A year had passed since the events and episodes described in the last chapter of Part I.
Alexander’s mood of dark despair had been replaced by one of bleak dejection. He had given up his thunderous curses accompanied by the grinding of teeth against the Count and Nadenka, and had dismissed them with profound contempt. Lizaveta Alexandrovna consoled him with all the tenderness of a friend and a sister, and he was a willing beneficiary of her kind attentions. Like all others of the same temperament, he was happy to subject his own volition to the authority of another – and like them, he was someone who needed a nanny.
His passion had finally drained out of him, and his period of genuine mourning was over, but he was sorry to part with it, and made every effort to prolong it – or rather, he had created an artificial melancholy for himself, acted it out, adorned himself with it and wallowed in it.
There was something about the role of victim that he enjoyed. He was taciturn, dignified, glum, like a man – to use his own words – stricken by “a blow of fate”. He spoke of his noble suffering, of his sacred, exalted feelings which had been manhandled and trampled in the mud – “And by whom?” he would add. “A hussy, a flirt and a despicable profligate, a mangy lion. Can it be that fate has put me in this world just to have everything that was finest in me sacrificed to this scum?”
Men would not forgive other men, nor would women forgive other women for such deceit, and would have lost no time in seeing that their deceivers came a cropper. But is there anything young people of opposite sexes wouldn’t forgive each other?
Lizaveta Alexandrovna would listen patiently to his jeremiads and comfort him as best she could, and this was not at all distasteful to her, perhaps because there was something about her nephew which plucked at strings in her own heart, and because she heard in his complaints about love an echo of sufferings to which she was no stranger. She listened greedily to the moaning and groaning of his heart, and responded to them with barely discernible sighs and hidden tears of her own. For the outpourings of her nephew’s misery, feigned and melodramatic as they were, she even found words of consolation of a similar tone and register; but Alexander didn’t want to listen.
“Please don’t talk to me about that, ma tante!” he protested. “I don’t want to defile the sacred name of love by using it to describe my relationship with that…” At this point, he would sneer contemptuously, and was ready, like his uncle, to ask, “Er… what’s-her-name?”
“Anyway,” he would add, in a tone of even greater contempt, “she can be forgiven; I was much too good for her and that count, and that whole pitiful and worthless crew; no wonder I remained a closed book to them.”
Even after he had finished, that expression of contempt remained on his face.
“Uncle claims that I should be grateful to Nadenka,” he continued, “but for what? What was noteworthy about that love? It was as banal and commonplace as they come; was there anything at all about it which rose above the pettiest and most vulgar of everyday squabbles? Was there anything in that love that could be seen as the slightest bit heroic or selfless? No, there was practically nothing she did without her mother knowing! Did she ever take a single step for me outside the social norms, outside what was socially correct? Never! A girl whose feelings could not include the merest spark of poetry.”
“But what kind of love could you ask of a woman?” asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
“What kind?” replied Alexander. “I would demand of her that I occupy the first place in her heart. The woman I love should not notice or see any man other than myself. All other men should be insufferable. I alone would be on a higher level, more handsome” – and here he drew himself up – “better and nobler than all others. Every second lived without me would be to her a wasted moment. In my eyes and in my words alone would she find bliss, and know of no other source…”
Lizaveta Alexandrovna tried to hide her smile, but Alexander did not notice.
“For me,” he continued with shining eyes, “she would be ready to sacrifice all, any petty advantage or profit, to cast off the despotic yoke of her mother, her husband, and flee, if necessary, to the ends of the earth, to withstand robustly any privation – and, finally, even to look death itself squarely in the face: that’s what I call love! But that—”
“And how would you reward her for such love?” his aunt asked.
“How?” Alexander began, raising his eyes to the heavens. “Why, I would lie at her feet. Gazing into her eyes would be my greatest happiness. Her every word would be law to me. I would sing of her beauty, her love, to nature itself:
“With her, my lips would possess
Petrarch’s language and that of love itself…*
“And didn’t I show Nadenka the love of which I was capable?”
“So you simply don’t believe in a feeling if it’s not expressed in the way you want? A strong feeling can remain hidden…”
“Wouldn’t you like to assure me, ma tante, that a feeling like my uncle’s, for example, remains hidden?”
Lizaveta Alexandrovna’s face suddenly reddened. Deep down, she had to agree with her nephew that a feeling that never actually manifests itself is somehow suspect, and maybe doesn’t even exist, and that if it did exist it would force its way to the surface. Also that, apart from the love itself, its very setting possesses indescribable delight.
She began to review mentally the whole course of her married life, and plunged into deep thought. Her nephew’s indiscreet remark had stirred up in her heart a secret which she had kept deeply hidden, and prompted the question – was she happy?
She had no right to complain: all the external conditions of happiness which the mass of the people strive for had been created for her as if they had been carefully planned. Contentment, even luxury now, and security in the future – all this spared her those trivial, oppressive cares which gnaw at the heart and constrict the breasts of the legions of the poor.
Her husband had worked tirelessly, and continued to work. But what was the ultimate goal of all this work? Did he work for the general good of mankind by performing the tasks set for him by destiny or merely for narrowly selfish reasons, to acquire the money and status that would earn him prestige among his peers and ultimately to avoid being trapped in poverty by circumstances? Only God knows. He was loath to talk about loftier goals, talk that he dismissed as so much hot air, and confined himself drily and simply to saying “Work is there to get done”.
Lizaveta Alexandrovna was forced to the grim conclusion that neither she herself nor love of her was the sole purpose of all his striving and zeal. He had worked hard before their marriage, even before he had known his wife. He had never talked to her of love, and had never asked her about it. Whenever she raised such questions, he would evade the issue with a joke, a quip or by pleading sleepiness. Soon after they had met, he mentioned marriage, giving her to understand that love was to be taken for granted, and that there was no point in talking much about it…
He was against doing anything for effect – which was all very well, but he had no time for baring his own feelings, and didn’t see the need for it in others. However, at any time, with a single word he could have stirred up in her the strongest feelings for him, but he remained silent and refrained. It was something that didn’t even tickle his self-esteem.
She tried to make him jealous, thinking that that couldn’t help but provoke an expression of love – nothing of the kind! He only had to notice her picking out some young man or other at a social gathering for him to invite him on the spot to visit them, be very friendly to him and praise his accomplishments to the skies, and would not hesitate to leave him alone with his wife.
Lizaveta Alexandrovna sometimes deluded herself into believing that perhaps Pyotr Ivanych’s behaviour was all part of a strategy, and that this might be the essence of his secret method whose purpose was to keep her constantly in doubt, and in this way to maintain her love. But her husband’s very first reference to love swiftly disabused her.
If he had also been ill bred, uncouth and callous, and a dullard, one of those husbands whose name is legion, one of those who can be deceived without any sense of guilt, so necessarily, and so comfortably for their own good and for that of the wife – those husbands who seem naturally disposed to let their wives look around to find a lover who is the polar opposite of their husband – then that would be a different matter, and she might have behaved as do most women in her circumstances. But Pyotr Ivanych was an intelligent and tactful man, a rare species. He was subtle, perspicacious and quick-witted. He understood all the vagaries of the heart and the turbulence of the emotions – but that was as far as it went. He kept in his head the complete textbook of the matters of the heart – but not in his heart. From all his opinions on the subject, it was clear that everything he had to say about it was, as it were, learnt by rote, but never actually felt. When he talked about the passions, what he said was accurate, although he never acknowledged that they might apply to himself. In fact, he derided them and dismissed them as errors and aberrations from reality, as if they were some kind of disease which would eventually be cured by the right medicine.
Lizaveta Alexandrovna was aware of his intellectual superiority over his peers and was tormented by it. “If he were not so intelligent,” she thought, “I would be saved.” His goals tended to be concrete ones – that was clear – and he insisted on his wife not living in a dream world.
“My God!” thought Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “Can he have married just so as to have someone to keep house and to equip his bachelor quarters with the proper decor and standards of a proper family home in order to improve his social standing? A wife in the most prosaic sense of the term – someone to keep house for him! Can he not grasp the idea that concrete goals must always include love? Yes, family responsibilities are indeed the concern of the wife, but can they be discharged without love? Nannies, wet-nurses can make the child they care for the centre of their lives, but a wife, a mother! Oh, if only I could acquire feeling even at the cost of great pain – every kind of suffering that comes with passion – simply in order to live a full life, to feel that I am alive instead of merely vegetating!”
She looked around at all the luxurious furniture and all the precious trinkets and toys in her boudoir – and all those comforts, with which in other marriages the hand of a caring husband surrounds his beloved wife, seemed nothing more than a callous parody of true happiness. She was the witness of two terrible extremes – represented by her nephew and her husband – the one passionate to excess, the other as cold as ice.
“How little either of them understands true feeling, just like most men! And how well I understand it!” she thought. “But what’s the use? And what for? Oh, if only…”
She closed her eyes, and kept them closed for a few minutes. Then she opened them, looked around and heaved a sigh, resuming her usual calm expression. The poor woman! No one noticed, no one knew. It was almost as if these unseen, impalpable and nameless sufferings unaccompanied by wounds or blood – and she, all the while clothed, not in rags but in velvet – were a punishment for some crime or other. But with heroic self-restraint she kept her sorrow to herself, and still had enough strength to comfort others.
Soon Alexander gave up talking about his noble sufferings and his misunderstood and priceless love. He adopted a more general refrain. He complained about the tedium of life, the emptiness of his soul, the anguish that drained him. He constantly reiterated:
“I endured my sufferings,
I cast away my dreams…*
“And now I am being haunted by a black demon. Oh ma tante, it’s with me all the time – at night, in the middle of a friendly chat, in the midst of revelry, at times of profound meditation!”
Several weeks passed in this way. You might think that in another couple of weeks this eccentric would have calmed down completely, and perhaps might even have turned into a respectable, that is to say, simply a normal member of the human race, just like everyone else. Not a bit of it! The peculiarity of his strange nature always managed to find an outlet.
Once he came to his aunt in an access of malevolence towards the whole human race. A word, a taunt, an opinion, a quip, whatever form it took, it was always aimed at people he should have respected. He spared no one. He even had it in for her and Pyotr Ivanych. Lizaveta Alexandrovna tried to delve into the reasons.
“Would you like to know,” he said with quiet solemnity, “what upsets me and infuriates me now? Well, listen. I had a friend whom I hadn’t seen for several years, and for whom I always had a soft spot. My uncle, when I first came here, made me write him a strange letter containing his favourite rules and way of thinking; but I tore it up and sent a different one, so there was no reason for it to affect our relationship. After that letter, we stopped writing to each other, and I lost track of my friend. So what happened? Three days ago, I’m walking along the Nevsky Prospekt and suddenly catch sight of him. I stood rooted to the spot: tremors of excitement ran through me and tears came to my eyes. I held out my hand to him, but was so overcome by joy that I couldn’t utter a word – I couldn’t catch my breath. He took my hand and shook it. ‘Hello, Aduyev!’ he said, as casually as if we had parted only the day before. ‘Have you been here long?’ He was surprised that we hadn’t run into each other before this, and asked casually what I was doing, where I was working, and made a point of informing me that he had a great job and was happy with the work, his superiors and his colleagues as well as… everyone and everything… then he told me that he had no time because he was hurrying to a formal dinner party. Can you imagine, ma tante! Here we were, two friends, meeting for the first time after so long, and he was worried about being late for his dinner…”
“But perhaps they were waiting for him, and it wouldn’t have been polite to—”
“Politeness and friendship? Then you agree, ma tante? Well, let me tell you something else – it gets better! He put his address in my hand: he said I should call on him the next day in the evening – and disappeared. I watched him walking off for a long time; I just couldn’t get over it. This was a companion of my childhood, and a friend of my youth! How do you like that? But then I thought perhaps he was just postponing things until the next evening and would take the time for us to have a real heart-to-heart talk. ‘Very well then,’ I think, ‘I’ll go.’ So I turn up. There were ten friends with him. True – he shook hands with me more warmly than the day before – but, without saying a word, proposed a game of cards. I told him that I don’t play, and sat down alone on a divan, imagining that he would leave the card table and come over and talk to me. ‘You’re not playing?’ he said in surprise. ‘But what will you do?’ Now, what kind of question is that? There I am waiting – one hour goes by, then another hour, and he still doesn’t come over. I’m losing patience. First, he offered me a cigar, then a pipe, said he was sorry I wasn’t playing, that I must be bored, and made an attempt to entertain me – can you guess how? He kept on turning to me and telling me how well or badly he was doing with each hand at the card table. I finally ran out of patience and went over to him and asked whether he had any intention of paying me any attention that evening. I was so furious that my voice was trembling. He seemed surprised, and gave me a strange look and said: ‘All right, let’s just finish the game.’ As soon as he said that, I picked up my hat, intending to leave, but he noticed and said: ‘We’re almost finished – and then we’ll have supper.’ They finally finished, and he sat down next to me and yawned, and our friendly chat began. ‘Was there something you wanted to tell me?’ he asked, in such a flat monotone that I said nothing and just smiled at him dejectedly – whereupon he suddenly came to life and started plying me with questions. ‘What’s the matter? Do you need something, or can I offer you any help professionally?’ and so on. I shook my head and said that I didn’t want to speak to him about work, or how well we’re doing materially, but about matters closer to the heart, the golden years of our childhood, the games we used to play, the pranks we got up to… and imagine, he didn’t even let me finish! – and said: ‘You’re still the same old dreamer!’ – and then changed the subject as if it were a waste of time, and started asking me seriously about my affairs, my hopes for the future, my career, and about my uncle. I was surprised, and couldn’t believe that a man’s nature could have coarsened to such a degree. I wanted to give it one last try, and fastened on the question he had asked me about my affairs, and began to tell him about how I had been treated, and started to say: ‘Listen to what some people did to me…’ That alarmed him, and he interrupted me to ask: ‘What? You haven’t been robbed, have you?’ – obviously thinking that when I said ‘people’, I meant ‘servants’.* Just like my uncle; it was the only misfortune which came to his mind. How can a man become so insensitive? ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘people robbed me of my soul…’ – and I started telling him of my love, my ordeal, of my spiritual emptiness, and began to get a little carried away, thinking that the tale of my sufferings would warm his icy crust, and that his eyes hadn’t yet forgotten how to weep. Suddenly he burst out laughing, and I saw that he had been holding a handkerchief in his hands. All the time I had been talking, he had hardly been able to contain himself. Finally, he couldn’t hold it in any longer. I stopped, horrified.
“‘It’s too much, too much!’ he said. ‘Better have some vodka! And then we’ll have some supper. Bring vodka!’ he ordered. ‘Come on, let’s go!’ he said. ‘The roast… beef… great… roast beef.’ He was laughing so hard, he could hardly get the words out. He tried to take my arm, but I tore myself away from the clutches of that monster and ran… That’s what people are like!” Alexander concluded, waved his hand and left.
Lizaveta Alexandrovna felt sorry for Alexander: sorry for his ardent but misguided heart. She saw that with a different upbringing and a proper outlook on life, he would have been happy and capable of making someone else happy, but now he was the victim of his own blindness, and the aberrations of his own heart. He himself creates the pain in his own life. How to point his heart in the right direction? Where is the compass that can save him? She felt that only a tender, friendly hand was capable of tending that delicate flower.
She had already once succeeded in taming the restless impulses of her nephew’s heart, but that was when it was a matter of love. In that area, she knew how to deal with a wounded heart. Like the skilled diplomat, she was the first to heap reproaches on Nadenka, and to cast her treatment of him in the worst possible light – and, by belittling her in Alexander’s eyes, she finally showed him that she was unworthy of his love. In this way, she wrenched from his heart the agonizing pain he was suffering, and replaced it with the comfortable but not entirely justified feeling of contempt. Pyotr Ivanych, on the other hand, tried to justify Nadenka’s behaviour – and by so doing, far from easing his pain, was actually making it worse, because he made him feel that it was the worthiest candidate who had been chosen.
The friendship, however, was a different matter. Lizaveta Alexandrovna saw that Alexander’s friend, although at fault in Alexander’s eyes, was right in the eyes of most people. Just imagine trying to convince Alexander of that! She couldn’t bring herself to attempt that feat and appealed to her husband, believing, not without reason, that he would not be short of arguments against friendship.
“Pyotr Ivanych!” she said sweetly to him one day. “I have something to ask you.”
“What is it?”
“Try and guess!”
“Just tell me, you know I can refuse you nothing. It’s probably about the St Petersburg dacha; but isn’t it rather early now?…”
“No!” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
“What then?”
“New furniture?”
She shook her head.
“I’m sorry, but I really don’t know,” said Pyotr Ivanych. “Why don’t you just take this pawn ticket and do whatever you like with the proceeds? It’s yesterday’s winnings…”
He started to take out his wallet.
“No, don’t bother, put your money back,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “What I am asking won’t cost you a copeck…”
“Not taking money when it’s offered!” said Pyotr Ivanych, putting back his wallet. “Unheard of! What is it you want?”
“Just a little of your goodwill…”
“Take as much as you want.”
“Well, you see, the other day Alexander came to see me—”
“Oh dear! I don’t think I’m going to like this!” Pyotr Ivanych cut in. “Well?”
“He’s so depressed,” Lizaveta Alexandrovna continued, “and I’m afraid of what he might do…”
“Now, what’s the matter with him? He hasn’t been let down by some other woman he’s fallen in love with, has he?”
“No, it’s about a friend.”
“A friend! It gets worse by the minute. So, what about this friend? I’m curious, please tell me.”
“It’s like this.”
And Lizaveta Alexandrovna proceeded to tell him everything that her nephew had told her. Pyotr Ivanych shrugged his shoulders emphatically.
“But what do you want me to do about it? You know how he is!”
“Just show him some understanding and ask him how he feels inside.”
“No, you should be the one to ask him.”
“Try talking to him – how shall I put it?… more sympathetically, instead of in your usual manner… Don’t make fun of his feelings…”
“You’re not asking me to cry, I hope?”
“Well, it wouldn’t hurt.”
“Anyway, what use would it be?”
“A great deal of use… and not just to him…” Lizaveta Alexandrovna muttered under her breath.
“What?” asked Pyotr Ivanych.
She said nothing.
“Oh, that Alexander, he’s a real pain in the…” said Pyotr Ivanych, pointing to the neck in question.
“How exactly has he been such a burden to you?”
“What do you mean, ‘how’? I’ve had to deal with him for six years now; if it’s not that he’s in tears and needs comforting, I also have to keep writing to his mother.”
“Oh dear, you poor thing! How trying for you! What a frightful bother! To have to get a letter once a month from the old lady and throw it into the waste-paper basket without reading it – or actually to have to talk to your nephew! Of course, I know it means taking you away from your whist! Men, men! If there’s a good dinner, Lafite with the gold seal followed by cards – then absolutely nothing or anybody else matters! And if it gives you a chance to pontificate and show how clever you are – then you’re happy!”
“Just the way it is with you when you have the chance to flirt,” Pyotr Ivanych retorted. “To each his own, my dear! So what else?”
“What else, you ask. Why, the heart, of course! But never a word about that.”
“And I should think not!”
“Oh, we’re so clever – not for us to bother with such frivolities, oh no! We’re in charge of people’s destinies. What matters to us is how much a man has in his pocket, or what decoration he wears in his buttonhole, and nothing else is worthy of our attention. We want everyone to be like them, and if among them there happens to be one single sensitive soul, capable of loving and being loved…”
“Well, he didn’t exactly do a wonderful job of being loved by that… what’s-her-name… Verochka or whatever?”
“Well, look who he is putting on an equal footing with him! It’s one of fate’s little jokes. It’s almost as if fate were mischievously pairing up a tender, sensitive soul with a block of ice! Poor Alexander. His trouble is that his mind and heart are out of step with each other, and that’s why he is condemned by people whose minds have outrun their hearts, people who favour reason over feeling whatever the situation…”
“But you must agree that that’s the important thing, otherwise—”
“No, I will never agree with that, not for the world. It may be important there at your factory, but you’re forgetting that people also have feelings…”
“Well, five, if you mean the senses!” said Aduyev. “I learnt that way back when I was learning my ABC.”
“And how distressing that is!” whispered Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
“There, there, no need to get upset; I’ll do whatever you say, but first you have to give me my instructions,” said Pyotr Ivanych.
“Well, talk to him nicely…”
“Give him a talking to? Certainly, that’s what I’m good at.”
“Here you go with your ‘talking to’! I want you to tell him as nicely as possible what to ask and expect of the friends he has now, and in particular that his friend’s behaviour wasn’t as bad as he thinks… Anyway, why am I telling you this? You’re so intelligent, you know how to talk people round,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
At this last phrase, Pyotr Ivanych’s brow crinkled.
“After all those heart-to-heart talks you must have had with him,” he said irritably, “and all that whispering that went on, you still didn’t manage to exhaust the topic of love and friendship – and now you want to get me involved…”
“But it will be for the last time,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “I’m hoping that after that he’ll feel better about things.”
Pyotr Ivanych shook his head doubtfully.
“Does he have any money?” he asked. “Perhaps he doesn’t and, well…”
“Can’t you think of anything except money! He would be ready to give up all the money he has for a pleasant word from a friend.”
“Well, isn’t that just like him! It doesn’t surprise me. Once he gave money to a colleague in his department for just that kind of effusive outpouring… But someone’s ringing, could it be him? What should I do? Tell me again – give him a talking to… or what else? Money?”
“What do you mean ‘a talking to’? That way, you’ll make things even worse. I asked you to talk to him about friendship, about matters of the heart – but don’t be hard on him, be more considerate!”
Alexander entered, bowed silently and, equally silently, ate a hearty dinner, and between courses rolled scraps of bread into little balls and inspected the bottles and carafes without raising his eyes. After dinner, just as he was picking up his hat, Pyotr Ivanych spoke up.
“Where are you off to?” he asked. “Why don’t you stay a while?”
Still silent, Alexander obeyed. Pyotr Ivanych tried to think how to approach the task in a more agreeable and more tactful manner, and suddenly burst out abruptly with: “I understand, Alexander, that your friend treated you rather off-handedly?”
At these unexpected words, Alexander’s head snapped back as if he had been wounded, and he aimed a look full of reproach at his aunt. She too had been taken aback by this abrupt approach, and for a moment kept her head buried in her work, and then she too looked reproachfully at her husband, but he was in the double grip of digestion and sleepiness, and the two glances bounced off him.
Alexander responded to his question with the faintest of sighs.
“That really wasn’t very nice of him. What kind of friend is that! He hadn’t seen his friend for five years, and couldn’t even bring himself to give him a hug when they met, and just casually invited him round one evening and asked him to play cards… and offered him food. And then even worse, noticing how miserable his friend was looking, he went on to ask him about what he was doing, and his circumstances and if there was anything he needed – what insufferable curiosity! And then on top of it all – the very height of insincerity! – he had the nerve to offer his services… help… maybe even money, but absolutely no thought of heartfelt outpourings. Terrible! Terrible! I would like to see this monster myself, bring him round for dinner on Friday. Oh, and ask him what stakes he plays for.”
“I don’t know,” Alexander responded angrily. “Laugh away, Uncle; you’re right: I’m the only one who is to blame. To trust people, to look for sympathy – from whom? To bare my heart – to whom? I was surrounded by meanness, cravenness, pettiness, but I held on to my faith in good, valour and constancy…”
Pyotr Ivanych’s head had begun to nod in a kind of regular rhythm.
“Pyotr Ivanych!” Lizaveta Alexandrovna whispered to him, tugging at his sleeve. “Are you sleeping?”
“What, me sleeping!” he said, now fully awake. “But I heard everything you said: ‘valour, constancy’. How could I have been sleeping?”
“Don’t bother my uncle, ma tante!” said Alexander. “He won’t go to sleep: it will upset his stomach, and God knows what will happen then. He may be the master of the universe, but he’s also the slave of his stomach.”
He tried to produce a bitter smile, but somehow it came out sour.
“Tell me what it was that you wanted from your friend? A sacrifice of some kind – like climbing up a wall, or throwing himself out of the window? What’s your understanding of friendship – what does it mean to you?” asked Pyotr Ivanych.
“Don’t worry, I’m not asking for any sacrifice now. It’s thanks to my experience of people that my notion of friendship and of love has sunk to such a low level. Here are some lines I always carry with me and which have always seemed to me to convey the truest definition of those two emotions, and it is the way I have always understood them – and is what they should be. I now see that that notion was false: it slanders people and betrays a pitiful ignorance of their hearts. People are not capable of such feelings. But no! I repudiate these treacherous words.”
He took his wallet out of his pocket, and from it two sheets of paper which had been written on.
“What’s that?” asked his uncle. “Show me!”
“It’s not worth it!” said Alexander, and was about to tear them up.
“Read them, read them!” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
“This is how two of the latest French novelists have defined true love and friendship, and I agreed with them, thinking that I would encounter these two entities in real life, and that I would find in them… whatever!” And with a gesture of contempt, he started to read: ‘Do not love with that false, timorous amiability which lives in our gilt palaces, which surrenders to a handful of gold and which fears the ambiguous word, but with that powerful affection which repays blood with blood, which manifests itself in battle and bloodshed, amidst the roar of the cannon and the thunder of the storm, when friends kiss, mouth to powder-blackened mouth, and smear each other with blood when they embrace, and when Pylades lies mortally wounded, and Orestes takes leave of him with a faithful thrust of his dagger in order to put him out of his misery, swears a terrifying oath to avenge his death and, after honouring this oath, wipes away his tear and finds repose—’”*
Pyotr Ivanych broke into his own kind of restrained laughter.
“Who are you laughing at, Uncle?” asked Alexander.
“At the author, if he wrote that in all seriousness, and was speaking for himself – and also at you if that is really the way you understood friendship.”
“And to you that was nothing but ridiculous?” asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
“Nothing but. And I’m sorry, but pitiful as well as ridiculous. And, by the way, Alexander agreed by allowing himself to laugh too. As he himself just acknowledged, this idea of friendship was false and slandered people – and that is a step in the right direction.”
“But a lie only because people cannot rise to the level of friendship as it should be properly understood…”
“Well, if people are incapable of doing that, then that definition of friendship must be wrong…” said Pyotr Ivanych.
“But there have been examples…”
“They are exceptions, and exceptions are almost always bad. Bloodied embraces, terrifying oaths, thrusts of a dagger!…” And he burst out laughing again. “Now read what it says about love,” he continued. “I’m not even sleepy any more…”
“Well, by all means, if it will give you another opportunity to have a good laugh,” said Alexander, and proceeded to read the following:
“‘To love means no longer belonging to yourself, to stop living for yourself, to live inside the skin of another, to concentrate all your human feelings, hope, fear, sorrow and pleasure, on a single object; to love means to live in perpetual—’”
“What the devil does all that mean?” Pyotr Ivanych cut in. “What a slew of words!”
“No, it’s very good! I like it,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “Read some more, Alexander.”
He continued reading: “‘To know no limits to feeling, to devote oneself to a single being, to live and think only for its happiness, to find great heights in being brought low, pleasure in sorrow, and sorrow in pleasure, to give oneself up to every possible pair of opposite extremes, except love and hate. To love means to live in an ideal world…’”
At this Pyotr Ivanych shook his head.
Alexander went on: “‘In an ideal world where radiance and splendour reign supreme, all radiance is splendour. In this world, the sky appears purer, nature more luxuriant; life and time are divided in two – presence and absence. There are two seasons – spring and winter: spring belongs to the former and winter to the latter, because no matter how beautiful the flowers and how pure the azure of the sky, in the time of absence the splendour of both is dimmed; in the whole world to see only one being, and in that one being embrace the whole universe… Finally, to love is to catch every glance of the beloved, as the Bedouin catch every drop of dew to moisten their parched lips; in the absence of that being, to be assailed by a swarm of thoughts, and in its presence to be unable to utter a single one; to strive to outdo each other in serving and pleasing—”
Pyotr interrupted him. “Stop, for God’s sake, that’s enough!” he exclaimed. “I can’t take it any more! You wanted to tear it up? Then tear it up right now! What rot!”
Pyotr Ivanych even rose from his chair and started pacing back and forth in the room.
“Can there really have been a time when people thought and acted like that in all seriousness?” he said. “All these fabrications they cook up about knights and shepherdesses must surely be insulting to their memory? And what possesses them to play on and analyse so minutely the vulnerable strings of the human heart?… Love! To make it all sound so important…”
He shrugged.
“Uncle, why go so far afield?” said Alexander. “I feel this power of love in myself, and I’m proud of it. My misfortune is simply that I haven’t met a being worthy of it who possesses the same gift and the same power…”
“‘The power of love’!” Pyotr Ivanych repeated. “You might just as well talk about the power of weakness.”
“That’s something beyond you, Pyotr Ivanych,” Lizaveta Alexandrovna put in. “You simply won’t believe in the existence of such love even in others…”
“And what about you? Are you telling me that you believe?” said Pyotr Ivanych, going up to her. “No, of course not, you’re just joking. He’s just a child, and doesn’t understand himself or anyone else; you would be ashamed to believe such a thing. Could you really respect a man if he loved you like that? No, surely that’s not the way people love…”
Lizaveta Alexandrovna looked up from her work.
“Of course they do,” she said quietly, taking him by the hands and pulling him towards her.
Pyotr Ivanych removed his hands from her grasp and pointed at Alexander, who was standing by the window with his back to them, and resumed his pacing back and forth.
“What’s that?” he said. “You sound as if you’ve never heard how people love.”
“‘How people love’!” she repeated pensively and slowly resumed her work.
Fifteen minutes of silence ensued. Pyotr Ivanych was the first to break it.
“What are you doing now?” he asked his nephew.
“Well… nothing.”
“Hardly enough. But do you read at least?”
“Yes…”
“Well, what?”
“Krylov’s fables.”*
“That’s a good book – only that?”
“The only one for now, but my God, what portraits of people, and how true to life!”
“You do have it in for people. Could it be that it was your love for that… you know who I mean… which made you like this?”
“Oh, I’ve forgotten all about that foolishness. Recently I passed by those places where I had been so happy and had suffered so much, and thought that my memories would surely be heart-rending.”
“Well, were they?”
“I saw the dacha, the garden and the fence, and my heart didn’t miss a beat.”
“Well, there you are, I told you so. But what is it you find so obnoxious about people?”
“I’ll tell you what: their nastiness, their mean-spiritedness, their… my God! When you think of all of the worst human qualities which have sprung up where nature has scattered such wonderful seeds…”
“But why should that matter to you? Is it your wish to reform people?”
“Why does it matter to me? Don’t you know how I have been spattered by that mud in which people wallow? Don’t you know all that has happened to me – and after that not to hate, not to despise people!”
“But what has happened to you?”
“I’ve been betrayed in love, and been coldly and callously forgotten by friends… and now I’m totally disgusted and repelled by the sight of people and the thought of living among them. All their thoughts, their deeds and dealings are built on sand. Today they are bent on a single goal: they rush, they knock others out of their way, they stop at nothing to gain their ends, they flatter, they grovel, they scheme; but the next day, they forget what it was they were after the day before, and they are off chasing something different. Today, they are flattering someone, but tomorrow they will be vilifying that same person; today they are hot, tomorrow they will be cold… No, wherever you look, life is terrible and disgusting! And as for people!…”
Pyotr Ivanych once again was on the point of nodding off in his armchair.
“Pyotr Ivanych!” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna, prodding him gently.
“You’re depressed, yes, you’re depressed! You must find some work,” said Pyotr Ivanych, wiping his eyes, “then you won’t be insulting people for no good reason. What exactly is wrong with the people you know? I mean, they’re all decent types.”
“Whoever you get hold of, you find they’re all beasts out of Krylov,” said Alexander.
“The Khozarov family, for example?”
“They’re a pack of animals, the lot of them!” Alexander cut in. “One of them showers you with flattery in your presence and fawns upon you, but I’ve heard what he says about me behind my back. Another one commiserates with you today when your feelings have been hurt, but tomorrow he’ll be commiserating with the person who insulted you; today, he’ll be joining you in making fun of someone else, and tomorrow he’ll be with that someone else, making fun of you… What scum!”
“And the Lunins?”
“And fine ones they are too! He himself is the very image of Krylov’s donkey which the nightingale flew thrice seven leagues to get away from. And as for her, she looks like Krylov’s ‘good fox’…”*
“And what about the Sonins?”
“Well, what is there to say in their favour? Sonin is always offering good advice when you no longer need it, but just try to ask for his help when you’re in trouble and he’ll send you home without supper – just like the fox did to the wolf.* Don’t you remember what a fuss he made of you when he wanted you to recommend him for a position? And now listen to what he is saying about you…”
“And I suppose you don’t think much of Volochkov either?”
“He’s worthless, and a vicious animal into the bargain!” said Alexander, and even spat.
“Well, that’s telling them what you think of them!” Pyotr Ivanych observed.
“And what else can I expect from people?” said Alexander.
“Everything: friendship, love, a commission as a staff officer and money… And now conclude this gallery of portraits with our own, and tell me which animals are we, your aunt and I?”
Alexander offered no reply, but there flickered across his face an expression of barely perceptible irony, and he smiled. Neither the expression nor the smile escaped Pyotr Ivanych’s notice. He exchanged glances with his wife, and she lowered her eyes.
“Well, what about yourself? What animal are you?” asked Pyotr Ivanych.
“I haven’t done anyone any harm!” Alexander said with some pride. “I’ve always treated other people properly… I have a loving heart; I approach people with my arms wide open, and what do I get in return?”
“You see how ridiculous he can be!” Pyotr Ivanych appealed to his wife.
“You find everything funny!” she replied.
“And I never asked anything of people: no great acts of kindness, no magnanimity, no self-abnegation… I asked only what was my due, what I had the right to expect…” Alexander continued.
“So you are in the right? You’ve come out of the water completely dry. Well, just hold it there and I’ll show you some fresh water…”
Lizaveta Alexandrovna noticed that her husband had adopted a harsher tone and was worried.
“Pyotr Ivanych!” she whispered. “Please don’t…”
“No, it’s time he heard the truth. I’ll only take a moment. Tell me, Alexander, just now, when you condemned everyone you know as knaves or fools, didn’t you feel in your heart the slightest stirring of conscience?”
“Why should I have, Uncle?”
“Because over a number of years you always got a warm welcome from these ‘animals’. Let’s suppose that with people from whom they had something to gain they did scheme and play dirty tricks, as you say; but with you they had nothing to gain, so what was it that made them offer you hospitality and affection? That’s not nice, Alexander!” added Pyotr Ivanych seriously. “Someone else, even if he had noticed some bad behaviour on their part, would have held his tongue.”
Alexander was furious. “I assumed that they would at least have shown some appreciation of your goodwill in introducing me,” he replied, but now more humbly, and a little deflated, “and anyway these were only social acquaintances…”
“All right, let’s talk about your relationships which were more than social. I’ve already tried to show you – although I don’t know whether I was successful – that you were unfair to your… what’s-her-name, Sashenka, is it? For eighteen months you were made welcome in their home – practically lived there from morning until night – and, what’s more, that despicable hussy, whoever she was, gave you her love. I would have thought that that treatment doesn’t deserve contempt…”
“Then why did she betray me?”
“Oh, you mean why did she fall in love with someone else? I thought we had settled that matter satisfactorily. And do you really think that, if she had gone on loving you, your own love for her would have lasted?”
“Yes, for ever.”
“Well, it seems you understand nothing; but let’s move on. You say that you have no friends, but I’ve always thought that you had three friends.”
“Three?” Alexander protested. “I once had one friend, but even he—”
“Three,” Pyotr Ivanych insisted. “Let’s take it in chronological order. First, there is that one friend. Someone else who hadn’t seen you for several years wouldn’t have bothered with you at all, but he invited you to his home, and you went there with a sour face. He took enough interest in you to ask whether there was anything you needed, and offered his help and his good offices – and, I’m convinced, would have given you money – yes! And in our day and age, that is an acid test which many relationships would not pass… No, let me meet him, and I can tell you that he will prove to be a decent person… for all that you describe him as insincere.”
Alexander just stood there, his head lowered.
“Now, who do you think is your second friend?” asked Pyotr Ivanych.
“Who?” said Alexander in bewilderment.
“Are you that ungrateful?” Pyotr Ivanych came back. “What about Liza! See, he doesn’t even blush! And me, what am I to you, may I ask?”
“You’re… a relative.”
“A grand title! I thought perhaps I was – something more. This is not a good side of you: a character flaw which even in writing exercises at school is described as rotten, something you can’t even find in Krylov.”
“But you were always pushing me away…” Alexander said meekly, without looking up.
“Yes, whenever you tried to hug me.”
“You laughed at me for showing my feelings…”
“But why, and what for?” asked Pyotr Ivanych.
“You followed every step I took.”
“Well, there you are! That’s exactly what I did! Where would you find such an attentive tutor as that? And why did I take all that trouble? I could say more about that, but it might sound too much like some kind of cheap reproach…”
“Uncle!” said Alexander, going up to him with both arms outstretched.
“Go back to your seat! I haven’t finished yet,” said Pyotr Ivanych coolly. “I would hope that you can now name your third friend yourself…”
Alexander looked at his uncle as if to ask: “But where is he?” Pyotr Ivanych pointed to his wife.
“There she is.”
“Pyotr Ivanych,” Lizaveta Alexandrovna broke in, “for God’s sake, please stop showing us how clever you are!”
“No, and stop interrupting!”
“I think I’m capable of appreciating my aunt’s friendship…” Alexander mumbled indistinctly.
“No, you’re not: if you were, you wouldn’t have been looking up at the ceiling to find her, but would have pointed straight at her. If you had felt her friendship, out of sheer respect for her qualities you would not have been so contemptuous of people in general, and in your eyes she would have made up for the shortcomings of the others. Who was it that dried your tears and whimpered together with you? Who offered you sympathy for all that nonsense you poured out to her? And what sympathy! It’s a rare mother who could have taken so much to heart everything that affects you; even your own mother wouldn’t have been able to. If you had felt that sympathy, you wouldn’t have smiled ironically the way you did before, and you would have seen that there is no fox and no wolf here, but simply a woman who loves like your own sister.”
“Oh, ma tante!” Alexander was distressed and totally destroyed by this rebuke. “Surely you can’t think that I don’t appreciate all that, and that I don’t consider you a shining exception to that whole crowd. Oh, God no! I swear…”
“I believe you, I believe you, Alexander!” she responded. “Don’t listen to Pyotr Ivanych; he’s making a mountain out of a molehill, and only too pleased to have another opportunity to show us how clever he is. Stop it, for God’s sake, Pyotr Ivanych!”
“Just a moment, just a moment, and I’ll be finished – ‘one more last utterance’!* You said that you do to others everything that your duty requires of you?”
Alexander still didn’t utter a word and didn’t raise his eyes.
“Now, tell me, do you love your mother?”
Alexander suddenly came to life.
“What kind of question is that?” he said. “Who else is there for me to love after this? I worship her, and would give my life for her…”
“Very well, then you must know that she lives and breathes only for you, and your every joy and every sorrow is her joy and her sorrow. She now counts time not by months or weeks, but by news from you and about you… Now, tell me, how long has it been since you last wrote to her?”
Alexander gave a start.
“Well three weeks… or so,” he mumbled.
“No, four months! And how would you choose to have such behaviour described? And what kind of animal does that make you? Perhaps you would be hard put to find a name for an animal that is not to be found in Krylov.”
“And so?” Alexander asked, suddenly frightened.
“And so, the old lady is grief-stricken.”
“Oh no! My God, my God!”
“It’s not true, it’s not true!” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna, and ran straight to the desk to fetch a letter which she handed to Alexander. “She’s not ill; she’s just really upset.”
“You’re spoiling him, Liza,” said Pyotr Ivanych.
“And you’re being too hard on him. Alexander was in a situation which preoccupied him for a time…”
“To forget your mother because of a hussy – that must have been quite some situation!”
“That’s enough – for God’s sake, stop it!” she said meaningfully, pointing to her nephew.
Alexander, having read his mother’s letter, covered his face with it.
“Leave Uncle alone, ma tante, let him let loose with his reproaches; I deserved worse: I am a monster!” he said, grimacing in desperation.
“Calm down, Alexander!” said Pyotr Ivanych. “There are a lot of such monsters around. You were carried away by this foolishness of yours and temporarily forgot about your mother – it’s only natural; ; love for one’s mother is a tranquil emotion. The only thing she has in the world… is you; that’s why she is easily upset. There’s no point in punishing you any further; I’ll just quote some words from your favourite author:
“Instead of finding fault with your friends.
Why not take a good look at yourself?*
“In other words, you should be more tolerant of other people’s weaknesses. Without that rule, life would be unlivable for oneself and others. That’s all I have to say. And now I’m going to bed.”
“Uncle, are you angry with me?” said Alexander, sounding deeply remorseful.
“How did you get that idea? Why would I try to upset you? I didn’t speak out of anger. I was just trying to play the part of the bear in the fable ‘The Monkey and the Mirror’. Put on a pretty good act, didn’t I, Liza?”
At this, he tried to kiss her, but she turned away.
“I think I’ve carried out your instructions to the letter,” Pyotr Ivanych added, “but you… Oh yes, I forgot one thing… what shape is your heart in now, Alexander?” he asked.
Alexander remained silent.
“You don’t need money, do you?” Pyotr Ivanych asked again.
“No, Uncle…”
“He never likes to ask!” said Pyotr Ivanych, closing the door behind him.
“What will Uncle think of me?” asked Alexander after a moment’s silence.
“The same as he did before,” replied Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “Do you think everything he told you came from the heart in all sincerity?”
“But of course.”
“Not at all. Believe me, all he was doing was showing off. Didn’t you see how methodically he set about it? He set forth all the evidence against you in a certain order – first the weaker evidence, and then the stronger; he began by getting you to reveal the reason for your low opinion of people… and then… it was all part of his method! And now, I think he’s even forgotten all about it.”
“What intelligence! How well he understands life, people! And what self-control!”
“Yes, a lot of intelligence, and too much self-control,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna despondently, “but…”
“And you, ma tante, will you lose respect for me? But believe me, it’s only the blows under which I’ve been reeling which could have distracted me… my God, my poor mother!”
Lizaveta Alexandrovna extended her hand to him.
“Alexander, I will never cease to respect the heart within you,” she said. “It’s your feelings which trap you into errors, and that’s why I will always pardon them.”
“Ah, ma tante, you are the ideal woman!”
“Just a woman.”
Alexander was profoundly affected by his uncle’s scolding and, sitting there with his aunt, he was assailed by tormenting thoughts. It seemed that the peace of mind which she had worked so hard and skilfully to restore in him had suddenly abandoned him.
She was worried – unnecessarily – that Alexander might respond by doing something damaging, and she was laying herself open to some barbed retort. She had also been doing her best to provoke a caustic quip at Pyotr Ivanych’s expense.
But Alexander was deaf and dumb; it was as if a bucket of cold water had been poured over him.
“What’s the matter with you? Why are you looking like that?” his aunt asked him.
“It’s nothing, just that I feel down-hearted for some reason. Uncle has made me understand myself; he’s a great explainer!”
“Don’t listen to him; he’s not always right.”
“Don’t try to make me feel better. At the moment I’m disgusted with myself. I despised and hated people, and now I despise and hate myself. You can hide from other people, but where can you hide from yourself? Everything has been reduced to dust and ashes – people, life itself, all futile, myself included…”
“Oh, that Pyotr Ivanych!” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna, sighing deeply. “He can make anyone feel wretched!”
“There’s only one consolation in all this: at least I haven’t deceived or betrayed anyone in love or friendship.”
“People didn’t appreciate you,” said his aunt, “but believe me, there will be a true heart to appreciate you, I can guarantee it. You’re still so young – just forget all this, and find some occupation. You have talent, so write… Are you working on anything at present?”
“No.”
“Write!”
“I’m afraid, ma tante…”
“Don’t listen to Pyotr Ivanych! Talk to him about anything you like: politics, agronomy, anything but poetry. He will never tell you the truth about that. Your readers will value you – you’ll see… So you will write?”
“Very well.”
“Will you start soon?”
“As soon as I can. Now that’s my only remaining hope…”
Pyotr Ivanych had awoken refreshed, and came into the room fully dressed and carrying his hat. He in turn advised Alexander to return to work at his office and in the agricultural department of the journal.
“I will try, Uncle,” replied Alexander, “but you see, I’ve just promised my aunt…”
Lizaveta Alexandrovna signalled to him not to say anything, but Pyotr Ivanych noticed.
“What did he promise?” he asked.
“To bring me some new music,” she replied.
“No, that’s not true. What was it, Alexander?”
“To write a novella or something…”
“So you still haven’t given up on your belles-lettres; and you, Liza, are leading him astray – you shouldn’t be!”
“I don’t have the right to give up on it,” Alexander responded.
“Who is stopping you?”
“Why should I voluntarily and ungratefully turn my back on an honourable vocation, my true calling? It’s the one bright hope left in my life, and you want me to destroy that too? This is something I’ve been called to by something outside myself – and if I kill it, I’ll be killing myself too…”
“So, please tell me, what exactly is it that has called you from the outside?”
“It’s something that I can’t explain to you, Uncle. It’s something you simply have to understand by yourself. Is there anything in your life that has made your hair stand on end – other than a comb?”
“No!” said Pyotr Ivanych.
“Well, let me ask you this: have passions ever surged in your breast, has your imagination ever caught fire and seethed with visions of beauty which have demanded to be embodied in some form? Has your heart ever beaten in some special way?”
“This is sheer craziness! And anyway, what about it?”
“To someone who has never experienced these things, how can one possibly explain the urge to write, when some restless spirit bids you night and day, in your dreams and in broad daylight, ‘Write, write!’?…”
“But you’re no good at it, are you?”
“Enough, Pyotr Ivanych! Just because you yourself are no good at something, why discourage others?” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
“Forgive me, Uncle, for saying that you are no judge in these matters.”
“Then who is? Her?”
Pyotr Ivanych pointed to his wife.
“She’s doing this purposely, and you believe her,” he added.
“Yes, and it was you yourself who, when I first arrived here, advised me to write, to try my hand…”
“Well, what of it? You tried, and nothing came of it – and you should have given up.”
“Do you really mean to tell me that you’ve never found a single idea, or a single line of mine at all worthwhile?”
“Of course I have! You’re not a fool; take any normal intelligent person who has written piles and piles of stuff: of course you would be sure to find a worthwhile idea or two. But that’s just a matter of intelligence, not talent.”
In her annoyance at this remark, Lizaveta swivelled in her seat.
“And all this beating of the heart, the fluttering, these ecstasies and so on and so forth – who doesn’t experience them?”
“Well, you in particular, less than anybody, it seems to me,” his wife remarked.
“What are you talking about? You must remember, there have been times when I have been delighted…”
“By what? I don’t remember.”
“Everyone experiences these things,” Pyotr Ivanych went on, turning to his nephew. “Who has never been moved by the silence and the darkness of night, or the sounds of the oak wood, by a garden, a pond or the sea? If it were only artists who experienced these things, there would be no one to appreciate their work. But expressing these feelings in their work is another matter: for this you need talent, and it doesn’t appear that you have any. It’s not something you can hide: it stands out in every line, in every brushstroke…”
“Pyotr Ivanych, it’s time for you to go,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
“In a moment. You want to make your mark?” Pyotr Ivanych went on. “You have other ways of doing that. The editor is full of praise for you; he says that your articles on agriculture are excellent – and thoughtful – and that it all bears the mark of real erudition and is not the work of a mere journeyman. I was delighted. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘we Aduyevs really have heads on our shoulders.’ You see, I’m not without my pride! You can excel just as well in your work, and earn the prestige of a writer…”
“Some prestige! A writer – about fertilizer!”
“To each his own; one man’s fate is to soar in celestial heights, another’s fate is to burrow into fertilizer and find treasure. I don’t understand why one should look down on the humbler occupations – they all have their own poetry. Look, if you were to make a career and make money by your efforts, make a good marriage, like the majority… I don’t understand what else you could want. Your duty done, a life spent with honour and honest work – that’s where happiness lies, to my way of thinking. Look at me. I’ve risen to the rank of state councillor,* I’m an industrialist by profession, and if you were to offer me the title of Poet Laureate instead, I wouldn’t take it!”
“Listen, Pyotr Ivanych, you’re really late!” Lizaveta Alexandrovna broke in. “It’s almost ten o’clock.”
“Yes indeed, it’s time. Well, goodbye for now. And these people, God knows why, think they are superior beings,” he growled on the way out. “It’s, well…”