The Nose and Other Stories

The little picture gallery at the Shchukin Market stalls attracted more people than anywhere else.¹ This little shop indeed presented the most varied collection of strange wonders. The paintings were mostly in oil, covered with dark green varnish, in tawdry, dark yellow frames. A winter scene with white trees; a thoroughly red evening resembling the glow of a conflagration; a Flemish peasant with a pipe and a splayed arm, who looked more like a turkey in fancy cuffs than a person—these were the usual subjects. In addition there were several engraved likenesses: a portrait of the Persian prince Khosrow Mirza in a sheepskin cap, and portraits of some generals with crooked noses, wearing tricorn hats. The doors of such a shop are usually hung with whole sheaves of the kind of pictures that attest to the native talent of the Russian. One of them depicts Princess Miliktrisa Kirbitievna, another the city of Jerusalem, whose houses and churches have been unceremoniously flooded with red paint, engulfing part of the ground as well as two Russian peasants in mittens, saying their prayers.² Usually there are not many buyers for such works of art, but to make up for it, there are heaps of onlookers. Inevitably a hard-drinking footman is gaping in front of them, holding covered dishes of dinner from a tavern for his master, who will doubtless have to slurp some soup that is none too hot. Inevitably a soldier is standing there, that cavalier of the flea market, who’s hoping to sell two penknives, and a tradeswoman from the Okhta neighborhood with her box full of shoes for sale. Each of them admires the pictures in a particular way. The peasants usually poke them with their fingers; the cavaliers do a serious inspection; servant boys and workshop boys laugh and mock each other with the caricature drawings; old footmen in coarse wool overcoats look just in order to have a chance to gape a bit; and the tradeswomen, young Russian peasant women, hurry here by instinct, in order to hear what people are chattering about and see what they’re looking at.

Just then the young artist Chertkov, who was passing by, stopped involuntarily in front of the shop. His old overcoat and far from foppish dress showed that he was the kind of man who is selflessly dedicated to his work and has no time to worry about fashionable attire, always so mysteriously attractive to young people. He stopped in front of the shop and first laughed inwardly at these monstrous paintings. Finally, he was irresistibly overcome by meditation. He began to think about the question, who could possibly need works like these? That the common Russian people stare in wonder at cheap woodcuts of the stories of Yeruslan Lazarevich, of The Glutton-Drunkard, of Foma and Yeryoma—this did not strike him as strange.³ The things they depicted were quite accessible and clear for the common people. But where were the buyers for these gaudy, filthy oil paintings? Who needed these Flemish peasants, these red-and-azure landscapes, which displayed a sort of pretension to a somewhat higher stage of art, but which expressed instead the deep debasement of art? If these had been the works of a child who was submitting to an involuntary whim, if they had had no regularity at all and had not preserved even the most rudimentary conventions of mechanistic drawing; if they had been entirely in the mode of caricature, but if the slightest bit of effort had glimmered through the caricature, some kind of impulse to produce something resembling nature—but one could find nothing of the sort in them. A senile dull-wittedness, a senseless inclination, or more precisely a force they could not resist, had guided the hands of their creators. Who had labored over them? And there was no doubt that it was one and the same person who had labored, because there were the same colors, the same style, the same practiced, accustomed hand, which belonged more likely to a crudely built automaton than to a person.

He was still standing in front of those filthy paintings and looking at them, but not really looking at them at all any more, while the owner of the art store, a grayish man of about fifty, in a coarse wool overcoat, with a chin that had long gone unshaven, was telling him that the paintings were “of the very highest quality” and had just come from the exchange, the varnish hadn’t yet dried and they hadn’t been framed. “Look for yourself, I swear on my honor that you’ll be satisfied.” All these seductive speeches flew right by Chertkov’s ears. Finally, in order to cheer up the owner a bit, he picked up some dusty paintings from the floor. These were old family portraits whose descendants would probably never be found. Almost mechanically he began to wipe the dust off one of them. A slight blush flamed up on his face, the blush that signifies secret pleasure at something unexpected. He began to rub impatiently with his hand, and soon he saw a portrait in which a masterly brush was clearly evident, although the colors seemed somewhat dull and darkened. It was an old man with an anxious and even malicious expression on his face. On his lips there was a cutting, venomous smile, and along with it a sort of fear; a sickly ruddiness was lightly spread across his face, disfigured by wrinkles; his eyes were large, dark, and dim; but at the same time a kind of strange vitality could be seen in them. It seemed that this portrait depicted a miser who had spent his life over his money chest, or one of those unfortunate people who their whole lives are tormented by the happiness of others. Overall, the face retained the vivid imprint of a southern physiognomy. Swarthiness, hair as black as pitch with streaks of gray showing through—this is not encountered in residents of the northern provinces. The whole portrait bespoke a certain unfinishedness, but if it had been completed to perfection, an expert would have gone mad trying to guess how the most perfect creation of Van Dyck had ended up in Russia and found its way to the little shop in Shchukin Market.⁴

With pounding heart the young artist put the portrait aside and began going through the others to see if anything else of the kind was to be found, but all the others formed a completely different world, and only demonstrated that this guest had ended up among them through foolish chance. Finally Chertkov asked about the price. The sly merchant, who had noticed, thanks to the artist’s interest, that the portrait was worth something, scratched behind his ear and said, “Well, you know, ten rubles would be a small price.”

Chertkov reached into his pocket.

“I’ll give eleven!” rang out behind him.

He turned and saw that a crowd of people had gathered and that one gentleman in a cloak had, like him, been standing in front of the painting for a long time. Chertkov’s heart began to beat hard and his lips began to quiver, like a man who feels that an object he has been searching for is about to be taken away from him. After looking attentively at the new customer, he was somewhat reassured, seeing that he was in clothes that were no better than his own. He said in a trembling voice, “I’ll give you twelve rubles, the painting is mine.”

“Proprietor! The painting is mine, here are fifteen rubles,” said the customer.

Chertkov’s face flinched convulsively, he caught his breath, and he said involuntarily, “Twenty rubles.”

The merchant rubbed his hands in pleasure, seeing that the customers were haggling among themselves to his advantage. The crowd grew denser around the buyers. They had caught the scent that an ordinary sale had turned into an auction, which is always so interesting, even for bystanders. Finally they drove the price up to fifty rubles. Almost in despair, Chertkov cried out, “Fifty,” recalling that all he had was fifty rubles, at least part of which he was supposed to use for rent, and also to buy paint and a few other necessities. His opponent gave up at that point—the sum had apparently exceeded his means as well—and the painting was Chertkov’s. He took a bill out of his pocket, threw it in the merchant’s face, and greedily grasped the painting. But suddenly he jumped away from it, overcome by terror. The dark eyes of the painted old man looked in such a lifelike and at the same time deathlike way that it was impossible not to feel fear. It seemed as if, by some inexplicably strange force, a part of life had been retained in them. These were not painted eyes; they were living eyes, human eyes. They were motionless, but they would probably not have been so horrible if they had moved. Some sort of savage feeling—not terror, but that inexplicable sensation that we feel at the appearance of something strange, something that represents a disorder in nature, or rather a kind of insanity of nature—that same feeling caused almost everyone to cry out. Trembling, Chertkov passed his hand over the canvas, but the canvas was smooth. The effect produced by the portrait was universal: the crowd rushed in horror away from the shop; the customer who had been competing with him moved away fearfully. The dusk had thickened just at that time, seemingly in order to make this incomprehensible phenomenon even more horrible. Chertkov didn’t have the strength to stay there any longer. Not daring to think of taking the portrait with him, he ran out into the street. The fresh air, the roar of traffic on the road, the talk of the crowd, seemed to refresh him for the moment, but his soul was still gripped by an oppressive feeling. No matter how he turned his gaze about him at the surrounding objects, still his thoughts were occupied only with the extraordinary phenomenon.

“What is it?” he thought to himself. “Art or some kind of supernatural magic, emerging independently of the laws of nature? What a strange, incomprehensible problem! Or is there a certain boundary line for a human being, up to which higher perception leads him, but when he steps over it, the human being steals something that is not to be created by human labor, he tears something living out of the life that animated the original? Why is it that this passing over the line set as a boundary for the imagination is so horrible? Or is it that after imagination, after impulse, there finally follows reality, that horrible reality onto which the imagination is pushed off its axis by an external shove, that horrible reality that appears to the one who thirsts for it when, wishing to comprehend a beautiful person, he arms himself with an anatomical knife, opens up the person’s viscera and sees a repulsive person? Incomprehensible! Such an amazing, horrible vitality! Or is an excessively faithful imitation of nature just as cloying as a dish with an excessively sweet taste?”

With such thoughts he entered his tiny room in a small wooden building on the Fifteenth Line of Vasilievsky Island, a room in which his rudimentary student work lay scattered in every corner—copies from ancient models that were careful and precise and demonstrated that the artist was trying to grasp the fundamental laws and inner proportions of nature.⁵ He examined them for a long time, and finally his thoughts began moving one after the other and were expressed almost in words—so vividly did he feel what he was reflecting on!

“It’s been a year now that I’ve been laboring over this dry, skeletal work! I try with all my powers to find out that which is given so miraculously to the great creators and seems to be the fruit of a moment’s swift inspiration. Hardly do they touch brush to canvas than a man appears, free, unfettered, just as he was created by nature; his movements are lifelike, unconstrained. To them this is given all at once, but I have to labor my whole life long; spend my whole life studying boring principles and elements, give my whole life up to insipid work that offers no response to my feelings. There are my daubings! They are faithful, they resemble the originals; but if I were to try to produce something of my own, it would come out all wrong. The leg won’t stand so surely and easily; the arm won’t rise so lightly and freely; for me the turn of the head will never be as natural as for them—and the conception, and those inexpressible phenomena… No, I will never be a great artist!”

His reflections were cut short by the entrance of his valet, a lad of about eighteen, in a Russian peasant shirt, with a pink face and red hair. Without ceremony he began to pull off Chertkov’s boots, while the latter remained plunged in his reflections. This lad in the red shirt was his manservant and model, cleaned his boots, yawned in his tiny anteroom, ground his paints, and soiled his floor with his dirty feet. Having taken the boots, he threw Chertkov a dressing gown and was leaving the room when he suddenly turned his head back and said loudly, “Master, should I light a candle or not?”

“Yes, do,” Chertkov answered absentmindedly.

“Oh, and the landlord came by,” the filthy valet added offhandedly, following the praiseworthy custom of all people of his profession—mentioning as a postscript the most important thing. “The landlord came by and said that if you don’t pay him, he’ll throw all your paintings out the window along with your bed.”

“Tell the landlord not to worry about the money,” Chertkov answered. “I managed to get the money.”

At these words he reached for the pocket of his tailcoat, but suddenly remembered that he had left all his money at the shop in payment for the portrait. He began mentally reproaching himself for his foolishness in running out of the shop for no reason, frightened by an insignificant incident, and not taking either the money or the portrait. He resolved to go to the merchant first thing the next day and take the money back, considering himself completely justified in refusing to make such a purchase, especially since his domestic circumstances did not permit him any unnecessary expenses.

The light of the moon lay on his floor in the form of a bright white window, encompassing part of the bed and ending on the wall. All the objects and paintings hanging in his room seemed to be smiling, sometimes catching with their edges a part of this eternally beautiful radiance. At that moment he looked at the wall as if by chance and saw on it that same strange portrait that had so impressed him in the shop. A light trembling passed involuntarily over his body. The first thing he did was call his valet-model and ask him how the portrait had gotten there and who had brought it; but the valet-model swore that no one had visited except the landlord, who had come in the morning and had had nothing but a key in his hands. Chertkov could feel his hair start to move on his head. Sitting down by the window, he struggled to convince himself that there couldn’t be anything supernatural going on, that his boy might have fallen asleep at that moment, that the owner of the portrait could have sent it after finding out his address by some special happenstance… In short, he began to adduce all those trite explanations that we use when we want what happened to have happened just the way we think it did. He made a point of not looking at the portrait, but his head kept turning to it involuntarily, and it seemed that his gaze was stuck to the strange depiction. The old man’s motionless gaze was unbearable; his eyes absolutely shone, absorbing the moonlight, and their vitality was so terrifying that Chertkov involuntarily covered his eyes with his hand. It seemed as if a tear was trembling on the old man’s eyelashes; the bright twilight into which the sovereign moon had transformed the night intensified the effect; the canvas disappeared, and the terrifying face of the old man moved forward and looked out of the frame as if out of a window.

Attributing the portrait’s supernatural effect to the moon, whose miraculous light possesses the secret property of lending objects part of the sounds and colors of another world, Chertkov ordered his servant to quickly give him the candle he was fumbling with, but the expressiveness of the portrait did not lessen in the slightest. The moonlight, merging with the radiance of the candle, lent the portrait a still more incomprehensible and at the same time strange vitality. Seizing a sheet, Chertkov began to cover the portrait, wrapping it up three times so that it could not shine through the sheet, but all the same, whether as the result of a powerfully disturbed imagination, or whether his own eyes, exhausted by intense strain, had attained a fleeting, transient knack, it seemed to him for a long time as if the gaze of the old man was gleaming through the canvas. Finally he decided to put out the candle and lie down in his bed, which was blocked off by screens that hid the portrait from him. In vain did he wait for sleep. The most distressing thoughts drove away that calm state that brings sleep with it. Anguish, vexation, the landlord demanding money, the unfinished paintings that were creations of impotent impulses, poverty—all these things moved before him, and one took the place of the other. And whenever he succeeded in driving them away for a moment, the magical portrait would push its way into his imagination like a sovereign, and it would seem as if its death-dealing eyes were gleaming through a chink in the screens. He had never before felt such a heavy weight on his soul. The moonlight, which contains so much music when it invades the lonely bedroom of a poet and carries infantile, enchanting half-dreams over the head of his bed—that same moonlight did not bring him musical reveries; his reveries were painful. Finally he fell into something that was not sleep, but a kind of half-oblivion, that oppressive state when with one eye we see the approaching visions of dreams, and with the other we see surrounding objects in a vague form. He saw the surface of the old man’s image detach itself and come down from the portrait, just as the top layer of froth comes off of boiling liquid; this surface image rose into the air and floated closer and closer to him and finally came right up to his bed. Chertkov felt his breath being taken away; he made an effort to raise himself up—but he couldn’t move his arms. The old man’s eyes burned dimly and fastened themselves on him with all their magnetic force.

“Do not be afraid,” said the strange old man in an intimate tone, and Chertkov noticed a smile on his lips that seemed to sting him with its grin and which illuminated the dull wrinkles of his face with its bright vitality. “Do not be afraid of me,” the strange phenomenon said. “You and I will never be separated. You’ve thought up a very stupid occupation: What makes you want to sweat for ages over the alphabet when you have long been able to read fluently? You think that by long efforts you’ll be able to comprehend art, that you will win and receive something for it? Yes, you’ll receive something…” and at this his face became strangely distorted and a motionless laughter was expressed in all his wrinkles, “you’ll receive the enviable right to throw yourself into the Neva River from Saint Isaac’s Bridge or to tie up your neck with a kerchief and hang yourself from the first available nail; and as for your works, some dauber will buy them up for a ruble and cover them with primer so he can paint some ugly red face on top. Give up your foolish idea! Everything on earth is done for the sake of profit. You’d do better to take your brush and paint portraits of the whole town! Take on anything they commission, but don’t fall in love with your work, don’t sit over it day and night; time flies fast and life does not stop. The more paintings you can slap together in a day, the more money and fame you’ll have in your pocket. Give up this garret and rent a luxurious apartment. I love you and that’s why I’m giving you this advice; I will also give you money if you’ll just come to me.” At these words the old man again expressed on his face the same motionless, terrifying laughter.

An incomprehensible trembling came over Chertkov and emerged as a cold sweat on his face. Gathering all his strength, he raised his arm and finally half rose from the bed. But the image of the old man had become dim, and he only caught sight of it going back into its frame. Chertkov got up anxiously and began to pace around the room. In order to refresh himself a little, he went up to the window. The moon’s radiance still lay on the roofs and the white walls of the houses, although some small storm clouds had begun to pass more frequently across the sky. All was quiet; now and then one could hear the distant jingling of a cabby’s droshky as he drowsed in some obscure lane, lulled to sleep by his lazy nag as he waited for a late fare.⁶ Chertkov finally convinced himself that his imagination was excessively upset and had presented to him in a dream the creation of his own disturbed thoughts. He went up to the portrait again. The sheet completely covered it from sight, and it seemed that only a little spark could be seen through it from time to time. Finally he fell asleep and slept until morning.

On awakening he long felt himself to be in that unpleasant condition that overcomes a person after coal-gas poisoning: His head ached unpleasantly. It was dim in the room, and an unpleasant dampness drizzled in the air and seeped through the chinks in his windows, which were blocked up by paintings or by stretched and primed canvases. Soon there was a knock at the door, and his landlord came in accompanied by the district police inspector, the appearance of whom is just as unpleasant for insignificant people as the ingratiating face of a petitioner is for the rich. The landlord of the small building in which Chertkov lived was one of those creatures who usually are owners of buildings on the Fifteenth Line of Vasilievsky Island, or on the Petersburg Side, or in a distant corner of Kolomna; a creature the likes of which is very numerous in Russia and whose character is as hard to define as the color of a worn-out frock coat.⁷ In his youth he was both a captain and a loudmouth, he was also employed in civilian business, he was a master at giving a good flogging, he was both quick and efficient, and a dandy, and stupid; but in his old age he had merged all these vivid peculiarities within himself into a kind of dim indefiniteness. He was already a widower, already retired; he no longer played the dandy, or boasted, or got into fights; he only loved to drink tea and chatter all kinds of nonsense while drinking it; he would walk around his room and trim the tallow candle-end; precisely at the end of each month he would call on his tenants for the rent; he would go out into the street with a key in his hand in order to look at the roof of his building; he would chase the yard sweeper several times out of his kennel, where he would hide in order to sleep—in short, he was a retired person who, after a wild life and a bumpy ride with post-horses, has nothing left but banal habits.

“Be so good as to see for yourself,” the landlord said, turning to the police inspector and spreading his arms. “Be so good as to take charge and inform him.”

“I must inform you,” said the district police inspector, hooking his hand behind the loop on his uniform, “that you must without fail pay the rent that you have owed for three months.”

“I would be glad to pay, but what can I do when I have no money?” Chertkov said coolly.

“In that case, the landlord must take your personal property equal in value to the sum of the rent, and you must immediately move out, this very day.”

“Take whatever you want,” Chertkov answered almost insensibly.

“Many of these paintings are done with some skill,” the police inspector continued, looking through some of them. “But it’s a pity that they’re not finished and the colors aren’t too vivid… Maybe you didn’t have enough money to buy paint? And what is this painting wrapped up in linen?”

At this, the police inspector, approaching the painting without ceremony, pulled the sheet off it, because these gentlemen always permit themselves a bit of liberty when they see utter defenselessness or poverty. The portrait seemed to amaze him, because the extraordinary vitality of the eyes produced an equal effect on everyone. While inspecting the painting he squeezed its frame firmly, and since the hands of police employees are always somewhat crudely fashioned, the frame suddenly split. A small board fell onto the floor together with a roll of gold coins that banged heavily to the ground, and several glittering little discs rolled in all directions. Chertkov greedily rushed to pick them up and tore out of the policeman’s hands several three-ruble coins that he had picked up.

“How can you say you don’t have any money,” the police inspector said, smiling pleasantly, “when you have so many gold coins?”

“This money is sacred to me!” Chertkov exclaimed, fearful of the policeman’s expert hands. “I must keep it, it was entrusted to me by my late father. But in order to satisfy you, here’s the money for the rent!” At these words he threw a few coins to the landlord.

The physiognomy and manner of the landlord and of the worthy guardian of the morals of drunken cabbies changed in a single moment.

The policeman began to make apologies and to assure Chertkov that he was only carrying out the prescribed formalities, and that he did not in any case have the right to compel him; and in order to assure Chertkov of this even more, he offered him the prize of some snuff. The landlord assured him that he had merely been having a joke, and he made his assurances with the kind of oaths and shamelessness that are usually employed by a merchant in the Gostiny Dvor shopping arcade.⁸

But Chertkov ran out and decided not to remain any longer in his former apartment. He didn’t have time to think about the strange nature of this incident. Inspecting the roll, he could see more than a hundred three-ruble coins in it. His first task was to rent a chic apartment. The apartment he happened to find seemed to have been prepared specially for him: four large rooms in a row, big windows, all the advantages and conveniences an artist could wish for! Lying on a Turkish sofa and looking through the sheet-glass windows at the growing and fleetingly glimpsed waves of people, he sank into a self-satisfied oblivion and was amazed at his fate, which only yesterday had crawled along with him in a garret. His unfinished and finished paintings were hung about the colossal, well-proportioned walls; among them hung the mysterious portrait, which he had obtained in such a unique manner. He again began to think about the origin of the unusual vitality of its eyes. His thoughts turned to the half-dream he had had, and finally to the magical treasure that was hidden in its frame. Everything led him to the conclusion that some kind of story was connected with the existence of the portrait and that perhaps even his own existence was linked to this portrait. He jumped up from his sofa and began to inspect the portrait carefully: in the edge of the frame there was a compartment concealed by a thin board that was so skillfully closed up and made even with the surface that no one could have found out about its existence if the heavy finger of the Police Inspector had not broken through the little board. He put the portrait back in its place and looked at it again. The vitality of the eyes no longer seemed so terrifying to him in the bright light that filled his room through the huge windows and the sound of the crowds in the street that thundered in his ears, but that vitality contained something unpleasant, so that he endeavored to turn away from the portrait as soon as possible.

At that time his doorbell rang, and a respectable middle-aged lady with a tiny waist entered his apartment, accompanied by a young girl of about eighteen; a footman in a rich livery opened the door for them and remained in the anteroom.

“I have come to you with a request,” the lady said in the affectionate tone ladies use with artists, French hairdressers, and all those people who are born for the pleasure of others. “I have heard about your gifts…” (Chertkov was amazed at this sudden fame of his.) “I would like you to paint a portrait of my daughter.”

At this the daughter’s pale little face turned toward the artist, who, if he had been an expert on the heart, would have immediately read on it the few volumes of its history. A childish passion for balls, the anguish and boredom of the prolonged periods before dinner and after dinner, the desire to run about among the many guests at an outdoor party in a dress of the latest fashion, an impatience to see her girlfriend in order to say, “Oh, my darling, how bored I was,” or to announce what kind of trimming Madame Sichler had made for the Princess B—’s dress… That is all that the young visitor’s face expressed—a pale face, almost without expression, with a tinge of sickly yellowness.⁹

“I would like you to begin right away,” the lady continued. “We can give you an hour.”

Chertkov rushed to his paints and brushes, took up a stretched and primed canvas, and settled down to work.

“I must give you some advance warning about my Annette,” said the lady, “which will lighten your labor somewhat. Languor has always been noticeable in her eyes and even in all the features of her face; my Annette is very sensitive, and I confess I never give her modern novels to read!” The artist looked as hard as he could but discerned no signs of languor. “I would like you to depict her simply in her family circle or, even better, alone in the open air, in the green shade, so that nothing would indicate that she was on her way to a ball. Our balls, I must confess, are so boring and so soul-destroying that I truly don’t understand what pleasure there is in attending them.”

But it was written most distinctly all over the daughter’s face and even the face of the respectable lady herself that they never missed a single ball.

Chertkov spent a moment reflecting on how to harmonize these small contradictions, and finally decided to choose a prudent middle course. Besides, he was enticed by the desire to conquer the difficulties and make art triumph by preserving the ambiguous expression of the portrait. His brush threw onto the canvas the first fog, the artistic chaos; the features taking shape began slowly to be distinguished and to emerge. He pressed up close to the model, his original, and was already beginning to capture those ineffable features that in a faithful copy lend even the most insipid original a kind of character that constitutes a high triumph of truth. A sweet trembling began to overcome him when he felt that he had finally noticed and would perhaps express that which is very rarely expressed successfully. Only talent knows this enjoyment, inexplicable and progressively heightening. Under his brush the face of the portrait seemed involuntarily to acquire that coloration that was a sudden discovery even for him; but the original began to fidget and yawn so much in front of him that the still inexperienced artist found it difficult to catch its constant expression in fits and starts and at odd moments.

“I think that’s enough for the first time,” the respectable lady pronounced.

God, how horrible! His soul and power had been stimulated and wanted to have free rein. Hanging his head and throwing down his palette, he stood in front of his painting.

“By the way, I was told that you can finish a portrait completely in two sittings,” the lady said, going up to the painting, “but so far you’ve done only a sketch. We’ll come tomorrow at the same time.”

The artist wordlessly saw his guests out and was left in unpleasant reflections. In his cramped garret no one had interrupted him when he sat at his work, commissioned by no one. With vexation he set aside the portrait he had begun and wanted to take up his other unfinished works. But how could it be possible to replace thoughts and feelings that have penetrated to the soul with new ones that the imagination has not yet managed to fall in love with? Throwing his brush aside, he left the house.

Youth is fortunate in that a multitude of different roads run before it, that its lively, fresh soul is accessible to a thousand different types of enjoyment; and thus Chertkov found distraction in almost the first moment. A few rubles in the pocket—and what is beyond the power of youth, filled with strength! Besides, a Russian, especially a nobleman or an artist, has this strange characteristic: as soon as he has a half-kopeck in his pocket, the whole world can go hang and he’s not afraid of anything. After the money he had paid in advance for the apartment, he had about thirty three-ruble coins left. And he squandered all thirty in a single evening. First he ordered the most superb dinner, drank two bottles of wine and didn’t take the change, hired a fancy carriage just in order to ride to a theater that was located a few steps from his apartment, treated three of his friends in a pastry shop, made a visit to yet another place, and returned home without a kopeck in his pocket.¹⁰

Throwing himself on the bed, he fell into a deep sleep, but his dreams were just as incoherent as on the first night, and his chest was just as tight, as if it felt something heavy on it; he saw through the chink in his screens that the depiction of the old man had detached itself from the canvas and with an anxious expression was counting and recounting piles of money, gold was pouring from his hands… Chertkov’s eyes blazed; it seemed that his feelings recognized in the gold an inexplicable charm that had been unknown to him up to that time. The old man beckoned him with a finger and showed him a whole mountain of gold coins. Chertkov convulsively reached out his hand and woke up. Having awakened, he went up to the portrait, shook it, cut its frame open on all sides, but didn’t find hidden money anywhere. Finally he gave up and decided to work, promising himself not to sit for a long time and not to get carried away by the alluring brush.

At that time the lady from the day before came with her pale Annette. The artist put his portrait on the easel, and this time his brush flew more quickly. The sunny day and bright illumination gave a kind of special expression to the original, and many subtleties that had not been noticeable before were revealed. His soul again began to burn with effort. He tried to capture the tiniest point or feature, even the very yellowness and uneven coloring of the yawning and exhausted beauty’s face, with the kind of precision that inexperienced artists permit themselves, imagining that the truth will please others the same way it pleases them. His brush had just started to capture the general expression of the whole when an annoyed “Enough!” resounded in his ears and the lady went up to his portrait.

“Oh, my God! What have you painted?” she cried out in vexation. “You’ve made Annette yellow; she has some kind of dark spots under her eyes; she looks as if she’s taken several vials of medicine. No, for the love of God, fix your portrait. That’s not her face at all. We’ll come tomorrow at the same time.”

Chertkov threw down his brush in vexation. He cursed himself, and his palette, and the affectionate lady, and her daughter, and the whole world. He sat starving in his magnificent room and didn’t have the strength to take up a single painting. The next day, rising early, he seized the first work that came to hand. It was a picture of Psyche that he had started long ago; he put it on the easel with the intention of forcing himself to continue working on it.¹¹ At that moment the lady from the day before came in.

“Oh, Annette, look, look at this!” the lady exclaimed with a joyful air. “Oh, what a good resemblance! It’s charming! Charming! The nose, the mouth, the eyebrows! How can we thank you for this beautiful surprise? How sweet! How good that this arm is raised a bit. I see that you truly are the great artist they told me about.”

Chertkov stood dumbfounded when he saw that the lady had mistaken his Psyche for a portrait of her daughter. With the shyness of a novice, he began to assure her that in this weak study he had wanted to depict Psyche; but the daughter took this as a compliment to herself and smiled sweetly, a smile shared by her mother. A hellish thought flashed in the artist’s head, a feeling of vexation and fury fortified it, and he decided to profit by this.

“Allow me to ask you to sit for me a little longer today,” he said, turning to the blonde, who was pleased this time. “You can see that I haven’t done the dress at all yet, because I wanted to paint it all from nature with greater precision.”

Quickly he dressed his Psyche in the clothing of the nineteenth century; he slightly touched the eyes and lips, made the hair somewhat lighter, and gave the portrait to his visitors. He was rewarded with a bundle of banknotes and an affectionate smile of gratitude.

But the artist stood as if rooted to the spot. His conscience was tormenting him; he was overcome by that fastidious, mistrustful fear for his unsullied name that is felt by a youth who carries in his soul the nobility of talent, a fear that forces him, if not to destroy, then at least to hide from the world those works in which he himself sees imperfection, a fear that forces him to prefer enduring the contempt of the whole crowd rather than the contempt of a true connoisseur. It seemed to him that a terrible judge was standing before his painting and, shaking his head, reproaching him for shamelessness and lack of talent. What wouldn’t he give to get it back! He wanted to run after the lady, tear the portrait from her hands, rip it up and stomp on it, but how could he do it? Where should he go? He didn’t even know his visitor’s name.

But from that time a happy change took place in his life. He expected his name to be covered in infamy, but it turned out quite the contrary. The lady who had commissioned the portrait went into raptures about this extraordinary artist, and our Chertkov’s studio filled with visitors wishing to double, and if possible increase tenfold, their own images. But the fresh, still innocent Chertkov, who felt in his soul that he was unworthy of taking on such an extraordinary task, in order to somewhat make amends and atone for his crime, decided to take up his work with all possible diligence, to double the exertion of his powers, which was the only thing that would produce miracles. But his intentions met with unforeseen obstacles. The visitors whose portraits he was painting were for the most part impatient, busy people in a hurry, and therefore, as soon as his brush began to create something a bit out of the ordinary, a new visitor would burst in and display his head in a most pompous way, burning with the desire to see it on canvas as soon as possible, and the artist would hurry to finish his work quickly.

His time was finally so filled up that he could not spend a single minute in reflection; and inspiration, continually destroyed at its very birth, finally got out of the habit of visiting him. Finally, in order to make his work go faster, he began to confine himself to well-known, defined, monotonous, long worn-out forms. Soon his portraits resembled those family depictions by the old artists, which are so often encountered in all the lands of Europe and in all corners of the world, where the ladies are depicted with their arms folded on their breasts and holding flowers in their hands, and the cavaliers in uniform with one hand tucked inside their jackets. Sometimes he wished to offer a new, not yet hackneyed posture that would be distinguished by originality and lack of constraint, but, alas! All that is unconstrained and easy is obtained by the poet and artist only in a most constrained way, and is the fruit of great exertions. In order to offer a new, bold expression, to grasp a new secret in painting, he would have to think for a long time, turning his eyes away from everything that surrounded him, flying away from everything worldly and from life. But he didn’t have time for this, and besides he was too exhausted by his daily work to be ready to receive inspiration; and the world he was using as a model to paint his works was too ordinary and monotonous to stimulate and stir his imagination. The deeply pondering and at the same time motionless face of the director of a department; the face of an Uhlan cavalry captain, handsome but always of the same type; the pale face of a St. Petersburg beauty with its forced smile; and many others that were just too ordinary—that is what appeared in turn every day before our painter. It seemed that his very brush had finally taken on the insipidity and lack of energy that marked his originals.

The banknotes and gold that constantly flashed before him finally put the virginal impulses of his soul to sleep. He shamelessly profited by the weakness of people who, in exchange for an extra feature of beauty added by the artist to their images, were ready to forgive him all his deficiencies, even if that beauty damaged the resemblance itself.

Chertkov finally became a quite fashionable painter. The whole capital applied to him. His portraits could be seen in everyone’s studies, bedrooms, drawing rooms, and boudoirs. True artists shrugged their shoulders when they looked at the works of this favorite of all-powerful chance. In vain did they try to find in him a single feature of real truth, tossed onto the canvas by passionate inspiration. It was just faces with regular features, almost always good looking, because the concept of beauty maintained a foothold in the artist, but there was no knowledge of the heart, the passions, or even the habits of man—nothing that would speak of a powerful development of subtle taste. Some who knew Chertkov were amazed at this strange event, because they had seen in his first efforts the presence of talent, and they tried to solve an incomprehensible enigma: How could a gift be extinguished in its prime, rather than developing in full brilliance?

But the self-satisfied artist did not hear this talk and gloried in his universal fame, throwing his gold coins around and beginning to believe that everything on earth is ordinary and simple, that there is no such thing as a revelation from on high, and that everything must of necessity be subsumed under a strict order of tidiness and monotony. His life was reaching the years when everything that breathes of impulse begins to shrink within a person, when the powerful violin bow reaches the soul more faintly and does not twine about the heart with piercing sounds, when contact with beauty no longer transforms virginal powers into fire and flame, but all the burned-out feelings become more open to the sound of gold, listen more attentively to its alluring music, and little by little, imperceptibly, allow it to put them completely to sleep. Fame cannot satiate and give enjoyment to one who has stolen it and not earned it; it produces a constant excitement only in one who is worthy of it. And so all his feelings and impulses turned toward gold. Gold became his passion, his ideal, his terror, his enjoyment, and his goal. Bundles of banknotes grew in his chests. And like everyone who is given this terrible gift, he became boring, closed to everything and indifferent to everything. It seemed that he was ready to turn into one of those strange creatures who are sometimes encountered in the world, at whom a person full of energy and passion looks with horror, and who seem to him like living bodies that contain corpses within themselves. But a certain event powerfully shook him and gave his life a completely different turn.

One day he saw on his desk a note in which the Academy of Fine Arts asked him, as a worthy member, to come and give his judgment about a new work that had been sent from Italy, by a Russian artist who was perfecting his art there. This artist was one of his former comrades, who had borne within himself a passion for art from an early age; with the fiery power of a toiler he had plunged into it with his whole soul, and for its sake, tearing himself away from his friends, relatives, and his favorite habits, without any financial assistance he had rushed to an unknown land. He endured poverty, degradation, even hunger, but with a rare selflessness, despising everything, was insensible to everything but his beloved art.

Upon entering the hall, Chertkov found a crowd of visitors gathered around the painting. The deepest silence, of a kind rarely encountered among a crowd of connoisseurs, reigned everywhere on this occasion. Chertkov assumed the significant physiognomy of an expert and approached the painting; but God, what he saw there!

Pure, unsullied, beautiful as a bride, the artist’s work stood before him. And if only the slightest desire to shine, if only a perhaps excusable vanity, if only a thought of showing itself off to the mob had been evident there—no, not a one! It rose up humbly. It was simple, innocent, and divine, like talent, like genius. The amazingly beautiful figures grouped themselves without constraint, freely, without touching the canvas, and, amazed by so many gazes directed at them, seemed to bashfully lower their beautiful eyelashes. In the divine features of the faces breathed those secret phenomena that the soul cannot, does not, know how to recount to another person; that which was expressed lay inexpressibly on them; and all this was tossed onto the canvas so easily, so humbly and freely, that it seemed to be the fruit of the artist’s momentary inspiration, a thought that had suddenly dawned upon him. The whole painting was—an instant, but an instant for which a whole human life is nothing but preparation. Involuntary tears were ready to roll down the faces of the visitors surrounding the painting. It seemed that all tastes, all bold, irregular deviations of taste, were merged into a silent hymn to the divine work. Motionless, with mouth open, Chertkov stood in front of the painting, and finally, when the visitors and experts began little by little to stir and to discuss the merits of the work, and when they finally turned to him and asked him to make his thoughts known, he regained consciousness. He wanted to assume an ordinary, indifferent air, wanted to offer the usual sort of banal opinion that stale, hard-hearted artists express: that the work was good and the artist’s talent was evident, but that one would wish for the idea and the finishing to be better executed in many places—but the words died on his lips, tears and sobs broke out discordantly in answer, and like a madman he ran out of the hall.

For about a minute he stood motionless and insensible in the middle of his magnificent studio. His whole being, his whole life was awakened in a single instant, as if youth had returned to him, as if the extinguished sparks of talent had flamed up anew. My God! To ruin so pitilessly all the best years of his youth, to destroy, to put out the spark of a fire that had perhaps been flickering in his breast and that would perhaps by now have developed in majesty and beauty, that would perhaps also have provoked tears of amazement and gratitude! And to ruin all that, to ruin it without any pity! It seemed as if at that moment those efforts and impulses that he had once known came to life again in his soul. He seized a brush and approached a canvas. The sweat of effort broke out on his face, he was transformed into one desire, and one may say that he burned with one thought: He wanted to depict a fallen angel. This idea was the one that was most in harmony with the state of his soul. But, alas! His figures, poses, groups, and thoughts came out onto the canvas in a constrained and incoherent way. His brush and imagination had confined themselves too much to one standard, and the impotent impulse to transgress the boundaries and fetters that he had laid on himself immediately resulted in incorrectness and error. He had neglected the tedious, long ladder of cumulative knowledge and the first basic laws of future greatness.

In vexation he removed all his works from his room, works marked by the dead pallor of superficial fashion. He locked the door and ordered that no one be admitted, and set to work like a passionate youth. But, alas! At every step he was stopped by his ignorance of the most primary elements. A simple, insignificant technical problem cooled off his impulse and stood as a threshold that his imagination could not jump over. Sometimes the sudden phantom of a great thought would dawn upon him, his imagination would see in the dark distance something that, if he could capture it and toss it onto the canvas, could be made into something unusual and at the same time accessible to everyone’s soul. A star of the miraculous sparkled in the indistinct fog of his thoughts, because he did in fact possess the phantom of talent; but God! Some insignificant convention that every schoolboy knows, some dead anatomical rule—and his thought would die, the impulse of his impotent imagination would freeze in its unnarrated, undepicted state; his brush would involuntarily turn to its rote forms: the arms were folded in a single manner learned by heart, the head did not dare to take an unusual turn, even the folds of a dress smacked of something memorized and did not want to obey and drape onto an unfamiliar position of the body. And he felt, he felt and saw this himself! Sweat poured from him, his lips trembled, and after a long pause during which all his feelings rebelled within him, he again set to work, but when one is past thirty it is harder to study the boring ladder of difficult rules and of anatomy; it is even harder to comprehend suddenly that which develops slowly and is obtained by long efforts, great exertions, deep selflessness. Finally he knew that horrible torment that sometimes appears in nature as a striking exception, when a weak talent strives to manifest itself on a scale that exceeds its scope and it fails to manifest itself, that torment that in a young man gives birth to great deeds but in one who has passed beyond the boundary of dreams turns into a futile thirst, that terrible torment that makes a person capable of horrible crimes.

He was overcome by a horrible envy, envy to the point of fury. His face became bilious when he saw a work that carried the stamp of talent. He would gnash his teeth and devour it with the death-dealing gaze of the basilisk.¹² Finally in his soul was born the most hellish intention that a person ever nourished, and with mad strength he rushed to carry it out. He began to buy up all the best works that art produced. After buying a painting for a high price, he would carefully carry it to his room, and then with the fury of a tiger he would throw himself on it, rip it, tear it up, cut it up into pieces and stomp on them, accompanying his actions with a horrible laugh of hellish enjoyment. As soon as a fresh work appeared somewhere, breathing with the fire of a new talent, he would use all his efforts to buy it at any cost. The innumerable riches he had amassed afforded him the means to satisfy this hellish desire. He untied all his sacks of gold and opened up his money chests. Never had a monster of ignorance destroyed as many works of beauty as did this ferocious avenger. And people who carried within themselves the spark of divine knowledge, thirsty only for the great, were pitilessly, inhumanly deprived of these holy, beautiful works, in which great art had lifted the veil from heaven and shown to the human being a part of his own inner world, filled with sounds and sacred mysteries. Nowhere, in no corner, could they hide from his rapacious passion, which knew no mercy. His sharp-sighted, fiery eye penetrated everywhere and could find the trace of an artistic brush even in the dust of neglect. At all the auctions where he appeared, everyone despaired in advance of obtaining an artistic creation. It seemed as if angry heaven had purposely sent this horrible scourge into the world, wishing to take away all its harmony. This horrible passion cast a terrible coloration onto his face. His face was almost always bilious; his eyes flashed almost insanely; his beetling brows and forehead, always crisscrossed by wrinkles, gave him a kind of savage expression and separated him completely from the peaceful inhabitants of the earth.

Fortunately for the world and the fine arts, such a strained and violent life could not last long. The size of his passions was too irregular and colossal for life’s weak forces. The fits of fury and madness began to occur more often, and finally they turned into the most horrible illness. A severe fever, combined with galloping consumption, overcame him so fiercely that in three days only a shadow of him was left. Added to this were all the signs of hopeless madness. Sometimes several people were unable to restrain him. He began to have visions of the long forgotten living eyes of the unusual portrait, and then his fury was horrible. All the people around his bed seemed to him to be horrible portraits. This portrait doubled, multiplied fourfold before his eyes, and finally he had the vision that all the walls were hung with these horrible portraits that fixed their immobile living eyes on him. The terrible portraits looked at him from the ceiling, from the floor, and moreover he could see the room getting larger and more spacious in order to accommodate more of these motionless eyes. The doctor who had the responsibility of treating him and who had already heard something of his strange story, tried with all his powers to discover the secret relationship between the visions that appeared to him and the events of his life, but he had no success. The patient did not understand or feel anything but his torments, and in a piercing, inexpressibly harrowing voice he cried out and prayed for them to take away the implacable portrait with the living eyes, the location of which he would describe with a degree of detail that was strange for a madman. In vain did they employ all their efforts to find the magical portrait. They rummaged through everything in the house, but couldn’t find the portrait. Then the patient raised himself up anxiously and again began to describe its location with the kind of precision that demonstrated the presence of a clear and penetrating mind; but all their searches were in vain. Finally the doctor concluded that it was nothing more than a particular phenomenon of madness. Soon his life was cut short in a final, now silent, burst of suffering. His corpse was terrifying. They also could find nothing of his huge wealth, but seeing the cut-up pieces of those lofty works of art, whose worth exceeded millions, they understood the horrible use his wealth had been put to.

Many coaches, droshkies, and carriages stood in front of the entrance to a house in which an auction was being held, an auction of the belongings of one of those rich art connoisseurs who sweetly sleep their whole life away absorbed in zephyrs and cupids, who innocently pass as Maecenases, and for this purpose ingenuously spend the millions that were amassed by their prosperous fathers, and sometimes even by their own previous labors. The long hall was filled with a motley crowd of visitors who had come flying like birds of prey onto an abandoned corpse. There was a whole flotilla of Russian merchants from the Gostiny Dvor shopping arcade and even from the flea market, in dark-blue German frock coats. Here their aspect and physiognomy were somehow firmer and more impudent, and were devoid of that cloying obsequiousness that is so evident in the Russian merchant. They did not at all stand on ceremony, despite the fact that present in the hall were many of those notable aristocrats before whom, in another context, they would be ready with their bowing to sweep away the dust brought in by their own boots. Here they were completely free and easy, they unceremoniously poked at the books and paintings, trying to find out the quality of the goods, and they boldly outbid the prices set by connoisseur Counts. Present here were many of those inevitable auction visitors who resolve every day to go to an auction instead of breakfast; connoisseur aristocrats, who consider it their duty not to miss a chance to increase their collection and who have no other occupation between twelve and one o’clock; finally, those noble gentlemen whose clothes and pockets are extremely worn, who appear every day without any self-interested motive, but solely in order to see how it will all end, who will offer more, who less, who will outbid whom, and who will end up in possession. Many paintings were scattered about without any order. They were mixed up with furniture and books bearing the monograms of the previous owner, who probably had never had the commendable curiosity to look inside them. Chinese vases, marble tabletops, new and antique furniture with curving lines, with griffins, sphinxes, and lion’s paws, gilded and without gilding, chandeliers, old oil lamps—all of it was piled up and not at all in the same kind of order as in the shops. It all represented a kind of chaos of the arts. In general we have a strange feeling when we see an auction. It seems to evoke something similar to a funeral procession. The hall in which it takes place is always gloomy; the windows, blocked up with furniture and paintings, afford only scanty light; silence is spread over everyone’s faces; and the voices: “A hundred rubles!” “One ruble twenty kopecks!” “Four hundred rubles fifty kopecks!”—which come from the lips in a long, drawn-out way, are somehow savage to the ear. But an even greater impression is made by the funereal voice of the auctioneer, who bangs his little hammer and sings a requiem for the poor arts that are so strangely brought together here.

This auction, however, had not yet begun. The visitors were inspecting various objects that were thrown in a heap on the floor. Meanwhile a small crowd had stopped in front of one portrait. It depicted an old man with such a strange vitality in his eyes that it had riveted their attention against their will. One had to acknowledge that the artist had true talent. Although the work had not been finished, still it carried the clear mark of a powerful brush, but at the same time the supernatural vitality of the eyes aroused an involuntary feeling of reproach toward the artist. They felt that this was the height of truthfulness, that only a genius could have depicted truth to such a degree, but that this genius had too boldly crossed over the boundaries set for the human will. Their attention was broken by a sudden exclamation from a certain rather elderly visitor. “Oh, that’s the one!” he cried with a violent movement, and fixed his eyes motionlessly on the portrait. Such an exclamation naturally ignited everyone’s curiosity, and several of the people inspecting the painting could not help but turn to him and say:

“You probably know something about this portrait?”

“You are not mistaken,” replied the man who had made the involuntary exclamation. “Indeed I know the history of this portrait better than anyone else. Everything convinces me that it must be the same portrait about which I would like to speak. Since I notice that you are all interested in finding out about it, I am prepared to satisfy you to some degree right now.”

The visitors expressed their gratitude with nods of their heads and prepared to listen with great attention.

“No doubt,” he began, “few of you are well familiar with that part of the city known as Kolomna. Its character is sharply distinguished from that of other parts of the city. The mores, occupations, means of support, and customs of the inhabitants are completely different from those of other people. Nothing here resembles a capital city, but at the same time it doesn’t resemble a provincial town either, because the fragmentation of a multifarious and, if I may say, civilized life has penetrated even here and appears in the kind of subtle details that can only be generated by a populous capital city. This is a completely different world, and as you ride into the secluded Kolomna streets, you seem to hear your young desires and impulses abandoning you. The life-giving, rainbow-colored future does not show itself here. Here everything is quietude and retirement. This is where the sediment forms out of the movements of the capital city. And in fact, this is the retreat of retired civil servants whose pensions do not exceed five hundred rubles a year; widows who used to live on the labors of their husbands; people of modest means who have a pleasant acquaintance with law proceedings in the highest courts and thus have condemned themselves to live here their whole lives; retired cooks who spend all day knocking about the markets, chattering nonsense with the peasant in the little grocery store and getting five kopecks’ worth of coffee and four kopecks’ worth of sugar every day; finally, that whole category of people that I will call ashlike, whose clothes, faces, and hair possess a kind of dim, ashlike appearance. They resemble a gray day when the sun does not blind us with its bright shining, when no storm whistles, accompanied by thunder, rain, and hail, but when it’s simply neither one thing nor the other in the sky: A fog settles and takes away all the sharp features from objects. The faces of these people are somehow reddish-rust, their hair is also reddish; their eyes are almost always devoid of sparkle; their clothing is also thoroughly drab and presents that turbid color that appears when you mix all the colors together, and in general their appearance is thoroughly drab. This category includes retired theater ushers; fifty-year-old titular councillors who’ve been dismissed; retired military men, nurslings of Mars with a two-hundred-ruble pension, a knocked-out eye, and a swollen lip.¹³ These people are completely devoid of passion; they don’t care a damn about anything. They walk without paying any attention to any objects; they are silent without thinking about anything. In their room there is only a bed and a liter bottle of pure Russian vodka, which they monotonously suck all day without any bold rush of blood to the head, aroused by a strong swig—the kind of swig a young German craftsman, that student of Meshchanskaya Street, the sole proprietor of the sidewalk after midnight, loves to take for himself on Sundays.

“Life in Kolomna is always monotonous. Rarely does a coach thunder in the peaceful streets, with the possible exception of the one in which some actors are riding and which disturbs the general quietude with its ringing, thundering, and clattering. Here almost everyone is a pedestrian. Seldom does a cabby, almost always without a passenger, drag lazily by, hauling along with himself the hay for his humble nag. Apartment rent is rarely as high as a thousand rubles. Most apartments are fifteen to twenty or thirty rubles a month, not counting the many little corners that go for four rubles fifty kopecks a month, along with heat and morning coffee. Widows of civil servants who receive a pension are the most respectable inhabitants of this neighborhood. They behave themselves very well, they sweep their rooms cleanly and talk to their female neighbors and acquaintances about the high price of beef, potatoes, and cabbage; they very often have a young daughter, a taciturn, silent creature, but sometimes quite comely nevertheless; they also keep a nasty little dog and an antique clock with a sadly ticking pendulum. These same civil servants’ widows occupy the best quarters, the ones that cost from twenty to thirty and sometimes even forty rubles. After them come the actors, whose salaries do not permit them to move out of Kolomna. They are a free-wheeling people, like all artists, who live for pleasure. Sitting in their dressing gowns, they either carve little knickknacks out of bone or repair their pistols, or glue together various useful household objects out of cardboard, or play checkers or cards with a visiting friend and spend the morning that way; they do the same thing in the evening, often adding in a rum punch. After these big shots, this Kolomna aristocracy, follows an unusual collection of small fry, and for the observer it is just as hard to enumerate all the people occupying the various corners and nooks of a single room as to give names to the multitude of insects that are generated in old vinegar. What people you encounter there! Old women who pray, old women who get drunk, old women who get drunk and pray at the same time, old women who make ends meet through incomprehensible means, who like ants drag old rags and linen from the Kalinkin Bridge to the flea market in order to sell them there for fifteen kopecks. In a word, all the pitiful and unfortunate sediment of humanity.

“Naturally, sometimes these people suffer great financial shortages that do not allow them to lead their usual poor lives. They must often take out emergency loans in order to extricate themselves from their circumstances. Then one finds among them those people who are called by the resounding name of capitalists and who can supply sums from twenty to a hundred rubles at various rates of interest, almost always excessive. These people little by little accumulate a fortune that sometimes allows them to acquire their own little home. But among these moneylenders there was one unlike all the rest, a strange creature by the name of Petromikhali. Whether he was a Greek or an Armenian or a Moldavian—no one knew, but at the least he had completely southern facial features. He always wore a capacious Asiatic robe, he was tall, his face had a dark olive complexion, and his black beetling eyebrows with a touch of gray and also his mustache lent him a frightening appearance. No expression was discernible on his face. It was almost always motionless, and his striking southern physiognomy presented a strange contrast to the ashlike inhabitants of Kolomna. Petromikhali did not at all resemble the abovementioned moneylenders of this secluded part of the city. He could offer any sum that was asked of him. Naturally, the rates of interest for this were also unusual. His dilapidated house with its multitude of annexes was located in the Goat’s Bog neighborhood. It would not have been so decrepit if its owner had laid out even a little bit of cash for repairs, but Petromikhali absolutely refused to make any expenditures. All the rooms of the house, excluding the small hole he himself occupied, were cold storerooms in which were scattered piles of vases made of porcelain, gold, and jasper, all sorts of trash, even furniture that was brought to him as security by debtors of various ranks and callings, because Petromikhali didn’t scorn anything, and although he could lend rubles by the hundreds of thousands, he was also ready to offer a sum no larger than one ruble. Old, worn-out linen, broken chairs, even torn boots—he was ready to take everything into his storerooms, and a beggar could have no fear in coming to him with a bundle in his hand. Costly pearls that perhaps had once entwined the most enchanting neck in the world were kept in his dirty iron trunk along with a fifty-year-old lady’s ancient snuffbox, a diadem that had risen over the alabaster brow of a great beauty, and the diamond ring of a poor civil servant who had received it as a reward for his tireless labors.

“But it must be noted that people were forced to turn to him only by the most dire necessity. His conditions were so onerous that they dispelled any desire. But strangest of all, at first his interest rates did not seem very high. By means of his strange and unusual computations he arranged them in such an inexplicable way that they grew at a terrible progression, and even auditors’ clerks could not fathom this incomprehensible rule, all the more since it seemed to be based on the laws of strict mathematical truth. They saw sums that were clearly exaggerated, but they also saw that there was no mistake in these calculations. Pity, like all the other passions of a feeling person, could never reach him, and no supplications could incline him to a deferment or to a lessening of the payment. Several times they found at his door unfortunate old women, ossified from the cold, whose dark-blue faces, frozen limbs, and dead, outstretched arms seemed even after death still to be begging him for mercy. This often aroused a general indignation, and the police tried several times to investigate more thoroughly the acts of this strange man, but the district police inspectors always managed to fend them off under various pretexts and to present the business in a different light, despite the fact that they had not received a penny from him. But wealth has such a strange force that people believe in it the way they believe in a state banknote. Without even showing itself, it can invisibly move everyone like fawning servants. This strange creature would sit cross-legged on his blackened divan, motionlessly receiving petitioners, only slightly twitching his brow as a sign of greeting, and one never heard anything superfluous or extraneous from him. Nevertheless there were rumors that he sometimes gave out money for nothing, without demanding its return, but that he would propose such a condition that everyone ran from him in horror, and even the most garrulous housewives did not have the strength to move their lips to tell others about it. Those who did have the courage to accept the money he gave them turned yellow, withered away, and died without daring to reveal the mystery.

“In this part of the town a certain artist who was then famed for his truly beautiful works owned a small house. This artist was my father. I can show you some of his works that display a decided talent. His life was quite placid. He was the kind of modest, pious painter that lived only in the religious Middle Ages. He could have had great fame and acquired a great fortune if he had made up his mind to take the many jobs that were offered him from all sides, but he preferred to work on religious subjects, and for a small sum he would agree to paint the entire iconostasis of a parish church. He often had need of money, but he never brought himself to have recourse to the horrible moneylender, although he always had the means to pay back his debt, because all he had to do was to sit down and paint a few portraits and the money would be in his pocket. But he was so sorry to tear himself away from his work, he was so sad to part with his beloved idea for even a short time, that he would rather have sat starving in his room for several days, which is what he would always have done if he had not had a passionately beloved wife and two children, one of whom you now see before you. But one time his extremity became so great that he was about ready to go see the Greek, when suddenly the news spread that the horrible moneylender was at the point of death. This incident struck him so powerfully that he was ready to acknowledge it as having been sent on purpose from above in order to hinder his intention, when he met in his entryway a panting old woman, the woman who carried out three duties for the moneylender: cook, yard sweeper, and valet. The old woman, who had quite lost the habit of talking while serving her strange master, indistinctly muttered a few incoherent, abrupt words, from which my father could learn only that her master had urgent need of him and asked that he bring his paints and brushes with him. My father could not imagine what he could be needed for at such a time, and moreover with his paints and brushes, but spurred by curiosity, he grabbed his box of painting supplies and set off with the old woman.

“Only with difficulty could he force his way through the crowd of beggars who were clustering around the dwelling of the dying moneylender, nourishing the hope that maybe now, finally, before death, this sinner would repent and dispense a small part of his innumerable riches. He went into a small room and saw, stretching out almost to its whole length, the body of the Asian, which at first he thought already dead, so stretched out and immobile was it. Finally the moneylender lifted his shriveled head, and his eyes became so terribly fixed that my father began to tremble. Petromikhali uttered a muffled exclamation and finally said: ‘Paint my portrait!’ My father was amazed at such a strange desire. He began to explain to him that this was no longer the time to think of such a thing, that he should reject all earthly desires, that he had only a few minutes left to live and that therefore it was time to reflect on his former deeds and to express repentance to the Most High. ‘I don’t want anything; paint my portrait!’ Petromikhali said in a firm voice, while his face was seized by such convulsions that my father would probably have left if he had not been stopped by a feeling that is quite excusable in an artist struck by an unusual subject for his brush. The face of the moneylender indeed was one of those that constitute a treasure for the artist. With terror and at the same time a kind of secret desire, he set up a canvas on his knees, not having an easel, and began to paint. The thought of later using this face in a painting in which he wished to depict a man possessed by demons that are expelled by the powerful word of the Savior, this thought compelled him to intensify his zeal. He hurriedly sketched an outline and the first shadows, afraid every minute that the moneylender’s life would suddenly be cut short, because death seemed to be hovering on his lips. From time to time the moneylender would emit a wheeze and would anxiously fix his terrible gaze on the painting. Finally something resembling joy flashed in his eyes when he saw how his features were taking shape on the canvas.

“Afraid for the moneylender’s life at every moment, my father decided to work on the ultimate refinement of the eyes first of all. This was the most difficult subject, because the feeling depicted in them was quite unusual and inexpressible. He labored over them for about an hour and finally captured to perfection the fire that was already going out in the moneylender, his original. With a secret pleasure he walked a short distance away from the painting in order to have a better look at it, and he jumped away from it in horror when he saw living eyes gazing at him. An incomprehensible terror took possession of him to such a degree that, throwing down his palette and paints, he rushed to the door; but the terrible, almost half-dead body of the moneylender rose from his bed and grabbed him with his emaciated hand, ordering him to continue working. My father crossed himself and swore that he would not continue. Then this horrible creature tumbled off his bed so that his bones rattled, gathered all his strength, his eyes flashed with vitality, his arms embraced my father’s legs, and, crawling, he kissed the hem of his clothes and implored him to finish painting the portrait. But my father was implacable and was merely amazed at the strength of the moneylender’s will, which overcame the very approach of death.

“Finally the desperate Petromikhali, with extraordinary force, pulled a chest out from under the bed, and a terrible pile of gold fell to my father’s feet. Seeing that even then he remained adamant, the moneylender collapsed at his feet, and a whole stream of incantations began to flow from his lips, which had been silent up until then. It was impossible not to feel a kind of horrible and, if one may say, repulsive compassion. ‘Kind man! Man of God! Man of Christ!’ this living skeleton said with an expression of despair. ‘I conjure you by your small children, by your beautiful wife, by the grave of your father, finish my portrait! Work on it just one more hour! Listen, I will reveal a secret to you.’ At these words a deathly pallor began to appear more clearly on his face. ‘But never reveal this secret to anyone—neither to your wife, nor to your children. If you do, you will die, and they will die, and you will all be unfortunate. Listen, if you do not take pity now, I will ask no further. After death I must go to the one to whom I would not wish to go. There I must suffer the kind of torments you have never heard of even in your dreams; but I can avoid going to him for a long time, for as long as our earth exists, if only you finish my portrait. I have learned that half of my life will pass into my portrait if only it is painted by a skillful painter. You see that a part of life has already remained in the eyes; it will be in all the other features too when you have finished. And although my body will perish, half of my life will remain on earth and I will escape the torments for a long time yet. Finish the painting! Finish the painting! Finish the painting!’ this strange creature cried out in a harrowing and dying voice. My father was even more possessed by horror. He could feel his hair stand on end from this horrible secret, and he dropped the brush that he had been on the point of raising, touched by the moneylender’s entreaties. ‘So you don’t want to finish painting me?’ Petromikhali said in a wheezing voice. ‘Then take my portrait for yourself. I give it to you as a gift.’ At these words something like a terrible laugh was expressed on his lips. Life seemed to flash once more in his features, and a minute later there remained before my father a dark-blue corpse. My father did not want to touch the brushes and paints that had painted those apostate features, and ran out of the room.

“In order to divert the unpleasant thoughts brought on by this incident, he walked around the city for a long time and returned home toward evening. The first object that met his eye in his studio was the portrait he had painted of the moneylender. He asked his wife, the woman who worked in the kitchen, and the yard sweeper, but they all answered decisively that no one had brought the portrait, and no one had even come while he was away. This caused him to ponder for a moment. He approached the portrait and involuntarily turned his eyes away, overwhelmed by revulsion from his own work. He ordered that it be taken down and carried away to the attic, but the whole time he felt a sort of strange burden, the presence of thoughts that frightened him. But most of all he was struck when he went to bed by the following almost unbelievable incident: He clearly saw Petromikhali come into his room and stand at the end of his bed. Petromikhali looked at him for a long time with his living eyes, and finally began to propose such horrible things to him, wished to give his art such a hellish direction, that my father leaped out of bed with a painful moan, penetrated by a cold sweat, by an unbearable weight on his soul, and also by the most ardent indignation. He could see the magical depiction of the dead Petromikhali recede into the frame of the portrait, which was again hanging before him on the wall.

“He resolved to burn this accursed product of his hands that very day. As soon as the fireplace was lit, he threw the portrait into the flaming fire and watched with secret delight as the canvas’s frame cracked, and the still wet paint hissed. Finally all that remained of its existence was a heap of cinders. And when that heap began to fly out the chimney in a light dust, it seemed that the vague image of Petromikhali flew away with it. He felt a certain lightening of the burden on his soul. With the feelings of a man who has recovered from a lengthy illness he turned to the corner of the room where an icon hung that he had painted in order to express pure repentance, and he saw with horror that before him stood that same portrait of Petromikhali, whose eyes seemed to have acquired even more vitality, so that even his children uttered a cry when they looked at it. This produced an extraordinary impression on my father. He resolved to confide everything to our parish priest and to ask his advice about how to proceed in this unusual business. The priest was a sensible man and was also devoted with warm love to his duties. He immediately appeared, at the first call from my father, whom he respected as a most worthy parishioner. My father did not consider it necessary to take him aside and resolved to tell him of this incomprehensible incident right there, in the presence of my mother and their children. But scarcely had he uttered his first word when my mother suddenly cried out in a muffled voice and fell senseless onto the floor. Her face was covered by a terrible pallor, her lips remained motionlessly open, and all her features were twisted in convulsions. My father and the priest ran to her and saw with horror that she had accidentally swallowed a dozen needles she had been holding in her mouth. The doctor came and declared that she could not be cured. Some needles had remained lodged in her throat, others had passed into her stomach and internal organs, and my mother died a horrible death.

“This incident had a powerful influence on my father’s whole life. From that time a kind of gloom took possession of his soul. Seldom did he do any work; he almost always remained silent and avoided any society. But meanwhile the horrible image of Petromikhali with his living eyes began to persecute him more constantly, and often my father felt a surge of such desperate, savage thoughts that he himself involuntarily shuddered. All that which settles like black sediment in the depths of a person, which is destroyed and expelled by education, noble deeds, and contemplation of the beautiful—all of that he felt rebelling and ceaselessly striving to come out and develop in all its depraved perfection. The gloomy state of his soul was precisely of the kind that would cause him to seize upon this black side of man. But I must note that the strength of my father’s character was unparalleled; the power he exerted over himself and his passions was incomprehensible; his convictions were firmer than granite, and the stronger the temptation, the more he strove to oppose it with the indestructible power of his soul. Finally, weakened by this struggle, he resolved to pour out and bare himself entirely by depicting the whole tale of his sufferings to that same priest who had almost always given him healing with his meditative speeches.

“This was at the beginning of autumn. The weather was beautiful, the sun was shining with a fresh autumn light. The windows of our rooms were open; my father was sitting with the worthy priest in his studio; my brother and I were playing in the room next to it. Both these rooms were on the second floor, which formed the mezzanine of our little house. The door to the studio was slightly ajar. I happened to glance through the opening, saw my father move closer to the priest, and even heard him say: ‘Finally I will reveal this whole secret…’ Suddenly a short cry caused me to turn around: my brother was not there. I went up to the window and—my God! I will never be able to forget this incident: on the pavement lay the corpse of my brother, soaked with blood. In playing he had probably bent carelessly out the window and fallen, no doubt head first, because his head was smashed. I will never forget this horrible accident. My father stood motionless before the window, crossed his arms on his chest and raised his eyes to heaven. The priest was overcome by terror when he remembered the horrible death of my mother, and he himself requested that my father preserve this horrible secret.

“After this my father sent me to the Cadet Corps military school, where I spent the whole time of my education, while he retired to a monastery in a secluded little town, surrounded by wilderness, where the poor North offered only a wild nature, and he solemnly took monastic vows. He bore all the heavy obligations of that office with such submissiveness and humility, he led his whole life of toil with such humility combined with enthusiasm and ardent faith, that apparently nothing criminal could have the power to touch him. But the terrible image with the living eyes, the image he himself had traced, persecuted him even in this almost tomblike seclusion. When the Father Superior learned of my father’s unusual talent as a painter, he charged him to decorate the church with some icons. One had to see with what lofty religious humility he labored over his work. In strict fasting and prayer, in deep meditation and seclusion of the soul he prepared for his feat. He spent whole nights over his holy depictions, and perhaps that is why you will rarely find works even by significant artists that would bear the stamp of such truly Christian feelings and thoughts. In his righteous men there was such heavenly tranquility, in his penitents such heartfelt grief, as I have very seldom encountered even in paintings by famous artists. Finally all his thoughts and desires were fixed on the goal of depicting the Divine Mother, meekly extending her arms over the praying people. He labored over this work with such self-sacrifice and such forgetfulness of himself and the whole world that a part of the tranquility that was poured out by his brush in the features of the divine protectress of the world seemed to have passed into his own soul. At least, the terrible image of the moneylender ceased to visit him, and the portrait disappeared, no one knew where.

“Meanwhile my education in the Cadet Corps ended. I graduated as an officer, but to my great regret, circumstances did not allow me to see my father. We were immediately sent to the army in the field, which, because of the war declared by the Turks, was located on the border.¹⁴ I will not bore you with stories about my life spent among campaigns, bivouacs, and hot skirmishes. Suffice it to say that labors, dangers, and a hot climate changed me completely, so that those who knew me before could not recognize me at all. My tanned face, huge mustache, and loud, hoarse voice gave me a completely different physiognomy. I was a merry fellow, never thought about tomorrow, loved to empty an extra bottle with a comrade, to talk nonsense with pretty girls, to let fall some foolish word without thinking about it—in short, I was a carefree military man. But as soon as the campaign was over, I considered it my first duty to visit my father.

“When I rode up to the secluded monastery, I was possessed by a strange feeling that I had never before experienced: I felt that I was still tied to one creature, that there was still something incomplete in my condition. The secluded monastery in the midst of a pale, bare nature induced a kind of poetic oblivion in me and gave a strange, indefinite direction to my thoughts, the kind we usually feel in the heart of autumn, when the leaves rustle under our feet, there is not a single leaf over our heads, the black branches appear as a sparse network, the ravens caw in the distant heights, and we involuntarily hasten our step as if trying to gather our scattered thoughts. A multitude of blackened wooden annexes surrounded the stone building. I entered under long galleries, rotted through in places, turned green with moss, which were located near the cells, and I asked for the monk Father Grigory. This was the name my father had taken when he became a monk.¹⁵ His cell was pointed out to me.

“I will never forget the impression he made on me. I saw an old man on whose pale, exhausted face there seemed to be not one feature, not one thought, of the earthly. His eyes, accustomed to being fixed toward heaven, had taken on the impassive look, permeated by an unearthly fire, that dawns on artists only in moments of inspiration. He was sitting motionless before me like a saint looking down onto the praying people from a canvas onto which the hand of an artist has transferred him; it seemed that he had not noticed me at all, although his eyes were turned in the direction from which I had entered his room. I did not want to reveal myself to him yet, and so I simply asked for his blessing like a travelling pilgrim; but what was my amazement when he said: ‘Greetings, my son, Leon!’ I was astounded by this: I had parted with him when I was only ten. Moreover, even people who had seen me not so long ago did not recognize me. ‘I knew that you would come to me,’ he continued. ‘I asked this of the Most Pure Virgin and the Holy Saint, and I was awaiting you with every passing hour, because I feel my end coming near and I want to reveal an important secret to you. Come, my son, and let us pray together first!’ We went into the church, and he led me up to a large painting depicting the Mother of God blessing the people. I was struck by the deep expression of divinity on her face. He lay for a long time cast down before the picture, and finally, after a long silence and meditation, he came out with me.

“Then my father recounted to me everything you have just heard. I believed the truth of the story because I myself was a witness to many sad incidents in our lives. ‘Now I will tell you, my son,’ he added after this story, ‘what was revealed to me by the saint who appeared to me, unrecognized by anyone but me in the midst of a large gathering of people, as I was honored by the merciful Creator with such an inexpressible blessing.’ At these words my father crossed his arms and fixed his eyes on heaven, completely devoted to Him with his whole being. And I finally heard that which I am now preparing to recount to you. You must not be amazed at the strangeness of his words. I saw that he was in that state of the soul that takes possession of a man when he experiences strong, unbearable misfortunes; when, wishing to gather all his strength, all the iron strength of his soul, and not finding it to be sufficiently powerful, he devotes himself entirely to religion, and the stronger the oppression of his misfortunes, the more ardent are his spiritual contemplations and prayers. He no longer resembles that quiet, meditative hermit who moored himself to his wilderness as if to a longed-for pier, with the desire to rest from life and to pray with Christian humility to the One to whom he has become closer and more accessible; on the contrary, he becomes something like a giant. The ardor of his soul has not been extinguished, but on the contrary strives and breaks out of him with greater strength. Then he turns entirely into a religious flame. His head is eternally filled with miraculous dreams. At every step he sees visions and hears revelations; his thoughts are white-hot; his eye no longer sees anything that belongs to the earth; all his movements, consequences of his eternal striving toward one thing, are filled with enthusiasm. From the very first I noted this state in him and I mention it so that the words I heard from him will not seem too amazing to you.

“ ‘My son!’ he said to me after a long, almost motionless fixing of his eyes toward heaven. ‘Soon, soon will come the time when the tempter of the human race, the Antichrist, will be born into the world. That time will be horrible. It will be right before the end of the world. He will gallop by on a giant steed, and great will be the torments endured by those who remain true to Christ. Listen, my son: The Antichrist has long wished to be born, but he cannot, because he must be born in a supernatural manner. But in our world everything has been arranged by the Omnipotent in such a way that everything happens in a natural order, and therefore no forces, my son, can help the Antichrist break through into the world. But our earth is dust before the Creator. According to His laws, it must collapse, and with each day the laws of nature will become weaker, and therefore the boundaries holding back the supernatural will become more pregnable. The Antichrist is being born even now, but only a certain part of him is striving to appear in the world. He chooses man himself as his dwelling and appears in those people whose angel seems to have forsaken them at their very birth and who are branded with a terrible hatred for people and for everything that is the work of the Creator. Such a one was that amazing moneylender whom I, accursed one, dared to depict with my criminal brush. It is he, my son, he was the Antichrist himself. If my criminal hand had not dared to depict him, he would have withdrawn and disappeared, because he could not live longer than the body in which he had confined himself. In those repulsive living eyes a demonic feeling was preserved. Be amazed, my son, at the horrible might of the demon. He tries to penetrate everything: our deeds, our thoughts, and even the very inspiration of the artist. Innumerable will be the victims of this hellish spirit, who lives invisibly, with no image, on the earth. It is that black spirit that breaks into us even in a moment of the most pure and holy meditations. Oh, if my brush had not stopped its hellish work, he would have done even more evil, and there are no human powers that can stand against him, because he chooses precisely the time when the greatest misfortunes befall us. Woe, my son, to poor humanity! But listen to what the Mother of God herself revealed to me in an hour of holy vision. When I was laboring over the depiction of the most pure visage of the Virgin Mary, shedding tears of repentance for my past life and abiding long in fasting and prayer, in order to be more worthy of depicting her divine features, I was visited, my son, by an inspiration, and I felt that a higher power dawned on me and an angel raised up my sinful hand, and I felt my hair start to move on my head, and my soul trembled all over. Oh, my son! For the sake of that moment I would take upon myself a thousand torments. And I myself marveled at what my brush had depicted. At that time the most pure visage of the Virgin appeared to me in a dream, and I learned that as a reward for my labors and prayers, the supernatural existence of that demon in the portrait would not be eternal, and if someone would solemnly recount his story after fifty years at the first new moon, his power would be extinguished and dispersed like dust, and that I could convey this to you right before my death. It has been thirty years that he has been living from that time; there are twenty years ahead. Let us pray, my son!’ At this he fell down on his knees and turned into nothing but prayer.

“I confess that internally I ascribed all these words to his inflamed imagination, heightened by ceaseless fasting and prayers, and therefore out of respect I did not wish to make any remark or comment. But when I saw how he raised his withered arms toward heaven, with what deep grief he fell silent, destroyed within himself, with what inexpressible tenderness he prayed for those who had not had the strength to withstand the hellish seducer and had destroyed everything lofty in their souls, with what passionate sorrow he prostrated himself, and how the speaking tears flowed down his face, and in all his features was expressed nothing but silent sobbing—oh! Then I did not have the strength to enter into cold reflection and to analyze his words.

“Several years passed after his death. I did not believe this story and did not even think much about it, but I could never recount it to anyone. I do not know why it was, but I always felt something holding me back. Today without any goal I dropped in to this auction and for the first time I told the story of this unusual portrait—so that I involuntarily begin to wonder whether today is that new moon about which my father spoke, because in fact twenty years have passed since that time.”

Here the narrator stopped, and the listeners who had heeded him with undistracted interest involuntarily turned their eyes to the strange portrait, and to their amazement noticed that its eyes no longer preserved that strange vitality that had so struck them at first. Their amazement increased still further when the features of the strange picture almost imperceptibly began to disappear, the way breath disappears from a pure steel surface. Something cloudy remained on the canvas. And when they went up closer to it, they saw an insignificant landscape. So the visitors, in leaving, wondered for a long time whether they had really seen the mysterious portrait, or whether it had been a daydream that had appeared for an instant to eyes wearied by long inspection of old paintings.