversation with him. It was possible
that the species of bird was recognized from a
distance by its feathers. At any rate, our gentleman,
at a loss what to do with his hands, found
it necessary to stroke his side-whiskers. The
side-whiskers were indeed very good ones, but
he stroked them with such assiduity that to look
at him it was quite natural to presume that the
side-whiskers came into the world first, and that[Pg 19]
the gentleman was attached to them afterwards
that he might stroke them.
Aside from this figure, participating after the
manner described in the domestic happiness of
the host—who had five well-fed boy youngsters—there
was another gentleman who diverted me.
He, however, was of a totally different character.
In fact, a real personage. They called him Julian
Mastakovich. The very first glance could have
told you that he was a respected guest, and that
his relation to the host was similar to the host’s
relation to the man who stroked his side-whiskers.
The host and the hostess showered compliments
upon him, waited upon him, flattered him, conducted
their guests into his presence for introduction,
while him they did not conduct to any
one else. I observed how a tear glistened in the
host’s eyes when Julian Mastakovich said that
seldom had he spent so pleasant an evening.
I experienced a disagreeable feeling before this
person, and so after admiring the children I went
into the small drawing-room, which was almost
empty, and sat down in a kind of flowery arbor
belonging to the hostess, and occupying almost
half of the room.
The children were incredibly charming, and
seemed determined not to resemble their elders,
notwithstanding all the efforts of their mothers[Pg 20]
and governesses. In a twinkling they bared the
tree to its last bonbon, and had managed to break
half of the playthings before they knew for whom
they were designated. Especially fine to look at
was a dark-eyed, curly-haired lad, who aimed at
me continuously with his wooden gun. But,
above all, my attention was attracted by his
sister, a girl of eleven years, as lovely as Cupid,
quiet, pensive, pale, with large, musing eyes,
slightly projecting out of their circles. The other
children had somehow offended her; for that
reason, she came into the very room where I sat,
and, betaking herself into a corner, was soon
occupied with her doll. The guests looked with
great deference in the direction of her father, a
wealthy proprietor, and some one mentioned in
a half-whisper that a dowry of three hundred
thousand rubles had already been laid aside for
her.
I turned around to glance at those interested
in this circumstance, and my gaze fell upon Julian
Mastakovich, who, having thrust his hands behind
him and inclined his head a trifle to the side,
was listening with a marked intentness to the
chatter of these folk.
Afterward I could not help but feel astonished
at the sageness of the hosts in distributing the
children’s gifts. The little girl who already had[Pg 21]
a dowry of three hundred thousand rubles received
the most expensive doll. Then followed
the other gifts, growing lower in value in proportion
to the lower standing of the parents of these
happy children. The last youngster, a boy of
ten years, meagre, diminutive, freckled, and red-haired,
received only a small volume of tales
dealing with the bountifulness of nature, the joy
of tears, and the like; the book contained no
pictures, not even a decoration. He was the son
of a poor widow, the governess of the host’s
children, and had a haunted, suppressed look.
He was dressed in a wretched cotton jacket.
Having received his book, he hovered for a long
time around the toys. He had the most intense
longing to play with the other children, but dared
not. It was evident that he already felt and understood
his position.
It is a favorite occupation of mine to observe
children. It is highly interesting to mark in them
certain early and free inclinations of their natures.
I noted how the red-haired boy was tempted by
the expensive playthings of the other children—and
especially by a toy theatre, in which he
showed a most eager desire to play some rôle—to
such a degree that he adopted an ingratiating
manner to attain his end. He smiled and joined
the other children in their play, gave up his apple[Pg 22]
to one puffed-up youngster who already had a
whole handkerchiefful of gifts tied to his body, and
even offered to carry another boy on his back, if
only they would not drive him away from the
theatre. Soon, however, a bully in the party gave
him a sound drubbing. The boy did not dare to
cry out. Presently the governess, his mother,
appeared, and ordered him not to interfere with
the other children’s play. The boy came into the
room where the little girl was. She permitted
him to join her, and the two of them were at once
absorbed very earnestly in the rich doll.
I had been sitting in the ivy bower a half-hour
and had almost dozed off, while listening to the
small chatter of the red-haired boy and the beauty
with three hundred thousand rubles’ dowry,
solicitous over the doll, when suddenly Julian
Mastakovich walked into the room. He took
advantage of a particularly disgraceful quarrel
among the children to steal out of the reception-room.
I had noticed that only a few moments
before he was discussing very fervently with the
father of the future rich bride, whose acquaintance
he had only just made, the preëminence of one
kind of service over another. At this instant he
stood as if lost in thought, and seemed to be making
a calculation of some sort upon his fingers.
“Three hundred ... three hundred,” he[Pg 23]
whispered. “Eleven ... twelve ...
thirteen ... sixteen ... five years!
Say, at four per cent—five times twelve equal
sixty; at compound interest ... well, let
us suppose in five years it ought to reach four
hundred. Yes, that’s it.... But the rascal
surely has it salted away at more than four per
cent. Eight or ten is more likely. Well, let’s
say five hundred—five hundred thousand at the
very least; not counting a few extra for
rags ... h’m ...”
Having ended his calculation, he sneezed
vigorously and moved to leave the room, when
suddenly, his eye alighting upon the little girl,
he stopped. He did not see me behind the vases
of flowers. He seemed to me to be violently
agitated. Either his calculation had upset him,
or something else; but he did not know what to
do with his hands, and was unable to remain on
one spot. His agitation increased— ne plus ultra—when
he stopped and threw another determined
glance at the future bride. He was about to move
forward, but first looked around. Then he approached
the child on his tiptoes, as if conscious
of guilt. Smiling, he bent over her and kissed
her head; while she, not expecting this onslaught,
cried out from fright.
“What are you doing here, sweet child?” he[Pg 24]
asked in a whisper, glancing around him, and
pinching the little girl’s cheek.
“We are playing....”
“Ah! With him?” Julian Mastakovich looked
askew at the boy. “Go into the next room, like
a nice little boy,” he said to him.
The boy was silent and gazed at him with
perturbed eyes. Julian Mastakovich looked
around once more and bent over the little
girl.
“And what have you, sweet child, a doll?” he
asked.
“Yes, a doll,” answered the little girl, frowning,
and quailing visibly.
“A doll.... And do you know, sweet
child, what the doll is made of?”
“I don’t know,” answered the little girl in a
whisper, lowering her head.
“Of rags, my darling.... And you, my
boy, you had better go into the other room to
your fellows,” said Julian Mastakovich, as he
looked severely at the youngster. The girl and
the boy frowned and caught hold of each other.
They did not wish to part.
“And do you know why they gave you this
doll?” asked Julian Mastakovich, lowering his
voice more and more.
“I don’t know.”
[Pg 25]
“Because you have been a lovely and well-behaved
child the entire week.”
At this juncture, Julian Mastakovich, agitated
to the utmost, looked round and, lowering his
tone to a whisper, asked finally in an almost inaudible
voice, dying away more and more from
agitation and impatience:
“And will you love me, sweet girlie, when I
shall come as a guest to your papa and mamma?”
Having said this, Julian Mastakovich made one
more effort to kiss the lovely child; but the red-haired
boy, quick to see that she was at the point
of tears, seized her hands and, out of deep sympathy
for her, began to whimper. Julian Mastakovich
became quite angry.
“Begone, begone from here, begone!” he said
to the boy. “Begone into the other room! Begone
to your own fellows!”
“No, don’t go! Don’t go! You had better
go,” said the young girl, “but leave him alone,
leave him alone!” She was almost in tears.
Presently there was a commotion just within
the door. Julian Mastakovich immediately rose
to his feet, somewhat frightened. The red-haired
boy was even more frightened. He left his companion
and stole out silently, with his hands
brushing the wall, into the dining-room. To hide
his confusion, Julian Mastakovich followed him.[Pg 26]
He was as red as a lobster, and when he looked in
the glass he seemed appalled as his own image.
Perhaps he was annoyed at his rage and impatience.
Perhaps the calculation he made earlier
on his fingers had so affected him, tempting and
inflaming him, that, notwithstanding his position
and dignity, he was impelled to act like a young
boy to attain his object, despite the fact that the
object in any case could be attained only five
years hence. I followed the esteemed gentleman
into the dining-room and witnessed a strange
scene. Julian Mastakovich, his face all red from
irritation and malice, was pursuing the red-haired
boy, who, retreating farther and farther from
him, did not know what to do with himself in his
fright.
“Begone with you! What are you doing here?
Begone, you good-for-nothing! Begone! Stealing
fruit, are you? Stealing fruit? Begone, good-for-nothing!
Begone, unclean one! Begone,
begone to the likes of yourself!”
The frightened boy, driven to desperate measures,
tried to get under the table. Then his
pursuer, enraged to the last degree, drew out his
long batiste handkerchief and lashed it out at
the cowering boy.
It is necessary to mention that Julian Mastakovich
was a trifle fat. He was a satiated, red-cheeked,[Pg 27]
stoutish person, large at the waist and
with fat legs; he was as round as a nut. He began
to perspire, to pant, and to grow fearfully red.
His fury knew no bounds, so great was his feeling
of malice and—who knows?—perhaps jealousy.
I laughed out loud. Julian Mastakovich turned
around, and in spite of his importance was covered
with most abject confusion. At this instant
the host entered by the opposite door. The boy
climbed out from under the table and wiped his
knees and elbows. Julian Mastakovich made
haste to put his handkerchief, which he held by
one corner, to his nose.
The host, not without perplexity, surveyed the
three of us; but, like a man who understood life
and looked at it with a serious eye, availed himself
of the opportunity to speak to his guest
alone.
“This is the youngster,” said he, pointing at
the red-haired boy, “whom I had the pleasure of
mentioning to you....”
“Ah?” answered Julian Mastakovich, not
yet fully recovered from his discomfiture.
“He is the son of the governess of my children,”
continued the host in an appealing voice. “She
is a poor woman, a widow, the wife of an honest
official; and it is for this reason that ...
Julian Mastakovich, is it possible to....”
[Pg 28]
“Oh, no, no!” Julian Mastakovich made haste
to exclaim. “No, Philip Alekseievich; I am
sorry, but it is utterly impossible. There is no
vacancy, and even if there were, there would be
ten candidates for the place, each having a greater
right to it than he.... It is a great pity, a
great pity....”
“Yes, a pity,” repeated the host. “He is such
a modest, quiet lad....”
“And quite a scamp, I should say,” added
Julian Mastakovich, his mouth hysterically
athwart. “Begone, boy! Why are you standing
there? Go to your equals!”
At this point he could not restrain himself any
longer, and looked at me with one eye. I too
could not resist, and laughed straight in his face.
Julian Mastakovich turned away immediately,
and with sufficient distinctness for me to hear
asked the host the identity of “that strange young
man.” They exchanged whispers and left the
room. I observed afterward how Julian Mastakovich,
listening to the host, shook his head
incredulously.
Having laughed to my heart’s content, I returned
to the reception-room. There the great
man, surrounded by the fathers and the mothers
of families, the host and the hostess, was speaking
with great warmth to a lady to whom he had just[Pg 29]
been introduced. The lady held by her hand the
little girl with whom only ten minutes before he
had made the scene. Now he was lavish in his
praises and raptures over the beauty, talents,
manners, and breeding of the lovely child. He
was plainly playing the wheedler before the
mother. She listened to him, almost with tears
of joy in her eyes. The father’s lips smiled. The
prevailing spirit of good-will rejoiced the heart
of the host. Even all the guests lent a sympathetic
hand, and made the children stop their
games in order not to interfere with the conversation.
The entire atmosphere was saturated with
devotion. I heard later how the mother of the
interesting little girl, touched to the very depths
of her heart, begged Julian Mastakovich, in most
effusive language, to do her the great honor of
conferring on the house more often his precious
presence; I heard with what undisguised joy
Julian Mastakovich accepted the invitation, and
how the guests, dispersing afterward in various
directions as propriety demanded, exchanged
with one another complimentary salutations
regarding the host, the hostess, the little girl, and
in particular Julian Mastakovich.
“Is this gentleman married?” I asked almost
aloud of an acquaintance who stood nearest to
Julian Mastakovich.
[Pg 30]
Julian Mastakovich threw at me a searching
and malicious glance.
“No!” answered my acquaintance, mortified
deeply at the awkwardness which I committed
purposely....
Not long ago I was passing the—— Church,
and I was astonished at the tremendous crowd
that had gathered there. Every one talked about
a wedding. It was a bleak day in late autumn.
I made my way through the crowd and caught a
glimpse of the bridegroom. He was a round,
satiated, pot-bellied little person, very much
adorned. He ran hither and thither, fussed, and
gave orders. At last a murmur went through the
crowd, announcing the arrival of the bride. I
squeezed through the crowd and saw an astoundingly
beautiful girl, who had hardly experienced
the first bloom of spring. But the beautiful girl
was pale and sad. She looked bewildered; and
it seemed to me that her eyes were red from newly-shed
tears. The classic rigidity of her features
imparted to her beauty a kind of dignity and
strength. But through all this rigidity and
dignity, through all this sadness, there penetrated
the first aspect of childhood’s innocence; it suggested
something naïve, fragile, and juvenile to
the last degree; and though the look bespoke[Pg 31]
resignation, it also seemed to utter a silent prayer
for mercy.
It was said in the crowd that she had just
passed her sixteenth birthday. An intent scrutiny
of the bridegroom suddenly revealed him to me
as Julian Mastakovich, whom I had not seen for
exactly five years. I looked at her.... My
God! I quickly made haste to leave the church.
In the crowd they were telling each other how
rich the bride was, that she had a dowry of five
hundred thousand rubles ... and so much
besides in rags....
“At any rate, his calculation was a good one!”
I reflected, as I jostled my way into the street.
[Pg 32]
[Pg 33]
KOROLENKO THE EXILE
No intelligent outlander, I suppose, but marvels
at the patience with which the Russian
people endure the exile system that has so long
brewed hell-broth for the nation to drink. When
some violent offense is answered by such punishment,
we do not demur, but when trivialities are
magnified, and the police stupidly blunder, our
blood boils with protest.
So many times has Vladimir Korolenko been
banished, that exile must seem to him almost a
normal condition, and freedom from police surveillance
a happy freak of fortune. And yet,
more than any other distinguished Russian writer,
he is free from pessimism—his writings are filled
with passages of lyric sweetness.
Sixty years ago—in July, 1853—Vladimir was
born at Jitomir, in the government of Volynia.
His father, of Cossack blood, was a district judge
in the cities of Dubno and Rovno, having previously
served as district attorney, and also as a
minor judge. He was an honest man, since he
forbore to enrich himself with bribes, but made
his modest salary suffice. This course—eccentric
in those days—left his wife in straitened circumstances
when he died. Vladimir was about fifteen[Pg 34]
at the time, and still in the Gymnasium at Rovno,
but his mother, the daughter of a Polish landed
proprietor, was enabled to keep him in school
and also maintain her other children, three boys
and two girls.
The future author entered the Institute of
Technology at St. Petersburg in due course, and
for two years fought off the extremes of nakedness
and hunger by coloring maps in the intervals of
study, for he had come to the great capital with
only seventeen rubles in his purse. The third
year found him in Moscow, in the Petrovsk (St.
Peter’s) Agricultural Academy, and here, in the
third year of his new course (1875), he got his
first taste of exile. His unforgivable crime was to
participate in a joint address of the students to
the Faculty! For this he was banished to the
government of Vologda, but the sentence was not
completely carried out, for some one relented and
before he reached the place he was bidden to
return to his home at Kronstadt. Here for one
year he was kept under police surveillance.
At the end of the year he was allowed to remove
with his family to St. Petersburg, where he worked
in peace as a proof-reader, until February, 1879.
But he was soon to learn that Government never
forgets, for twice during that month was his home
officially searched, and at length he, together with[Pg 35]
his brother, his brother-in-law, and his cousin,
was banished to Glazof, in the government of
Vyatka, and presently still further north, to
Vyshne Volotsk, where he was confined in a
political prison—and all without a trial, the reading
of charges, or any semblance of human justice.
The whole term of his exile was spent without a
single gleam of light to make clear his offense.
But after his release in 1880, he learned that his
exile was due to his having attempted to break
prison—an offense which was alleged against
him before he had ever been in prison!
The circumstances of his release were fortunate.
Prince Imeritinsky had been deputized to investigate
the condition of the political prisons
and to report on the causes of incarceration.
Among other prisons, he visited that at Vyshne
Volotsk, and Korolenko was already on the way
to Yakutsk, Siberia, when the message came
ordering his release—probably as a result of the
investigation.
Even then entire freedom was not granted him,
for he was “allowed” to settle at Perm; and here
he began his active work as a writer, though he
had written successfully as early as 1879.
In 1881 Alexander III became Emperor of
Russia, and all his subjects were required to take
oath of allegiance. But Korolenko refused, because[Pg 36]
in addition the government officers demanded
that he betray his friends by giving details
of any revolutionary enterprises in which he
knew them to be engaged. Rather than become
a party to such villainy, the young man chose
further exile, and for the succeeding three years
lived miserably in Yakutsk, in East Siberia. At
length he returned to the ancient Tartar city of
Nijni Novgorod, on the Volga, where he now
lives with his family.
All this period of maddening oppression was
aggravated by the fact that his mother needed
his help. When in 1879 Korolenko began to contribute
literary sketches to such Russian periodicals
as Russian Thought, The Northern Messenger,
and Annals of the Fatherland, the meagre honorariums
were indeed a blessing to his loved ones.
The thing that “goes without saying” often
needs to be said just the same. That a writer is
likely to reproduce his life-experiences in his
writings is one of these truisms, yet it will always
remain an interesting occupation to trace connection
between life and literary product in the work
of an author of individuality.
Korolenko came from “Little Russia,” and
began to find his subjects in the towns and villages
of the west country in which he was born,[Pg 37]
but naturally he turned at length to depicting
the life of the extreme Siberian east.
That Korolenko has been formed in opinion
and moulded to iron fortitude of heart by his
severe experiences in exile is shown by his remarkable
story, “The Wondrous Maid,” in which
the Nihilist is depicted as a simple gendarme,
whose manhood transfigures his Nihilism and his
work as an officer. Again, our author proved his
independence in a letter to the St. Petersburg
Academy, in which, as did Chekhov before him,
he courteously declined membership because the
Academy had struck the name of Gorki from its
list of members.
It was in 1885, while in exile in Yakutsk, that
he wrote his famous “Makár’s Dream.” It is
an odd fantasy, this story of the Yakut who,
having gotten half frozen in the wood, dreams
that he is dragged before the tribunal of the great
Lord Toyon—a nondescript judge who is neither
of heaven nor of earth. Before a great scale,
whose one end is a small golden platter and whose
other a huge wooden bowl, the peasant is summoned
to explain the acts of his life. At length,
when his cheatings and stealings are found to
have outweighed all of the deeds of service and
faithfulness in his life, he suddenly breaks into
an unwonted eloquence of protest. He is unwilling[Pg 38]
to bear the penalty of being turned into a
beast of burden by becoming the horse of a church
official, not because the horse is badly treated,
for it is well fed—better fed, indeed, than he, the
peasant, has ever been—but he protests because
the penalty is unjust. This appeal to justice
seems to move the great Toyon, and he ends by
saying to the dejected Makár, “Have patience,
poor soul, thou art no longer on earth: here will
be found justice, even for thee!” And as he
speaks the scales begin to tremble, and the wooden
bowl, filled with his evil deeds, rises higher and
higher, as though weighed down by his good acts.
Surely, the great meed of injustice suffered by
The Exile himself gave inspiration for the message
of mercy at the end of this fantastic tale.
What may be called Korolenko’s Siberian era
is further illustrated in his sketches of a Siberian
tourist, nine of which cover about one hundred
pages of ordinary size. All the sketches are
remarkable for local color and fine understanding
of character. The one unfortunate tendency is
toward unfinished situation, for the sense of coming
to an adequate close is inseparable from good
story-telling. It is but fair to observe, however,
that this trait of incompleteness is characteristic
of the sketch as a fictional form.
Throughout this series I have frequently[Pg 39]
asserted the obvious fact that Russian themes
have largely reflected the Russian temperament,
as is shown by the realistically direct and often
terrible pictures which fill the pages of their
literature. Altogether apart from our interest
in the literate expressions of a great and alien
people, we must feel a sort of gruesome fascination
as we are thrilled to the point of horror in
reading these simple yet titanic records of gloom.
All this raises the question of what is the difference
between fascination and charm—for
charm, from the Anglo-American viewpoint, is
almost an unknown element in Russian literature.
Fascination they all possess; but charm is fascination
plus delight. In Korolenko we do have a
writer of charm; and, besides, a charm that is
not the reflex of literatures other than his own—it
evidently springs from the sweetness of a spirit
which all of the bitterness of banishment could
not defile. Here is a high and final test of native
fineness.
As compared with the stories of Garshin, with
their “terrible, incoherent cries of woe,” Korolenko’s
tales are idyllic. A rhythmical, lyrical
measure beats enchantingly in his nature passages,
whose intimacy with the life of the woods
inevitably recalls the French Theuriet. “The
Forest Whispers,” one of his longer short-stories,[Pg 40]
is simply redolent of tree-fragrance. We feel the
wandering airs of the glades; we hear the never-ceasing
swish of majestic boughs; we stand rapt
in the cathedral silences of the green-shadowy
aisles. The peasant tale is the thread on which
these pearls are strung, but the pearls hide the
string.
Listen to this passage. What Loti has evoked
from the inscrutable sea, Korolenko has charmed
from the forest with his enchanter’s wand.
In the forest there was always a murmur, regular,
continuous, like the faint echo of a distant peal of bells;
soft and indistinct, like a song without words, or like
the confused recollection of bygone days. The murmur
never ceased by day or night, for it was an old dense
forest of pines that had never been touched by woodman’s
saw or axe. Lofty pines, a hundred years old,
with their red, sturdy trunks, stood in close array,
waving, in response to each breath of wind, their high-tufted
tops. Below, all was quiet; the air was filled
with an odor of tar; through the thick layer of pine-cones,
with which the ground was strewn, pushed gay
ferns, in all the luxury of their rich fringes, and standing
motionless, their leaves unstirred by the breeze.
In damp nooks green grasses rose up on their high
stalks; and the white clover bent its heavy head, overcome,
as it were, with dreamy lassitude. And above
flowed the murmur of the forest, the mingling sighs of
the old pine-wood.
[Pg 41]
Besides “The Forest Whispers,” two stories
belong especially to Korolenko’s Little-Russian
group—“Iom-Kipour” (the Jewish Day of Expiation)
and “The Blind Musician.” The former
relates how a Little-Russian miller, good Christian
though he is, narrowly escapes being carried
away by the Devil, in the place of the Jewish
tavern-keeper Iankiel, because, like him, he has
tried to make money out of the poor peasants—the
same tendency to penetrate to the inner life
which we discover in other of Korolenko’s work,
for he rose above the realistic school, with its
pathological records.
“The Blind Musician” is a remarkable psychological
story—about forty thousand words in
length—in which all the sensations of the blind
are portrayed with sympathy and intelligence.
The author has not attempted to build up a
meretricious interest by surrounding his blind
characters with the usual accompaniments to be
found in fiction—poverty and physical distress.
Disallowing all such devices, he wonderfully
pictures the life of a child born blind in the home
of a wealthy family, his advance to boyhood, his
love-life, and finally his manhood’s experiences
as a brilliant musician, “who attempts to reproduce
the sensations of sight by means of sounds.”
The following passage is typical:
[Pg 42]
The boy imaged to himself depth in the form of the
soft murmur of the stream as it flowed at the foot of
the precipice, or of the frightened splash of pebbles
thrown from its top. Distance sounded in his ears like
the confused notes of a dying song. At times, in the
sultry noonday, when over the whole of nature there
reigns a quiet so profound that we can only divine the
uninterrupted noiseless course of life, the face of the
blind boy would light up with a strange expression. It
seemed as if, under the influence of the silence that
prevailed around, there rose from the depth of his soul
sounds audible only to himself, to which he was listening
with rapt attention. It was easy to believe that
at such moments a vague but productive train of
thought was awakening in his soul, like to the imperfectly
caught melody of an unknown song.
Two prose poems, of harmonious diction and
fine human feeling, I have space only to mention—“Easter
Night,” and “The Old Bell-Ringer,”
which Korolenko calls “A Spring Idyl.” The
latter is reproduced herewith in a new translation
for this series, and from it the tone of the former
may well be inferred.
Though not a great novelist—if he can be
classed as a novelist at all—Korolenko is the
exponent of normality. He is more like Turgenev
than is any other living writer, though comparison
with the Greatest must not be taken to imply[Pg 43]
equality. The anarchistic, anti-Christian Artsybashev,
whose big-fisted novel, “Sanin,” forms an
iconoclastic type of its own, cannot approach
Korolenko in lucid attractiveness. Tolstoi,
Korolenko followed, but at a distance, for he was
of the romantic school and little inclined to
Tolstoi’s ultra-idealism, particularly that of the
last period.
One more refreshing characteristic of our author
I venture to name—human sympathy. True, he
does not always temper his pity for the “unfortunates”
with the sound judgment of the
moralist. Whether they suffer deservedly or not,
he does not deeply inquire—it is enough for him
that they suffer.
Well, I love him for that very trait of all-embracing
sympathy. When a man lets his heart
go unleashed by the eternal judgment as to
whether the victim has sinned and may be suffering
a righteous punishment, he rises to utmost
humanity—which is to say, the divine spirit of
the Great Master whose heart was Pity.
[Pg 44]
[Pg 45]
THE OLD BELL-RINGER
By Vladimir Korolenko
It had grown dark.
The tiny village, resting on the ledge of a
remote stream, in a pine forest, had become enveloped
in that twilight which is peculiar to
starry spring nights, when the thin mist, rising
from the earth, deepens the shadows of the woods
and fills the open spaces with a silvery blue vapor....
How still was everything, and pensive
and sad!
The village was quietly dreaming.
The dark outlines of the wretched huts were
but vaguely visible; here and there lights were
aglimmer; now and then you could hear a gate
creak; a dog’s bark would start suddenly and
die away; occasionally out of the dark woods
the figure of a pedestrian would emerge, or that
of a horseman; or a cart would pass by with a
jolting noise. These were the inhabitants of lone
forest settlements, gathering to their church to
greet the great spring holiday.
The church stood on a little hill, in the very
middle of the village. Its windows were all alight.
Its belfry—an old, tall, and dark structure—pierced
the blue sky.
[Pg 46]
The steps of the staircase creaked as the old bell-ringer
ascended the belfry, and soon his little lantern
looked like a star suddenly sprung into space.
It was hard for the old man to mount the steep
staircase. His old legs had already served their
time, and his eyesight had grown dim....
It was time an old man had rest, but God seemed
slow in sending deliverance. The old bell-ringer
had buried sons and grandsons; he had escorted
both young and old to their final resting-place;
but he himself was still alive. It was hard!...
So many times had he greeted Easter
that he had lost count—he could not even remember
how many times he had awaited here
his last hour. And now once more God had willed
that he should be here.
Having reached the top, he leaned his elbow
on the railing.
Below, around the church, he could discern the
wretchedly kept graves of the village burial-place;
as if to protect, old crosses stood over them with
outstretched arms. Here and there a young
birch-tree inclined over them its branches, as yet
leafless.... The aromatic odor of young
buds ascended from below towards Mikheyich,
and with it came a feeling of the sad tranquillity
of eternal sleep.
[Pg 47]
And what would he be doing a year hence?
Would he once more climb this height, under this
bronze bell, to arouse with a resounding peal the
lightly-slumbering night, or would he be resting ...
down there, in some dark corner
of the graveyard, under a cross? God knows!...
He was ready, but in the meantime the
Lord called him once more to greet the
holiday.
“All glory be to God!” whispered his lips,
accustomed to the old formula. Mikheyich
raised his eyes towards the sky, dense with millions
of stars, and crossed himself.
“Mikheyich, Mikheyich!” a trembling voice,
also that of an old man, suddenly called him from
below. The aged sexton looked up towards the
belfry, even fixed his palm over his blinking, tear-wet
eyes, and still could not see Mikheyich.
“What do you want? I am here,” answered
the bell-ringer, leaning out from the belfry.
“Can’t you see me?”
“No, I can’t see. Isn’t it time to strike?
What do you think?”
Both of them glanced at the stars. Thousands
of God’s lights twinkled on high. The fiery
“Wagoner” was already far above the horizon.
Mikheyich pondered.
[Pg 48]
“No, not yet; wait just a little longer....
I know when to ...”
He knew. He had no need of a timepiece.
God’s stars always told him when the time came.
The earth and the sky, the white cloud floating
silently across the expanse of blue, the indistinct
murmur of dark pines below, and the rippling of
the stream concealed by the dark—all were
familiar to him, near to him.... Not in
vain had he spent his life here.
For the moment his entire long past unrolled
before him.... He recalled how he ascended
the belfry with his father for the first
time.... Good Lord! how long ago it was!—and
what a short time it seemed!... He
saw himself once more a fair-haired lad; his eyes
were kindled; the wind—not the sort that raises
the dust of the street, but rather a more rare
wind, flapping, as it were, its noiseless wings high
above the earth—played with his hair....
There below, so far, so far away, he saw some
sort of little people; and the houses of the village
also seemed small, and the forest receded into
the distance, and the round-shaped meadow,
upon which stood the village, seemed immense,
almost boundless.
[Pg 49]
“Well, here it is, all here!” smiled the old man,
glancing at the small spot of earth.
“So life, too, is like that,” he reflected. “When
one is young, one sees neither its end nor its edge.” ...
And yet here it was, as if in the palm of
one’s hand, from the very beginning to the very
grave he had just been contemplating in the
corner of the burial-ground.... What of
that? Glory be to the Lord!—It was time for
rest. It was a hard road, and he had traversed
it an honest man; and the damp earth was his
mother.... Soon—if only soon!...
Well, the time had come. Mikheyich glanced
once more at the stars, removed his cap, crossed
himself, and began to gather up the ropes of the
bells.... A few more moments, and the
nocturnal air trembled from the resounding
stroke.... Another, a third, a fourth ...
one after the other, filling the lightly-slumbering
pre-festal night with an outpouring of powerful,
lingering, resonant, singing tones.
The bell grew silent. The service in church
had begun. It was the habit of Mikheyich in
former years to go down and to stop in a corner
near the door in order to pray and listen to the
chanting. This time, however, he remained in[Pg 50]
the tower. It was difficult for him; aside from
that, he felt intensely fatigued. He sat down on a
little bench, and as he listened to the dying tones
of the agitated bronze he grew deeply pensive.
What were his thoughts? He himself could
hardly have answered the question....
The bell-tower was but dimly lighted by his
lantern. The still vibrating bells were lost in the
darkness; faint murmurs of the chant reached
him occasionally from below, and the nocturnal
wind stirred the ropes fastened to the iron hearts
of the bells.
The old fellow let fall his gray head upon his
breast. His mind was in a state of delirious
fancy. “Now they are singing a hymn,” he
thought, and he imagined himself among the
others in church. He heard an outpouring of
children’s voices in a choir; he saw the figure
of the long-since-departed priest Nahum exhorting
the congregation to prayer; he saw hundreds
of peasants’ heads, like ripe corn before the wind,
bend low and stand erect again.... The
peasants were crossing themselves....
Familiar faces, all of them, and all faces of the
dead. Here was the stern face of his father; here,
beside his father, his older brother, crossing himself
and sighing. And he himself stood here, in
the bloom of health and strength and full of the[Pg 51]
unconscious yearning for happiness and the joy
of life.... Where, oh, where, was this
happiness?... The old man’s mind flared
up for a moment, like a dying flame, flashing with
a bright, quick movement and illuminating for
the moment all the passages of his past life....
Hard work, sorrow, care.... Oh,
where was this happiness? A hard fate can bring
furrows to a young face, give a stoop to a strong
back, and cause one to sigh like an older man.
There, on the left, among the women of the
village, humbly inclining her head, stood his
sweetheart. A good woman, hers be the Kingdom
of God! How much had she not suffered,
that fine soul!... Constant need and labor
and the inevitable womanly sorrow will cause a
handsome woman to wither; her eyes will lose
their sparkle; and the expression of perpetual,
dull-like fright before each unawaited blow of life
will change the most superbly beautiful creature....
Yes, and where was her happiness?...
One son remained to them, their one
hope and joy, and he fell a victim to human
weakness.
And he too was here, his rich enemy, bending
low time and again, seeking to pray away the
bitter tears of orphans he had wronged; repeatedly
he was performing upon himself the[Pg 52]
sign of the cross, falling on his knees and touching
the ground with his forehead.... And
Mikheyich’s heart boiled over within him, while
the dark faces of the ikons looked down severely
from their walls upon human sorrow and human
iniquity.
All that was past, all that behind him....
Now the entire world seemed to him like a dark
bell-tower, where the wind blew in the dusk,
stirring the bell-ropes.... “Let the Lord
judge you!” whispered the old man, shaking his
gray head, while tears silently ran down his
cheeks.
“Mikheyich! Mikheyich!... You haven’t
fallen asleep?” someone shouted up to him from
below.
“Eh?” returned the old man, and quickly
jumped to his feet. “Lord! Have I in truth
fallen asleep? That never happened before!”
With an accustomed hand, Mikheyich quickly
caught the ropes. Below him moved the peasant
throng, a veritable ant-hill; the holy banners
aglimmer with gold brocade fluttered in the
wind.... The procession made a circuit
of the church, and presently Mikheyich heard
the joyous cry, “Christ has risen from the dead!”
Coming like a mighty wave, the cry whelmed[Pg 53]
the old man’s heart.... And it seemed to
Mikheyich that brighter flared the lights of the
waxen candles, and that stronger grew the agitation
of the people; the holy banners seemed to
become more alive; and the suddenly awakened
wind caught up the waves of sound and with
broad sweeps lifted them high, where they became
one with the loud triumphant music of the
bell.
Never before had old Mikheyich rung so well!
It was as if the old man’s brimming-over heart
had passed into the inanimate bronze; and it
seemed as if the reverberations at the same time
sang and throbbed, laughed and wept, and,
uniting in a rare harmony, rose higher and higher
unto the starry sky. The stars themselves seemed
to him to take on a new sparkle, to burst into
flame, while the sounds trembled and flowed,
and again came down to earth with a loving
embrace.
A powerful bass loudly proclaimed: “Christ
has risen!”
While two tenor voices, constantly atremble
from the repeated blows of the iron hearts,
mingled with the bass joyously and resonantly:
“Christ has risen!”
And, again, two most slender soprano voices,[Pg 54]
seemingly in haste not to be left behind, stole in
among the more powerful ones, little children, as it
were, and sang in emulation: “Christ has risen!”
The entire belfry seemed to tremble and to
shake; and the wind blowing in the face of the
bell-ringer appeared to flap its mighty wings and
to repeat: “Christ has risen!”
The old heart forgot about life, full of cares
and wrongs. The old bell-ringer forgot that life
for him had become a thing shut up in a melancholy
and crowded tower; he forgot that he was
alone in the world—like an old stump, weather-beaten
and broken.... He intercepted
these singing and weeping sounds, fleeting higher
towards the skies and falling again to the poor
earth, and it seemed to him that he was surrounded
by his sons and his grandsons; that these
joyous voices, of old and young, had flowed together
into one great chorus, and that they sang
to him of happiness and joyousness, which he
had not tasted in his life.... And the old
man continued to tug at the ropes, while tears
ran down his face, and his heart beat tremulously
with the illusion of happiness.
And below the people were listening and saying
to each other that never had old Mikheyich rung
so marvellously.
[Pg 55]
Then all of a sudden the large bell trembled
violently and grew silent.... The smaller
ones, as if confused, rang an unfinished tone;
and then too stopped, as if to drink in the prolonged,
sadly droning note, which trembled and
flowed and wept, gradually dying away in the
air....
The old bell-ringer fell back exhausted on the
bench, and his last two tears trickled silently
down his pale face.
“Quick! Send a substitute! The old bell-ringer
has rung his last stroke.”
[Pg 56]
[Pg 57]
GARSHIN THE MELANCHOLIAC
“There is still something around us and
within that baffles and surprises us.
Events happen which are as mysterious after our
glib explanations as they were before. Changes
for good or ill take place in the heart of man for
which his intellect gives no reason.”
These words of Dr. Henry Van Dyke, written
among others to preface his latest collected short
fictions, apply right well to our attempts at
literary criticism. Mathematics differ from life
in this: after a proposition in number or in form-theory
is demonstrated the last word has been
said; the height of finality is reached; for any
one to argue the point might amaze, though it
would not interest us. But with life, who can
name a fixed and infallible answer to its problems?
Here is ever the unknown quantity, irreducible
to precise terms, and varying in all sorts of
perplexing ratios.
Is it not exactly because literature is the literate
expression of life that we approach its subtler
problems with the same sense of futility as the
issues of life arouse in us? Yet the eternal challenge
to discover the why, born, as it is, with our
own babyhood, dies not with our manhood’s[Pg 58]
strength, but still calls us to try our “literary
discernment” once more, and yet once more, to
see if we may not by some magic of penetration
find the true causes which move back among
the shadows.
So, with some degree of assurance we lay our
fingers upon the causes in a given literary career
which seem to us to be calculable—parentage,
birth, early environment, education, chosen
occupation, and all the rest. Yet a considerable
proportion of the results must remain unaccountable,
because the actuating forces are, after all,
imponderable. We find motives and standards
of conduct, or ideals, clearly expressed in the
man’s own words; but did he understand himself?
Here we find one acknowledged fact, here
a second, and here a third. But by what law of
causation may we say that three-times-one is
three and not six, or sixty, or even six myriads?
No, in seeking to estimate the weight of the
inner things we are calculating the incalculable;
it is like trying to clothe in cumbersome workaday
garb a being that is too subtle for material
restrictions.
Especially, then, in seeking to enter the penetralia
of a man of Garshin’s varying moods and
tenses, let us confess anew to ourselves how tentative
must be our guesses at truth. His mind—like[Pg 59]
that of not a few other literary artists—fluttered
between normality and abnormality.
However, only the literal, prosaic, practical,
uninventive mind is sane, and that is but a shorter
way of spelling uninteresting. There is still a
strong argument to be made for the essential
seer-quality—perhaps the “second sight,” perhaps
the inner light—of many a one whom the
sober world has adjudged as of unsound mind.
But this again brings us up facing another great
and tantalizing x of life.
Wsewolod Michailovich Garshin was born in
February, 1855, of good family. His south-of-Russia
parentage marked his physique. He was
good-looking, almost dark, fiery of eye, and in
temperament sweet, impressionable, and sympathetic—a
combination rare enough in a man to
make it noteworthy.
Like Pushkin, he spent his very early life on
the family estates, his father having retired from
the army when the boy was three years old. At
nine, however, the child was placed at school in
the inevitable St. Petersburg, with the object of
his preparing for the study of medicine. But the
parental ambitions were not realized, for the lad
was so abnormally nervous that he became subject
to vagaries and hallucinations, so that while[Pg 60]
yet but seventeen years of age, and already writing
remarkable bits of realistic self-revelation, it
was found best to place him under restraint.
The effects of this clouded period are to be traced
in much of his later work.
Happily, in about a year he recovered his
balance, took up study anew, and finished his
preparatory course with credit, entering the
Institute of Mining Engineers in 1874, at the age
of nineteen—for in everything Garshin was
precocious.
From this point on, Garshin’s career may
plainly be read in his writings. He wrote only
about twenty-five stories in all, and practically
without exception they are autobiographical.
The two great dominant motifs grew out of his
two great life-experiences: war—but war from
a special viewpoint—and what I may call the
border consciousness, experiences of the mind
when its poise is either uncertain or completely
upset.
I have said that Garshin viewed war in an
unusual way. This is true not alone of his fiction
but of his life. In 1876 the Russo-Turkish war
broke out, and Garshin considered it his sacred
duty to go. The horrors of war had always
deeply affected his sensitive nature. The intoxicating
blare, the thrill of glory, the call of the[Pg 61]
spectacle, all meant nothing to him, except
revulsion. But duty was a word of serious meaning,
and it won from him a serious response. This
pupil of Tolstoi could detest and denounce an
institution to whose claims he felt bound to bow
in time of national need.
It is always interesting to observe how two
artists, especially contemporary artists, interpret
the same theme. Guy de Maupassant, incomparably
the greater literator, but destined to the
same sad end as met Garshin, has worked out a
motive in “A Coward” similar to the Russian
author’s “Coward,” though the stories themselves
could not be more dissimilar.
Maupassant simply unclothes a human soul
face to face with the idea of suicide. Relentlessly
he strips shred after shred of illusion from the introspective
thinker who is meditating upon his own
cowardice. But when the end does come the reader
is half in doubt as to how to judge the wretch.
Garshin’s impressionistic sketch is tremendously
cumulative. In soliloquy the Person of the
story weighs the war, its appeals, its repulsions,
the motives that lead men to go, the awful casualties,
and finally tells how that he is considered
a coward for his inaction.
Am I a coward or not?
To-day I was told that I am a coward. Certainly it[Pg 62]
was a very shallow-minded person who said so when I
declared in her presence my unwillingness to go to the
war, and expressed a fear that they will call me up to
serve. Her opinion did not distress me, but raised the
question, Am I really a coward? Perhaps all my aversion
against what every one else considers a great matter
arises only from fear of my skin! Is it really worth
while to worry about any one unimportant life in view
of a great matter? And am I capable of subjecting my
life to danger generally for the sake of any matter?
At length—just as it was with Garshin, who
joined a regiment at Kishinev-of-terrible-memory—the
“coward” goes to war, and after a story-within-a-story
is told, his act of heroism closes
the picture.
Ever since I was old enough to attempt just
thinking, I have always had much sympathy for
a coward—I suppose because I have been afraid
so often myself at moments when heroes are said
to feel no trepidation. And do we not all feel
keenly with Garshin?—for a man of his temperament,
and one finding nothing admirable in war,
it must have required genuine courage to go, even
while he was repelled and afraid. But this was
only one more phase of a contradictory character—as
all characters are in whom the inner life and
the outer do not coördinate.
[Pg 63]
In “The Signal,” we have a perfectly-wrought
short-story with as dramatic a surprise as ever
capped a climax.
While serving in the army, as servant to an
officer, the health of Simon Ivanoff had broken
down, and all that was left to him was a minor
post as linesman on the railway. One day, while
walking the tracks, he met for the first time his
neighboring linesman, whom he found to be quite
repellent in his manner. The simple-minded
Simon, however, eventually pressed an acquaintance
upon both the linesman, Vassili Stepanich
Spiridoff, and his young wife, and found that
Vassili had been much embittered by reflecting
upon the inequalities of life, and especially those
of his own hard position.
One day, the traffic inspector came along and
forced Vassili to tear up his little garden, merely
because he had planted it without permission;
and, besides, he reported him for his technical
irregularity. Shortly after this, the district chief
arrived and showed animosity, evidently founded
upon the report against Vassili, and when the
man protested, the chief struck him brutally.
The next day Simon met Vassili, stick and
bundle over his shoulder, and his cheek bound up
in a handkerchief.
[Pg 64]
“Where are you off to, Neighbor?” cried Simon.
Vassili came close, but was quite pale, white as chalk,
and his eyes had a wild look.
Almost choking, he muttered, “To the town—to
Moscow—to the Head Office.”
“Head Office? Ah, you are going, I suppose, to
complain. Give it up, Vassili Stepanich. Forget it.”
“No, Mate, I will not forget. It is too late. See!
He struck me in the face—drew blood. So long as I
live, I will not forget.”
Simon vainly attempted to dissuade him, and
the man at length passed on.
On the day following, Simon left his wife at
home to meet the six o’clock train, and, taking
his knife, started off to the forest to get some reeds
out of which to make flutes, which he used to sell
for two copecks apiece. As he walked along, he
fancied that he heard the clang of iron striking
iron. Since there were no repairs going on, he
wondered, but as he came out on the fringe of
the wood he saw a man squatting on the roadbed,
busily engaged in loosening a rail.
A mist came before Simon’s eyes; he wanted to cry
out, but he could not. It was Vassili!... Simon
scrambled up the bank as Vassili, with crowbar and
wrench, slid headlong down the other side.
“Vassili Stepanich! For the love ... Old
friend! Come back! Give me the crowbar. We will[Pg 65]
put the rail back; no one will know. Come back!
Save your soul from this sin!”
Vassili did not look back, but disappeared into the
wood.
Simon stood before the rail which had been torn up.
He threw down his bundle of sticks. A train was due;
not a goods train, but a passenger train. And he had
nothing with which to stop it, no flag. He could not
replace the rail, and could not drive in the spikes with
his bare hands. It was necessary to run to the hut for
some tools. “God help me,” he murmured.
He ran toward his hut, faltering every now and then
in his eagerness, but he soon realized that he would be
too late. What should he do! In desperation, he
turned back to the spot where the rail threatened disaster
to the on-coming train. As he reached it, he
heard the even tremor of the rails.
Then an idea came into his head, literally like a ray
of light. Pulling off his cap, he took out of it a cotton
scarf, drew his knife out of the upper part of his boot,
and crossed himself, muttering, “God bless me!”
He buried the knife into his left arm above the elbow;
the blood spurted out, flowing in a hot stream. In this
he soaked his scarf, smoothed it out, tied it to the stick,
and hung out his red flag.
He stood waving his flag. The train was already in
sight. The driver will not see him—will come close up,
and a heavy train cannot be pulled up in a hundred
sajenes.
And the blood kept on flowing. Simon kept pressing
the sides of the wound together, wanting to close it,[Pg 66]
but the blood did not diminish. Evidently he had cut
his arm very deeply. His head commenced to swim,
black spots began to dance before his eyes, and then
it became dark. There was a ringing in his ears. He
could not see the train or hear the noise. Only one
thought possessed him: “I shall not be able to keep
standing up. I shall fall and drop the flag; the train
will pass over me.... Help me, O Lord!...”
All became quite black before him, his mind became
a blank, and he dropped the flag; but the blood-stained
banner did not fall to the ground. A hand seized it
and held it high to meet the approaching train. The
engine-driver saw it, shut the regulator, and reversed
steam. The train came to a standstill.
People jumped out of the carriages and collected in
a crowd. Looking, they saw a man lying senseless on
the footway, drenched in blood, and another man standing
beside him with a blood-stained rag on a stick.
Vassili looked around at all; then, lowering his head,
said, “Bind me; I have pulled up a rail!”
In “Four Days,” which follows in an original
translation for this series, we have another autobiographical
story of singular penetration. It
must be remembered that Garshin’s convictions
of duty led him to unusual length—he enlisted
as a private, when his family connections would
have warranted something better. So he writes
from close to the people—in this respect differing
from Tolstoi, with whose memorable Sevastopol[Pg 67]
sketches Garshin’s “Four Days” has been seriously
compared by critics. It was at the engagement
of Aislar that Garshin received his incapacitating
bullet-wound, after real gallantry in action,
and Aislar is the battle of the story.
After recovering from his wound, our author
became desperately absorbed in trying to save
one of his friends from execution for having
attempted the life of Loris Melikov, but Garshin
failed, and soon afterward it again became necessary
to confine him in an asylum.
From this seizure he recovered, and married a
young lady who devoted her life to a beautiful
service—that of healing his mind and preventing
a recurrence of his malady; but, sadly enough,
without success. He never shook off the boding
pall of the madhouse. One needs only to read
his “Red Flower” to feel the haunting presence
of that pathetic colony of abnormal minds and
spirits coming to sit with him in hours when he
sought happiness in forgetfulness. Half-memories
of days of half-self-possession are indeed shapes
that haunt the dusk! To quote Waliszewski’s
vivid summary: “The story describes a demented
person, half-conscious of his condition, who
wears himself out in superhuman efforts to gain
possession of a red-poppy—reddened, as he
imagines, by the blood of all the martyrdoms of[Pg 68]
the human race. If the flower were only destroyed,
he thinks, humanity would be saved.”
In 1887, in physical and mental suffering too
combinedly torturing to be borne, Garshin eluded
the watchers by his bedside and flung himself
down a stone staircase, sustaining injuries from
which he never recovered. The consciousness
of his act caused him to brood still more painfully
over his state, and he died in a hospital the next
year, 1888, at the age of only thirty-three.
If one may venture to be analytical, there are
three kinds of stories: those told of life as it
exists apart from the narrator; those dealing
with events intimately associated with the narrator;
and those that are purely evoked from the
inner life of the story-teller himself.
These last-named—spun of gossamer thread,
intangible as the dawn, airy, floating, subtle—are
the highest type. To this height Garshin did
not perfectly attain. His stories were rather of
the second sort, drawn from his own experiences.
That they were touched with mysterious moods
and vague, unnamable potencies must have been
due to the author’s pitiful journeys into that
shadowy, distraught land which we so confidently
call the Insane.
Garshin’s realism grew out of his need for writing[Pg 69]
his own experiences. Though some of his
descriptions of the dead Turk, in the following
sketch, “Four Days,” are so revoltingly real as
to justify the excisions made in the magazine
version, I have retained them here, for Garshin’s
realism, as a rule, lacks disgusting detail. But it
is as faithful to fact as a canvas by Verestchagin,
whose paintings, indeed, might be said to exhibit
the same method which Garshin applied to
literature.
Garshin is a pessimist—of course, one is almost
forced to add. His heroes are not idealized, even
in the hour of their victory. But there is nobility—that
priceless tone in literature!—in much of
his work, and the body takes its true place in
life, as an expression of spirit, and not as the
master of the house.
All in all, Garshin was a great writer, doing
pitifully wonderful things under such stress as
makes us love him for his brave, losing fight
against black foes within and without.
[Pg 70]
By Wsewolod Garshin
I remember how we ran through the wood,
how the bullets whizzed past us, how the
twigs that were hit by them snapped and fell,
how we scrambled through the bushes. The
firing grew heavier. Looking through to the outer
edge, I could see little flashes of red here and
there. Sidorov, a young private of Company I—“How
did he come to fall into our line?” was
the thought that flashed through my head—suddenly
sat down on the ground and silently
looked at me with open, terrified eyes. A stream
of blood trickled from his mouth. Yes, that too
I remember well. I also remember how when
almost on the edge of the wood I first saw ...
him in the thick bushes. He was an enormous,
corpulent Turk, but I ran straight at him, although
I am weak and small. Something burst,
something huge seemed to fly past me; there
was a ringing in my ears. “He has shot me,”
was my thought. But he, with a cry of terror,
pressed his back against the dense foliage. He
could have gone around it without difficulty,[Pg 72]
but in his fright he lost his presence of mind completely,
and he tried to crawl through the prickly
bushes.
With a blow, I knocked the gun out of his hand;
I followed this by a thrust with my bayonet.
There was an outcry: a roar that died into a
moan. I ran on farther. Our soldiers cried,
“Hurrah!” fell low, and discharged their guns.
I remember that I too fired several times after
we had left the wood and were in the field. Suddenly
the cry of “Hurrah!” grew louder, and we
all in a body moved forward. That is, not we,
but my comrades; I remained behind. That
seemed strange to me. Still stranger was the
fact that suddenly everything vanished; all the
cries and firing died away. I could hear nothing,
but saw only something blue, which I concluded
was the sky. Afterwards, that too passed out of
my senses.
Never before have I found myself in such a
strange situation. I am lying, it seems, on my
stomach, and I see before me only a small clod
of earth. A few blades of grass, an ant climbing
down one of these head downwards, bits of
litter from last year’s grass—that is my whole
world. And I can see with only one eye, because
the other is obstructed by some hard[Pg 73]
substance, perhaps a twig upon which my head
rests. I feel terribly uncomfortable, and I wish
to stir; it is incomprehensible to me why I
cannot. So the time passes. I hear the noise
of the grasshoppers and the humming of bees.
Nothing more. At last I make an effort, and,
extracting my right arm from under me, I press
both my hands against the earth and try to rise
to my knees.
Something sharp and rapid like lightning shoots
across my entire body from the knees to my chest
and head, and I collapse to the ground. Again
darkness, again nothingness.
I am awake once more. Why do I see stars,
which shine so brightly in the dark-blue Bulgarian
sky? Am I in my tent? Why have I
crawled out of it? I make a movement, and feel
an agonizing pain in my legs.
Yes, I have been wounded in battle. Dangerously
or not? I catch hold of my legs, there where
the pain is. And both the right and the left legs
are covered with clotted blood. When I touch
them with my hands, the pain becomes even more
intense. It is like a protracted toothache, gnawing
at the very soul. There is a ringing in the
ears, an oppressiveness in the head. I vaguely
understand that I have been wounded in both[Pg 74]
legs. But it is all incomprehensible. Why have
I not been picked up? Have the Turks really
beaten us? I try to recall what has happened to
me; at the beginning things seem a bit confused,
but they gradually become clearer, and I come
to the conclusion that we have not been beaten.
And simply because I fell on the little field on top
of the slope. In any case, how it all happened is
difficult for me to remember; but I do recall
how they all rushed forward, and that I alone
could not run; and that only something blue
remained before my eyes. Somewhat earlier our
captain pointed towards this hillock. “Boys,
we will get there!” he cried in his sonorous voice.
And we got there; it is clear we have not been
beaten.... Why, then, was I not picked
up? This is such an open spot, and everything is
visible. There must be others lying here. The
shots came so thick. I must turn my head to
look. It is easier to do this now, because when
I first came to consciousness and I saw the grass,
and the ant crawling head downwards, I tried to
rise, and I fell back, not into my former position,
but turned over on my spine. That explains why
I see the stars.
I try to rise to a sitting position. This is very
difficult, when both legs are wounded. After
several attempts I begin to despair; at last,[Pg 75]
however, with tears in my eyes, forced out by the
pain, I manage it.
Overhead I see a spot of dark-blue sky, in
which are visible a large star and a number of small
ones; and around me something dark and tall—the
bushes. I am in the bushes—that is why
I have not been found!
I feel a stirring at the roots of my hair.
How, then, did I get into the bushes, if I were
shot in the open field? It is likely that I crawled
here when I was wounded and the pain obliterated
the memory of it. It is singular, however, that
I should not be able to move now, and that I had
been able to drag myself then towards these
bushes. It is possible that I got my second wound
while lying here, which may explain the matter.
I now see pale-rose stains around me. The
large star has lost its brilliancy; some of the
small ones have disappeared. It is because the
moon has begun to rise. How good it must be at
home!...
I hear strange sounds somewhere.... As
if some one were moaning. Yes, it is a moan.
Is it another unfortunate lying near me, forgotten
like myself, with broken legs—or with a bullet
in his stomach? No, the moans sound so near,
and yet it seems there is no one here....
Oh, God, but it is—myself! Low, piteous moans;[Pg 76]
am I actually in such agony? I must be. Only,
I don’t understand this pain; because there is a
fog in my head that weighs me down like lead.
It is better that I should lie down again and go
to sleep—and sleep and sleep.... Shall
I ever wake again? It does not really matter.
At the instant that I am gathering strength to
lie down, a broad, pale strip of moonlight strikes
the spot where I am sitting, revealing something
dark and large lying only a few feet away. Here
and there upon it little gleams are visible in the
moonlight. Is it buttons or bullets? Is it a
corpse, or is it some one wounded?
Well, I will lie down....
No, it is impossible. Our soldiers have not
departed. They are here, they have beaten the
Turks and have remained here. Why do I not
hear voices and the crackle of bonfires? I must
be too weak to hear. They are surely here.
“Help! Help!”
Wild, incoherent, and hoarse cries burst from
my bosom, and they receive no answer. Loudly
they scatter in the nocturnal air. Everything
else is silent. Only the crickets chirrup on ceaselessly
as before. The round moon looks compassionately
down on me.
If he were only wounded, my cries surely would
have roused him. It is a corpse. Is it one of us[Pg 77]
or a Turk? Oh, God! as if it really mattered....
And I feel sleep descending upon my
inflamed eyes.
I am lying with closed eyes, though I have
been awake for some time. I do not wish to open
my eyes, because I feel through the shut eyelids
the blaze of the sun; if I open them, they will
begin to smart. Perhaps I had better not even
stir.... It was yesterday—yes, it must
have been yesterday—that I was wounded; a
day has now passed, and other days will pass,
and I shall die. It does not matter. It is better
not to stir. I will keep my body motionless. If
I could only stop the working of the brain! Nothing
will stop that. Thoughts, memories, crowd
upon me. In any case, it will not be for long; the
end must come soon. The newspapers will publish
just a few lines to say that our losses have
been insignificant: so many have been wounded;
among those killed is Ivanov, a private in the
volunteers’ ranks. No, even my name will not
be mentioned; they will simply say, “One killed.”
One soldier in the ranks—like some little dog.
The entire picture now comes to mind. It
happened long ago; in fact, everything, all my
life, that life, before I lay here with wounded legs,
seems to have been such a long time ago....[Pg 78]
I remember strolling along the street. Seeing a
crowd of people, I stopped. The crowd stood
and silently looked upon something white, bloody,
piteously whining. It was a handsome little dog
which had been run over by a tram-car. It was
dying, as I am now. A house-porter made his
way through the crowd, picked the dog up by
the collar, and carried it away. The crowd
dispersed.
Will some one carry me away? No, you lie
here and die. But how good it is to live!...
Upon that particular day—when the little dog
met misfortune—I was happy. I was walking
along in a kind of intoxication; and there was
good cause. Oh, my memories, don’t torture me,
leave me! My past was happiness; my present
is agony.... If only my sufferings alone
remained, and my memories ceased to torture me—for
they compel comparisons. Ah, longings,
longings! You are wounded worse.
It is becoming hot. The sun is scorching me.
I open my eyes, see the same bushes, the same
sky—only, in the light of day. And here, too, is
my neighbor. Yes, it is the Turk—his body.
What a huge fellow! I recognize him—it is the
very same one.
Before my eyes lies a man I have killed. Why
have I killed him?
[Pg 79]
He lies here dead, blood-stained. What fate
brought him here? Who is he? Perhaps, like
myself, he has an old mother. Long will she sit
evenings at the door of her wretched hut, looking
ever towards the north: is he coming home, he,
her beloved son, her protector and provider?...
And I? Yes, I also.... I would even
change places with him. How happy he is! He
hears nothing; neither does he feel pain from
wounds, nor terrible longing, nor thirst....
The bayonet entered his very heart....
There is a large black hole in his uniform, and
blood all around it. That is my work.
I did not wish to do it. I did not wish to harm
any one when I volunteered. The thought that
I too should have to kill somehow escaped me.
I only imagined how I would expose my own
breast to bullets. And I did expose it.
Well, and what has it come to? Fool, fool!
This unfortunate fellah, in Egyptian uniform, he
is even less to blame than you are. Before he
and others were packed, like herrings in a barrel,
into a steamer and brought to Constantinople, he
had not even heard of Russia or of Bulgaria. He
was commanded to go, and he went. Had he
refused to go, he would have been beaten with
sticks, and perhaps some Pasha or other would[Pg 80]
have fired a bullet into him. It was a long, difficult
march for him from Stamboul to Rustchuk.
We attacked, he defended himself. Seeing, however,
that we were a fearless people, and that,
unafraid of his English carbine, we rushed forward
and still moved forward, he was seized with terror.
Just as he was trying to get away, some sort of
little man, whom he could have killed with one
blow of his dark fist, ran forward and plunged a
bayonet into his heart.
Of what had he been guilty?
And of what am I guilty, even though I have
killed him? Of what am I guilty? Why am I
tortured by thirst? Thirst! Who knows the
meaning of this word? Even during the days
when we marched through Roumania, fifty versts
at a stretch, through unbearable heat, I did not
feel what I feel now. If only some one came along
this way!
Oh, God! But there must be water in that
big flask of his! Only to reach it! Come what
may, I will get it.
I begin to crawl. I drag my legs slowly; my
exhausted arms barely stir the passive body from
its place. The spot is hardly more than fifteen
feet away, but it seems like ten versts. Nevertheless,
I must crawl on. My throat is aflame
with a terrible fire. To be sure, without water, I[Pg 81]
could die the more quickly. All the same, perhaps....
And so I crawl. My legs drag on the ground,
and every movement calls forth most excruciating
pain. I cry out again and again, with tears
in my eyes, and still I crawl on. At last! The
flask is in my hand.... There’s water in
it—and quite a deal! It seems more than half
full. Ah, it will last me some time ... until
I die!
It is you, my victim, who will save me! I
begin to undo the flask, propping myself up on
one elbow; and suddenly, losing my balance, I
fall downward across the breast of my deliverer.
Decay having set in, a strong stench comes from
his body.
I have slaked my thirst. The water is warm,
but not spoilt; and there is a great deal of it. I
can live a few more days. I remember having
read somewhere that one could exist without food
for over a week, provided one had water. Yes,
and I recall also the story of the man who committed
suicide by starvation, but who lived a
long time because he drank water.
Well, and what’s to be the end of it? And if I
do live five or six days longer, what of that? Our
troops have gone, the Bulgarians have dispersed.
I am far from a road. Death—there is no way[Pg 82]
out of it. I have but prolonged my three-day
agony with a seven-day one. Perhaps I had better
end it all. At my neighbor’s side lies his gun,
an excellent English mechanism. I have only to
stretch out my hand; then—one little moment,
and an end. There is quite a lot of cartridges
here, too. He hadn’t had time to dispose of
them all.
Shall I end it all—or wait? Wait for what?
Deliverance? Death? Or shall I wait until the
Turks come here and tear the skin from my
wounded legs? Far better that I should put an
end to it myself.
No; there is no need to lose courage. I will
struggle to the end, to my last resource. There
is still hope of being found. It is possible my
bones are not affected; and I may return to
health. I shall again see my native land, my
mother, and Masha....
Oh, Lord, save them from knowing the whole
truth! Let them think I was killed outright.
What if they should learn that I had suffered slow
torture for two, three, or four days!
My head is in a whirl. My journey to my
neighbor has completely exhausted me. What a
terrible stench! He has grown black ...
and what will he be like to-morrow or the day
after? And now I am lying here only because I[Pg 83]
haven’t sufficient strength to drag myself away.
I will rest awhile, and will then crawl back to my
old place; and, besides, the breeze blows from
that direction and will drive the smell away.
I am lying now in complete exhaustion. The
sun is scorching my face and hands. There is
nothing to cover oneself with. If only night
would come! I think this will be the second night.
My thoughts wander, and I am losing consciousness.
I must have slept a long time, because when I
awoke it was already night. As before, the
wounds ache, and my neighbor lies beside me—the
same huge, motionless figure.
I cannot help thinking of him. Have I really
left behind me all that is pleasant and dear to me,
and marched here at the speed of four versts an
hour, hungered, froze, suffered from the heat,
only to undergo this final torture—for no other
reason than that this unfortunate should cease
to live? And have I really accomplished anything
useful for my country except this murder?
This is murder—and I am a murderer.
When I first got the idea into my head to go
and fight, Mother and Masha did not try to dissuade
me, although they both wept much.
Blinded by my idea, I did not understand those[Pg 84]
tears. Only now I understand what I have done
to those so near to me.
Why recall all this? There is no returning to the
past.
And what a singular attitude my acquaintances
assumed towards my action! “What a madman!
He is meddling without knowing why!” How
could they say that? How could they reconcile
their words with their ideas of heroism, love of
mother country, and other such things? Surely
I earned their admiration for living up to these
virtues. Yet I am a “madman.”
Presently I am on my way to Kishinev; I am
supplied with a knapsack and all the other military
accoutrements. I go with thousands of
others; among them a few, like myself, are
volunteers. The rest would have preferred to
remain at home, if they were permitted. Nevertheless,
they go along just like we “conscious
ones,” march thousands of versts, and fight as
well as ourselves, or even better. They fulfil their
obligations notwithstanding the fact that they
would on the instant drop everything and go home
if permission were given them.
A fresh early morning breeze has begun to
blow. There is a stirring among the bushes; I
can hear the flutter of a bird’s wings. The stars
are no longer visible. The dark blue sky has[Pg 85]
turned gray, and stretching across it are gentle,
fleecy cloudlets; a gray mist is rising from the
earth. It is the beginning of the third day of
my ... what can I call it? Life? Agony?
The third day.... How many more are
left to me? At any rate, only a few. I have
grown terribly weak, and I fear that I am unable
to move away from the corpse. Only a little
while longer, and I will stretch out by his side,
and we shall not be unpleasant to each other.
I must have a drink. I will drink three times
a day—in the morning, at noon, and in the
evening.
The sun has risen. Its enormous disk, broken
and intersected by the dark branches of the
bushes, is red like blood. It looks as if it will
be a hot day. My neighbor—what will become
of you? Even now you are quite terrible.
Yes, he is terrible. His hair has begun to fall
out. His skin, dark by nature, has grown a pale
yellow; his bloated face has become so tightly
stretched that the skin burst just behind one ear.
The worms have begun to swarm there. The
lower limbs, encased in gaiters, have swollen, and
huge blisters have showed themselves from between
the hooks of the gaiters. What will the
sun make of him to-day?
[Pg 86]
It is unendurable to be so near him. I must
get away, at all costs. Can I do it? I am still
able to lift my hand, open the flask, and drink;
but to move my passive, cumbersome body is
quite another matter. Still, I will make an effort,
even if it should take me an hour to move a few
inches.
The entire morning passes in this attempt to
shift. The pain is intense, but what does it matter?
I no longer remember; I cannot imagine to
myself the perception of a normal man. I have
gotten used to the pain. I have managed to shift
about fifteen feet, and am now in my old place.
Not for long, however, have I enjoyed the fresh
breeze, as far as it can be fresh with a rotting
corpse only a few steps away. The breeze too
has shifted and has brought the stench upon me
anew to the point of nausea. The empty stomach
contracts painfully and convulsively; all the
internals groan. But the ill-smelling, infected
air continues to pour upon me.
I weep in my desperation.
Broken in body and spirit and half insane, I
was beginning to lose consciousness. Suddenly ...
or is it only a delusion of a distressed
imagination? Yes, I think I hear voices.
The clatter of horses’ hoofs—and human voices.
I almost came near shouting, but restrained[Pg 87]
myself. Suppose they should be Turks? They,
of course—as if I already hadn’t suffered enough—will
subject me to terrible torture, such as
makes your hair stand on end just to read about
in the newspapers. They’ll peel my skin off, and
they’ll apply a fire to my wounded legs ...
or they might invent some new torture. Is it
not better to end my life at their hands than die
here? Who can tell?—they may be my countrymen!
Oh, accursed bushes! Why have you
fenced yourselves so thickly around me? There
is no opening except one aperture in the foliage,
that opens like a window upon a hollow visible
in the distance. There, I think, is a brook from
which we drank before the battle. I can see, too,
the huge flat stone across the stream, put there
to serve as a bridge. They will surely cross it.
The voices are dying away. I cannot make out
the language they speak; my hearing too has
grown weak. Oh, Lord! what if they are my
countrymen!... I will shout. They will
hear me even from the brook. That is better
than falling into the hands of the Bashi-Bazouks.
What has become of them? I don’t see them. I
am being consumed with impatience; I no longer
even notice the smell of the corpse, although it
has not grown any less.
Suddenly a body of horsemen make their[Pg 88]
appearance crossing the bridge. Cossacks! Blue
uniforms, red stripes, lances! About fifty of
them! At the fore, upon a handsome horse, is an
officer with a black beard. No sooner do the
fifty horsemen cross the brook than he turns full
face in his saddle and shouts:
“Tro-t, march!”
“Stop, stop, for God’s sake! Help, help,
brothers!” But the stamping of sturdy horses,
the clanging of many sabres, and the lusty shouting
of Cossack throats are too much for my weak
outcry—and I am not heard.
Oh, curses! In complete exhaustion, I fall face
to the ground and begin to weep. In my falling,
I fail to notice that I have upset the flask and out
of its mouth the water—my life, my deliverance,
my respite from death—is oozing. I notice it
only when there is no more than a half-cupful left;
the rest has been absorbed by the dry, thirsty
earth.
It is simply agony to recall the stupor which
seized me after this terrible accident. I lay motionless,
with half-closed eyes. The wind kept
changing, and now fanned me with pure, clear
air and now sent the stench upon me anew. My
neighbor has become unsightly beyond all description.
Once I opened my eyes to glance at
him, and I recoiled in horror. He no longer had[Pg 89]
any face. The flesh seemed to peel right off the
bone. That horrible smile of bones, that eternal
grin, seemed never so repulsive, never so awful,
although it had been my lot to hold many a
human skull in my hands before, in the medical
classes. The skeleton in uniform with shining
buttons caused me to shudder. “This is war,”
I reflected, “and here is its symbol.”
The sun is burning and scorching me as before.
My hands and face have been smarting for some
time. I drank up the remaining water. The
thirst tortured me so intensely that in trying to
take a single swallow I gulped down all. Fool
that I was not to have called to the Cossacks
when they were so near! Even if they had been
Turks, it would have been better than this. They
would have tortured me an hour or two; but
now there’s no saying how long I am to lie here
and suffer. My dear, dearest mother! If you
only knew! You would tear your gray hair out,
you would knock your head against the wall, you
would curse the day of my birth, you would curse
the world which invented war and its sorrows.
It is well that you and Masha will not hear of
my sufferings. Farewell, Mother; farewell, my
sweetheart, my love! But how sad and bitter I
feel! And there is something gnawing at the
heart....
[Pg 90]
Again I am thinking of that little white dog!
The porter did not pity it, but knocked its head
against the wall and threw it into a garbage heap.
And still it was alive; and suffered a whole day.
I am more unfortunate, because I have suffered
already three days. To-morrow will be the
fourth day, then the fifth, the sixth....
Death, where art thou? Come, come! Take
me!
But death does not come. And I am lying in
the blaze of this terrible sun; and there is not a
drop of water to refreshen my inflamed throat;
the corpse, too, is making me ill. Myriads of
vermin are feeding in it. How they swarm!
When he is eaten, and there is nothing left except
the bones and the uniform, then it will be my
turn. I too shall share the same fate.
The day passes, and the night passes. No
change. Again morning. No change. Another
day will pass....
The bushes are stirring and rustling, as if they
were talking among themselves. “You will die,
you will die, you will die!” they whisper. “You
will not see, you will not see, you will not see!”
answer the bushes on the other side.
“No, you will not see them here!” I hear a
loud voice quite near.
I tremble and at once come to myself. I look[Pg 91]
up, to find the good blue eyes of our corporal
Yakovlev looking at me.
“Spades!” he cries out. “There are two more
of them here—and one of them is theirs!”
“There is no need for spades, no need to bury
me; I’m alive!” I wish to cry out; but only a
feeble groan issues from my parched lips.
“Lord! But he is alive! Barin[1] Ivanov!
Children, come this way! Our Barin is alive!
And bring the doctor, quick!”
Presently I feel the pleasant contact in my
mouth of water, whiskey, and of something else.
Then everything disappears.
The stretcher sways with a measured motion.
This motion is soothing. Now I recall myself,
now everything lapses from my memory. The
bandaged wounds no longer hurt. An inexpressible
feeling of comfort has diffused itself
through my entire body....
“Hal-t! L-lo-wer! Fresh hands to the
stretchers! Now get hold—lift—march!”
The command is issued by Peter Ivanich, our
sanitary officer, a tall, lean, and very kindly man.
He is so tall that as I turn my eyes in his direction
I can see his head, his peculiar long beard,
[Pg 92]and his shoulders, although the stretcher is being
carried on the shoulders of four big men.
“Peter Ivanich!” I whisper.
“What is it, dear fellow?”
Peter Ivanich leans toward me.
“Peter Ivanich, what did the doctor tell you?
Will I die soon?”
“What are you saying, Ivanov? Of course
you will live. Your bones are whole. What a
lucky fellow you are! Your bones are all right,
and so are your arteries! But tell me, how did
you manage to pull through these three and a
half days? What did you eat?”
“Nothing.”
“And had you anything to drink?”
“I took the Turk’s flask. Peter Ivanich, I
cannot speak now. Later....”
“Well, God be with you, dear fellow, and have
your nap.”
Again sleep, forgetfulness....
When I awake again, I am in the division
hospital, surrounded by nurses and doctors. At
my feet stands a man whom I recognize as a
celebrated St. Petersburg professor. His hands
are blood-stained. He is attending to me, and
presently he turns to speak to me:
“Well, the Lord has been good to you, young
man. You will remain alive. We’ve deprived[Pg 93]
you of one leg; but that is a mere trifle. Can
you talk?”
Yes, I can talk, and I am telling him all that
I have written here.
[Pg 95]
CHEKHOV, RECORDER OF LOST
ILLUSIONS
The history—that is, the philosophical
history—of a national literature is sure to
reveal the close relation subsisting between the
significant social movements of that nation and
its literature. Those who think lightly of fiction
as a force in a people’s life fail to recognize that
in the large it is something more than a mirror
of the times, since worthy fiction must be an
expression—and that the most vivid possible—of
the ideals, the faiths, the scepticisms, the
struggles, the foibles, the prejudices, the occupations
light and serious, and, chiefly, the social ferment,
of the era it represents, because out of, and
not merely during, that era its fiction was born.
While really no more applicable to Russia than
to any other nation, this representative quality
of literature is more startlingly apparent in Slavic
literature than in any other. During the period
just preceding 1880, the “back to the people”
movement was at its height. Tolstoi’s life among
his peasants inspired many to imitation—but
that is a story by itself. Enough to note here
that the movement broke down of its own weight,
as all social movements must which think to fill[Pg 96]
old skins with new wine. And Anton Pavlovich
Chekhov came to a full though depressing inheritance
of the stunned discouragement characteristic
of the early eighties. In common with
his entire school, Chekhov’s philosophy embraced
three paramount tenets: The “system” in Russia
is productive of evil, and evil only; there is no
present hope of better things; but for the future,
such hope as may gestate unborn can come to
birth only by the Russian people’s facing the full
truth honestly and fearlessly.
Here is a social philosophy which is something
more than pessimism, for while it believes that
things must be worse before they can be better,
it neither denies nor predicts the coming of that
meliorated day. The true basis of Russian realism
is thus seen to differ from the French: French
realism is sensational and of the senses; that of
Russia is intellectual and largely for a patriotic
purpose.
Chekhov was a south-Russian, born January
17, 1860, in Taganrog, a seaport on an arm
of the Black Sea, near the mouth of the river Don.
His father was a serf, whose ambition and ability
led him early to buy his freedom and provide for
the education of his four children. Anton passed
through the local college and was graduated from[Pg 97]
the school of medicine at Moscow, but more than
his year as a hospital interne, and a volunteer
service during an epidemic of cholera, he did not
practise.
His medical education, however, set the tone
for Chekhov’s literary work, for he became a
great pathologist of character, dealing chiefly
with those sick of mind and heart whom we are
wont to think of as unnormal. Early afflicted
with the tubercular trouble which he combated
in vain, and which carried him off July 2, 1904,
in Badenweiler, Germany, at forty-four, he disclosed
in his work, as Professor Phelps has pointed
out, the double character of the observing physician
and the sick patient. To the observer and
in the observed, in such a dual rôle, trivialities
would assume a larger interest than to the typical
healthy man writing of complacent themes in a
rosy land. And so they did to Chekhov—as will
more and more appear.
While yet the youth was in the University
(1879) he began to write “fugitive sketches” for
the minor metropolitan newspapers, and eventually
for the better-known Novoe Vremya and the
St. Petersburg Gazette. A humor keen, if somewhat
coarse, characterized these productions,
which were often only a few hundred words in
length. This light satirical tone prevailed until[Pg 98]
after the appearance in 1887 of his first book.
Perhaps the critical disapproval it aroused made
him see that one who could write so well might be
better employed than in merely making people
laugh, as one reviewer expressed it. At all events,
his later work was more serious, though always
a subtle, intellectual humor might be found—for
it often lurked—in his most sober fictional and
dramatic writings.
Chekhov was so modest, so retiring, so diffident
even, that he came to his own by dint of sheer
merit. When in the later years of his short life
he married Olga Knipper, the blonde beauty of
the Théâtre Libre, they took a villa at Yalta, on
the Black Sea, for the husband’s enfeebled health
demanded a milder climate than that of the
metropolis. At Yalta, for a time, dwelt also
Tolstoi and Gorki, and there Chekhov learned to
know his brother writers. With that sincere big-heartedness
which is happily characteristic of
each of the Russian littérateurs chosen for inclusion
in this series, both did much to bring
his work to the attention of the public to which
they were themselves looking.
With Tolstoi’s convictions Chekhov had little
in common, so he did not seek him out. But the
elder artist went to the younger, and a firm friendship
ensued. That the enthusiastic prophesies[Pg 99]
of both Tolstoi and Gorki were not fully realized
was doubtless due to the untimely ending of a
career so full of promise and of real literary
achievement.
Naturally, Chekhov’s attitude toward life was
something more personal than was his conscious
philosophy. The lost illusions of the Russian
people—I speak now of the Russia of the late
eighties and early nineties—were perfectly reflected
in our author’s work. Of one of his characters
he writes:
The Student remembered that when he left the house
his mother sat in the hall, barefooted, and cleaned the
samovar; and his father lay upon the stove and
coughed; and because it was Good Friday nothing
was being cooked at home, though he was tortured
with desire to eat. And now, shivering with cold, the
Student reflected that just the same icy wind blew in
the reign of Rurik, in the reign of Ivan the Terrible,
and in the reign of Peter the Great; and that there was
just the same gnawing hunger and poverty, just the
same dilapidated thatched roofs, just the same ignorance,
the same boredom with life, the same desert
around, the same darkness within, the same sense of
oppression—that all these terrors were and are and
will be, and that, though a thousand years roll by, life
can never be any better.
Could anything be more pitiful—and more[Pg 100]
hopeless! And yet it was not the pity of it that
Chekhov was picturing. It was the fatalism, the
mockery, the uselessness of struggle, the satire of
even complaining, that seemed to him to demand
a voice. All contemporary life was gray. To
him it was a silly thing to seek to idealize it. The
only course was to view things as they are—the
venom, the scurrility, the disenchantment, the
heart-break, the hunger, the chill of soul and
body, were real; then why delude self by renaming
them, for alter them one could not! Why
struggle when inertia accomplished just as much—that
is to say, nothing! Why dream when the
visions brought one no nearer light than did
waking! Again and again his characters set out
cheered by hopes and warmed by illusions, but
one by one they return, hardened, dulled, disenchanted.
But even this experience is not worth
fretting about. The gaunt, wild-eyed men, the
flat, empty-breasted women, are products of the
Russian system, so why should they aspire to the
unattainable? Let them be indifferent, for that
is the surest anæsthetic.
But in all this one feels the terrible arraignment
of the god-of-things-as-they-are, and no blame
for the individual. Chekhov doubtless pitied
men, but he excoriated Russian society. If he
laughed at misery, it was that misery might not[Pg 101]
crush out the very life. If he preached indifferentism,
it was that the Juggernaut of society
should not pulverize those over whom its wheels
must surely pass.
In the banalities of life and its useless beatings
against the bars Chekhov was quick to see effective
literary material. If life was colorless, it
still called for a master of grays and neutral tints
to lay them effectively upon the canvas—and
such a painter was Chekhov. Dealing with
trivial things, and dealing with them in a manner
sometimes bitterly laughing, again at times with
fierce cynicism, but sometimes too with the
gentle sadness of an accepted despair, the man
became a sincere realist—an accurate delineator
of “the unprofitable life.” He could picture, in
“The Steppe,” that most monotonous of all landscapes
with an idealized charm of variety which
enchanted the reader, but his obligation to human
nature was to paint it remorselessly with truth.
Unhappily, his pathological mind saw little but
the contemptible, the trivial, the stupid, and the
mean. The nobler elements he did not omit, but
he never asserted or even intimated their final
triumph. He could strip the shreds of pretension
and illusion from the soul of man as ruthlessly
as a fiend would denude the body of his helpless
victim. For old age to be despicable, or for youth[Pg 102]
to be polluted, was all the justification needed to
picture them just so upon his canvas.
“Ward No. 6”—a pitiless tragedy disclosing
the ultimate break-down of all that is noble in
body, mind, and spirit—is probably Chekhov’s
greatest story. It takes its title from the lunatic
asylum in a “squalid, remote, and stagnant
country town.... A pandemonium of
brutality, corruption, and neglect.” The patients
suffer unspeakable abuses from the attendants,
chiefly from the porter, Nikita, whose brutal fists
beat all protesting patients into insensibility.
The old doctor used to sell the hospital stores
to enrich himself, but Ragin, the new physician,
was a man of honesty, heart, and ability. The
abuses of the place he detests, and the sufferings
of the inmates make his gorge rise and his heart
burn. But, as with most of Chekhov’s good men,
his will is inert, and at last he condones and falls
into indifference toward the horrors of the place.
One day he discovers an unusual intelligence
in Gromof, one of the long-time inmates, and
comes to take a great interest in him. For hours
at a time he gives up his occupations and listens
to Gromof’s wisdom. The nurses, at this, think
Ragin insane, and by a trick shut him up in the
very room whose terrible condition at first so
inspired him with horror. “I am glad! You[Pg 103]
drank other men’s blood; now they will drink
yours!” screams Gromof in a rage of madness.
After a short confinement, Ragin joins the
other inmates in a revolt, but Nikita uses his huge
fists, and the next day Ragin is dead.
I recite this at some length because no shorter
story could so fully present the hopeless philosophy
of its author. It is a powerful, impressionistic
picture of Russia—at its worst, let us
hope.
Chekhov made several excursions into the
drama, but he was not given to plot, and all his
efforts were subtle and intellectual, so that it
requires a company of brilliant actors to present
his plays. The most important are “The Cherry
Orchard,” “The Seagull,” “The Bear,” and
“The Gray Stocking.”
In the short-story our author excelled, but here
too his tendency was not toward plot. The
objectivist in fiction tends toward the impressionistic
sketch, and Chekhov was a master in
sensing a mood outside of himself and relentlessly
reproducing the impression.
Of “Darling,” Tolstoi has said that the author
intended to laugh at Darling, sneer at her self-sacrifice;
but in spite of his plan he had created
a character of beauty.
[Pg 104]
Olenka Plemyannikof, the daughter of a retired
“college assessor,” cannot live unless she is loving
some one. She loves her father, her mother, her
relatives, and when at school she had fallen in
love with the French-master. Observing her
rosy cheeks and kind expression, and the naïve
smile playing on her face when she is pleased,
every one feels attracted to her, and frequently
women stop in the midst of a conversation and
grasp her hand, exclaiming, “You darling!”
Koukin, manager and proprietor of the Tivoli
pleasure gardens, occupies the wing in the
Plemyannikofs’ house. Troubles connected with
rainy evenings, when his audiences are small,
touch Olenka’s kind heart, and she stays awake
at night until he comes home, so that she may
smile encouragement through her window. At
length they marry, and their life runs smoothly,
Olenka helping her husband in many ways. Her
radiant face alone draws people, and she tells
them that the theatre is the greatest thing in the
world. “What a wonderful man you are!” she
says adoringly to her husband. But when on
a business trip to Moscow Koukin dies; and
Olenka feels then that the end of the world has
come for her.
Three months after, returning from church one
day, she meets Vassili Andreyich Pastovalof,[Pg 105]
manager of a timber merchant’s yard, and he
tells her that she should bear submissively the
fate which God willed. His grave voice stays in
her memory—and shortly afterward they are
married. They live happily, and now it seems to
Olenka that she has been in the timber trade all
her life. She echoes her husband’s opinions—whatever
he thinks, she thinks, wherever he
wants to go, or not to go, she does the same.
When her friends suggest recreation, her reply is,
“I and Vassichka have no time to frequent
theatres. We are business people, with no time
for trifles. Besides, what good is there in
theatres?”
Thus they live harmoniously for six years. But
one cold morning, after drinking some hot tea,
Pastovalof steps into the yard without his hat
and catches a chill. Four months later Olenka
is again a widow.
Not till six months after her husband’s death
does she remove her weeds and open the house
shutters, so great is her grief. Then it is rumored
that she takes tea with a regimental veterinary
surgeon, Smirnin, who occupies one of the wings
of her house. He is separated from his wife, but
contributes to his son’s support. Olenka becomes
absorbed in this new interest, for she cannot live
without lavishing her affection on some one.[Pg 106]
Their happiness is interrupted by Smirnin’s being
called away with his regiment; and now the
woman is once more desolate.
The years pass and Olenka is entirely without
fixed opinions, has nothing to speak about, so
she grows old-looking and dormant. She has
nothing to reflect. But one night Smirnin comes
back. He has retired from the army, is reunited
with his wife, and wants to settle down in the
town. Olenka offers him her house free to live in,
saying that the wing is quite enough for her; so
the man and the woman and their child come to
Olenka’s house. And in the little boy she finds
an object to love, even taking him into her own
rooms, where they play and study together.
Then Olenka develops opinions on education,
and grows young again.
In his earlier days Chekhov espoused satirical
comedy. In “A Work of Art—The Story of a
Gift” we have one of these typical nonsense
stories.
A young man, Alexander Smirnoff, enters the
office of Dr. Koshelkoff, his physician, and, with
many expressions of profoundest gratitude, presents
him with an exquisite bronze candelabrum.
The youth is the only son of his mother, and out
of the stock left by his father—for they are carrying[Pg 107]
on his business in antiques—they have reserved
this treasure, which they now give to the
physician because his care had saved the young
man’s life. Smirnoff’s one regret is that he does
not possess the mate, so as to give the doctor the
pair.
The medical man is embarrassed. The piece
is lovely, but—improper. The two dancing
female figures are quite too unconventional for
the doctor’s office—he has a wife, a family, a
mother-in-law, and lady patients! No, he cannot
accept the gift. But after many hurt protests
on the part of the donor, the physician keeps it
anyhow.
No sooner is the young man gone than the
doctor remembers a gay bachelor lawyer to whom
he owes many favors, and hurries off to give him
the beautiful but immodest bronze. The lawyer
cannot express his admiration—and regret. His
patrons would be horrified, it would injure his
reputation. No, he cannot keep it.
The physician in turn is deeply wounded, so to
save his friend’s feelings the lawyer consents to
keep it; and the doctor hurries off chuckling in
glee.
Immediately the lawyer presents the statuette
to an actor. The theatrical star is delighted, and
soon his room is besieged by men who want to see[Pg 108]
the savory work of art. But presently the actor
sees that he cannot receive lady visitors in the
presence of such a statuette.
“Sell it,” suggests a friend, and at once he
despatches the offending candelabrum to Madame
Smirnoff, the old woman who deals in antiques.
Two days later Dr. Koshelkoff sat peacefully in his
study—when suddenly the door of his room flew open,
and Alexander Smirnoff burst upon his sight. His face
beamed with joy, he fairly shone, and his whole body
breathed inexpressible content.
In his hands he held an object wrapped in a newspaper.
“Doctor,” he began breathlessly, “imagine my joy!
What good fortune! Luckily for you, my mother has
succeeded in obtaining a companion piece to your
candelabrum. You now have the pair complete.
Mother is so happy. I am her only son, you know.
You saved my life.”
Trembling with joy and with excess of gratitude,
young Smirnoff placed the candelabrum before the
doctor. The physician opened his mouth, attempted
to say something, but the power of speech failed him—and
he said nothing.
Again in a different vein is “The Safety
Match.”
Lieutenant Klausoff, a retired officer of the
Horse Guards, who has separated from his wife,[Pg 109]
Olga, on account of his own dissipations and her
shrewish temper, is reported as missing by
Psyekoff, the lieutenant’s agent. The examining
magistrate, Chubikoff, and Dukovski, his ambitious
assistant, learn that Klausoff has not been
seen for a week, and when they break open his
room all signs suggest a murder. Young
Dukovski, who is a disciple of induction as a
means of arriving at the facts of crime, discovers
in the room one boot, a burned safety-match,
marks of teeth on a pillow, signs of struggle about
the bed, an unfastened window, footprints beneath
it, the mark of a knee on the window-sill,
and some threads of blue cloth caught in a
burdock bush near-by. All these lead him to conclude
that the murderers, one of whom wore blue
trousers, climbed in the window, sprang upon
Klausoff while he was taking off his boots, smothered
him with a pillow, and dragged him away.
The second boot is at length found near-by, and
the investigators now seek for the criminals. The
shrewd Dukovski, who is continually laughed at
by his superior Chubikoff, infers that two of the
murderers are the valet and Psyekoff, the agent,
because it developed that first the valet and then
Psyekoff had loved the same woman, whom their
master had finally won. Besides, Psyekoff wears
blue trousers. Jealousy must have been the[Pg 110]
cause, for the victim’s watch and money still lay
upon his table. When confronted with these
facts and a reconstruction of the deed, neither
can make effective denial.
A third conspirator is found in the victim’s
sister, who is a religious enthusiast and intensely
indignant that her rakish brother should be living
apart from his wife, Olga.
At last Dukovski succeeds in tracing the purchase
of a box of safety matches to Olga, whereupon
he concludes that she also is implicated.
He and Chubikoff confront her with the circumstantial
evidences which indicate that she and
her accomplices have dragged off the body of her
husband. Astounded, she breaks down, and leads
the officers into an adjoining room, where the
body of Klausoff is lying on a couch—asleep!
The wife, who still loves her tipsy lord, has
dragged him away and holds him in durance so
that she may live with him whether he will or not.
Master of an alert, firm style, and skilled not
only in penetration but in effective expression,
Chekhov has a place in Russian literature which
is less difficult to designate than is usual in the
case of one only a few years dead. Certainly his
themes are neither big nor vital enough, nor yet
sufficiently human, to accord him position beside[Pg 111]
the philosophical Tolstoi, the titanic Turgenev,
and the iron-hearted Dostoevski (a greater
novelist than short-story writer). Rather do his
workmanship, power of characterization, and
subtle, sardonic humor point to a solitary niche
close to the grim and morbid Andreev. His
appeal—always intellectual—to his own people
is tremendous, and in Germany his vogue is still
important. It seems safe to say that among
Russian fictionists he stands in the first rank
of the second company.
To represent Chekhov’s work, I have chosen
“In Exile,” which follows complete in a new
translation, because, while it exhibits all his
mature characteristics, it is less unpleasant on
the one hand and on the other less trivial than
many of his other short-stories. But of its qualities
the reader may now judge.
[Pg 112]
By Anton Chekhov
Old Simon, nicknamed Wiseacre, and a
young Tartar, whom no one knew by name,
sat on the river-bank before a bonfire. The other
three ferrymen were in the hut. Simon, a man of
sixty, gaunt and toothless, but broad of shoulder
and still hale in appearance, was drunk. He had
meant to go to sleep long ago, but there was a
flask in his pocket, and he feared that his comrades
in the hut might ask him to pass it around.
The Tartar felt ill and tired; shivering in his
rags, he was recounting what a comfortable home
he had had in his native province, and what a
handsome, clever wife he had left there. He was
hardly more than twenty-five years old, but now,
before the blaze of the bonfire, his pale, melancholy
face seemed to be that of a mere lad.
“It’s no paradise here, to be sure,” Wiseacre
agreed with him. “You can see for yourself:
water, bare banks, and everywhere clay—nothing
more.... Holy Week has passed, there’s
ice on the river, and only this morning it snowed.”
“It’s miserable! Miserable!” said the Tartar,
as he glanced round him in terror.
[Pg 114]
Some ten paces away flowed the dark, cold
river. It seemed to grumble as it noised its way
past the corroded clay bank and rapidly bore
itself onward somewhere towards the distant sea.
At the very edge of the bank there rose the dark,
massive form of a barge, the kind called karbass
by the ferrymen. Looking in the distance towards
the opposite bank, one could see numerous
fires, flaring and retreating, and resembling so
many leaping serpents. It was the burning of
last year’s grass. And beyond the fires, again
darkness. The sound of floating ice beating
against the barge could be heard. It was damp,
cold....
The Tartar glanced up towards the sky. There
were just as many stars here as at home, and the
same surrounding darkness; yet there was something
lacking. Somehow, at home, in the Simbirsk
province, there were no such stars and no
such sky.
“It’s miserable! Miserable!” he repeated.
“You’ll get used to it!” said Wiseacre, and
laughed. “You are still in your teens, and silly.
Your mother’s milk hasn’t as yet dried upon
your lips. Of course it seems to your foolish mind
that there is no one more miserable than you;
but the time will come when you yourself will
say, ‘May God grant every one such a life!’ Now,[Pg 115]
look at me. In another week the water will be
normal again; I shall take charge of the ferry-boat;
you will go jaunting through Siberia, while
I shall remain here and resume making my way
from bank to bank. I’ve been doing it twenty-two
years, night and day. The pike and the
salmon under the water; I above it. And thank
God for that! I want nothing. May God grant
every one such a life!”
The Tartar threw more brushwood into the
fire, and, moving closer to it, said:
“I have an ailing father. When he dies, my
mother and my wife will join me here. They
have promised.”
“What do you want with a mother and a wife?”
asked Wiseacre. “You’ll repent it, brother. It’s
the devil that’s putting you up to it, curse his
soul! Don’t listen to him, the accursed one!
Don’t give in to him. When he gets your mind
on women, just spite him; tell him, ‘I don’t want
them!’ When he talks freedom to you, get stubborn;
tell him, ‘I don’t want it! I want nothing—neither
father, nor mother, nor wife, nor freedom,
nor house, nor anything! I want nothing,
confound their souls!’”
Wiseacre took another gulp from his flask, and
continued:
“Now, look at me, brother. I am not a simple[Pg 116]
muzhik, but a sexton’s son, in fact; and when I
lived in freedom in Kursk I wore a frock-coat;
but now I’ve gotten so that I could sleep naked
on the ground and eat grass. And God grant
every one such a life! I want nothing, and I fear
no one. I’m on good terms with myself, and I
cannot imagine any one richer and freer than I.
When I was banished from Russia, I insisted from
the very first day: ‘I want nothing!’ The devil
he talks to me of wife, and of home, and of freedom;
and I back at him: ‘I want nothing!’ I
insisted on mine, and, as you see, I live well, and
do not complain. Give way to the devil but an
inch, and you are lost. There’s no deliverance,
you sink into the bog over your very head, and
there’s no getting out. Not alone your brother,
the stupid muzhik; but nobles and educated men
are lost. Some fifteen years ago they sent here
one of that gentry. He didn’t share some property
with his brothers, tampered somehow with a
will. They say he comes from the dukes or the
barons—or perhaps he is only an official—how
should one know? Well, this gentleman arrived
here, and the first thing he did was to buy himself
a house and some land. ‘I intend,’ he said,
‘to live by the sweat of my brow, because,’ he
said, ‘I am no longer a gentleman, but a convict.’
‘Well,’ said I to myself, ‘may God help him, he[Pg 117]
means well!’ He was at that time a fussy, bustling
young man; did his own mowing and now
and then caught fish, and rode sixty versts a day
on horseback. That was his one misfortune.
From the very first year he made trips to Girino,
to the post-office there. Times were and he would
be on my ferry-boat, sighing: ‘Ah, Simon, it’s
rather a long time since they have sent me money
from home!’ ‘There’s no need,’ I’d go on telling
him, ‘of money, Vassili Sergeyich. What good
is it? Throw it aside,’ I argued with him. ‘All
that’s gone by; forget it as if it never were; as
if you had only dreamt it; and begin life anew.
Don’t listen,’ I said to him, ‘to the devil. It’ll
lead to no good; it’ll only draw a noose around
your neck. Now it’s money you want, and later
it’ll be another thing—there’s no end to it. If
it’s happiness you seek, first of all desire nothing.
Yes.... If,’ I said to him, ‘fate has treated
you and me badly, there’s no begging charity of
her, no falling at her feet; rather should one
treat her with scorn and laugh at her—then she
too will laugh.’ So I spoke to him.... Two
years later I ferried him over to this side—and he
all overjoyed and laughing. ‘I am going,’ he
said, ‘to Girino to meet my wife. She has taken
pity on me,’ he said, ‘and is coming out here.
She’s a fine woman, good-hearted.’ He almost[Pg 118]
choked from happiness. The next day he brought
his wife. She was young, handsome, in a pretty
hat; and in her arms a girl baby; and all sorts
of baggage with her. As to Vassili Sergeyich, he
fussed around her, couldn’t stop feasting his
eyes on her or stop raving about her. ‘Yes,
brother Simon, even in Siberia people live.’
‘All right,’ I said to myself. ‘Don’t be too sure
of that.’ And from that time on, mark it, he
began to make weekly visits to Girino: to see if
any money had come from Russia. He needed
no end of money. ‘She,’ he said, ‘is sacrificing
her youth and beauty in Siberia for my sake, and
is sharing with me my bitter lot; and therefore,’
he said, ‘I should give her every possible pleasure.’ ...
To make it cheerful for her, he started
up an acquaintance with the officials and with all
sorts of trashy people. Well, all this company had
to be furnished food and drink; then a piano had
to be had, and a shaggy little dog for the sofa—the
deuce take it!... In a word, luxury, extravagance!
She did not live long with him. How could
she? Here she saw only mud, water, cold, no vegetables
or fruits, and all around her uneducated people,
full of drink, and without manners—and she
a spoiled lady from St. Petersburg.... Naturally,
she grew sick of it. And the husband
too was no longer what he had been, but a convict.
[Pg 119]
“It was one Assumption Eve, three years later,
that I remember some one shouting from the
opposite bank. I crossed over, and whom should
I see but the lady herself, all wrapped up—and
with her a young gentleman, one of the officials.
A troika!... I ferried them over to this
side; the troika was ready; ah, but you should
have seen them fly! Hardly the wink of an eye
and there was not a trace of them.
“And in the morning Vassili Sergeyich came
running here. ‘Simon, has my wife passed this
way with a gentleman in spectacles?’ ‘Yes, she
did pass this way,’ I said to him. ‘Go and seek
the wind in the fields!’ He gave chase to them,
but returned in five days. When I ferried him
across to the other side, he threw himself down
in the bottom of the boat, and began to beat his
head against the planks and to whine. ‘What else
had you to expect?’ I said to him. I laughed and
reminded him: ‘Even in Siberia people live!’
But he only beat his head the harder....
Then he began to hanker after freedom. He
heard his wife was in Russia, and of course he
wanted to go there and to take her away from her
lover. Almost every day he would go to the post-office
or to the government offices. He presented
petition after petition, begging for pardon and
for permission to return home. He told me he[Pg 120]
had spent a couple of hundred rubles on telegrams
alone. He sold his land, while he mortgaged
his house to Jews. He grew gray and bent;
his face yellow—a consumptive, in fact. Speaking
to you, he would always go: khe-khe-khe ...
and his eyes full of tears. For
eight years he kept on handing in those petitions,
but after that he had come to life and grown
jolly again. You see, he had thought of another
luxury. His daughter had grown up. And he
feasted his eyes on her and didn’t get enough
of it. She really was an attractive girl—pretty,
black-browed, and rather spirited in manner.
Every Sunday he’d take her with him to Girino
to church. They’d stand hand in hand on the
ferry, and he not taking his eyes from her. ‘Yes,
Simon,’ he would say, ‘even in Siberia people live.
Even in Siberia there is happiness. Just look
what a daughter I’ve got! You can’t find another
like her if you seek a thousand miles around!’
The girl, as I said, was really a beauty....
But I thought to myself: ‘Just wait....
She’s a young girl; the blood tingles, and one
wants to live, and what sort of life is to be had
here?’ And, comrade, to make the story short,
she really began to ail.... She got to
coughing, and coughing, to pining away; and
now she is very sick, can hardly stand on her legs.[Pg 121]
Consumption! There’s your Siberian happiness
for you—the deuce take it!—that’s how even in
Siberia people live.... Now he’s begun
to chase after doctors, and to bring them back
home with him. Let him but hear there’s a
doctor or a healer within two hundred or three
hundred versts, and off he goes after him. It’s
terrible to think how much money he has spent
on doctors. I’d rather drink up the money....
She’ll die, any way. She’ll die, there’s
no gainsaying that, and then he’ll be lost altogether.
He’ll hang himself from sorrow, or he’ll
escape to Russia—and then you know what will
happen. He’ll be caught, sentenced to hard
labor; he’ll taste the knout....”
“That is well,” murmured the Tartar, trembling
with cold.
“What is well?” asked Wiseacre.
“He’s had his wife, his daughter....
You say you want nothing. To have nothing is
bad! His wife lived with him three years—God
was good to him. To have nothing is bad, but
three years is good. Don’t you understand?”
Trembling with cold, stammering out with
difficulty the few Russian words he knew, the
Tartar expressed the hope that God might preserve
him from dying in a strange land and being
buried in a cold, blighted earth; if his wife should[Pg 122]
come only for a single day, for a single hour, he
would consent, for the sake of this brief happiness,
to undergo the worst tortures and thank
God for them. Better one day of happiness than
nothing!
Again he spoke of the handsome and clever
wife he had left at home; then, putting his hands
to his head, he began to cry and to assure Simon
that he was innocent and was undergoing punishment
for no just cause. His two brothers and
an uncle had stolen some horses from a muzhik
and had beaten the old man half to death; but
society dealt with him unjustly, and sent the
three brothers to Siberia, while the uncle, a rich
man, remained at home.
“You’ll get used to it,” said Simon.
The Tartar did not reply, but fixed a tearful
gaze upon the fire. His face expressed doubt and
alarm, as if he still did not understand why he
was here in this darkness and cold, among
strangers, and not at home. Wiseacre lay beside
the fire, chuckled at something, and hummed.
“What sort of happiness is there for her with
her father?” he said after a pause. “He loves
her, and is comforted in her, it is true; but he’s
no fool; he’s a stern, harsh old man—and young
girls don’t want sternness.... They want
caresses and ha-ha-ha! and hi-ho-ho!—and perfume[Pg 123]
and pomade. Yes.... Ekh, this
business!” sighed Simon, and lifted himself
awkwardly. “The vodka’s all gone; that means
it’s time to go to bed. Well, I’m going,
brother....”
Left alone, the Tartar added more brushwood
to the fire, lay down facing it, and began to think
of his native village and of his wife; if she were
to come, even if only for a month, for a day—then
let her go back if she wanted to! Better a
month, even a day, than nothing! But if his wife
were to keep her promise and come, how should
he feed her? Where could she live?
“If there is nothing to eat, how can one live?”
he asked aloud.
For working day and night at an oar he was
paid but ten copecks a day; it is true, passengers
sometimes gave a gratuity for tea and for vodka,
but his companions shared it among themselves,
and gave the Tartar nothing, only laughing at
him. And poverty made him feel hungry, cold,
and frightened. Now, since his body ached and
trembled, he wished to go into the hut and to bed,
but he knew that there was nothing there to cover
oneself with, and that it was colder than on the
bank; here too there was nothing to cover oneself
with, but one could at least keep up the fire....
In another week, when the water should have[Pg 124]
subsided, and the regular ferry-boat resumed its
course, the services of the ferrymen, with the
exception of Simon’s, would be dispensed with;
then the Tartar must start tramping from village
to village and beg for alms and work. His wife
was but seventeen years old; pretty, petted, and
shy—must she too traverse villages and beg for
bread? No, the mere thought of it was terrible.
Dawn was already breaking. The barge and
the willows stood out clearly; the surging foam
too was visible. Glancing behind him, the Tartar
could see the clayey slope; the small, brown-thatched
hut was at its base, and the huts of the
village above. The cocks already crowed in the
village.
The red clayey slope, the barge, the river, the
strange, evil-minded people, hunger, cold, disease—they
all seemed not to exist at all. It was all
a dream, thought the Tartar. He imagined that
he was asleep and could hear himself snoring....
Of course he was at home, in the Simbirsk
province, and all he needed to do to have
his wife appear was to call her by name; and in
the next room was his mother.... What
terrible things dreams are! Of what use are they?
The Tartar smiled and opened his eyes. What
river was this? The Volga?
It began to snow.
[Pg 125]
“Ho, there!” came a shout from the other side.
“The boat!”
The Tartar sprang up and went to wake his
companions. Pulling on their torn sheepskin
coats while on the way to the boat, filling the
air with oaths from their hoarse throats, and
shivering with cold, the ferrymen made their
appearance. After their sleep, the river, with its
cold, penetrating wind, seemed to them most
repellent and terrible. Leisurely they took their
places in the karbass.
The Tartar and three ferrymen seized the long,
broad-bladed oars, resembling in the dark the
claws of a crab; while Simon threw himself down
on his stomach across the helm. The shouting
continued on the other side; two revolver-shots
were also heard; it was apparent that he who
fired them thought the ferrymen were still asleep,
or in the village tavern.
“Never mind, you’ll get there,” murmured
Wiseacre in a voice which conveyed his assurance
that in this world there was no need of hurrying—that
it was all the same in the long run.
The heavy, awkward barge parted from the
bank, and made its way slowly through the willows;
and only the slightly perceptible backward
movement of the willows indicated that the barge
was moving at all. The ferrymen, with measured[Pg 126]
slowness, swung their oars. Wiseacre lay on his
stomach across the helm, and, describing a curve
in the air, was thrown from one side to the other.
In the dark, it seemed as if a number of men were
sitting on some long-clawed antediluvian animal
and were floating towards that cold, melancholy
land seen only in nightmares.
The barge passed beyond the willows and was
now in the open. Presently, on the other bank,
could be heard the creaking and the measured
dipping of the oars; while those in the boat could
hear some one shouting, “Quicker! Quicker!”
Another ten minutes, and the barge struck heavily
against the landing.
“It keeps on snowing! It keeps on snowing!”
grumbled Simon, wiping the snow from
his face. “God knows where it all comes
from!”
On the bank stood a rather thin, low-statured
old man, dressed in a short foxskin coat and a
white lambskin cap. He stood at some distance
from the horses and did not move; his face had a
morose, concentrated expression, as if he were
making an effort to recall something and were
angry at his disobedient memory. When Simon,
smiling, approached him, and took off his cap,
the man said:
“I am in great haste to go to Anastasevka.[Pg 127]
My daughter is worse again, and there, I am told,
a new doctor has come.”
The coach was wheeled on board the barge,
which started to cross back. The man, whom
Simon called Vassili Sergeyich, stood all the time
immovable, tightly compressing his thick lips,
and looking with a fixed gaze into the distance.
When the driver asked permission to smoke in
his presence, he did not reply, as if he had not
heard. Simon lay on the bottom of the boat,
on his stomach, looked at him derisively, and
said:
“Even in Siberia people live. L-live!”
The face of Wiseacre wore a triumphant expression,
as if he had demonstrated something
and rejoiced that what he had prophesied had
come true. The unhappy, helpless look of the
man in the foxskin coat apparently afforded him
considerable gratification.
“Rather muddy now for travelling, Vassili
Sergeyich,” said he, while the horses were being
harnessed. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to postpone
your trip for a week or two, till it gets a
bit more dry. Perhaps it were better you didn’t
go at all.... If there were only some sense
in your going! Well, you yourself know that
people travel eternally, day and night, and get
nowheres. What do you say?”
[Pg 128]
Vassili Sergeyich gave the ferrymen for vodka,
sat himself in the coach, and was off.
“There! After the doctor again!” said Simon,
trembling from cold.... “Yes, seek a real
doctor, catch the wind in the field, seize the devil by
the tail, confound your soul! What queer people
there are! And forgive me, O Lord, a sinner!”
The Tartar walked up to Wiseacre, and looked
at him with hatred and repulsion. He trembled,
and as he spoke he mingled with his broken
Russian several Tartar words:
“He is good ... good, but you are bad!
You are bad! He is a good soul, a noble soul, but
you are a beast, you are bad! He is living, but
you are dead.... God created men that
they might live, that they might have joys and
sorrows; but you want nothing—which means
that you are dead, you’re a stone, you’re earth!
A stone wants nothing—and you want nothing!...
You’re a stone—and God does not love
you, but him He loves!”
All laughed; the Tartar frowned disgustedly,
waved with his hand, and, wrapping his rags
around him, walked up to the fire. Simon and
the ferrymen went towards the hut.
“It’s cold!” hoarsely murmured one ferryman,
stretching himself on the straw, with which the
entire floor was covered.
[Pg 129]
“Yes, it isn’t warm!” agreed another. “A
galley slave’s life!”
All lay down. The door flew open before the
wind, and the snow drifted into the hut. No one
wanted to get up and close the door; they all
felt cold and lazy.
“Well, things suit me,” said Simon drowsily.
“God grant every one such a life!”
“You, as every one knows, are a born galley
slave. Even the devil won’t take you!”
From the outside came sounds resembling the
whining of a dog.
“What’s that? Who’s there?”
“That’s the Tartar crying!”
“Well!... What a character!”
“He’ll get used to it!” said Simon, and soon
was asleep.
Soon the others were also asleep. But the door
remained unshut.
[Pg 130]
[Pg 131]
ANDREEV, APOSTLE OF THE
TERRIBLE
Of contemporary Russian fictionists, Leonid
Nikolaevich Andreev rises largest with
promise. Just past forty, he has for fourteen
years been producing work of strength and individual
flavor, and, now that Tolstoi is gone, his
place is probably ahead of even Maxim Gorki—at
least, he is primus inter pares.
Andreev’s life is best told in his own brief
words:
“I was born in 1871, in Oryol, and studied
there at the gymnasium. I studied poorly:
while in the seventh class I was for a whole year
known as the worst student, and my mark for
conduct was never higher than 4, sometimes 3.
The most pleasant time spent in school, which I
recall to this day with pleasure, was recess time
between the lectures, and also the rare occasions
when I was sent out from the class-room. The
sunbeams which penetrated some cleft, and which
played with the dust in the hallway—all this was
so mysterious, so interesting, so full of a peculiar,
hidden meaning.
“When I studied at the gymnasium my father,[Pg 132]
an engineer, died, and while at the university I
was in dire need. During my first year at the
St. Petersburg University I even starved—not so
much out of real necessity as because of my youth,
inexperience, and inability to utilize the unnecessary
parts of my costume. I am to this day
ashamed to think that I went without food at a
time when I had two or three pairs of trousers,
two overcoats, and the like.
“It was then that I wrote my first story—about
a starving student. I cried when I wrote it, and
the editor who returned my manuscript—laughed.
That story of mine remained unpublished.
“In 1894 I made an unsuccessful attempt to
kill myself by shooting. As a result of this unsuccessful
attempt, I was forced by the authorities
into religious penitence, and I contracted
heart trouble, though not of a serious nature, yet
very annoying. During this time I made one or
two unsuccessful attempts at writing. I devoted
myself with greater pleasure and success to painting,
which I loved from childhood on. I made
portraits to order at three and five rubles apiece.
“In 1897 I received my diploma and became
an assistant attorney, but I was sidetracked at
the very outset of my career. I was offered a
position on the Courier, for which I was to report
court proceedings. I did not succeed in securing[Pg 133]
any practice as a lawyer. I had but one case,
and lost it at every point.
“In 1898 I wrote my first story—for the Easter
number—and since then I have devoted myself
exclusively to literature. Maxim Gorki helped
me considerably in my literary work by his always
practical advice and suggestions.”
The anecdote is told that when this first story
was published Gorki telegraphed the Courier,
“Who is it who hides himself under the pseudonym
of Leonid Andreev?” And later, when
the Russian Life issued another of his stories,
the poet Mereschkowsky asked if Andreev was
the pseudonym of Gorki or of Chekhov.
But Andreev is best to be studied through his
writings.
“The Friend” is an effective bit of impressionism
which must have driven countless thousands
to repentant kindness toward neglected animals.
Vladimir, the typical young Russian, is a
promising writer, wrapped up in his work, and
safely past the period of gay carousing. At night
he returns to his room and his “only friend,”
Vasyuk, a little black-haired dog, who adores his
master. “My friend, my only friend,” are words
often on Vladimir’s lips, but at length he comes
to love Natalia, and Vasyuk gets his favorite[Pg 134]
dish of liver less often. One day the dog is taken
ill, but in his haste to visit Natalia, Vladimir does
not take Vasyuk to the veterinary. By and by
it is too late. In months to come, Vladimir fails
to make good his literary promise, and—
... then, like the cover of a coffin, heavy, dead
oblivion fell upon him.
The woman had also forsaken him; she too considered
herself deceived.
The fumy, vaporous nights went by, also the mercilessly
punishing white days, and often, more often
than before ... he lay in his bed ... and
whispered:
“My friend, my only friend!”
And his quivering hand fell faintly upon the empty
place.
From the foregoing, and even more from that
which follows, we may conclude it to be a peculiar
property of the sketch-form in fiction that
its story may not be told in synopsis. Indeed, in
the true sketch there is no story. Atmosphere,
character-drawing, swift outlining of a situation,
impressions of mood and feeling—all these permeate
the sketch, but crises in human lives, complications
arising therefrom, and the untangling
of the plotted skein—these belong to the short-story
and the novel.
For this reason much of Andreev’s shorter
work defies our efforts to retell it; one must go[Pg 135]
to the writer himself for his final phrase, his subtly
suggested situation, his almost uncanny evocation
of mood. “Valia,” for example, is one of his
sketches which baffle the second-hand narrator:
as well try to reconstruct an old-time beauty by
dressing up a lay-figure in hand-me-downs.
Valia is a sensitive child who is awakened from
his unconscious joy in home by the hard, prickling
kisses of a thin-lipped, long-necked woman
who announces herself to be his mother. Indignantly,
yet politely, the lad turns for denial to
his supposed mother, rosy and sweet-lipped, but
she tearfully confirms the claim—he had been
abandoned in babyhood when he was inconvenient,
but now that the mother was lonely she
claimed the child. The impending separation
tears the hearts of foster-father and -mother and
the child himself. Valia becomes nervous, fearful
of the dark, and pines almost to illness. But
joy and new health come to them all when the
courts, which have been invoked to aid the
unnatural mother, decide against her claim. At
length, however, the highest tribunal reverses
the lower court, and the child must go away. The
final scene leaves the real mother weeping because
her stranger-child takes no pleasure in playthings.
The situation is symbolical, for that is the only
appeal a sordid, self-serving woman knows how[Pg 136]
to make to a spirituelle child who has drawn his
spirituality not from her nature, but—who knows
whence, if not from the breast of his foster-mother!
And when the child at the last timidly approaches
the weeping egoist and with gentle dignity
promises to love her “all he can,” we see a
triumph of impressionistic sketch-work.
Even more difficult to outline is “The Man
Who Found the Truth.” It is the story told by
himself of a man who at sixty is released from an
unjust imprisonment, after having been convicted
years before of murdering several members of his
family in order to gain an inheritance. But when
he realizes the stress of his old life out in the world,
he has his room transformed into a model of his
old cell, hires a keeper from his prison, and once
more returns to a tranquil life. Its leit-motif is
strikingly like that of Pierre Loti’s “The Wall
Opposite.”
The last cry in mysticism is Andreev’s “A
Story Which Will Never Be Finished.” Seek to
lay your finger upon its precise meaning, and it
flutters away like a gauzy-winged visitant; and
yet every progressing line deepens an impression
upon the soul. It is a pervasive, atmospheric
thing, full of mysterious movements, potent
though nameless—breaths of uncharted freedom
whisper of an impinging world where our realities[Pg 137]
are unreal; sleeping senses, hitherto unsuspected,
strangely stir to their awakening; yet they do
not actually awaken. Is it war, is it death opening
out into life, is it emancipation—one doesn’t
quite know; yet it is all of these. Hawthorne
was never more vaguely pregnant, and Poe never
more perfectly conveyed the sense of an unnamed
something which is just about to be.
Here indeed Andreev is like Poe. Now and
then I hear him called “The Russian Poe.” The
epithet is not satisfactory. Something of our
American poet there is in the Russian, for both,
like Hawthorne, are masters of introspection,
and both know the ritual of fantasy as past-masters,
but when Andreev depicts the weird
there is always a basis of human reality. Poe
could harrow the soul with a sense of fantastic
horrors impending, but Andreev need only draw
aside the curtains and show us truth unadorned,
truth unrelieved by truth’s beautiful other half,
and a deeper shudder rocks the soul than ever
chilled the flesh at Poe’s phantasmagoric evocations.
Really, this young titan is two men—one
mystical like Hawthorne, a vein of melancholy in
his pessimism, but sympathetic withal, and showing
more pity for his characters than the realistic
school approves. The other fairly makes revel
with the gibbering images of war, abnormalities[Pg 138]
of soul rise and take on flesh at his bidding, and
there is no spirit so gloomy, wicked, and repellent
but he can conjure it into being for these terrible
story-pictures. Which will be the artist’s final
mood, one may not surely forecast. In either
extreme he is not his best self, one may surmise.
Certainly we should deplore the constant choice
of a theme like that of “The Abyss,” his first
important story, in which the love of a pure lad
for a spotless girl is transformed into a vicious
thing that leads at length to a revolting crime.
At the other end of the gamut sounds the author’s
idealistic note. “To the Stars,” his first drama,
is as far removed in tone from “The Abyss” as
the titles indicate. But Andreev’s dramas are
worthy of a separate study.
Doubtless the mantle of fatalism which dropped
from the shoulders of Turgenev and Tolstoi
successively will some day be discarded by
Russia’s younger prophets. Nietzsche influences
Andreev strongly, but so do the former great
Russian novelists; is it too much to expect that
a spirit of hope may yet penetrate the heart of
this genius who is still young? Just now the
revolution is outwardly cowed, anticipation of
better things has been rebuffed; but the spirit
of progress rising everywhere else is not for
nought, and out of the very blackness painted by[Pg 139]
Russia’s realists must come a determined and
successful struggle for vital reforms. Think of
a nation of which the recent Congress of Pathology
at Moscow could report:
They all drink, the students, the collegians, and even
the pupils of the primary schools. There are a great
number of alcoholics among children of from seven to
ten years of age. In the government of Perm, all the
students in the primary school, without exception,
drink vodka. In Livonia, 72 per cent. of the school-children
drink systematically. At Moscow, 64 per
cent. are given up to the vice.
These facts, on Russian authority, make one
accept the essential truth of Andreev’s terrible
revelations of depraved student life in his recent
play, “The Days of Our Life.” If only this black
realism be accepted as the prophet’s warning, its
revolting character will be not without justification.
It is, however, a paradoxical seer who can
in his play, “Black Masks,” ridicule the spiritual
struggle between darkness and light, and yet
write to an admirer that he finds in the Bible the
greatest teacher of all.
Four of Andreev’s longer stories deserve more
than mere mention. “A Dilemma”—sometimes
called “Thought,” which conforms to the Russian
title, Mysl (1902)—is a long short-story. It
is a remarkable psychological study of Kerzhentsev,[Pg 140]
a physician, who hovers between sanity
and madness. In spite of his superb endowments
of body and mind, he becomes obsessed with the
desire to murder his best friend, Alexis Savelov,
merely because Savelov had married the woman
whom the physician desired. This murder he
determines to commit under two conditions—the
murder shall be known to the victim’s wife,
yet the perpetrator must escape punishment.
One night, while dining with the Savelovs, the
doctor feigns a sort of mad fit, but for a whole
month craftily does not renew the pretense. At
length Kerzhentsev propounds his problem to his
intended victim in a veiled way, and the victim
argues that with a heavy metal paper-weight one
might crush a man’s head, and bids the doctor
go through such an action in dumb show. But
the wife protests against such risks, for she has
had a presentiment of evil. Soon after this the
doctor actually does crush the head of Savelov,
and in the confusion slips away to his home. Just
as he is falling asleep, delighted with the success
of his plan, a thought languidly enters his brain,
as though a voice issued from another: It is very
possible that Dr. Kerzhentsev is really insane. He
thought that he simulated, but he is really insane—insane
at this very instant.
Thus begins the terrible dilemma, “for he is[Pg 141]
fighting against himself for his own reason.” At
length to save himself from the madhouse he
confesses to the judges that he is not mad, but a
criminal deserving of punishment.
“The Red Laugh” (1904), which has been
translated into German, French, and English, is
Andreev’s most terrible piece of realism. If
this inspired picture of the Manchurian War is
true, and one feels that it is, General Sherman was
conservative. Those who thrill at war pictures
and feel the power of patriotism in the call of
battle will not enjoy the bloody horror of “The
Red Laugh.” The story is a service—of the
heroic remedy sort—which Andreev renders to
the cause of peace. Naked, lustful, scheming war,
hellish and brutal, that is the Russian’s picture—like
Wiertz in his mad paintings of blood and
torment. The title takes itself naturally from an
incident which the narrator, an officer, tells early
in the book, how that a young volunteer approaches
him with a countenance so intensely
white that the officer asks, “Are you afraid?”
With that the young man’s face bursts into the
red laugh—He has become a victim of war’s
awful stroke, frightful, unspeakable.
Sidorov fell suddenly to the ground and stared at
me in silence, with great, terrified eyes. Out of his
mouth poured a stream of blood.
[Pg 142]
“Judas Iscariot and the Others” (1907) is a
short novel truly notable for its unique motif—the
traitorous apostle is not inspired to betray
Jesus by mercenary motives, but in order to force
the Master to manifest his power and demonstrate
his Divinity. Thus were Judas a high-minded
patriot instead of a contemptible bribe-taker.
“The Seven Who Were Hanged” (1907) is
Andreev’s most distinguished work. As a novel,
it is sincere, powerful, and provocative. Whatever
one’s views of the death penalty for crime,
the author makes a tremendous appeal to pity.
Here are seven condemned ones who are to suffer
“the horror and the iniquity of capital punishment,”
and they surely are of “all sorts and conditions,”
from Musya, whose large womanhood
flows, a sustaining stream, to the least of her
fellow victims, down to that miserable one whose
inert soul suffers less than his brutalized body.
The identity of each is not lost for a moment in
the circumstances and occupations of imprisonment,
nor yet in the midnight journey to the
hanging place. They are individual, yet they
are pitiably types. Oh, the sadness of it—we feel
that to be the burden of the author’s soul, and
so it becomes our own. It is a poignant, fearful
picture, depressing and relentless, but more[Pg 143]
deeply imbued with pity than anything else
Andreev has written.
“Silence,” which was published in 1900, and is
therefore one of our author’s earliest stories, is a
sketch whose iterant impressionism is felt in every
line.
[Pg 144]
By Leonid Andreev
I
It was a moonlight night in May, and the
nightingales were singing, when the wife of
Father Ignatius entered his chamber. Her
countenance expressed suffering, and the little
lamp she held in her hand trembled. Approaching
her husband, she touched his shoulder, and
managed to say between her sobs:
“Father, let us go to Verochka!”
Without turning his head, Father Ignatius
glanced severely at his wife over the rims of his
spectacles, and looked long and intently, till she
waved her unoccupied hand and dropped on a
low divan.
“That one toward the other should be so pitiless!”
she pronounced slowly, with emphasis on
the final syllables, and her good plump face was
distorted with a grimace of pain and exasperation,
as if thus she would express what stern people
they were—her husband and daughter.
Father Ignatius smiled and arose. Closing his
book, he took off his spectacles, put them in the
case, and meditated. His long black beard, inwoven[Pg 146]
with silver threads, lay dignified on his
breast, and slowly heaved at every deep breath.
“Well, let us go,” said he.
Olga Stepanovna quickly arose and entreated
in an appealing, timorous voice:
“Only don’t revile her, Father! You know the
sort she is.”
Vera’s chamber was in the attic, and the narrow,
wooden stair bent and creaked under the
heavy tread of Father Ignatius. Tall and ponderous,
he bent his head to avoid striking the
floor of the upper story, and frowned disdainfully
when the white jacket of his wife brushed his
face. Well he knew that nothing would come of
their talk with Vera.
“Why do you come?” asked Vera, raising a
bared arm to her eyes. The other arm lay on top
of a white summer blanket, hardly distinguishable
from the fabric, so white, translucent, and
cold was its aspect.
“Verochka——” began her mother, but, sobbing,
she grew silent.
“Vera,” said her father, making an effort to
soften his dry and hard voice—“Vera, tell us,
what troubles you?”
Vera was silent.
“Vera, do not your mother and I deserve your[Pg 147]
confidence? Do we not love you? And is there
some one nearer to you than we? Tell us about
your sorrow, and, take the word of an experienced
old man, you’ll feel better for it. And we too.
Look at your aged mother, how much she suffers!”
“Verochka!”
“And I——” The dry voice trembled, truly
something had broken in it. “And I—do you
think I find it easy? As if I did not see that some
sorrow is gnawing at you—and what is it? And
I, your father, do not know what it is. Do you
think that right?”
Vera was silent. Father Ignatius very cautiously
stroked his beard, as if afraid that his
fingers would enmesh themselves involuntarily
in it, and continued:
“Against my wish you went to St. Petersburg—did
I pronounce a curse upon you, you who disobeyed
me? Or did I deny you money? Or,
perhaps, I have not been kind? Well, why, then,
are you silent? There, you’ve had your St.
Petersburg!”
Father Ignatius became silent, and there
loomed before him an image of something huge,
granite, and terrible, full of invisible dangers and
of strange and indifferent people. And it was
there that, alone and weak, his Vera had gone, and
it was there they had lost her. An awful hatred[Pg 148]
against that terrible and mysterious city arose
in the soul of Father Ignatius, and an anger
against his daughter, who was silent—obstinately
silent.
“St. Petersburg has nothing to do with it,” said
Vera morosely, and closed her eyes. “And nothing
is the matter with me. Better go to bed, it
is late.”
“Verochka, my child,” whimpered her mother,
“do tell me!”
“ Akh, Mamma!” Vera impatiently interrupted
her.
Father Ignatius sat down on a chair and
laughed.
“Well, then, it’s nothing?” he inquired
ironically.
“Father,” sharply ejaculated Vera, raising
herself from the pillow, “you know that I love
you and Mother. Well, I do feel a little weary.
But that will pass. Do go to sleep, and I also
wish to sleep. And to-morrow, or some other
time, we’ll have a chat.”
Father Ignatius arose so impetuously that the
chair hit the wall, and he took his wife’s
hand.
“Let us go.”
“Verochka!”
“Let us go, I tell you!” shouted Father[Pg 149]
Ignatius. “If she has forgotten God, shall
we——”
Almost forcibly he led Olga Stepanovna out of
the room, and when they descended the stairs,
his wife, decreasing her gait, said in a harsh
whisper:
“It was you, priest, who have made her such!
From you she learned her ways. And you’ll
answer for it. Akh, unhappy creature that I am!”
She burst into tears, and, as her vision grew
dim, her foot, missing a step, would descend with
a sudden jolt, as if she were eager to fall into some
abyss which waited below.
From that day Father Ignatius ceased to speak
to his daughter, but she seemed not to notice it.
As before, she lay in her room, or walked about,
continually with the palms of her hands wiping
her eyes, as if they contained some irritating
foreign substance. And, crushed between these
two silent people, the jolly, fun-loving wife of
the priest quailed and seemed lost, not knowing
what to say or do.
Occasionally Vera took a stroll. A week after
the interview she went out in the evening, as was
her habit. She was not seen again alive, as that
night she threw herself under the train, and it
cut her in two.
Father Ignatius himself directed the funeral.[Pg 150]
His wife was not present in church, for at the
news of Vera’s death she was prostrated by a
stroke. She lost control of her feet, hands, and
tongue, and when the church bells rang out she
lay motionless in the half-darkened room. She
heard the people intone the chants as they issued
out of church and passed the house, and she made
an effort to raise her hand to make the sign of the
cross, but her hand refused to obey; she wished
to say, “Farewell, Vera!” but the tongue lay in
her mouth huge and heavy. And her attitude
was so calm that it gave one an impression of
restfulness, or of sleep. Only, her eyes remained
open.
At the funeral, in church, were many people
who knew Father Ignatius, and many strangers.
All bewailed Vera’s terrible death, and tried to
detect in the movements and voice of Father
Ignatius tokens of a deep sorrow. They did not
love Father Ignatius, because of his severity and
proud manners, his scorn of sinners, his unforgiving
spirit, his envy and covetousness, his habit
of utilizing every opportunity to extort money
from his parishioners. They all wished to see
him suffer, to see his spirit broken, to see him conscious
in his two-fold guilt for the death of his
daughter—as a cruel father and a bad priest—incapable
of preserving his own flesh from sin.[Pg 151]
They cast searching glances at him, and he, feeling
these glances directed toward his back, made
efforts to hold erect its broad and strong expanse,
and his thoughts were not concerning his dead
daughter, but concerning his own dignity.
“A hardened priest!” with a shake of his head
said Karzenoff, a carpenter, to whom Father
Ignatius owed five rubles for frames.
And thus, hard and erect, Father Ignatius
reached the burial-ground; and in the same manner
he returned. Only at the door of his wife’s
chamber did his backbone relax a little, but this
may have been due to the fact that the height of
the door was insufficient to admit his tall figure.
The change from broad daylight made it hard for
him to distinguish the face of his wife, but, after
scrutiny, he was astonished at its calmness, and
because the eyes showed no tears. And there was
neither anger nor sorrow in the eyes—they were
dumb, though they kept silent with difficulty,
reluctantly, as did the entire round and helpless
body that pressed against the feather bedding.
“Well, how do you feel?” inquired Father
Ignatius.
But the lips were dumb; the eyes too were
silent. Father Ignatius laid his hand on her
forehead; it was cold and moist, and Olga Stepanovna
did not show in any way that she had[Pg 152]
felt the contact of the hand. When Father
Ignatius removed his hand there gazed at him,
immobile, two deep gray eyes, from the dilated
pupils seeming almost entirely dark, and there
was neither sadness in them nor anger.
“I am going into my own room,” said Father
Ignatius, who began to feel cold and terror.
He passed through the drawing-room, where,
as usual, everything appeared neat and in order,
and where, attired in white covers, stood tall
chairs, like corpses in their shrouds. In one
window hung an empty wire cage, with the door
open.
“Nastasya,” shouted Father Ignatius. His
own voice seemed to him coarse, and he felt ill
at ease because he raised it to so high a pitch in
these silent rooms, so soon after his daughter’s
funeral.
“Nastasya!” he called more softly, “where is
the canary?”
“It flew away, to be sure.”
“Why did you let it out?”
Nastasya began to weep, and, wiping her face
with the edges of her calico headkerchief, said
through her tears:
“It was my young mistress’s soul. Was it
right to hold it?”
And it seemed to Father Ignatius that the[Pg 153]
happy little yellow canary, always singing with
side-tilted head, was actually the soul of Vera,
and if it had not flown away it wouldn’t have
been possible to say that Vera had died. He became
even more incensed at the maid-servant
and shouted:
“Off with you!”
And because Nastasya did not vanish on the
instant he added:
“Fool!”
II
From the day of the funeral, silence reigned in
the little house. It was not stillness, for stillness
is merely the absence of sounds; it was silence,
because it seemed that they who were silent could
speak but would not. So thought Father Ignatius
each time he entered his wife’s chamber and met
that obstinate gaze, so heavy in its aspect that
it seemed to transform the very air into lead,
which bore down one’s head and spine. So
thought he, examining his daughter’s music-sheets,
which bore marks of her voice-work, and
also her books and her portrait, which she had
brought with her from St. Petersburg. Father
Ignatius never deviated from the following order
when scrutinizing the portrait: First, he would[Pg 154]
gaze on the cheek upon which a strong light had
been thrown by the painter; in his fancy he
would see upon it a slight wound, which he had
noticed on Vera’s cheek in death, and the source
of which mystified him. More than once he
meditated upon causes, and each time he reasoned
that if it had been made by the train the
entire skull would have been crushed, whereas
the head of Vera remained wholly untouched.
It was possible that some one had done it with
his foot when the body was being lifted, or accidentally
with a finger-nail.
The details of Vera’s death, contemplated at
length, taxed the strength of Father Ignatius, so
that he would soon pass on to the eyes. These
were dark, handsome, with long lashes that cast
deep shadows beneath, causing the whites to seem
particularly luminous, both eyes appearing to be
inclosed in black mourning frames. A strange
expression had been given them by the unknown
but talented artist; it seemed as if in the space
between the eyes and the object upon which they
gazed lay a thin, transparent film. It resembled
somewhat the effect made by an imperceptible
layer of dust on the black top of a piano, softening
the shine of polished wood. And no matter how
Father Ignatius placed the portrait, the eyes insistently
followed him; but there was no speech[Pg 155]
in them, only silence; and this silence was so
clear that it seemed it could be heard. Gradually
Father Ignatius began to think that he heard
silence.
Every morning after breakfast the priest would
enter the drawing-room, take in at a rapid glance
the empty cage and the other familiar objects,
and, seating himself in the arm-chair, would close
his eyes and listen to the silence of the house.
There was something grotesque about this. The
cage kept silence, stilly and tenderly, and in this
silence were felt sorrow and tears and distant
dead laughter. The silence of his wife, deepened
by the walls, continued insistent, heavy as lead,
and terrible, so terrible that on the hottest day
Father Ignatius would be seized with cold shivers.
Continuous and frigid as the grave, and mysterious
as death, was the silence of his daughter.
The silence itself seemed to share this suffering
and struggled, as it were, with the terrible desire
to pass into speech; something strong and cumbersome,
as a machine, held it motionless, however,
and stretched it out as a wire. And somewhere
at the distant end, the wire would begin
to agitate and resound subduedly, feebly, and
plaintively. With joy, yet with terror, Father
Ignatius would seize upon this engendered sound,
and, resting with his arms upon the arm of the[Pg 156]
chair, would lean his head forward, waiting for
the sound to reach him. But it would break and
pass into silence.
“How stupid!” muttered Father Ignatius
angrily, arising from the chair, still erect and tall.
Through the window he saw, suffused with sunlight,
the street paved with round, even-sized
stones, and, directly across, the stone wall of a
long, windowless shed. On the corner stood a
cab-driver, looking like a clay statue, and it was
difficult to understand why he stood there, when
for hours there was not a single passer-by.
III
Father Ignatius had occasion for considerable
speech outside his house. There was talking to
be done with the clergy, with the members of his
flock, while officiating at ceremonies, sometimes
with acquaintances at social evenings; yet, upon
his return, he would feel invariably that the entire
day he had been silent. This was due to the fact
that with none of those people could he talk upon
the matter which concerned him most, and upon
which he would reflect each night: Why did
Vera die?
Father Ignatius did not seem to realize that
now this could not be known, and thought that[Pg 157]
it was still possible to know. Each night—all
his nights had become sleepless—he would re-experience
that moment when he and his wife, at
dead midnight, had stood near Vera’s bed, and
he had entreated her: “Tell us!” And when in
his recollection he would reach these words, the
rest appeared to him not as it was in reality. His
closed eyes, preserving in their darkness a live,
undimmed picture of that night, saw how Vera
raised herself in her bed, smiled, and tried to say
something. But what was it she had tried to say?
That unuttered word of Vera’s, which would have
solved all, seemed so near that if one only had
bent his ear and suppressed the beats of his heart,
one could have heard it—and at the same time it
was so infinitely, so hopelessly distant. Father
Ignatius would arise from his bed, stretch forth
his wringing hands, and cry:
“Vera!”
And he would be answered by silence.
One evening Father Ignatius entered the chamber
of Olga Stepanovna, whom he had not come
to see for a week, seated himself at her head, and,
turning away from that insistent, heavy gaze,
said:
“Mother, I wish to talk to you about Vera.
Do you hear?”
Her eyes were silent, and Father Ignatius,[Pg 158]
raising his voice, spoke sternly and powerfully,
as he was accustomed to speak to penitents:
“I am aware that you are under the impression
that I have been the cause of Vera’s death.
Reflect, however: did I love her less than you
loved her? You reason absurdly. I have been
stern; did that prevent her from doing as she
wished? I forfeited the dignity of a father, I
humbly bent my neck, when she defied my
malediction and departed—hence. And you—did
you not plead with her to remain, did you
not weep, old woman, until I commanded you to
be silent? Did I beget cruelty in her? Did I
not teach her about God, about humility, about
love?”
Father Ignatius quickly glanced into the eyes
of his wife, and turned away.
“What was there for me to do when she refused
to reveal her sorrow? Did I not command her?
Did I not entreat her? I suppose, in your opinion,
I should have dropped on my knees before
the girl, and cried like an old woman! How
should I have known what was going on in her
head! Cruel, heartless daughter!”
Father Ignatius came down on his knee with
his fist.
“There was no love in her—that’s what! As
far as I’m concerned, that’s settled, of course—I’m[Pg 159]
a tyrant! Perhaps she loved you—you who
wept and humbled yourself?”
Father Ignatius gave a hollow laugh.
“There’s love for you! And as a solace for you,
what a death she chose! A cruel, ignominious
death. She died in the dust, in the dirt—as a
d-dog who is kicked in the jaw.”
The voice of Father Ignatius sounded low and
hoarse:
“I feel ashamed! Ashamed to go out in the
street! Ashamed before the altar! Ashamed
before God! Cruel, undeserving daughter! Accurst
in thy grave!”
When Father Ignatius glanced at his wife she
was unconscious; she came to only after several
hours. When she regained consciousness her
eyes maintained their silence, and it was impossible
to tell whether or not she remembered what
Father Ignatius had said.
That very night—it was a moonlit, calm, warm,
deathly still night in May—Father Ignatius,
proceeding on his tiptoes so as not to be overheard
by his wife and the sick-nurse, climbed up
the stairs and entered Vera’s room. The window
in the attic had remained closed since the death
of Vera, and the air was dry and warm, with a
light odor of burning that comes from heat generated
during the day in the iron roof. Long[Pg 160]
unvisited, an atmosphere of lifelessness and forsakenness
permeated the apartment, while the
timber of the the walls, and other objects
gave forth a slight odor of active decay. The
moonlight streamed in through the window, and
its reflections on the white floor cast a dim light
into the corners of the room, while the white,
clean bed, with two pillows, one large and one
small, seemed phantom-like and aërial. Father
Ignatius opened the window, causing a considerable
current of fresh air to pour into the room,
smelling of dust, of the near-by river, and of the
blooming linden. An indistinct sound as of
voices in chorus also drifted in occasionally;
evidently young people were rowing and singing.
Resembling a white phantom, Father Ignatius
made his way noiselessly, in bare feet, to the
empty bed, bent his knees, and fell face down on
the pillows, embracing them—on that spot where
Vera’s face should have been. Long he lay thus;
the song grew louder, then died out; but he still
lay there, while his long black hair spread over
his shoulders and the bed.
The moon had changed its position, and the
room grew darker, when Father Ignatius raised
his head and murmured, charging his voice with
the entire strength of his long-suppressed and
unconscious love, and hearkening to his own[Pg 161]
words, as if it were not he who was listening, but
Vera.
“Vera, my daughter! Do you understand what
you are to me, daughter? Little daughter! My
heart, my blood, and my life. Your father—your
old father—is already gray, and also
feeble.”
The shoulders of Father Ignatius shook, and
the entire burdened figure became convulsed.
Suppressing his agitation, Father Ignatius murmured
tenderly, as to an infant:
“Your old father entreats you. No, little
Vera, he supplicates. He weeps. He never has
wept before. Your sorrow, little child, your sufferings—they
are also mine. Greater than mine.”
Father Ignatius shook his head.
“Greater, Verochka. What is death to an old
man like me? But you—if you only knew how
delicate and weak and timid you are! Do you
recall how you bruised your finger once and the
blood trickled and you cried a little? My child!
I know that you love me, love me intensely.
Every morning you kiss my hand. Tell me, do
tell me, what grief troubles your little head, and
I—with these hands—shall smother your grief.
They are still strong, Vera, these hands.”
The hair of Father Ignatius shook.
“Tell me!”
[Pg 162]
Father Ignatius fixed his eyes on the wall, and
wrung his hands.
“Tell me!”
Stillness prevailed in the room, and from afar
was heard the prolonged, interrupted whistle of
a locomotive.
Father Ignatius, gazing out of his dilated eyes,
as if there had suddenly arisen before him the
frightful phantom of the mutilated corpse, slowly
raised himself from his knees, and, making an
incredulous motion, reached for his head with his
hand, with spread and tensely stiffened fingers.
Making a step toward the door, Father Ignatius
whispered brokenly:
“Tell me!”
And he was answered by silence.
IV
The next day, after an early and lonely dinner,
Father Ignatius went to the graveyard, for the
first time since his daughter’s death. It was
warm, deserted, and still; it seemed more like a
brilliantly clear night. Following habit, Father
Ignatius straightened his back with effort, looked
severely about him, and thought that he was the
same as formerly; he was conscious neither of
the new, terrible weakness in his legs, nor that[Pg 163]
his long beard had become entirely white, as if a
hard frost had hit it. The road to the graveyard
led through a long, direct street, slightly on an
upward incline, and at its termination loomed the
arch of the graveyard gate, resembling a dark,
perpetually open mouth, edged with glistening
teeth.
Vera’s grave was situated in the depth of the
grounds, where the sandy little pathways ended,
and for a considerable time Father Ignatius was
obliged to blunder along the narrow footpaths
which led in a broken line between green mounds,
forgotten and abandoned by all. Here and there
appeared sloping tombstones, green with age,
broken railings, and large, heavy stones planted
in the ground, and seemingly crushing it with
some cruel, ancient spite.
Near one such stone was the grave of Vera. It
was covered with fresh turf, turned yellow;
around, however, all was in bloom. The ash
embraced the maple tree; and the widely spread
hazel bush stretched out over the grave its bending
branches with their downy, shaggy foliage.
Sitting down on a neighboring grave and catching
his breath, Father Ignatius looked around him,
throwing a glance toward the cloudless expanse
of sky, where in complete immobility hung the
glowing sun disk—and here he felt only that deep,[Pg 164]
incomparable stillness which reigns in graveyards,
when the wind is absent and the slumbering
foliage has ceased its rustling. And anew the
thought came to Father Ignatius that this was
not a stillness, but a silence. It extended to the
very brick walls of the graveyard, crept over
them, and occupied the town. And it terminated
only—in those gray, obstinate, and persistently
silent eyes.
Father Ignatius’s shoulders shivered, and he
lowered his eyes upon the grave of Vera. He
gazed long upon the little tufts of grass uprooted
together with the earth from some open, windswept
field and not successful in adapting themselves
to a strange soil; he could not imagine
that here, under this grass, only a few feet from
him, lay Vera. And this nearness seemed incomprehensible,
and brought confusion into the soul,
and a strange agitation. She of whom Father
Ignatius was accustomed to think as of one passed
away forever into the dark depths of eternity was
here, close by—and it was hard to understand
that nevertheless she was no more and never
again would be. And in the mind’s fancy of
Father Ignatius it seemed that if he could only
utter some word, which was almost upon his lips,
or if he could make some sort of movement, Vera
would issue forth from her grave and arise to the[Pg 165]
same height and beauty that was once hers. And
not alone would she arise, but all the corpses,
intensely sensitive in their solemnly-cold silence.
Father Ignatius removed his wide-brimmed
black hat, smoothed down his disarranged hair,
and whispered:
“Vera!”
The fear that he might be overheard by a
stranger made Father Ignatius feel ill at ease and
caused him to look carefully around him as he
stepped on the grave. No one was present, and
this time he repeated loudly:
“Vera!”
It was the voice of an aged man, sharp and
demanding, and it was strange that so powerfully
expressed a desire should receive no response.
“Vera!”
Loudly and insistently the voice called, and
when it relapsed into silence it seemed for a
moment that somewhere from underneath came
an incoherent answer. And Father Ignatius,
clearing his ear of his long hair, pressed it to the
rough, prickly turf.
“Vera, tell me!”
With terror, Father Ignatius felt pouring into
his ear something cold as of the grave, which
froze his marrow; Vera seemed to be speaking—speaking,
however, with the same unbroken[Pg 166]
silence. This feeling became more racking and
terrible, and when Father Ignatius finally forced
himself to wrench away his head, his face was as
pale as that of a corpse, and he fancied that the
entire atmosphere trembled and palpitated from
a resounding silence, and that this terrible sea
was being swept by a wild hurricane. The silence
strangled him; with icy waves it rolled through
his head and agitated the hair; it smote against
his breast, which groaned under the blows. Trembling
from head to foot, casting around him sharp
and sudden glances, Father Ignatius slowly raised
himself and with a prolonged and torturous effort
attempted to straighten his spine and to give
proud dignity to his trembling body. He succeeded
in this. With measured protractedness,
Father Ignatius shook the dirt from his knees,
put on his hat, made the sign of the cross three
times over the grave, and walked away with an
even and firm gait, not recognizing, however, the
familiar burial ground and losing his way.
“Well, here I’ve gone astray!” smiled Father
Ignatius, halting at the branching of the footpaths.
He stood there for a moment, and, unreflecting,
turned to the left, because it was impossible to
stand and to wait. The silence drove him on.
It arose from the green graves; it was the breath[Pg 167]
issuing from the gray, melancholy crosses; in
thin, stifling currents it came from all pores of
the earth, satiated with the dead. Father
Ignatius increased his stride. Dizzy, he circled
the same paths, jumped over graves, stumbled
across railings, clutching with his hands the
prickly, metallic garlands, and turning the soft
material of his dress into tatters. His sole thought
was to escape. He fled from one place to another,
and finally broke into a dead run, seeming very
tall and unusual in the flowing cassock, and his
hair streaming in the wind. A corpse arisen from
the grave could not have frightened a passer-by
more than this wild figure of a man, running and
leaping, and waving his arms, his face distorted
and insane, and the open mouth breathing with
a dull, hoarse sound. With one long leap, Father
Ignatius landed on a little street, at one end of
which appeared the small church attached to the
graveyard. At the entrance, on a low bench,
dozed an old man, seemingly a distant pilgrim,
and near him, assailing each other, were two
quarreling old beggar women, filling the air with
their oaths.
When Father Ignatius reached his home, it was
already dusk, and there was light in Olga Stepanovna’s
chamber. Not waiting to undress, or
even to remove his hat, Father Ignatius, dusty[Pg 168]
and tattered, approached his wife and fell on his
knees.
“Mother ... Olga ... have pity on
me!” he wept. “I shall go mad.”
He beat his head against the edge of the table
and he wept with anguish, as one who was weeping
for the first time. Then he raised his head, confident
that a miracle would come to pass, that his
wife would speak and would pity him.
“My love!”
With his entire big body he drew himself toward
his wife—and met the gaze of those gray
eyes. There was neither compassion in them, nor
anger. It was possible his wife had forgiven him,
but in her eyes there was neither pity nor anger.
They were dumb and silent.
And silent was the entire dark, deserted house.
[Pg 169]
GORKI THE BITTER
Some day we shall be indebted to the clear-visioned
critic who will expound for us the
true place of the unpleasant, the terrible, even
the horrible, in fiction; and the study would not
be complete without a thorough-going examination
of Russian literature generally, and the writings
of Maxim Gorki in particular.
Such an inquiry—which I must only touch
upon—would doubtless focus upon two factors
of importance: the one a primary cause—the
nature of the author as conditioned by self,
environment, and nationality; the other a secondary
cause—the ultimate purposes of fiction.
Phrased differently, we have the two elements:
what an author writes because he is what and
where he is, and what he writes quite deliberately.
Reference has already been made, in these introductory
studies, to the sombre, hopeless, and
even tragic tone of Russian life—a tone sounded
deeply in its literature. In fact, the broader the
sweep of view, the more instances stand forth to
support the statement that all Muscovite art
feels the same impulse—witness in an exemplary
and typical way the paintings of Verestchagin
and the music of Tschaikovsky. It is an inviting[Pg 170]
theme, this one of why one nation should
drink fiery vodka, another phlegmatic beer, and
yet another light wine. Are the national characteristics
which plainly go with drinks and foods
and pleasures causes, in the final analysis, or
effects? Do servitude and stolidity and hopelessness
on the one hand, and thin-nostriled freedom
and lofty spirit on the other, arise from forces
which the historian may trace clearly to their
political well-springs, or are there certain imponderable
potencies in the air of different lands
which in the very beginning of things instilled a
spirit of fatalism into the Moslem, nihilism into
the Russian, emotionalism into the French, and a
nervous need for action into the American? When
outward national conditions change, or when
nations are transplanted, precisely what is it in
climate that breeds essentially the same strain
cycle after cycle?
So we should have to dissect, weigh, and classify
all available facts about Russia past and present
in order to get an unclouded understanding of
the national temper, just as a similar study of
Gorki’s antecedents and life, for instance, would
illuminate his literary expressions. Each of these
studies would be consistent with the other, for
Gorki is a national figure, though, as all such
iconoclastic spirits will, he outrussias his own[Pg 171]
middle-class countrymen in outspoken unfaith
in and defiance of the god-of-things-as-they-are.
The second great factor for finding the place
and potency of the unpleasant, the bitter, and
the terrible in fiction consists in the purpose of
fiction, which broadly is one of two: either to
picture forth life or to interpret life. When the
fictional artist—granted that he is clear-headed—sets
out to hold the mirror relentlessly up to
life, he becomes an extreme realist. When he
faithfully paints life as he sees it, sincerely using
his selective powers so as to present what he conceives
to be types rather than mere personalities,
and thus interprets life for those of less penetrative
and constructive vision, we have a philosophical
realist. When he takes liberties with the spirit
of facts (not merely with the facts themselves,
which may be just as real in one order as in
another), he is a romancer. When he uses facts
to support and enforce ideals of his own, he is an
idealist.
Thus all fiction, so far as it has a respectable
purpose at all, falls easily into one class or the
other—that which merely represents life, or
that which interprets life while it represents it.
All the farther motives—amusement, teaching,
excoriation, demagoguery, what not—line up
behind these two prime purposes.
[Pg 172]
Now, how does all this bear upon the place of
unpleasant fiction? Very vitally, and we are
considering Gorki—a highly morbid and at times
revolting writer—as a notable example of this
rather Russian characteristic. In him we have a
spirit who looks at facts, despises all palliations,
dares greatly for his convictions, and in it all is
Russian through and through. Such a man, of
such a history, in such a period, in such a land,
with such a motive of truth-telling, for such a
purpose of reform, could not write pleasant, tinkly
fiction. Russians read him because Russia must
read him. An author draws men to his message
either because they need it without liking it, or
like it already. First of all, Gorki is himself—a
soul sensitive to the tragic, the morbid, and the
bitter—then he boldly gives Russia her own self-made
wormwood to drink while she thirsts in the
hour of her crucifixion.
With two classes I have no sympathy: writers
who pander to morbid, dirty tastes, and readers
who support gruesome, nasty writers for pure
love of noisome pestilence. No more do we have
need for the not-impure and not-revolting yet
depressing and pessimistic fiction which serves
no good purpose beyond that of producing
revenue. The place for such unpleasant, unhappy-beginning,
tearful-middle, and sorrowful-ending[Pg 173]
stories is precisely nowhere. But in Gorki we
have a queer contradiction of conditions: some
of his most revolting fiction is as important to the
Muscovite land which bred it as light is vital to
a dark place. Yet when some one of these poignant,
dreadful diagnoses of Russian sicknesses is
translated and spread abroad, say in English, it
should be read only by those who are students of
the writer and his country, and not by the young
or the morbid. It is needful to expose ulcers in
a clinic, it is indecent and disgusting to parade
them on the street. In a word: the horrible in
fiction needs be justified by a high purpose.
In “The Exorcism,” a thousand-word sketch,
Gorki has produced a terrible illustration of how
worse than useless such material may be for purposes
of general reading in translation, while
originally serving a tremendous moral purpose
by showing his own people what beasts some of
their fellows are.
Along a village street a strange procession is
moving slowly with wild howls. The dense,
wave-like crowd surrounds a cart. Tied by her
wrists to a rope attached to the cart is a slight,
almost girlish woman—entirely nude. Dazed,
halting, gazing into nothing with wide, lacklustre
look, she staggers bleeding on. Now and
again a tall peasant standing in the cart, his white[Pg 174]
canine teeth showing, his eyes bloodshot from
fury, lays a lash upon the woman’s body, already
covered with unspeakable slashes and bruises.
And every fiendish brutality—detailed and repeated
until the soul sickens—the men, women,
and children of the mob acclaim!
“This,” he concludes, “which I have written
above, is not an allegorical description of the
persecution and torture of a prophet, who has
no honor in his own country—no, unfortunately,
it is not that! It is called an ‘exorcism.’ Thus
do husbands punish their wives for infidelity;
this is a picture from life, a custom—and I beheld
it in the year 1891, on the 15th of July, in the
village of Kandybovko, Government of Kherson.”
Need I say that I have toned down the horror
of this presentment, and that I relate it, horrible
still, to show the very futility of such pictures as
pictures, and their very great worth, to those concerned,
as pleas for reform?
The readers of modern fiction need to look this
question full in the face and then make their
feelings known to the magazines. There is a
place for all pathological studies, whether of
society, soul, or body, by priest, physician,
sociologist, and novelist. But is that place either
the market-place, or a fiction-printing magazine
whose pages invite the scrutiny of children as[Pg 175]
well as morbid adults? If we segregate bodily
pestilence, why should the public magazine and
the public playhouse be allowed to spread contagion?
Is there no difference between an earnest
fictional presentation of moral problems which
must be solved more or less publicly, and the
mere skilful portrayal of lust and degradation
and easy morals, with no possible resultant good?
If a hatter took it into his head to be interested
in smallpox, what would the authorities say?
Well, shall magazines be exposed for general circulation
because that same hatter, and a million
of his like, love dirty, crime-teaching, and viciously
morbid fiction? Some one must be brave
enough to declare the difference between “frank”
fiction in books for those who really wish to study
social problems (and there are too many filthy
books sold under the guise of social study) and
the printing of such material in the magazines
which make appeal to families for their circulation.
We can keep such books out of the home
and the library if we wish, but when vicious short-stories
creep into otherwise clean magazines, the
damage is great enough to be serious.
But Gorki’s fiction is not unclean, as a rule,
even when it deals with “broad” subjects. He
moves directly and simply among the facts of an
unlovely and often brutalized life and tells the[Pg 176]
truth about it without interpretation or apology.
For example, here is the story of “The Khan and
His Son,” as told by a blind mendicant. It is
more romantic than most of Gorki’s work.
Mosolaīma el Asvab, an old Crimean Khan, is
possessed of many women in his harem, who love
“the old eagle” for the noble fire of his spirit,
which age has not quenched. One above all
others is his favorite, a Kazak prisoner maid from
the steppes of the Dnieper. Once when the Khan’s
much-loved son, Alhalla, returns from a victorious
raid on the Russians, the father exchanges
with him words of affection and rashly makes
the time-honored oriental promise: “What wilt
thou take from the hand of thy father, Alhalla?
Tell me, and I will give thee everything, according
to thy desire.”
And the son asks of his father the one thing the
old man loves best and leans upon in his old age—the
Russian prisoner maid.
The Khan spake not—for a space he said no word,
for so long as was required to crush the shudder in his
heart—and, after this pause, he said, boldly and firmly:
“Take her! Let us finish the feast, and then thou
shalt take her.”
The son knows what his request means, and
soon they fall to talking of the sacrifice required.[Pg 177]
But to the pleadings of the old Khan the son
returns only the argument of his own love for
the girl. At length the young man proposes that
“in mercy to each other” they fling her into the
sea from the mountain, and in despair the Khan
consents.
Summoned by her lord, the girl divines all,
and asks only that she be carried to the place of
sacrifice in the arms of her “old eagle,” whom
she loves. And so they slowly journey to the
cliff, and by his arms she is flung into the sea.
The son at last turns away, but—
With swift strides the Khan approached the brink,
and hurled himself down. His son did not hold him
back, there was no time for that. And again nothing
was audible from the sea—neither shriek nor noise of
the Khan’s fall. Only the waves plashed on there, and
the wind hummed wild songs.
Long did Tolaīk Alhalla gaze below, and then he
said aloud:
“And grant me, also, as stout a heart, O Allah!”
And then he went forth into the gloom of the night....
Thus perished Khan Mosolaīma el Asvab,
and Tolaīk Alhalla became Khan of the Crimea.
Of all his varied and acrid experiences the
brain of “Maxim the Bitter,” as his pseudonym
means, is a bursting note-book. From it he[Pg 178]
selects with entire artlessness—that is, without
either the patience or the knowledge which true
art presupposes—whatever he needs for his
fictional work. Hence his longer productions,
novels and plays, are not well constructed.
Indeed, they are marvellous mixtures of idealism,
realism, humor, shocking openness, and drivel,
illuminated in sudden patches by exquisite
descriptions and lofty beauties. The best example
of his novels is “Fomá Gordyéeff,” and his
strongest play is “The Night Asylum.”
The general tone of Gorki’s work is not so
depressing, because not so hopeless, as that of
his fellow fiction-writers of the younger generation;
but none of them dives so deep into the
sub-silt of the great Russian stream, for none is so
native to its turgid, fetid flow. To witness before
our eyes, for example, the dragging down of the
girl in the short-story “Twenty-Six and One
Other,” is so terrible as to revolt the hardened.
Yet in his tramps, his thieves, his broken-down
derelicts, there is a certain impudent bravery that
strikes a new note of hopefulness for submerged
Russia. It is this, I think, that endeared the
young apostle of the proletariat when from 1892
to 1897 his greatest short fictional work was done.
He not only had a message for revolutionary
Russia, but the spirit of his characters was precisely[Pg 179]
what so many of the drifting, sodden wrecks
needed—boldness to look up.
For many superficial English and American
readers Gorki furnished what Professor Phelps
has aptly compared to a slumming party—they
were pleased to be nauseated. Naturally, they
soon dropped the new toy. But others have continued
to read him, some because they are in
sympathy with the reform movement, some from
sheer enjoyment of the terrible, others for the
flashes of genius which are frequent enough to
remind us that he has not lived up to the anticipations
his earlier writings evoked. In this
country, he has lost general sympathy, especially
since his comparatively recent visit culminated
in the disclosure of his illicit relations with his
travelling companion, and much consequent
newspaper gossip; so that on the whole we wait
for another to wear the mantle of Tolstoi, which
so many, six years ago, were ready to cast upon
the shoulders of Maxim Gorki.
Gorki has had a wild and varied life,—but he
may tell the story in his own words:
“I was born March 14th, either in 1868 or
1869, in Nijni Novgorod, in the family of Vassili
Vassilezewitsch Kaschirin, dyer, to his daughter
Warwara, and Maxim Sawwatjev Pjeschkow,[Pg 180]
who, according to his sign, was an upholsterer.
Thenceforth I have borne honorably and without
a stain the title of a member of the guild of artists.
I was baptized by the name of Alexei, but in
choosing a pseudonym I preferred my father’s
name, Maxim.
“My real name is therefore Alexei Maximowitsch
Pjeschkow. My father died in Astrakhan
when I was five years old. After the death of my
mother my grandfather placed me in a shoe-store.
I was then nine years old, and my grandfather
had taught me to read in the Psalter and Prayer
Book. I ran away from my studies and became
a draughtsman’s apprentice; ran away from him
and entered the workshop of a painter of saints’
images; then I served on a steamer as a cook’s
boy; then I became a gardener’s assistant.
“Here I remained till my fifteenth year, spending
all my time in zealously reading the productions
of known authors, such as ‘Guak; or,
Unshakable Fidelity,’ ‘Andreas Fearnaught,’
‘Jacschka, the Cut-throat,’ etc.
“While I was serving as cook’s boy on the
steamboat, the cook, Smury, gained a powerful
influence over my development. He persuaded
me to read the ‘Legends of the Saints,’ Eckartshausen,
Gogol, Gljeb Uspenski, Dumas père,
and various books on Freemasonry.
[Pg 181]
“Up to that time I had been a sworn enemy of
all books and of all printed paper, even including
my passport. After my fifteenth year I felt a
passionate wish to learn, in pursuance of which
I betook myself to Kasan, under the impression
that knowledge would be imparted free to all who
desired it. It turned out, however, that this was
not the case; so I went to work in a pretzel
bakery, at a salary of three rubles a month.
“Of all the kinds of work I have tried, this was
the hardest. In Kasan I came into relations with
the ‘Lost People’ and lived long with them. I
worked in the villages on the Volga, now as a
woodchopper, now as a porter, and during this
time read every book I could lay my hands on,
which various kind people supplied me with. I
got along very badly, and in 1888 even tried to
kill myself by shooting a bullet into my body.
“I lay a long time in the hospital, but finally
recovered and went into the apple trade. I
finally turned my back on inhospitable Kasan, to
try my luck in Zarizyn, where I got a job as a
railroad attendant. Then I returned to Nijni,
where I had to go up for the army. But since
they could not make use of fellows with holes in
their bodies, I escaped the fate of becoming a
soldier, and instead became a Munich beer seller.
I soon exchanged this calling for that of a clerk[Pg 182]
in the office of Lanin, a lawyer of Nijni Novgorod.
“That was a turning point in my life. Lanin’s
influence on my development was immeasurably
great. I owe this cultivated and great-hearted
man more than to any one else. But, however
agreeable I found life with Lanin, where my soul
could at last find room to breathe, I was again
impelled to the life of a tramp. And I have
tramped all over Russia. Where have I not been!
What have I not seen and suffered! What kind
of work have I not done!”
By Maxim Gorki
I
The burning July sun blazed dazzlingly over
Smolkena, pouring down upon the old huts
a generous stream of resplendent rays. A goodly
share of the sunlight fell to the roof of the
Starosta’s[2] hut, newly recovered with smoothly-planed,
yellow, fragrant planks. It was Sunday,
and almost the entire population of the village
had gone out into the street, thickly overgrown
with grass and bespattered in spots with quantities
of dry mud. A large group of peasants—men
and women—had gathered in front of the
Starosta’s hut. Some sat on the earthwork around
the house, others simply stood; while the children
chased one another in and out of the throng,
calling forth from the elders rebukes and blows.
The centre of the crowd was a tall man, with
large, drooping mustaches. To judge from his
swarthy face, covered with thick gray bristles
and a network of deep wrinkles, as well as from
the gray tufts of hair which forced their way from
under the dirty straw hat, he might have been
[Pg 184]fifty years of age. He was gazing on the ground,
and the nostrils of his large, gristly nose were
quivering; and when he raised his head, throwing
his glance upon the windows of the Starosta’s hut,
his eyes—large, melancholy, and even morose—became
visible; they were sunk deep within their
orbits, and the bushy brows cast shadows over
their dark pupils. He was dressed in the brown
under-cassock of a lay-brother, worse for the
wear; it hardly covered his knees, and was girt
with cord. Over his back was flung a bag; in his
right hand he carried a long stick with iron ferrule;
his left hand he held in his bosom. The people
eyed him suspiciously, derisively, with contempt;
and with evident joy in having caught a wolf
before he had had time to do hurt to their flock.
He was passing through the village, and had
asked for a drink at the window of the Starosta’s
hut. The Starosta gave him cider and entered
into conversation with him. The wayfarer, however,
unlike his kind, answered unwillingly. The
Starosta asked him for his passport, but none was
forthcoming. It was decided to send him to the
local magistrate. The Starosta chose as the man’s
escort the village deputy, and was now in the hut
giving him directions, having in the meantime
left the prisoner in the midst of the mob which
made sport of him.
[Pg 185]
The prisoner stood near the trunk of a willow
and rested against it his stooped back.
Presently there appeared on the staircase of
the hut a dim-eyed old man, with a foxy face and
a gray, wedge-shaped beard. He lowered his
booted feet step by step, measuredly, and his
round stomach moved from side to side solidly
under the long calico shirt. Just over his shoulder
came to view the bearded, four-cornered face of
the deputy.
“Do you understand me, Efimushka?” the
Starosta questioned the deputy.
“Why shouldn’t I understand? It’s easy
enough. Simply means I am to take this man
to the magistrate—and there’s an end of it!”
The deputy, pronouncing his speech with measured
emphasis and with comical dignity, winked
at the public.
“And the papers?”
“The papers are stuck away in my bosom.”
“Well, all right, then,” said the Starosta, and,
scratching his sides energetically, he added:
“Go, and God be with you!”
“Well, shall we march on, father?” said the
deputy to the prisoner.
“You might furnish a conveyance,” grumbled
the prisoner at the deputy’s proposition.
The Starosta smiled.
[Pg 186]
“A con—vey—ance? The idea! There are
lots of you fellows tramping across fields and
villages. Where are all the horses to come from?
You’ve got to make it on foot; that’s all there’s
to it!”
“That’s nothing, father; let us go,” said the
deputy cheerfully. “Do you think it so far?
Can’t be more than twenty versts! You’ll be
there before you know it. We shall make a nice
trip of it. And afterwards you shall have a rest.”
“In a cool place,” explained the Starosta.
“That’s nothing,” the deputy hastened to say.
“A man, when he is very tired, will find rest even
in jail. And especially after a hot day you will
find it cool and comfortable there.”
The prisoner eyed his escort sharply; the latter
smiled good-naturedly and frankly.
“Well, come along, honest father! Good-bye,
Vasil Gavrilich! Let’s go!”
“God be with you, Efimushka! Use both your
eyes.”
“Yes, you’ll have to look sharp!” was the suggestion
thrown at the deputy by a young peasant
in the crowd.
“What, do you think I’m an infant?”
They started, keeping close to the huts, so as
to be within the strip of shadow. The man in the
cassock walked in front, with the loose but rapid[Pg 187]
gait of a being accustomed to roaming. The
deputy, with a sturdy stick in his hand, followed.
Efimushka was a little peasant, low in stature,
but built strongly, with a broad, good-natured
face framed in an unkempt red beard beginning
just below his bright gray eyes. He nearly always
smiled at something, showing his healthy yellow
teeth, and wrinkling his nose as if he wanted to
sneeze. He was dressed in a long garment whose
folds were caught up at the waist with a belt, so
that they might not hamper his feet; on his head
was stuck a dark green cap, without a visor,
reminding one of a prisoner’s cap.
His companion moved on as if oblivious of
another presence. They walked along by a narrow
by-path, which wound its way through a
billowy sea of rye; and the shadows of the
travellers glided along against the gold of the
corn.
Looking towards the horizon, the crest of a
wood appeared blue against the sky. To the
left stretched endlessly field upon field; in their
midst, like a dark patch, lay a village; and
beyond the village again fields, losing themselves
finally in the bluish haze.
To the right, from behind a group of willows, a
church spire covered with tin-plate, as yet unpainted,
pierced the blue sky. It glistened so[Pg 188]
strongly in the sun that it was painful to look at.
Up high the larks twittered; and in the rye
the cornflowers smiled; and it was hot—almost
stifling. From under the feet of the travellers
the dust flew up.
Efimushka, clearing his throat, began to sing
in falsetto voice.
“It’s no use. I can’t make my voice carry!
And yet—there was a time when I could sing....
The Vishensky teacher would say, ‘Well,
Efimushka, make a start!’ And we would sing
together! A fine fellow he was, too!”
“Who was he?”, asked the man in the cassock,
in a dull bass voice.
“The Vishensky teacher.”
“Was Vishensky his name?”
“No, brother; that’s the name of the village.
The teacher’s name was Pavel Mikhalich. A
first-rate sort he was. Died three years ago.”
“Was he young?”
“He wasn’t thirty.”
“What did he die of?”
“Of grief, I take it.”
Efimushka’s companion glanced at him askance
and smiled.
“You see, my dear fellow, this is how it happened.
He taught—seven years at a stretch he
taught. Well, he began to cough. He coughed[Pg 189]
and he coughed, and then got to grieving....
Well, you know how it is—grief drove him to
drink. And Father Alexei did not like him; and
when he started drinking, Father Alexei sent a
report to town—told this and that: the teacher
is drinking, and that sort of thing. It’s a scandal,
to be sure. And the people in town sent back an
answer and a woman teacher. She was tall,
bony, big-nosed. Well, Pavel Mikhalich saw
how things stood. He felt hurt. ‘Here,’ thought
he,’ I have taught and taught ... and now
you—— ’ ... From the school he went
straight to the hospital, and within five days gave
up his soul to God.... That’s all.”
For a time they went on in silence. They were
approaching the wood, which with every step
loomed larger and larger and was turning from
blue to green.
“Shall we go by the wood?” asked Efimushka’s
fellow traveller.
“We will only catch the edge of it, for a half-verst
or so. But what are you up to? I shall
keep my eye on you, my good man.”
And Efimushka, shaking his head, laughed.
“What ails you?” the prisoner asked.
“Oh, nothing! But you are a funny one!
‘Shall we go by the wood?’ says he. You are a
simpleton, dear fellow; another wouldn’t have[Pg 190]
asked this question—that is, if he were any
smarter. He would have made straight for the
wood, and——”
“Well?”
“Oh, nothing! I see through you, brother.
Your game is like a very thin reed! I should
advise you to drop this idea about the wood! Do
you think you can get around me? I can handle
three like you; as for you, I can manage you
with my left hand. Do you understand?”
“Understand you? You’re a fool!” said the
prisoner simply but with emphasis.
“Ah, I hit the mark that time!” said Efimushka
triumphantly.
“Blockhead! What mark did you hit?” asked
the prisoner, with a wry smile.
“About the wood. I understand, I do. You
were thinking that when we reached the wood you
would knock me down—yes, knock me down—and
then make a break for the fields or for the
woods. Now, isn’t that so?”
“You’re a fool,” said the apprehended man,
shrugging his shoulders. “Where could I go?”
“Well, where you wish—that’s your affair.”
“But where?”
Efimushka’s companion was either angry or
else he really wished to know from his escort precisely
in what direction he could run.
[Pg 191]
“I told you, where you wished,” replied
Efimushka calmly.
“There’s nowhere where I could run, nowhere,”
said his companion quietly.
“W-well!” the escort pronounced incredulously,
and waved his hand. “There’s always
some place where one could run to. The world is
large. There will be always enough room in it
for one man.”
“Tell me, then: do you really want me to run
away?” the prisoner, smiling, ventured to ask.
“Ah, you! You are terribly good! What will
come of it? You’ll run away, and in your place
some one else will have to go to jail. And that
one will be me. No, I’m simply making conversation.”
“You are a blessed fool—otherwise you seem
a good sort of fellow,” said Efimushka’s companion,
uttering a sigh. Efimushka quite agreed
with him.
“It is true I am called blessed by some people;
and that I’m a good fellow is also true. I am a
simple man—that’s at the bottom of it. Other
people say things with cunning, in an underhand
sort of way, but why should I? I am alone in the
world. Deal wrongly—and you die; deal rightly—you
die also. And so I’ve kept straight,
mostly.”
[Pg 192]
“That is the right way,” remarked the prisoner
indifferently.
“How else should it be? Why should I let my
soul go wrong when I am alone here? I am a free
man, brother. As I wish, so I live. I have my
own idea of life, and live according to it. So it
goes. By the way, how are you called?”
“How? Well, you may call me Ivan Ivanov.”
“So! Are you of the priesthood?”
“N-no.”
“Well! And I thought you were——”
“Because of my dress?”
“Well, you look like a runaway monk or an
unfrocked priest.... But your face is not
at all suited; it looks more like a soldier’s. God
knows what kind of man you are!” Efimushka
cast a curious glance at the stranger. The other
sighed, readjusted his hat, wiped the perspiration
from his forehead, and asked the deputy:
“Do you smoke?”
“Happy to afford you the pleasure. To be
sure, I do!”
He drew out of his bosom a soiled pouch and,
lowering his head, without decreasing his gait,
began to fill a clay pipe with tobacco.
“Well, have your smoke.” The prisoner
paused, inclined his head to receive a light from
a match held by the convoy, and drew in[Pg 193]
his cheeks. A thin blue smoke rose in the
air.
“You haven’t told me as yet to what class
you belong.”
“The gentry,” replied the prisoner curtly, and
spat out sideways.
“So that’s it! How come you, then, to be
strolling about without a passport?”
“I simply choose to.”
“So—so! What an occupation! You gentry
do not usually take to this wolfish life. Ah, but
you are a poor wretch!”
“Well, let it go at that ... and stop your
chattering,” remarked the poor wretch dryly.
Efimushka, however, surveyed the passportless
man with increased curiosity and interest, and,
shaking his head in a perplexed manner, continued:
“Eh, but how fate does play with a man, when
you come to think of it! And it is very likely
true that you are of the gentry, because you have
a grand manner about you. Have you lived long
like this?”
The man with the grand manner looked
gloomily at Efimushka, and waved him aside
like some pestering wasp.
“Drop it, I tell you! Why do you stick at it
like a woman?”
[Pg 194]
“Now, don’t be vexed,” said Efimushka reassuringly.
“I speak from the heart ...
and I am really kind-hearted....”
“Well, that’s lucky for you.... On the
other hand, your tongue keeps on babbling without
a stop—that’s unlucky for me!”
“No more, then, since you object. I can keep
quiet, since you want none of my conversation.
Still, you’re vexed for nothing. Is it my fault
that you are leading a vagabond’s life?”
The prisoner stopped and clamped his jaws
together so that his cheek-bones stood out like
two sharp corners and the gray bristle covering
them rose rigidly on end. He measured
Efimushka from head to foot with passionate
disdain and with a screwed-up expression at the
eyes. Before Efimushka could note this, the
other once more began to measure the ground
with a broad stride.
The face of the loquacious deputy assumed an
aspect of distraught pensiveness. He gazed upwards,
whence sounded the trills of the larks,
and with them whistled between his teeth, at the
same time swinging his stick to the measure of
his steps.
They approached the edge of the forest. It
stood there like an immovable, dark wall. Not
a sound came from it to greet the travellers. The[Pg 195]
sun already had set, and its oblique rays colored
the tops of the trees purple and gold. The trees
exhumed a fragrant dampness; and the gloom
and the concentrated silence which filled the
forest gave birth to sombre feelings.
When a forest stands before us dark and immovable,
when it is all plunged in a mysterious
silence, and every tree assumes the attitude as
of listening to something, then it seems that the
entire forest is filled with something alive, and
that that something is only hiding for a time.
And you await the next moment in the expectation
that it will bring forth something huge and
incomprehensible to the human mind, and that it
will speak in a mighty voice about the great
mysteries of creation.
II
At the edge of the wood, Efimushka and his
companion decided to rest, and so they sat themselves
on the grass beside the trunk of a huge oak.
The prisoner slowly took down the bag from his
shoulder and asked his convoy indifferently:
“Do you want some bread?”
“If you’ll give me, I’ll not refuse,” Efimushka
replied with a smile.
And in silence they began to eat their bread.
Efimushka ate slowly and sighed continually,[Pg 196]
directing his gaze across the field to his left, somewhere
into the distance, while his companion was
all absorbed in the process of gratifying his
appetite. He ate rapidly and munched audibly,
measuring with his eyes his crust of bread. The
dusk began to settle upon the field, and the corn
had already lost its golden lustre and assumed a
rose-yellow hue. Towards the southwest small
fleecy clouds advanced across the sky; they cast
shadows upon the field and crept across the ears
of corn towards the forest, where sat two dark
human figures. Other shadows were cast on the
ground by the trees, and they breathed melancholy
into the soul.
“Glory be to Thee, O Lord!” exclaimed
Efimushka, gathering up the crumbs of his piece
of bread and licking them up from the palm of
his hand with his tongue. “The Lord hath fed
us—no one hath seen us; and He who hath seen
us, His eye was unoffended! Comrade, what do
you say to sitting here another hour or so? Plenty
time for the cold cell, eh?”
His comrade nodded his assent.
“Well, well.... A very good place—it
has a place in my heart.... Over there,
to the left, once stood the manor of the
Tuchkovs.”
“Where?” quickly inquired the prisoner, wheeling[Pg 197]
around in the direction indicated by Efimushka.
“Over there, behind that hill. All the land
hereabouts belonged to them. They were very
rich; but after the emancipation they didn’t
do as well.... I too belonged to them—all
of us belonged to them. It was a big family....
There was the Colonel himself—Alexander
Nikitich Tuchkov. Then, there were four sons—where
could they all have gone to? It is as if the
wind carried them along, like leaves in the
autumn. Only Ivan Alexandrovich remains—I
am taking you to him now. He is our magistrate ... quite an old man.”
The prisoner laughed. His laugh had a hollow
sound in it; it was a strange inward sort of laugh:
his chest and stomach shook, but the face remained
unmoved; and when he showed his teeth,
there issued from between them hollow, dog-like
sounds.
Efimushka, trembling apprehensively, reached
out for his stick and placed it nearer within his
reach. He asked:
“What is the matter with you now?”
“Nothing.... It was just a passing
thought,” said the prisoner abruptly, but kindly.
“Go on with your story.”
“W-well, yes. As I was saying, they were[Pg 198]
important people, the Tuchkovs, and now they
are here no more.... Some of them have
died, some of them have simply vanished, and
not a soul knows what’s become of them. One
especially I have in mind—the very youngest.
Victor was his name—Vic for short. He was a
comrade of mine.... At the time of the
emancipation we were, both of us, fourteen years
old.... He was a fine lad, and may God
be good to his soul! A pure stream! Running
along beautifully all day—and gurgling....
Where is he now? Is he living or dead?”
“In what way was he so ‘good’?” Efimushka’s
companion asked quietly.
“In every way!” exclaimed Efimushka. “He
had beauty, good sense, a kind heart....
My dear man, he was a ripe berry. Ah, but you
should have seen then the two of us!...
The games we played! The merry life we led!
There were times when he would cry, ‘Efimka,
let’s go hunting!’ He had a gun—a birthday gift
from his father—and I used to carry it. And off
we would wander into the woods for a whole day,
or for two days, or even three! Once back home,
he would get a scolding, and I a birching; the
next day you’d forget all about it and start life
anew. This time he would call, ‘Efimushka, let
us go after mushrooms!’ Thousands of birds we[Pg 199]
must have killed! We gathered these mushrooms
by the ton! He used to catch butterflies and
bugs and stick them on pins in little boxes. And
he taught me my letters.... ‘Efimka,’ he
said to me,’ I will teach you. Begin,’ said he, and
I began. ‘Say,’ says he, ‘A!’ I roared out,
‘A—a!’ How we did laugh! At the start I took
it as a joke—what does a man like me want with
reading and writing?... But he rebuked
me: ‘You, fool, have been granted freedom that
you might learn.... If you knew how to
read, it would help you to know how to live and
where to seek the truth.’ ... To be sure, he
was an apt child; and he had probably heard
such speeches from his elders, and began to talk
that way himself.... Of course, we know
it’s nonsense. Real learning is in the heart; and
only the heart can point the way to truth....
It is all-seeing.... And so he taught me....
Stuck so hard to his business that he
gave me no rest! It was torture to me. ‘Vic,’
I would appeal to him, ‘it’s impossible for me to
learn my letters. I really can’t manage it!’ ...
You should have seen him rage at me!
Sometimes he threatened me with a whip! But
teach me he would! ‘Be merciful!’ I’d cry....
Once I tried to dodge the lesson, and
there was a row, let me tell you. He sought for[Pg 200]
me all day long with a gun—wanted to shoot me.
And later he told me that had he met me that day
he certainly would have shot me! He was a fearless
one. He was unbending and fiery—a real
lord.... He loved me; his was an ardent
soul.... Once my father used the birch
on my back, and when Vic saw it, off he went at
once to my father’s house. Good Lord, but there
was a scene! He was all pale and trembling, and
clenched his fists, and followed my father up into
the loft. Says he, ‘How dared you?’ The old
man replied, ‘But I’m his father!’ ‘So? Very
well, father, I can’t manage you single-handed,
but your back all the same shall be like Efimka’s!’
He gave way to tears after that, and ran out of
the house.... And what do you say to
this? He actually carried out his word. He must
have said something to his servants, for one day
father came home groaning; he tried to take off
his shirt, and it stuck to his back.... My
father was very angry with me at the time. ‘I’m
suffering on your account. You are an informer.’
And he gave me a good beating. But as to being
an informer, that I was not....”
“That’s true, Efim, you were not!” said the
prisoner, with emphasis, and trembled violently.
“It’s evident even now that you couldn’t have
been an informer,” he added hastily.
[Pg 201]
“That’s it!” exclaimed Efimushka. “I simply
loved him—this fellow Vic.... Such a
talented child he was! All loved him, not alone
I.... Fine speeches he used to make....
I can’t remember any of them now—thirty
years have passed since then.... Oh,
Lord! Where is he now? If he is alive, he must
be having a grand job, or else—he is having the
very devil of a time of it.... Life is a most
strange thing! It seethes and seethes—and still
nothing comes of it.... And people perish....
It is pitiful, to the very death, how
pitiful!”
Efimushka, sighing deeply, inclined his head
on his bosom.... There was a brief silence.
“And are you sorry for me?” asked the prisoner
cheerfully, while his face lit up with a good,
kindly smile.
“You are a queer one!” exclaimed Efimushka.
“Why shouldn’t I feel sorry for you? What are
you, when you come to think of it? If you are
roaming about, that only shows that you haven’t
a thing on earth of your own—not a corner, not
a chip.... And, aside from that, perhaps
you are burdened with some great sin—who
knows? In a word, you’re a miserable man.”
“That’s how it is,” replied the prisoner.
Once more there was a pause. The sun had[Pg 202]
already set, and the shadows grew more dense.
The air was fragrant with the fresh moisture of
the earth, with the smell of flowers, and with that
pungent odor that comes from the woods. For a
long time they sat there in silence.
“It is fine to sit here; but, for all that, we’ve
got to go. Still eight more versts to do....
Come along, father; get up!”
“Let’s sit here a while longer,” begged the
other.
“I don’t mind it myself—I love to be near the
woods at night.... But when shall we
ever get to the magistrate’s? I will catch it if I
get there late.”
“Never fear, they shan’t say anything.”
“Perhaps you’ll put in a word for me,” said the
deputy, with a smile.
“I may.”
“You?”
“And why not?”
“You’re a wag! He’ll try a little pepper on you.”
“You mean, he’ll flog me?”
“He’s a terror! And right clever, too. He’ll
punch you with his fist on the ear, and I’ll warrant
you—you’ll not be steady on your feet.”
“We’ll see to that,” said the prisoner reassuringly,
touching the convoy’s shoulder in a friendly
manner.
[Pg 203]
This familiarity did not please Efimushka.
Everything else considered, he, after all, stood
for the law, and this goose should bear in mind
that Efimushka wore under his coat a brass badge.
Efimushka arose, took his stick in his hand, rearranged
the badge in a conspicuous place on his
breast, and said gruffly:
“Get up! We’ve got to be on the move.”
“I am not going,” said the prisoner.
Efimushka was nonplussed, and, opening his
eyes wide, remained for the moment silent—not
comprehending why the prisoner had become all
of a sudden such a joker.
“Well, don’t make a fuss, and come along,”
said he more softly.
“I am not going,” the prisoner repeated resolutely.
“What do you mean by saying you’re not
going?” shouted Efimushka, in astonishment and
anger.
“Just that. I want to spend the night with
you here. Come, build a fire.”
“Let you spend the night here, will I? As
to the fire, I’ll build it on your back, I will,”
growled Efimushka. But in the depths of his
soul he was amazed. Here is a man who says,
“I am not going,” and yet shows no opposition,
nor any desire to quarrel, but[Pg 204]
simply lies on the ground, and that’s all. What
is one to do?
“Don’t shout so, Efim,” suggested the prisoner
calmly.
Efimushka again became silent, and, changing
his weight from foot to foot, he looked down on
the prisoner with wide-awake eyes. But the
other returned his gaze and smiled. Efimushka
was thinking very hard as to what his next move
should be.
What he could not understand was that this
vagabond, who had been all the time morose and
malignant in his manner, should suddenly develop
such good spirits. What was to prevent Efimushka
from falling on the fellow, wrenching his
arms, hitting him once or twice across the neck,
and ending this farce? Assuming the most severe,
authoritative tone of which he was capable,
Efimushka said:
“Well, you piece of putty, enough of that! Up
with you! Or else I’ll bind you—and then you’ll
go along all right, never fear! Do you understand
me? Well? I’ll flog you!”
“M-me?” asked the prisoner, with a
chuckle.
“Whom else do you think?”
“What, you’ll flog Vic Tuchkov?”
“None of that, now!” cried the astonished[Pg 205]
Efimushka. “But who are you, really? What
sort of game are you playing?”
“Don’t shout so, Efimushka; it is time you
recognized me,” said the prisoner, smiling calmly,
and rising to his feet. “Why don’t you say ‘how
d’you do?’”
Efimushka drew back from the hand stretched
out to him, and, open-eyed, looked into the face
of the prisoner. Then his lips trembled and his
face contracted.
“Victor Alexandrovich!... Really, is it
you?” he asked in a whisper.
“If you insist, I’ll show you my papers. But
I’ll do better—I’ll remind you of old times....
Now, let me see—do you remember how
you once fell into a wolves’ lair in the pine forest
of Ramensk? And how I climbed up a tree after
a nest and hung head downwards from a limb?
And how we stole cream from the old woman
Petrovna? And the tales she told us?”
Overpowered by this recital, Efimushka sat
down on the ground and laughed in a confused
manner.
“Do you believe now?” the prisoner asked, as
he sat down at Efimushka’s side, looking straight
in his companion’s face and placing his hand on
his shoulder. Efimushka was silent. The landscape
had grown dark by this time. In the forest[Pg 206]
arose a confused murmuring and whispering.
Somewhere from its distant depths came the
sounds of a night-bird’s song. A cloud was passing
over the wood with an almost imperceptible
motion.
“What ails you, Efim? Aren’t you glad to
meet me, or are you so glad? Eh, you holy soul!
As you were as a babe, so are you now. Well,
Efim! Say something, dear creature!”
Efimushka tried to control himself.
“Well, brother, why don’t you speak?” said
the prisoner, shaking his head reproachfully.
“What ails you, any way? You should be
ashamed! Here you are in your fiftieth year, and
occupied with such trifling business! Give it up!”
And, taking hold of the deputy by the shoulders,
he shook him lightly. The deputy burst into
laughter, and at last delivered himself, without
glancing at his neighbor:
“Well, who am I? Of course, I’m glad....
And it’s really you? How am I to believe it?
You, and ... such a business as this!
Vic ... and in such a shape! Going to
jail.... Without passport ... without
tobacco.... Oh, Lord! Is that the
proper order of things? At least, if I were only
in your place, and you were the deputy! Even
that would have been easier to bear! But instead[Pg 207] ...
how can I look you straight in
your eyes? I had always recalled you with
joy ... Vic.... One sometimes thinks
about it.... And the heart aches at the
thought.... But now—look! Oh, Lord!
... if one were to tell people about it, they
wouldn’t believe it.”
His eyes fixed intently upon the ground, he
mumbled his broken phrases, and now and then
gripped his hand to his bosom or to his throat.
“Never mind telling people about it; it is
unnecessary. And stop lamenting....
Don’t worry on my account. I have my papers.
I didn’t show them to the Starosta, because I
didn’t want to be recognized.... My
brother Ivan shan’t send me to jail, but will help
to put me on my feet. I will remain with him,
and once more will we two go hunting....
Now, you see how well everything will end.”
Vic said this gently, using the intonation which
elders employ in calming their aggrieved young.
The passing cloud and the moon met by this time;
and the edge of the cloud, touched up with the
silver rays, took on a soft, opal tint. From among
the corn came the cries of the quail; somewhere
or other the railbird prattled. The darkness grew
denser....
“To think that it’s really true,” began Efimushka[Pg 208]
softly. “Ivan Alexandrovich will surely
lend a helping hand to his own brother; and that
means you will begin life anew. It is really so....
And we will go hunting.... And
yet, somehow, it is different.... I thought
you would do things in this world! But instead,
here’s what it’s come to!”
Vic Tuchkov laughed.
“I, brother Efimushka, have done enough
deeds in my day.... I have squandered
my share in the estate; I have given up my position
in the service; I have been an actor; I have
been a clerk in the lumber trade; afterwards I
have had my own troupe of actors....
Then I lost everything, contracted debts, got
mixed up in a bad affair ... eh! I have
had everything.... And I have lost everything!”
The prisoner waved his hand and laughed
good-naturedly.
“And, brother Efimushka, I am no longer a
gentleman. I am cured of that. Now we will
have good times together! Eh? what do you say?
Come, cheer up!”
“What should I say,” began Efimushka, in a
subdued voice. “I am ashamed. I have been
telling you such things ... such nonsense!...
I am only a peasant....[Pg 209]
And we will spend the night here? I’ll light
a fire.”
“Well, go ahead!”
The prisoner stretched himself upon the ground,
face upwards, while the deputy went into the
woods, from whence soon came sounds of the
cracking of twigs. Presently Efimushka reappeared
with an armful of firewood, and in a jiffy
a small serpent of flame was merrily working its
way upward through the pile of wood.
The old comrades, sitting opposite each other,
watched it pensively, and took turns at smoking
the pipe.
“Just as in the old days,” said Efimushka
sadly.
“Only, the times are not the same,” said
Tuchkov.
“W-well, yes, life is sterner than character....
Ah, but she has broken you....”
“That still remains to be seen—whether I’m
stronger or she,” smiled Tuchkov.
They became silent.
Behind them loomed the dark wall of the softly
whispering forest; the bonfire crackled merrily;
around it danced the silent shadows; and across
the field lay an impenetrable darkness.