Sketches from a Hunter's Album (36 page)

‘Of course; do go on.'

‘Very well. As soon, then, as I reached sixteen, my mama, without the slightest delay, expelled my French tutor – a German by the name of Philipovich who'd taken up residence among the Nezhin Greeks – and carted me off to Moscow, entered me for the university and then gave up her soul to the Almighty, leaving me in the hands of a blood-relation of mine, the attorney Koltun-Babura, an old bird famous not only in the Shchigrovsky district. This blood uncle of mine, the attorney Koltun-Babura, fleeced me of all I'd got, as is customary in such cases… But again that's beside the point. I entered the university well enough prepared – I must give that much due to my maternal parent; but a lack of originality was even then beginning to make itself apparent in me. My boyhood had in no way differed from the boyhood of other youths: I had grown up just as stupid and flabby, precisely as if I'd lived my life under a feather-bed, just as early I'd begun repeating verses by heart and moping about on the pretext of having a dreamy disposition… With what in mind? With the Beautiful in mind, and so on. I went the same way at the
university: I at once joined a circle. Times were different then… But perhaps you don't know what a circle is? I recall that Schiller said somewhere:

‘But what do you find so horrible about a student's circle?' I asked.

My neighbour seized his nightcap and tilted it forward on to his nose.

‘What do I find so horrible?' he cried. ‘This is what: a circle – a circle's the destruction of any original development; a circle is a ghastly substitute for social intercourse, for women, for living; a circle… Wait a minute, I'll tell you what a circle really is! A circle is a lazy and flabby kind of communal, side-by-side existence, to which people attribute the significance and appearance of an intelligent business; a circle replaces conversation with discourses, inclines its members to fruitless chatter, distracts you from isolated, beneficial work, implants in you a literary itch; finally, it deprives you of freshness and the virginal strength of your spirit. A circle – it's mediocrity and boredom parading under the name of brotherhood and friendship, a whole chain of misapprehensions and pretences parading under the pretext of frankness and consideration; in a circle, thanks to the right of each friend to let his dirty fingers touch on the inner feelings of a comrade at any time or any hour, no one has a clean, untouched region left in his soul; in a circle, respect is paid to empty gasbags, conceited brains, young men who've acquired old men's habits; and rhymesters with no gifts at all but with “mysterious” ideas are nursed like babies; in a circle, young,
seventeen-year-old boys talk saucily and craftily about women and love, but in front of women they are either silent or they talk to them as if they were talking to a book – and the things they talk about! A circle is a place where underhand eloquence flourishes; in a circle, the members watch one another no less closely than do police officials… Oh, students' circles! They're not circles, they're enchanted rings in which more than one decent fellow has perished!'

‘But surely you're exaggerating, allow me to remark,' I interrupted.

My neighbour glanced at me in silence.

‘Perhaps – the Good Lord knows the sort of person I am – perhaps I am exaggerating. For people of my sort there's only one pleasure left – the pleasure of exaggerating. Anyhow, my dear sir, that's how I spent four years in Moscow. I am quite incapable of describing to you, kind sir, how quickly, how awfully quickly that time passed; it even saddens and vexes me to remember it. You would get up in the morning and just like tobogganing downhill, you'd soon find you were rushing to the end of the day; suddenly it was evening already; your sleepy manservant'd be pulling your frock-coat on to you – you'd dress and plod off to a friend's place and light up your little pipe, drink glass after glass of watery tea and talk away about German philosophy, love, the eternal light of the spirit and other lofty matters. But here I also used to meet independent, original people: no matter how much they might try to break their spirits or bend themselves to the bow of fashion, nature would always in the end assert itself; only I, miserable fellow that I was, went on trying to mould myself like soft wax and my pitiful nature offered not the least resistance! At that time I reached the age of twenty-one. I entered into ownership of my inheritance or, more correctly, that part of my inheritance which my guardian had been good enough to leave me, entrusted the administration of my estate to a freed house-serf, Vasily Kudryashev, and left for abroad, for Berlin. Abroad I spent, as I have already had the pleasure of informing you, three years. And what of it? There also, abroad, I remained the same unoriginal being. In the first place, there's no need to tell you that I didn't acquire the first inkling of knowledge about Europe itself and European circumstances; I listened to German
professors and read German books in the place of their origin – that was all the difference there was. I led a life of isolation, just as if I'd been a monk of some kind; I took up with lieutenants who'd left the service and were cursed, as I was, with a thirst for knowledge, but were very hard of understanding and not endowed with the gift of words; I was on familiar terms with dim-witted families from Penza and other grain-producing provinces; I dragged myself from coffee-house to coffee-house, read the journals and went to the theatre in the evenings. I had little intercourse with the natives, would converse with them in a somewhat strained way and never had a single one of them to visit me, with the exception of two or three importunate youngsters of Jewish origin who kept on running after me and borrowing money from me – it is a good thing
der Russe
has a trustful nature.

‘A strange trick of fortune brought me finally to the home of one of my professors. This is how it happened: I came to him to sign on to his course, but he suddenly took it into his head to invite me home for an evening. This professor had two daughters, about twenty-seven years old, such dumpy things – God be with them – with such majestic noses, hair all in frizzly curls, eyes of the palest blue and red hands with white fingernails. One was called Linchen, the other Minchen. I started visiting the professor's house. I ought to tell you that this professor was not so much foolish as literally punch-drunk: when he lectured he was fairly coherent, but at home he stumbled over his words and wore his spectacles stuck up all the time on his forehead; yet he was a most learned chap… And then what? Suddenly it seemed to me I'd fallen in love with Linchen – and this seemed to be the case for a whole six months. I talked with her little, it's true, mostly just looked at her; but I read aloud to her various touching works of literature, squeezed her hands in secret and in the evenings used to sit dreaming beside her, gazing fixedly at the moon or simply up in the air. At the same time, she could make excellent coffee! What more could one ask for? Only one thing bothered me: at this very moment, as they say, of inexplicable bliss there would be a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach and my abdomen would be assailed by a melancholy, cold shivering. In the end I couldn't abide such happiness and ran away. I spent a further two years abroad even after that: I went to Italy, in Rome I stood for a while in
front of the Transfiguration, and in Florence I did the same thing in front of the Venus; I became subject to sudden, exaggerated enthusiasms, just like fits of bad temper; in the evenings I would do a little writing of verses, begin keeping a diary; put in a nutshell, I did exactly what everyone else did. And, yet, look how easy it is to be original! For instance, I'm a complete philistine when it comes to painting and sculpture, but to admit such a thing out loud – no, quite impossible! So you hire a guide, dash off to see the frescos…'

He again lowered his head and again flung down his nightcap.

‘So I returned finally to my native country,' he continued in a tired voice, ‘and came to Moscow. In Moscow I underwent a surprising change. Abroad I had mostly kept my mouth shut, but now I suddenly began talking with unexpected vigour and at the same time conceived God knows how many exalted ideas about myself. Indulgent people cropped up to whom I seemed to be almost a genius; ladies listened considerably to my blatherings; but I did not succeed in remaining at the height of my fame. One fine day gave birth to some gossip on my account (I don't know who trotted it out into the light of God's world; probably some old maid of the male sex – the number of such old maids in Moscow is infinite), it was born and started putting out shoots and runners as fast as a strawberry plant. I got entangled in them, wanted to jump free, break through the sticky threads, but there was nothing doing. So I left. That's where I showed what an empty person I was; I should have waited until it had blown over, in the way people wait for nettle-rash to pass, and those very same indulgent people would again have opened their arms to me, those very same ladies would again have smiled at my eloquence… But that's just my problem: I'm not original. A feeling of honesty, you understand, awoke in me: I became somehow ashamed of chattering ceaselessly all the time, holding forth yesterday in the Arbat, today in Truba Street, tomorrow in the Sitsevo-Vrazhok, and always about the same thing. What if that's what they expect of you? Take a look at the real old battleaxes in that line of the country: it doesn't mean a thing to them; on the contrary, that's all they want; some of them have been wagging their tongues for twenty years and all the time in the same direction. That's real self-assurance, real egotistical ambition for you! I had it, too – ambition, that is – and even now it's not completely left me. But the bad part
of it is that, I repeat, I'm not original. I've stopped half-way: nature should either have allowed me a great deal more ambition or have given me none at all. But in the first stages things really got very steep for me; at the same time, my journey abroad had finally exhausted my means and I had no desire to marry a merchant's daughter with a body already as flabby as jelly, even though young. So I retreated to my place in the country. I suppose,' my neighbour added, again glancing at me sideways, ‘I can pass over in silence the first impressions of country life, all references to the beauties of nature, the quiet charm of a life of solitude and so on…'

‘You can, you can,' I responded.

‘So much the better,' the speaker continued, ‘since it's all nonsense, at least so far as I'm concerned. I was as bored in the country as a puppy put under lock and key, although, I admit, as I returned for the first time in springtime past a birch grove that was familiar to me my head was dizzy and my heart beat fast in vague, delightful anticipation. But such vague expectations, as you yourself know, never come to anything; on the contrary, the things that actually happen are always those one had somehow never expected: epidemics among the cattle, arrears of rent, public auctions and so on, and so forth. Making out from day to day with the help of my bailiff Yakov, who had taken the place of the former manager and turned out subsequently to be just as much of a pilferer, if not a greater one, and who, to top it all, poisoned my existence with the smell of his tarred boots. I recalled one day a neighbouring family of my acquaintance consisting of a retired colonel's widow and two daughters, ordered my carriage to be harnessed and went to visit them. That day must always remain fixed in my memory: six months later I was married to the widow's younger daughter!'

The speaker let his head drop and raised his arms high in the air.

‘Not that,' he continued heatedly, ‘I'd want to give you a poor impression of my late lamented spouse! God forbid! She was the noblest of creatures, the kindest, most loving person and capable of any kind of sacrifice, although I must, between ourselves, admit that, if I had not had the misfortune to lose her, I would probably not be in a position to talk to you today, because in my earth-floor barn you will find to this day in good shape the beam on which I had more than once intended to hang myself!'

‘Some pears,' he began after a short silence, ‘need to lie a while covered with earth in a cellar to enable them, as they say, to acquire their true taste; my late wife, apparently, belonged to such types of natural produce. It is only now that I can do her full justice. It is only now, for instance, that the memory of certain evenings spent in her company before our marriage not only does not arouse in me the least bitterness but, to the contrary, touches me almost to the point of tears. They were not rich people; their house, very ancient, of wooden construction, but comfortable, stood on a hill between a garden buried under weeds and an overgrown courtyard. At the foot of the hill ran a river and it was scarcely visible through the thick foliage. A large terrace led from the house into the garden, and in front of the terrace there arrayed itself in all its splendour a lengthy flower-bed covered with roses; at the end of the flower-bed grew two acacias which had been twined as young bushes into a screw shape by the late owner of the property. A little farther away, in the very depths of a neglected and wild raspberry patch, stood a summer-house, decorated with exceeding cleverness inside, but so ancient and dilapidated on the outside that it gave one the shivers to look at. From the terrace a glass door led into the drawing-room; while inside the drawing-room the following items met the curious gaze of the onlooker: tiled stoves in the corners, a flat-sounding piano on the right-hand side piled with sheets of handwritten music, a divan upholstered in a faded, pale-blue material with broad whitish patterns, a round table, two cabinets containing china and bead trinkets of the time of Catherine the Great, on the wall hung a well-known portrait of a fair-haired girl with a dove on her breast and upraised eyes, on the table stood a vase with fresh roses… Note in what detail I describe it all. In that drawing-room and on that terrace was enacted the entire tragic comedy of my love.

‘The widow herself was a dreadful woman, with the continuous rasp of malice in her throat, a burdensome and cantankerous creature; of her daughters one of them – Vera – was in no way distinguishable from the ordinary run of provincial young ladies, the other was Sofia and it was with Sofia that I fell in love. Both sisters had another little room, their common bedroom, which contained two innocent little wooden beds, some yellow little albums, some mignonette, some portraits of friends of both sexes, drawn rather poorly in pencil
(among them there stood out one gentleman with an unusually energetic expression on his face who had adorned his portrait with a still more energetic signature and had aroused in his youth unusual expectations, but had ended like all of us by doing nothing), busts of Goethe and Schiller, some German books, some withered garlands and other objects preserved for sentimental reasons. But I entered that room on few occasions and then unwillingly: somehow or other it made me gasp for breath. Besides, strange though it may be, Sofia pleased me most when I was sitting with my back to her or again, if you will, when I was thinking or, more likely, dreaming about her, particularly in the evening, out on the terrace. I would gaze then at the sunset, the trees, the tiny green leaves which, though already darkened, were still sharply outlined against the rosy sky; in the drawing-room Sofia would be seated at the piano endlessly playing over some favourite, exceedingly meditative phrase from Beethoven; the wicked old woman would be peacefully snoring on the divan; in the dining-room, illuminated by a flood of crimson light, Vera would be fussing over the tea; the samovar would be hissing fancifully to itself, as if enjoying some secret joke; pretzels would break with a happy crackling, spoons would strike resonantly against teacups; the canary, mercilessly chirping away all day long, would suddenly grow quiet and chirrup only now and then as if asking a question about something; one or two drops of rain would fall from a translucent, light cloud as it passed by… But I would sit and sit, listening and listening and watching, and my heart would fill with emotion, and it would again seem to me that I was in love. So, under the influence of just such an evening I asked the old woman for her daughter's hand and about two months later I was married.