I am a writer of a transitional period,
and I am fit only for people
who are in a transitional state …
OF THE WRITERS CITED so far I. S. Turgenev was the first to travel extensively abroad, though Gogol (introduced in the next section) had done so at length before him; Turgenev was also the first major Russian writer to die in emigration. In this regard he is the melancholy herald of a tragic aspect of twentieth-century Russian cultural history—a period in which a good half of Russia’s brightest talents, men and women of extraordinary merits and accomplishments in many fields, would be forced to live their lives abroad and die there as well. Gogol died in Moscow in 1852, and shortly thereafter Turgenev was arrested, imprisoned for a month, then forcibly confined for an additional sixteen-months exile to his own estate. His offense had been writing an innocuous eulogy commemorating Gogol, who was in official disfavor at the time. This draconian treatment was certainly a factor in Turgenev’s eventual self-imposed exile. Finally—while in no sense ever seriously affected by Gogol’s style—there is yet a third aspect which connects these two writers, namely that Turgenev, like Gogol, began his immersion in literature as a poet, but gave it up early to become an unquestioned master of prose. His achievements were so high in the latter that popular consensus bestows on him a seat, along with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in what some have called the “Holy Trinity of Russian Realism.” Yet, unlike Gogol, Turgenev never really gave up his fascination with the succinct richness of poetic diction and, at the end of his life felt like uniting his very real achievements in prose with poetry again.
Turgenev was one of the first Russian writers to feel that the power of his pen might affect the unfolding of actual history. For students of social history, especially those who relish the petrified thought that Russia has always lagged behind the West in social developments (a view which, incidentally, Turgenev himself was inclined to hold), it might be irksome to recall that in the United States—the so-called bastion of democracy at the time, and certainly very much admired by Turgenev—the loathsome institution of slavery was abolished a full three years after Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom in Russia. The young Alexander is known to have been profoundly influenced in this connection by Turgenev’s first famous collection of short prose, A Sportsman’s Sketches (Zapiski okhotnika, 1852). Thematically devoted to a sympathetic portrayal of Russian peasants and exposure of the evils of serfdom, the work was undeniably instrumental in preparing the ground for Alexander’s 1861 Emancipation Proclamation. By 1861 Turgenev was not only viewed as an active contributor to the great reform, but also as a first-rate novelist who had articulated contemporary life in three major works—the novels Rudin (1856), A Nest of the Gentry (Dvorianskoe gnezdo, 1859), and On the Eve (Nakanune, 1860). Now that Russia finally had a writer whose fiction could capture the aspirations of the times, it is ironic that Turgenev’s best-wrought novel, Fathers and Children (Ottsy i deti, 1862), caused his prestige as a conduit of such aspirations to fall. Both radicals and conservatives saw in the personages of this work a lampoon of themselves and mercilessly attacked it, often for issues that lay outside its fictional universe. Pained by such a reception, Turgenev left his homeland and took up residence in Europe where he continued to write and to win a wide audience of admirers. Henry James, for instance, regarded Turgenev as his master and coined the appellation of “beautiful genius” to express this admiration.
Our volume attempts to provide a corrective to the notion that Turgenev’s merits lay principally in the role of a writer occupied with social change. In fact, it would be surprising to expect of a writer whose prose was often said to read like poetry to be occupied with anything less than the craft of fiction itself. Indeed, it is precisely for the way his Fathers and Children was written and for the depiction of the trasformative drama within the soul of its protagonist, Bazarov, that Dostoevsky—Turgenev’s otherwise lifelong nemesis—provided an isolated note of lavish praise within the heat of Russian polemics surrounding the novel’s publication. It is then on Turgenev’s art—and its collateral need for fantasy weaving—that the discussion of even his most socially influential works, such as the A Sportsman’s Sketches should be focused. If one takes up, for instance, his most memorable story Bezhin Meadow (Bezhin lug, 1851), available in nearly every collection of Russian short stories, one will encounter its traditional interpretation along the following lines: it is essentially a tale written by a budding realist foregrounding for the reader the mythopoetic world of the Russian folk: As peasant boys sit around their campfire artlessly narrating horror-stories and anecdotes of the supernatural, the reader should be supposedly aware that these are merely superstitions, even though such complacency is challenged at the end of the tale by the surprising fate of one of the boys. Rarely, however, it is noted that this story exists within a context of the wider meaning provided by the Russian title of the original collection, Zapiski okhotnika. None of this title’s various English translations (A Sportsman’s Sketches, Diary of a Hunter, etc.) has ever captured a crucial alternate sense of the word okhotnik. As Turgenev was well aware, the word—which commonly does mean “hunter”—also serves as a calque of the eighteenth-century French term amateur, signifying connoisseur or expert admirer, an enthusiast or devotee, and the title Notes of a Connoisseur Enthusiast would be truer to Turgenev’s intentions than the traditional one, which focuses almost exclusively on the subject matter. The author is after far more elusive game here than snipe or grouse. Perhaps for this reason alone Turgenev never seems to have considered the collection as a whole, finished opus. It grew bulkier and bulkier as years went by as Turgenev added more and more stories, each representing varied degrees of immersion of the narrative space into the fantastic. Bezhin Meadow, one of the first to be composed for this collection, was an actual meadow on Turgenev’s former estates. One of the last tales to be added was A Living Relic (Zhivye moshchi, 1874) a sympathetic depiction of a paralyzed Russian woman spending her entire adult life immobile in a village barn, who was considered by local folk as a living saint. One of the final works added by Turgenev was Father Alexei’s Story (Rasskaz Otsa Alekseia, 1877). Here the principal narrator is a country priest. His story is framed by comments from the narrator—an aristocratic landowner—whose restraint foregrounds the intensity of Father Alexis’ tale: the priest is grieving for the tragic fate of his son, Yakov. The boy’s experiences with the supernatural, which intensify and become more harrowing as he grows older, are in his father’s world explicable as satanic attacks on a Christian soul. The reader, however, is left with a more nuanced and ambivalent understanding which accommodates the pathological as well as the paranormal. Thematically, in Father Alexis Turgenev engages with the supernatural and the fantastic as they are experienced in the everyday world surrounding us.
Since we are fully cognizant of the fact that A Sportsman’s Sketches are generally available to western readers, we chose to omit these wonderful tales from our volume. We offer instead his less well known Phantoms (Prizraki, 1864) and two selections from his last opus Senilia: Poems in Prose (Stikhotvorenia v proze, 1878-82). Phantoms can be read as autobiographical work, given its depictions of ennui (toska) and the author’s complex, unsettling relationship with the French operatic singer, Pauline Viardot. An image that might have provided the genesis for the story is a painting at Baden-Baden, a spa frequented by Turgenev. The work is a fresco of a knight kneeling in front of a phantom female who drifts low above ground in front of him. Above both figures is a depiction of a circling bird and the backdrop is a forest with an old oak tree in the foreground. Whatever its origins the tale’s fantastic elements are striking—indeed it is one of Russia’s first works to be subtitled by the author as Fantasy in its generic sense, and we have chosen to abridge the work to give this greater prominence. The vampiric allusions of the narrator’s encounters with the ghostly Ellis and the fantastic flight through space and time is the story’s frame, within which the author expresses his distain for the barbarism of the past (especially focused on the Roman Empire) and the philistinism of the present. The latter is particularly found in Paris and in Petersburg, which Turgenev clearly sees as urban dystopias.
The two “poems in prose” we have added at the end represent the two oxymoronic poles of human existence, a dichotomy Turgenev starkly tackles at the end of his long creative life. The collection of Senilia from which they are taken attempts to combine prose with poetry, life and death, reality and dreams, beauty and ugliness. Alternating lyrical evocations of the beauty of life and putrid images of death which enter the proso-poetic narrator’s space in the form of toothless hags, giant insectoid forms, etc., the collection as a whole is virtually unknown to both Russian and western readers, and cannot be thus considered Turgenev’s lasting accomplishment. Yet for the purposes of this volume the chosen works clearly illustrate Turgenev’s tragic realization at the end of his own life that no matter how satisfying the idyllic image of Russian village life he paints for us in the first “poem” might be, no matter how evocative this edenic utopia of emotional plenitude (recalling, in its painterly power, The Orison on the Downfall of the Russian Land) might be desirable, in the end—as the second “poem-in-prose” illustrates—it serves as a proof that Life itself is a self-perpetuating Fantasy, over which no poet’s eye has any control whatsoever.
(A Fantasy)
[ABRIDGED]
An instant—and the magic yarn is o’er—
And again the soul is filled with hope….
AFANASII FET
I
I could not sleep for a long time, constantly tossing and turning. “Damn that stupidity with the séance tables!—All it’s done is irritate my nerves,” I thought. Drowsiness overcame me gradually …
Suddenly it seemed to me that somewhere in the room a string had been plucked, softly and plaintively.
I raised my head. The full moon was low in the sky and shone directly into my eyes. Its light lay on the floor as white as chalk. The strange sound was distinctly repeated.
I lifted myself up on one elbow. A faint fear pricked at my heart. A minute passed, another … a cock crowed somewhere far off: from farther still another answered.
I lowered my head to the pillow. “Just see what you can do to yourself,” again I thought. “Next you’ll have ringing in the ears.”
A bit later I fell asleep—seemed to fall asleep. I had an extraordinary dream. In this dream I was lying in my bedroom, on my bed—I wasn’t sleeping and couldn’t so much as close my eyes. Again the sound was heard … I turned … the moonlight on the floor quietly began to rise, straighten itself, round out at the top … before me, transparent as mist, unmoving, stood a pallid woman.
“Who are you?” with an effort I asked her.
A voice like the rustling of leaves answered: It is I … I … … I come for you.
“For me? But who are you?”
Come tonight to the foot of the wood, to the old oak. I will be there.
I tried to look more closely at the features of the mysterious woman—and suddenly shivered in spite of myself: a chill had come over me. And then I was no longer lying down, but sitting up in bed and there—where I thought the phantom had stood—the moonlight lay white upon the floor.
II
The day passed somehow or other. I recollect that I would sit down to read or to work … nothing held me. Night came on. My heart was pounding in anticipation. I went to bed and turned my face to the wall.
Why haven’t you come?—the whisper was clear.
I quickly turned to look.
Again she was there … again this mysterious phantom. Motionless eyes in a motionless face—and a gaze full of sorrow.
Come!—the whisper was heard again.
“I’ll come” I replied, helpless with dread. The phantom swung slowly forward, grew indistinct, rippling lightly, like smoke—and once more the moonlight serenely lay upon the floor.
III
I spent the next day in agitation. At supper I drank nearly a full bottle of wine, started for the porch, but turned back and threw myself onto my bed. My blood pulsed sluggishly through my body.
Once more the sound … I flinched, but did not look around. Suddenly I felt that someone behind me was tightly clasping me and babbling in my ear—Come on then, come on, come on … Trembling with fear, I moaned—“I’ll come!”—and got up.
The woman stood bending over the headboard of my bed. She smiled faintly and disappeared. I had, however, managed to get a look at her face. I thought I’d seen her somewhere before; but where, when? I slept late and spent the whole day wandering over the fields. I came upon the old oak at the edge of the forest and looked attentively around.
As evening drew on I sat down by an open window in my study. My elderly housekeeper placed a cup of tea before me, but I didn’t touch it … I was beset by doubt and asked myself: “Can it be that I’m losing my mind?” The sun had only just set, and not only the sky was dyed red, the very atmosphere was suddenly permeated with an almost unnatural crimson hue: the leaves and blades of grass, as if freshly lacquered, were motionless. In their petrified immobility, in their sharp brilliance of outline, in that combination of fierce radiance and deathly silence there was something strange and enigmatic. A rather large gray bird suddenly—with no sound whatsoever—flew up and lit on the very window sash. I looked at it—and it looked back at me askance with one round, dark eye. “Can they have sent you to remind me?” I wondered.
The bird immediately fluttered its soft wings and flew off as silently as before. I stayed by the window for a long time, but was no longer given over to doubt: It was as if I’d stepped into a magic circle—and an irresistible yet gentle force was drawing me on, just as a boat is carried on by the current long before nearing the waterfall. At last I roused myself. The crimson of the atmosphere had long since vanished, its hues had darkened, and the enchanted silence was broken. A breeze was rustling, the moon was rising more brilliant than ever in the dark-blue sky—and soon the leaves on the trees began their black and silver play in its cold light. My housekeeper entered the study with a candle, but a draft from the window caught it, and the flame died. I couldn’t hold back any longer, leapt up, jammed my hat on my head and set off for the foot of the wood and the old oak.
IV
Many years ago the oak had been struck by lightning. Its crest was broken and withered, but it had continued alive for several centuries. As I approached it a cloud overtook the moon: it was very dark beneath the tree’s broad limbs. At first I noticed nothing out of the ordinary; but I glanced to one side—and my heart sank. A white figure was standing near a tall hedge between the oak and the wood. My hair stood on end; but I gathered up my courage, and approached the trees.
Yes, it was she, my nocturnal visitor. As I drew near her the moon shone forth again. She seemed to be all woven of semi-transparent, milk-white mist—through her features I made out a branch softly swaying in the wind—only her hair and her eyes seemed slightly darker, and on one of the fingers of her folded hands shone a thin band of pale gold. I halted in front of her and attempted to speak, but my voice died in my chest, although I no longer felt any fear for myself. Her eyes turned to me: their gaze expressed neither sorrow nor joy, but some sort of lifeless concentration. I waited for her to speak a word, but she remained motionless and speechless and continued to gaze at me with her dead-fixed gaze. I grew terrified once more.
“I’m here!” I exclaimed at last, with an effort. My voice sounded hollow and strange.
I love you—came a whisper.
“You love me!” I repeated in amazement.
Trust yourself to me—again came a whisper in reply.
“Trust myself to you! But you’re a phantom—you have no substance at all.” A strange courage overcame me. “What are you made of? Smoke, air, mist? Trust myself to you! Answer me first, who are you? Did you once live on the earth? Where have you come from?”
Trust yourself to me. I’ll do you no harm. Just say two words: ‘Take me.’
I looked at her. “What is she saying?” I wondered. “What does it all mean? And how will she take me? Or attempt to?”
“All right then,” I said aloud, and in an unexpectedly loud tone, exactly as if someone standing behind me had given me a push. “Take me!”
The words had not left my lips before the mysterious figure, some sort of suppressed smile causing her features to tremble, threw herself forward. She opened her arms and stretched them out to me…. I tried to jump aside; but I was already in her power. She seized me, my body rose a foot or two off the ground —and both of us set off smoothly and not too rapidly above the damp, still grass.
V
At first my head was spinning, and I involuntarily closed my eyes…. A minute later I opened them again. We were sailing along as before, but the wood was no longer visible: unfolding beneath us was a plain dotted with dark patches. With horror I concluded that we had risen to a fearsome height.
“I’m lost, I’m in Satan’s power.” This thought struck me like lightning. Until that instant the thought of diabolic possession, of the possibility of damnation, had not entered my head. We continued to speed along and, it seemed, were climbing higher and higher.
“Where are you taking me?” I moaned at last.
Wherever you like—my companion answered. She was pressed closely against me, her face nearly touching mine. Nonetheless I barely felt her touch.
“Take me back down to earth; I feel sick this high up.”
Very well; but you must close your eyes and hold your breath.
I obeyed—and instantly felt myself falling like a stone … the wind whistled through my hair. When I came to myself we were once again smoothly sailing above the ground, low enough for our feet to brush the tops of the tall grass.
“Put me back on my feet” I began. “Where’s the pleasure in flying? I’m not a bird.”
I thought you would enjoy it. We have no other diversion.
“We? Who are you?”—There was no answer.
“You don’t dare to tell me?”
A plaintive sound, like the one that had awakened me on the first night, trembled in my ears. Meanwhile we continued to move almost imperceptibly through the damp night air.
“Release me then!” I said. My companion slowly moved off and I found myself standing on my own feet. She halted in front of me and once more folded her hands. I became calmer and gazed into her face: as before it expressed a resigned grief.
“Where are we?” I asked. I didn’t recognize my surroundings.
Far from your home, but you may be there in a single instant.
“How? Trusting myself to you again?”
I have done you no harm, and I will do you none. You and I may fly together until dawn, nothing more. I may carry you to any place you can imagine—to the ends of the earth. Trust yourself to me! Say it again: ‘Take me!’
“Well then … take me!”
She embraced me once again, my feet left the ground—and off we flew.
VI
Where?—she asked me.
“Straight ahead, always straight ahead.”
But the wood is in our way.
“Rise above the wood — but more slowly.”
We shot upwards like a wood snipe alighting on a birch and sped onwards. Instead of grass, treetops now shimmered beneath our feet. It was marvelous to see the wood from above, with its bristly spine illuminated by the moon. It resembled some sort of immense, sleeping beast, and its resonant, ceaseless rustling accompanied us, like an incoherent muttering. Occasionally small glades could be seen, each with a handsome band of jagged black shadows along one side…. Now and then a hare would give its plaintive cry down below; above us an owl whistled, also plaintively. The air smelled of mushrooms and tree-buds, of meadow-sweet; the moonlight seemed to flow all around—cold and severe—the Pleiades shone just above our heads.
The forest was left behind; through the field stretched bands of mist: this was a river. We sped along one of its banks above bushes that were weighed down and motionless with dew. The swells of that river at moments glistened blue, at others they rolled darkly and almost malevolently. In places a delicate steam curled strangely above the surface—and the chalices of the water lilies glowed chastely and richly white with all of their full-blown petals, as if they were aware that they were out of reach. I took it into my head to pick one—and suddenly I found myself just above the surface of the river…. The damp struck me vindictively in the face as soon as I had broken the taut stem of the sturdy flower. We began to fly from bank to bank, like the sandpipers we occasionally roused and chased after. More than once we came upon families of wild ducks circled in open spots among the reeds. At most, one would dart its head out from under its wing, look about and anxiously thrust its beak back among the downy feathers, as another of the group would quack faintly, which made its entire body shiver. We startled a solitary heron: it bolted up from a willow clump, trailing its legs and with an clumsy effort flapping its wings. The fish were not rising—they too were asleep. I was beginning to get used to flying and even to find it pleasant; anyone who’s flown in a dream will understand me. I began to concentrate my observations on that strange being under whose auspices I was having such an implausible experience.
VII-XVIII
She was a smallish woman with un-Russian features. Grayish-white, semi-transparent with barely perceptible shadings, she recalled a figure on an alabaster vase lit from within—and yet once more she seemed familiar.
“May I speak with you?” I inquired.
Speak then.
“I see you wear a ring on your finger: so you must have lived on earth—were you married?”
I paused … There was no answer.
“What is you name? Or at least, what was it?”
Call me Ellis.
“Ellis! An English name! Are you English? Did you know me in the past?”
No, I didn’t.
“Then why do you come for me?”
I love you.
“And this is all that you want?”
Yes, when we’re together, rushing along and circling through the pure air.
“Ellis!” I interjected. “Are you perhaps … a criminal, or a damned soul?”
My companion’s head drooped.—I cannot understand you—she whispered.
“I abjure you in the name of God …” I began.
What are you saying?—she murmured uncomprehendingly. And then it seemed to me that her arm, which lay like a chill band about my waist, shifted slightly …
Don’t be afraid—Ellis implored—Don’t be afraid, my dear one!
Her face turned and moved closer to mine … I felt on my lips a strange sensation, like the touch of a delicate, soft sting … harmless leeches feel like that. < … >
A sudden daring flared up within me. “Take me to South America!”
To America I cannot. It is day there now.
“And you and I are birds of the night … Well, wherever you can then, but as far away as possible.”
Close your eyes and hold your breath—replied Ellis—and we set off at a dizzying speed. The wind burst into my ears with a deafening noise. Then we halted, but the noise did not cease. Instead it became some sort of ominous roar, a thunderous din … You may open your eyes now—said Ellis.
IX
I obeyed. My God, where was I?
Above our heads clouds hung like heavy smoke; they bunched together and moved about like a flock of malignant monsters … and there, below us, was another monster: an enraged, yes truly enraged sea. A white foam spasmodically flashed atop the swells—raising shaggy crests, with a rough thunder it beat against an immense pitch-black cliff. The roiling storm, the icy breath from the rolling deep, the heavy crashing of the surf in which from time to time I seemed to hear something like howling, or like distant cannon fire, or alarm bells, the heart-rending shriek and grinding of the boulders, or the sudden cry of an unseen gull, the bobbing wreckage of stove boats on the murky horizon—everywhere death, death and horror…. My head began to spin, and near fainting I once again closed my eyes … “What is this? Where are we?”
On the south shore of the Isle of Wight, before the Blackgang Chine—the cliff where ships are so often wrecked—Ellis replied, for once in particular detail and, I felt, with some gloating relish.
“Take me away, away from here … Home! Home!”
I hunched over and buried my face in my hands…. I felt us rushing along at even greater speed than before; the wind now was not just whistling, but shrieking through my hair and clothing, my breath caught in my throat….
You can stand on your feet, now—came Ellis’s voice.
I tried to get hold of myself, of my thoughts … I felt the earth move under my feet and heard nothing, just as if everything had died … but my blood still surged through my temples with a faint internal sound, and my head continued to whirl. I straightened up and opened my eyes.
X
We were standing on the dam that spanned my own pond. Just before me, through the sharp leaves of a willow, I could see its wide smooth surface with wisps of downy mist arising here and there. To the right a field of rye gleamed dimly; to the left rose the trees of the orchard, elongated, motionless and drenched … morning had already breathed on them. In the clear gray sky, like ribbons of smoke, hung two or three sloping clouds; they seemed to have a yellowish tinge—an early, faint reflection of sunrise was falling on them from God knows where: the eye could not yet distinguish on the paling horizon the spot where dawn would break. The stars were disappearing: nothing moved as yet, although everything was awake in the enchanted quiet of early half-dawn.
Morning! It’s morning!—exclaimed Ellis just above my ear … Until tomorrow!
I turned…. Lightly hovering, she floated past me, and suddenly lifted both arms above her head. For an instant her head, arms and shoulders flared up with warm, living hues; in her dark eyes trembled living sparks; a smile of secret bliss passed over her reddened lips—a beautiful woman suddenly appeared before me—but she fell backwards at once as if fainting, and melted like mist.
I was left rooted to the spot.
When I came to myself and looked about me, it seemed to me that the living, rosy hue that had come over my phantom had not yet disappeared, it was suffusing the air and washing over me … Dawn was breaking. Suddenly I felt extremely tired and set off for home. As I passed the barnyard I heard the first murmurs of the goslings (no birds awaken earlier than they do); along the roof-line a dawn perched on every bracepole—each was carefully and silently preening its feathers, sharply outlined against the milky sky. From time to time they would all take flight—and having flown about for a moment, would alight again in a row, without a sound … Twice from the nearby wood carried the hoarse cry of a black grouse settling into the dewy, dripping grass … My body was trembling slightly as I made my way to my bed and soon fell deeply asleep.
XI
The following night as I approached the old oak Ellis rushed out to greet me as you would greet a friend. I didn’t fear her now as I had before, and was almost glad to see her; I no longer attempted to understand what was happening; I simply wanted to fly farther, to strange places.< … >
XIV
Look around you, and calm yourself—Ellis said to me. I did and, as I recall, my first impression was so pleasurable that I could do nothing but sigh. A smoky-blue, silvery-soft something that was neither light nor shadow inundated me from all sides. At first I could make out nothing, blinded by that azure shimmer, but little by little there emerged the outlines of beautiful mountains, forests—a lake spread out before me, starlight twinkling in its depths as it broke on the shore with a quiet murmur. The scent of orange blossoms overwhelmed me like a wave—at the same instant, also like a breaking wave, came the intense, pure tone of a young woman’s voice. That scent and those tones seemed to entice me, and I began to descend … towards a sumptuous marble villa. Its whiteness gleamed hospitably in the midst of a cypress grove. The singing poured out from its wide-open windows; the waves of the lake, covered with orange blossom pollen, broke against its walls—and directly opposite, clad in a radiant haze, all adorned with statues, delicate colonnades and porticoes, arose from the lake a lofty, rounded island….
Isola Bella … Lago Maggiore—Ellis announced.
“Ah!” was my only response as I continued to descend. The woman’s voice rang through the villa with increasing strength and brightness: it drew me irresistibly…. I wished to see the face of the singer who was filling such a night with such music. We halted before a window.
In the center of a chamber decorated in the Pompean taste and resembling more an ancient shrine than a modern drawing room, amid Greek figurines, Etruscan vases, exotic plants and rare carpets, illumined from above by the soft rays of two spherical crystal lamps—a young woman sat at the fortepiano. With her head bowed and her eyes half-closed she was singing an Italian aria; she sang and smiled, and at the same time her features expressed assurance, even sternness … a sign of pure pleasure! She smiled … and Praxilites’ faun—indolent, young as she was young, delicate, passionate—seemed to return her smile from a corner, through a curtain of oleander blossoms and the light smoke arising from a bronze brazier on an antique tripod. The stunning woman was alone. Enchanted by her singing and beauty, by the brilliance and fragrance of the night, shaken to the depths of my soul by her youthful, serene radiance, I had completely forgotten my companion, the strange way I had come to witness a life so far-removed from and alien to my own—I wished to go through the window and say….
My body shuddered from a harsh shock—exactly as if I’d touched a Leyden jar. I glanced back … Ellis’ face, for all its transparency, was dark and threatening; anger flared in her suddenly wide-open eyes …
Away!—she whispered irately, and once again the whirlwind, and darkness, and my head aspin … But the singer’s voice, cut off as she reached a high note, still lingered in my ears … < … >
XVII-XVIII
Next morning I had a headache, and my legs would barely carry me; but I paid no attention to my physical disarray, remorse was gnawing at me and anger at myself was suffocating me. < … >
I summoned my housekeeper: “Marfa, what time did I go to bed last night, do you remember?”
“Hard to say with you, Master … It was late, seems like. You went out at dusk, and your boot-heels were knocking about in there after midnight. Near daybreak—yes. For the third night in a row. You must have some trouble or other on your mind.”
“Ah-ha!” I thought. So the flying is real and no doubt. “Well, and how do I look to you today?” I asked aloud.
“How do you look? Let me have a peek … You’ve gone a little hollow-cheeked. And you’re pale, Master: it’s as if you’d got no blood in your face.”
I felt myself sag a bit … and dismissed Marfa.
“Keep on like this and you’ll die, or go out of your mind—I concluded as I sat pensively by the window. “You have to give it up. It’s dangerous. Feel how strangely your heart is beating. And when I’m flying I feel as if something is sucking away at my heart, or as if something is leaking from it, just like sap from a birch tree in the spring, if you sink an ax into it. I’ll be sorry to give it up, though. Yes, and Ellis … She’s playing cat and mouse with me … But she can’t really wish me any harm. I’ll trust myself to her one last time—I’ll look my fill—and then … But what if she’s drinking my blood? That’s horrible. What’s more, moving that fast can’t help but be bad for you: they say that even in England the trains are forbidden to travel more than one hundred and twenty versts an hour …”
In this way I reasoned with myself — but at ten o’clock that evening I was already standing at the old oak. < … > Ellis came, threw over my head the end of her long, flowing sleeve. Immediately I was enveloped in a sort of white mist, soporific with the scent of poppies. Everything disappeared instantaneously; all light, all sound—and almost consciousness itself. Only the sensation of life remained—and this wasn’t unpleasant. Suddenly the mist vanished; Ellis had removed her sleeve, and I saw before me a huge mass of buildings crowded together, brilliance, movement, din … I saw Paris.
XIX
I’d been in Paris before and therefore immediately recognized the spot to which Ellis had shaped her course. It was the garden of the Tuileries, with its old chestnut-trees, wrought-iron fences, fortress-moat, and beastlike Zouaves on guard. Passing the palace, passing the Church of St. Roch, on whose steps the first Napoleon shed French blood for the first time, we halted high above the Boulevard des Italiens, where the third Napoleon did the same thing, and with equal success. Crowds of people—young and old dandies, workmen, women in sumptuous attire—were thronging the sidewalks; the gilded restaurants and cafes were blazing with lights, carriages of all sorts and kinds drove up and down the boulevard; everything was fairly seething and glittering, in every direction, wherever the eye fell…. But, strange to say, I didn’t feel like leaving my pure, dark, airy height; I didn’t want to approach that human ant-hill. It seemed as though a burning, oppressive, red-hot exhalation arose from it, not precisely fragrant, yet not precisely foul either; a lot of life, of living things were jumbled together there in a heap. I wavered…. But then the voice of a street-walker, sharp as the screech of iron rails, abruptly assaulted my ear; like a naked blade it thrust itself upward, that voice; it stung me like the fangs of a viper. I immediately pictured to myself a stony, greedy, flat Parisian face with high cheekbones, and the eyes of a pawn-broker, the rouge, powder, and curled hair, and the bouquet of garish artificial flowers on the high-peaked hat, the nails filed in the shape of claws, the monstrous crinoline…. I also pictured a brother steppe-dweller pursuing this venal doll with a detestable tripping gait…. I pictured to myself how, confused to the point of rudeness, and lisping with the effort, he tries to imitate the manners of the waiters at Véfour’s, how he squeals, fawns, wheedles—and a feeling of loathing took possession of me…. “No,”—I thought,—”Ellis will have no need to feel jealous here….”
In the meantime I noticed that we were gradually beginning to descend…. Paris rose to meet us with all its din and reek….
“Stop!”—I turned to Ellis.—”Don’t you find it stifling here, oppressive? < … > Carry me away, Ellis, I’m begging you. It’s just as I thought: there goes Prince Kulmamétov, hobbling along the boulevard; and his friend Baráksin is beckoning him and calling: ‘Iván Stepánitch, allons souper, as quickly as possible, and engage Rigolbosch itself!’ Take me away from these Mabilles and Maisons Dorés, away from fops, male and female, from the Jockey Club and Figaro, from the soldiers with their shaved heads and the fancied-up barracks, from the sergeants de ville with their goatees and the glasses of cloudy absinthe, from the domino players in the cafés and the gamblers on the ‘Change, from the bits of red ribbon in the buttonhole of the coat and the buttonhole of the overcoat, from Monsieur de Foi, the inventor of ‘the specialty of weddings,’ and from the free consultations of Dr. Charles Albert, from liberal lectures and governmental pamphlets, from Parisian comedies and Parisian operas and Parisian ignorance…. Away! Away! Away!”
Look down—Ellis answered me:—you’re no longer over Paris.
I glanced down…. It was a fact. A dark plain, here and there intersected by the pale lines of roads, was swiftly passing beneath us and only on the horizon far behind us did the reflection of the innumerable lights of the world’s capital throb upward like the glow of a huge conflagration. < … >
We’re now flying towards Russia—said Ellis. This wasn’t the first time I’d noticed that she almost always knew what I was thinking.—Do you want to go home?
“Yes, home…. or, no! I’ve been in Paris; take me to Petersburg.”
Now?
“This instant … Only cover my head with your veil or I’ll be dizzy.
Ellis raised her arm … but before the mist enveloped me I felt on my lips the touch of that soft, dull sting …
XXII
“AT-TE-E-E-E-ENTION!”—a prolonged cry resounded in my ears. “At-te-e-e-e-ention!” came the response, as though in despair, from the distance. “At-te-e-e-e-ention!” died away somewhere at the end of the world. I started. A lofty golden spire met my eye: I recognized the Peter-and-Paul Fortress.
It was one of the north’s “white nights”! Yes, but was it night? Wasn’t it more of a pale, sickly day? I’ve never liked the Petersburg nights; but this time I was actually terrified: Ellis’ form disappeared entirely, melted like morning mist in the July sun, and I clearly saw my own body as it hung heavily and alone on a level with the Alexander column. So this was Petersburg! Yes, it really was. Those broad, empty, gray streets; those grayish-white, yellowish-gray, grayish-lilac, stuccoed and peeling buildings with their sunken windows, brilliant sign-boards, and iron pavilions over their porches; the nasty little vegetable shops; those facades; those inscriptions, sentry-boxes, watering-troughs; the golden cap of St. Isaac’s Cathedral; the useless, piebald Exchange; the granite walls of the fortress and the broken wooden pavement; those barges laden with hay and firewood; that odor of dust, cabbage, bast-matting and stables; those petrified yard-porters in sheepskin coats at the gates. Those cab-drivers curled up in death-like sleep on rickety carriages. Indeed it was our Northern Palmyra. Everything was visible and clear, painfully clear and distinct; everything was sadly asleep, strangely heaped up and outlined in the dimly-transparent air. The glow of sunset—a consumptive glow—had not yet departed, and would not depart until morning from the white, starless sky. It lay on the silky surface of Neva, and the river barely murmured, undulating as it hurried its cold, blue waters along …
Let’s fly away—pleaded Ellis.
And without waiting for an answer she carried me over the Neva, across Palace Square to Liteinaia Street. Footsteps and voices were audible below: along the street walked a cluster of young men with drink-sodden faces, discussing their dancing-classes. “Sub-lieutenant Stolpakov seventh!” a soldier dozing on guard by a pyramid of rusty cannon balls at the artillery barracks, suddenly cried out in his sleep. A little further on, at the open window of a tall house I caught sight of a young girl in a sleeveless crumpled silk gown, with a pearl snood on her hair and a cigarette in her mouth. She was avidly perusing a book: it was the work of one of the newest Juvenals.
“Let’s fly away from here, “I said to Ellis.
A minute more, and the mangy forests of decaying spruce-trees and mossy swamps surrounding Petersburg were flitting past us. We headed southwards; both sky and earth gradually grew darker and darker. The diseased night, the diseased day, the diseased city—all were left behind.
XXIII
We flew more slowly than usual, and I was able to watch the broad expanse of my native land unrolling before me in a series of endless panoramas. Forests, copses, fields, ravines, rivers—now and then villages and churches—and then again fields, and forests, and copses, and ravines…. I began to feel melancholy and bored in an indifferent sort of way, somehow. And it wasn’t because we were flying over Russian in particular that I felt melancholy and bored. No! The earth itself, that flat surface unfolding beneath me; the entire globe with its inhabitants, transitory, impotent, crushed by want, by sorrow, by diseases, fettered to a clod of contemptible earth; that rough, brittle crust, that excrescence on the fiery grain of sand that was our planet—our planet where a mold has sprung up that we celebrate as the organic, vegetable kingdom; and those man-flies, a thousand times more insignificant than actual flies; their huts stuck together with mud, the tiny traces of their petty, monotonous pother, their amusing struggles with the unchangeable and the inevitable,—how disgusting all this suddenly seemed! My heart slowly sickened, and I no longer wanted to look at those insignificant pictures, at that stale exhibition…. Yes, I was bored—worse than bored. I didn’t even feel compassion for my fellow men: all my emotions were sunk in one which I hardly dare to name: in a feeling of revulsion; and that revulsion was strongest of all and most of all toward myself.
Stop—whispered Ellis—Stop, or I won’t be able to carry you. You’re getting heavy.
“Head home.”—I replied in the very voice I used when addressing the same words to my coachman—as I emerged, at four in the morning, from the houses of my Moscow friends with whom I had been discussing the future of Russia and the significance of the peasant commune ever since dinner.—”Head home,” I repeated, and closed my eyes.
XXIV
But I soon opened them again. Ellis was pressing against me in a strange sort of way; she was almost pushing me. I looked at her, and the blood curdled in my veins. Anyone who has happened to see on someone else’s face a sudden expression of profound terror, without understanding what’s causing it, will understand me. Terror, harassing terror, contorted, distorted the pale, almost obliterated features of Ellis. I had never seen anything like it even on a living human face. This was a lifeless, shadowy phantom, a shadow … and that swooning terror….
“Ellis, what’s wrong?”—I said at last.
She … she … the shadow replied with an effort—She!
“She? Who’s she?”
Don’t say it, don’t—hurriedly stammered Ellis—We must get away, or it will all will be over. … Look: there!
I turned my head in the direction of her trembling hand and saw something … something truly horrifying. It was all the more horrifying because it had no definite shape. Something heavy, gloomy, yellowish-black in hue, mottled like the belly of a lizard—not a storm-cloud, and not smoke—was moving over the earth with a slow, serpentine motion. A measured, wide-reaching undulation downward and upward—an undulation which brought to mind the ominous wing-sweep of a bird of prey in search of its quarry. Then the inexpressibly revolting swoop earthwards—just the way a spider swoops down to the captured fly…. Under the influence of this threatening mass—I saw this, I felt it—everything was annihilated, everything was silenced…. A rotten, pestilential odor emanated from it and a chill that sickened the heart, darkened the sight, made the hair stand on end. A power was advancing; the irresistible power to which all are subject, a power which—without sight, form, thought—sees everything, knows everything, and, like a bird of prey selects its victims and crushes them like a serpent, licking them with its chilly sting….
“Ellis! Ellis!”—I shrieked like a madman.—”Is that Death?—Death itself?”
The wailing sound I had heard earlier burst from Ellis’s mouth. This time it was more like a despairing, human scream—and we dashed away. But our flight was strange and frighteningly uneven; Ellis turned somersaults in the air; she fell downward, she threw herself from side to side like a partridge when mortally wounded, or when she wants to lure the hound away from her brood. Even so, long, waving tentacles separating themselves from the inexpressibly dreadful mass rolled after us like outstretched arms, like claws. The huge form of a muffled figure on a pale horse rose up for one moment, and soared up to the very sky…. Still more agitated, still more despairing Ellis threw herself about.
It saw me! It’s all over! I’m lost!—her broken whispers could now be heard—What a horrid fate! I could have enjoyed—I could have come to—life … but now. … annihilation, annihilation!
This was too unbearable…. I fainted.
XXV
When I came to myself I was lying stretched out on the grass, with a dull pain all through my body, as though I’d been severely hurt. Dawn was breaking in the sky: I could make out objects clearly. Not far away, along the edge of a birch-coppice ran a road fringed with willows; the surroundings seemed familiar to me. I began to recall what had happened to me, and shuddered all over when the last, monstrous vision recurred to my mind …
“But what was Ellis afraid of?” I thought. “Is it possible that even she isn’t immortal? That she is doomed to annihilation, to destruction? How can that be?”
A soft moan sounded close at hand. I turned my head. Two paces off lay, outstretched and motionless, a young woman in a white gown, with disheveled hair and bared shoulders. One arm was thrown up over her head, the other fell across her chest. Her eyes were closed, and a light scarlet froth foamed from between her compressed lips. Could that be Ellis? But Ellis was a phantom, and I saw before me a living woman. I approached her, bent down….
“Ellis? Is it you?” I exclaimed. Suddenly, with a slow quiver, the broad eyelids were lifted; dark, piercing eyes bored into me—and at that same moment her lips also clung to me, warm, moist, scented with blood … the soft arms wound themselves tightly around my neck, the full, burning breast was pressed convulsively to mine. Farewell! Farewell forever!—a fading voice said distinctly—and everything vanished.
I rose to my feet staggering like a drunken man, and passing my hands several times across my face, looked attentively about me. I was close to the highway, a couple of miles from my manor. The sun had already risen when I reached home.
All the following nights I waited—and not without terror, I admit—for the appearance of my phantom; but it didn’t visit me again. I even—once—went at twilight to the old oak; but nothing unusual happened there either. I didn’t grieve much, however, at the end of my strange friendship. I thought long and hard about this incomprehensible, almost inexplicable business and concluded that not only would science be unable to explain it, but that in folk-tales and legends there was nothing like it. What was Ellis, really? A vision, a wandering soul, an evil spirit, a sylph, a vampire? At times it seemed to me once more that Ellis was a woman whom I had formerly known, and I made strenuous efforts to recall where I had seen her…. There now—it sometimes seemed to me—I’m just about to remember it, in another moment…. In vain! Again everything would melt like a dream. Yes, I pondered a great deal, and as might be expected, I arrived at no conclusion. I couldn’t make up my mind to ask the advice or opinion of other people, because I was afraid of gaining the reputation of a madman. In the end I have cast aside all my speculations: to tell the truth, I’m in no mood for them. The Emancipation has taken place, with its division of crop land, and so forth, and so on, whereas my health has failed and my chest gives me pain, I am subject to insomnia, and have a cough. My body is withering away. My face is as yellow as the face of a corpse. The doctor declares that I have very little blood, and calls my malady by a Greek name—anaemia—and has ordered me to Gastein. But the Justice of the Peace tells me that he won’t be able to make the peasants “toe the line” without me….
So you see how things are with me now!
But what of those keen, piercingly-clear sounds—the sounds of a harmonium—which I hear as soon as anyone begins to speak to me about death? They grow ever louder and more piercing…. And why do I shudder at the mere thought of annihilation?
Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood; revised by A.L. and M.K.
1. COUNTRYSIDE VILLAGE.
Last day of June; Russia all around for a thousand versts—my native land.
The seamless blue of the entire sky; a single cloudlet neither floating nor melting. Absolute stillness and gentle warmth, air like fresh milk! Larks peal from on high; curved-neck doves coo; swallows hover in silence; horses quietly snort and chew; dogs do not bark and stand still, wagging their tails.
It smells of smoke and grass—a bit of tar—and a bit of leather. Hemp-fields are in full growth and give off their strong but pleasant smell.
A deep, but gently sloping ravine. Down its sides are several rows of top-heavy broom, splintered at their base. Through ravine runs a stream; small pebbles on its bed are atremble through the shimmer. Far away, at the vanishing point of the earth and the sky, lies the bluish thread of a great river.
Along one side of the ravine—neat barns, grain cribs with close-fitting doors, on the other—half a dozen pine huts with shake roofs. Atop each roof the tall stave of a starling-roost, on every porch roof a short-maned horse in cast iron. The wavy window glass gives off rainbow colors. Baskets with bouquets of painted daisys on the shutters. In front of each hut proudly stands a well-made bench. On the earthworks the cats have curled up, pricking up their transparent ears; behind the tall thresholds the dark storerooms beckon.
I am lying at the very edge of the ravine on an outspread horse blanket; all around are great heaps of new mown hay whose fragrance is overwhelming. The shrewd owners have strewn the hay in front of their huts: let it bake out a little, and then into the barn! That’ll make it good to sleep on!
The curly heads of children poke out of each heap: cockaded chickens search the hay for moths and bugs; a white-muzzled pup rolls around in the tangled stalks.
Tow-headed lads, in clean tunics belted low, in heavy top boots, exchange spirited remarks while leaning on an unharnessed cart—and scoff.
A moon-faced girl looks out of a window; she’s laughing partly at their words, partly at the antics of the youngsters playing in the piles of hay.
Another girl, with strong arms, is hauling a large wet bucket from the well … The bucket trembles and sways on its rope, spilling out long fiery drops.
Before me stands the old farm-wife in a new checkered apron and new slippers.
A strand of large blown-glass beads are wound around her thin swarthy neck; her grey head is covered with a yellow scarf with red dots; it has slipped down over her dim eyes.
But those old eyes smile cordially; her wrinkled face smiles. After all the old lady is in her seventh decade … one can see even now: she was a beauty in her day! On the outspread weatherbeaten fingers of her right hand she balances a jug of unskimmed milk, fresh from the cool cellar; the sides of the jug are covered with beads of dew, like jewels. On the palm of her left hand the old lady brings me a large piece of still-warm bread, as if saying: “Here, eat in good health, dear visiting traveller!”
Suddenly the cock crows, restlessly flapping his wings: unhurrriedly, the stalled calf lows in answer.
“O what a rich yield of oats it’ll be!” I hear the voice of my coachman.
O the bliss, peace and plenitude of a free Russian village! So still, yet so abundant!
And the thought comes to me: what need do we have for the cross on the cupola of St. Sophia in the City of Kings—Constantinople, and everything else we strive for—we city folk?
February, 1878
2. NESSUN MAGGIOR DOLORE.
(There is no greater grief)
The azure of skies, the weightless down of clouds, aroma of flowers, sweet sounds of a young voice, translucent splendor of great works of art, the smile of happiness on a lovely woman’s face and those magic eyes … what for, what is all this for?
A spoon of a horrid, useless medication every two hours—that’s what is really needed.
June, 1882
Translated by A.L. and M. K.