MIRKIN SET OFF to see Kapluner. Upset by his meeting with Geverman’s mother, he walked hurriedly, his head bowed, considering how best to convey to Geverman the conversation he’d had with his mother. However much Esther had won his sympathy, he still didn’t take her side in the matter; he repeated to himself that mothers, with their concessions, tears, and solicitude, could be more dangerous than the strictest, most threatening fathers. He decided to convey to Geverman his mother’s proposition in the most objective form and to allow him to decide for himself whether or not to return home.
“Gre-e-etings, Mirkin!” Coming from behind he suddenly heard a joyful exclamation uttered in a woman’s extended singsong.
Turning around, he saw his former pupil, a young woman with a broad face, a pitiful expression, and very kind eyes. She was dressed poorly, like a worker. This meeting with Mirkin, apparently, cheered her up significantly.
“Ah, Genesina! How are you?” Mirkin greeted her warmly.
“Oy, how pleased I am to see you,” the young woman continued. “I tell you, if I’d found a treasure—I wouldn’t be nearly as happy. . . . I thought you’d left a long time ago. . . .”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Oy, then why haven’t you been to see us in so long?” she continued with an imploring reproach. “You know that if you’d come, we’d have had a real holiday! The children remember you to this day and keep repeating, ‘Oy, when will the teacher Mirkin come again?’ And I . . . I tell you . . . I can’t express. . . .”
“I didn’t have time,” Mirkin replied in embarrassment. “I’ll certainly stop by this week. . . . And how are you?” he tried to change the subject.
“How am I?” Genesina repeated dully and plaintively. “My mother’s still ill. Shendel and I work at the cigarette factory. . . . We have to work all day—there’s no time to study. That’s the greatest sorrow. . . . But I’ll try to save a little money—then I’ll quit work and begin studying. . . . If only you knew how much I wanted to study!”
“I’ll definitely begin to tutor you again!” Mirkin promised. He felt the pangs of conscience—several months before he’d stopped working with Genesina and her sister because of his lack of time; then he forgot all about them.
“Oy, you’ve revived me!” Genesina said, overjoyed. “I tell you, if I’d found a treasure—I wouldn’t be . . .”
Mirkin repeated his promise, said a hasty goodbye, and then headed for Kapluner’s place.
While he was still in the entrance hall, sounds of a passionate argument being waged by young voices reached him. Kapluner jumped up and went running out of the room to meet him; he was wearing an unbuttoned uniform, and his hair was tousled.
“Ah! It’s you!” he cried excitedly. “People have gathered here and we’re having an argument. It’s very interesting!”
“Well, read it! Revel in it! And to hell with you! I’ve known you to be a philistine for a long time!!!” Mirkin heard Geverman’s exclamation of disgust just as he entered the room.
“Who’s the philistine here? Who?” Mirkin asked, looking around with his nearsighted eyes and smiling.
“He is!!” cried Geverman shrilly from where he was standing at the window, pointing at the gymnasium student who lay sprawling on the bed, stretched to his full height, his hands folded under his head.
“I’m the philistine!” he confirmed serenely, even with a trace of self-satisfaction. “I’m Tsivershtein! Do you understand? I’m a philistine because I’m reading Dostoevsky!”
“We’ll live to see him reading Fet and Maikov!”1 Geverman continued with indignation.
“Maybe you will live to see it! I’m capable of anything!” Tsivershtein replied to him in his previous serene and sarcastic tone.
“Wait a minute, what are you arguing about?” Mirkin intervened.
“You see,” Kapluner spoke up excitedly. “Tsivershtein maintains that Dostoevsky is higher than Mikhailov.”2
“You idiot!” Geverman put in.
“I didn’t say that Dostoevsky is higher than Mikhailov,” Tsivershtein replied, imperturbably as before. “I haven’t measured their height. I said, and I repeat, that Dostoevsky is incomparably more talented than Mikhailov!”
“That’s a lie!” cried Geverman.
“Have you measured their talents? How do you know that?” asked another of the gymnasium students, the one with a dark face; he was thin, wore glasses, and was pacing the room, his head bowed.
“Dostoevsky? More talented than Mikhailov?” Mirkin said in surprise. “Where did you get that? Why do you think so?”
“Because Dostoevsky’s a great psychologist!” Tsivershtein replied firmly. “Even your Pisarev acknowledges that fact!” he added, emphasizing the word “your.”
“And what does Pisarev say about Pushkin? Pushkin?” a little, very lively gymnasium student exclaimed gleefully; he seemed still a child, in spite of his sixteen years. His kind eyes shone with the plaintive entreaty of a timid pupil who doesn’t know his lesson.
Running up to Mirkin and looking him right in the eye with his plaintively imploring gaze, he asked in agitation, “Have you read him? Have you?”
“What?”
“Pisarev’s article, ‘Pushkin and Belinsky?’3 How he does away with Onegin?4 Oy! He calls him brainless! Brainless!” the student shrieked.
“Wait, Kevesh,” Mirkin shoved him aside lightly. Turning to Tsivershtein, he asked insistently, “Well, and if Dostoevsky’s a great psychologist, then so what?”
“What do you mean, so what?”
“Just that! What follows from the fact that he’s a great psychologist?”
“I don’t understand you! You can ask the same thing about any great writer! About Shakespeare, about . . .”
“And I do ask! What follows from the fact that they’re great writers?”
“What do you mean? Don’t you experience aesthetic pleasure when you read. . . .”
“Aha!!” Geverman interrupted him triumphantly. “Did you hear that? ‘Aesthetics’! ‘Pleasure’! That’s why I say you’re a philistine! ‘Pleasure’! Perhaps a roast or a pastry also affords you pleasure! Well, choke on them! Go read your Dostoevsky! I don’t seek pleasure in books, nor aesthetics, but substance, real meaning! What use is Crime and Punishment5 to me? None whatsoever! Whereas If You Chop Down a Forest—Woodchips Will Fly or Rotten Marshes6 opened my eyes, showed me the path! I myself was a philistine, a drone, and a brainless idiot before I read those books. From them I understood that man must work!”
“Does that mean, in your opinion, that Kirpichnikov’s Grammar7 is also higher than Shakespeare or Pushkin?” asked Tsivershtein. “After all, it has its uses.”
“Yes, higher! In any case, Karl Vogt’s Physiological Letters8 are certainly higher than Pushkin!”
The gymnasium student in glasses, pacing around the room with a serious, thoughtful look, stopped in front of Tsivershtein and uttered seriously, “You still haven’t answered my question: how do you measure the greatness of talent? You say that Dostoevsky’s more talented than Mikhailov. How can you prove that to me? I don’t know, perhaps Dostoevsky really is a great psychologist, but I don’t find him interesting to read. He doesn’t affect me. The same is true for Pushkin’s poetry. I read it and I forget it. It’s easy to read—but that’s all there is. Mikhailov grabs hold of my soul. As I was reading If You Chop Down a Forest—I sobbed uncontrollably. Thanks to that novel, I was reborn, I became a totally different person, and I threw off everything old. . . . Could that possibly happen if Mikhailov wasn’t a writer of genius? Yes! I consider him to be a writer of genius!” he added with deep conviction.
Tsivershtein got up from the bed, sat down again and, after running his hands through his beautiful, soft hair, managed to say with some difficulty, although with a desire to convey self-assurance, “None of this proves yet that Mikhailov’s a writer of genius. . . . My grandmother sobs and wails when she reads the Tkhines—it’s impossible to conclude from this fact that it’s also a work of genius!”
“But how can we define it?” exclaimed Kapluner.
“That’s why critics exist!” Tsivershtein found his tongue at last. “Only a critic can define who’s a real genius. Take Belinsky, for example . . .”
“Wait a moment!” Kapluner interrupted him. “Now you’re caught, my friend! What does Pisarev say about Pushkin? About your Pushkin?”
“Aha!” shrieked Kevesh. “He calls Onegin brainless, witless!”
“For me Pisarev’s no authority!” Tsivershtein replied shrilly and resolutely. “I know of a critic who’s a thousand times more profound than Pisarev!”
This categorical assertion shocked everyone.
“Who? Who is it?” asked the astonished comrades surrounding Tsivershtein.
“Dobrolyubov!”9 he articulated. “You all fiddle about with Pisarev! But just you read Dobrolyubov! Try reading “The Kingdom of Darkness”10—you’ll see!”
“I have read it, but . . . I didn’t find anything special in it,” the gymnasium student in glasses replied indecisively.
“Nonsense!” Geverman cried in irritation. “ ‘More profound than Pisarev’? In what sense? How could he be more profound than Pisarev? What does he say? That you don’t have to be a thinking person? You don’t have to be a realist? You can be a drone? Why, everything Pisarev says is so clear, so very clear; only a brainless idiot could fail to understand it!”
“In the entire world there’s no writer more profound than Pisarev!” Kevesh exclaimed with fanatical fervor, jumping onto a chair for greater effectiveness.
Tsivershtein, with a sign of contempt for his opponents, stretched out on the bed again; throwing his hands behind his head, he uttered serenely, “Why should I argue with you when you don’t understand a thing? Read Dobrolyubov carefully—you’ll see he’s higher than Pisarev. . . .”
“I, too, don’t consider Pisarev . . . an authority!” All of sudden a tall, round-shouldered gymnasium student, Meerov, spoke up; he’d been sitting in silence the whole time. He’d recently come right from the yeshiva and entered the fifth class in the gymnasium, but still hadn’t got used to wearing the uniform. He’d been listening to the debate attentively and intensely; now, apparently, it took great effort on his part to enter with such a serious declaration.
Everyone looked at him with surprise.
“Why?”
“Because, I consider . . . I believe . . . that there is a God.”
In reply to this declaration Kapluner and Geverman burst out laughing.
“Yes!” said the gymnasium student, getting carried away. “Laugh all you want, that doesn’t bother me. . . . I’ve thought long and hard about it. . . . Pisarev says there’s no God, but I say there is one!”
“And just how will you prove it?’
“Here’s how! If there were no God, then man would be no different from animals!”
“Why bring up man and the animals?” Geverman cried contemptuously. “You’re talking nonsense!”
“If there were no God,” continued Meerov, “then man would be free and could calmly do whatever he wanted: murder, steal, lie—everything! But if man has the awareness that he can do this, but not that—then it means someone has instilled that awareness in his soul. That means: there is a God!”
“ ‘In his soul,’ ‘his soul’!” cried Geverman. “You forget there is no soul! Read Vogt’s Physiological Letters—you’ll see!”
“I don’t want to read them!” Meerov replied stubbornly.
“Well, then go to the synagogue and read the Psalms,” advised Kapluner.
“If I want to—I will. I’m not afraid of your Pisarev,” Meerov replied with the same stubbornness, then immediately walked out without even saying goodbye to any of them.
1. Afanasy Fet (1820–92), a Russian poet whose lyrics dealt primarily with nature, love, and philosophical themes; Apollon Maikov (1821–97), a lyrical poet known for his aesthetic tendency that rejected the call to devote one’s art to contemporary social problems.
2. Aleksandr Sheller Mikhailov (1838–1900), author of numerous didactic novels of Russian life in the 1860s that idealized progressive forces in society.
3. The article was published in 1865 and argued that the social significance Belinsky attributed to Pushkin’s works was no more than a substitution of the critic’s own ideas for the poet’s.
4. The hero of Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1833).
5. The first of Dostoevsky’s five major novels, published in 1866, on the theme of murderous ambition, subsequent remorse, and religious faith.
6. Two novels by Mikhailov. The first, taking a Russian proverb as its title, was published in 1871. An English equivalent might be “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” The second, an autobiographical novel, was published in 1864.
7. Aleksandr Ivanovich Kirpichnikov’s (1845–1903) grammar of the Russian language was published in 1867.
8. Karl Vogt (1817–95) was a German scientist, zoologist, doctor, and materialist philosopher who lived and worked primarily in Switzerland and France. His Physiologische Briefe was published in Stuttgart in 1845–46.
9. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov (1836–61) was an influential critic of both literature and society in the radical tradition.
10. Dobrolyubov’s article (1859) devoted to the plays of leading nineteenth-century Russian dramatist Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovsky (1823–86) analyzes the socio-literary relationships among the main characters, emphasizing both the cruelty of the oppressors and the resignation of their victims.