by Maxim Gorky
“Yes, but what is one to lean against?”
“Find a point of support for yourself, and lean on it!”
“And why haven’t you done that?”
“Why, don’t I tell you, you queer man, that I myself am to blame for my own life!… I didn’t find my point of support! I’m seeking it, I’m pining for it—but I can’t find it!”
But we were obliged to look after the bread, so we set to work, each continuing to demonstrate to the other the truth of his views. As a matter of course, neither of us proved anything, and when we had finished attending to the oven, we lay down to sleep.
Konováloff stretched himself out on the floor of the bakery, and soon fell asleep. I lay on the sacks of flour, and looked down from above upon his powerful, bearded figure, stretched out, in the fashion of an epic hero, on a mat which had been thrown down near the bin. There was an odor of hot bread, of fermented dough, of carbonic acid gas.… The day dawned, and the gray sky peeped through the panes of the windows, which were draped in shrouds of flour-dust. A peasant’s cart rumbled past, and the shepherd blew his horn to assemble his flock.
Konováloff snored. I watched his broad breast rise and fall, and thought over various methods of converting him, as speedily as possible, to my belief, but could hit upon nothing suitable, and fell asleep.
In the morning, he and I rose, set the dough to rise, washed ourselves and sat down on the bin to drink tea.
“Say, have you got a little book?” inquired Konováloff.
“Yes.”
“Will you read it to me?”
“All right.”
“That’s good! Do you know what? I’ll live here a month, I’ll get some money from the boss, and I’ll give you half of it!”
“What for?”
“Buy some little books.… Buy some for yourself, after your own taste, and buy me some…about a couple. I want some about the peasants. After the fashion of Pilá and Sysóika.… And let them be written pathetically, you know, not to make fun of folks.… There are some which are downright trash! Panfilka and Filátka—even with a picture in the front—nonsense. Bureaucrats, various tales. I don’t like all that sort of thing. I didn’t know there were any like that one you have.”
“Do you want one about Sténka Rázin?”
“About Sténka?… Is it good?”
“Very good.”
“Fetch it along!”
And soon I was reading aloud to him N. Kostomároff’s “The Revolt of Sténka Rázin” At first, this talented monograph, which is almost an epic poem, did not please my bearded hearer.
“Why aren’t there any conversations in it?” he asked, peeping into the book. And when I explained the reason, he went so far as to yawn, and tried to hide the yawn, but did not succeed, and he said to me, in a confused and guilty way:
“Read away…never mind. I didn’t mean to.…”
I was pleased with his delicate tact, and pretended not to have observed anything, and that I did not, in the least, understand what he was talking about.
But in proportion as the historian depicted, with his artistic brush, the figure of Stepán Timoféevitch, and “the Prince of the Vólga Volunteers” started out from the pages of the book, Konováloff became transformed. In the beginning somewhat bored and indifferent, with eyes veiled in indolent dreaminess,—he gradually and by degrees imperceptible to me, presented himself to me in an astonishing, new form. As he sat on the bin opposite me, clasping his knees in his arms, and with his head laid upon them in such a way that his beard hid his legs, he stared at me with greedy, strangely burning eyes from beneath his sternly knit brows. There was not left in him a single trace of that childlike ingenuousness which had always so surprised me in him, and all that simplicity and feminine softness, which accorded so well with his kindly blue eyes, were now darkened and dried up…had vanished somewhere. Something lion-like, fiery was contained in his muscular figure, thus curled up in a ball. I stopped reading and gazed at him.
“Read away,”—he said softly but impressively.
“What ails you?”
“Read!” he repeated, and there was an accent of irritation as well as of entreaty in his tone.
I continued, casting an occasional glance at him, and noting that he was becoming more and more inflamed. Something emanated from him which excited and intoxicated me—a sort of glowing mist. The book, also, exerted its influence.… And thus it was in a state of nervous tremor, full of foreboding of something unusual, that I reached the point where Sténka was captured.
“They captured him!” roared Konováloff.
Pain, affront, wrath, readiness to rescue Sténka resounded in his mighty exclamation.
The sweat started out on his brow, and his eyes widened strangely. He sprang from the bin, tall, excited, halted in front of me, laid his hand on my shoulder, and said loudly and hastily:
“Wait! Don’t read!… Tell me, what’s coming next? No, stop, don’t speak! Do they execute him? Hey? Read quick, Maxím!”
One might have thought that Konováloff instead of Frólka was Rázin’s own brother. It seemed as though certain bonds of blood, unbroken and uncongealed for the space of three centuries, united this tramp with Sténka, and the tramp, with the full strength of his lively, mighty body, with all the passion of his soul which was pining without “a point of support,” felt the anguish and wrath of the free falcon who had been captured more than three hundred years before.
“Do go on reading, for Christ’s sake!”
I read on, aroused and deeply moved, conscious that my heart was beating hard, and in company with Konováloff, living over again Sténka’s anguish. And thus we came to the tortures.
Konováloff gnashed his teeth, and his blue eyes blazed like live coals. He leaned over me from behind, and did not take his eyes from the book, any more than I did. His breath buzzed above my ears, and blew my hair into my eyes. I shook my head to put it out of the way. Konováloff noticed this, and laid his heavy palm on my head.
“‘Then Rázin gnashed his teeth so hard, that he spat them out on the floor, along with the blood.…’”
“Enough!—Go to the devil!” shouted Konováloff, and snatching the book from my hand, he flung it on the floor with all his might, and dropped down after it.
He wept, and, as he was ashamed of his tears, he bellowed in a queer way, in order to keep from sobbing. He hid his head on his knees, and cried, wiping his eyes on his dirty ticking trousers.
I sat in front of him, on the bin, and did not know what to say to console him.
“Maxím!” said Konováloff, as he sat on the floor. “It’s awful! Pilá…Sysóika. And now Sténka…isn’t it? What a fate!… And how he spit out his teeth!… didn’t he?”
And he trembled all over with emotion.
He was particularly impressed with the teeth which Sténka spit out, and he kept referring to them, twitching his shoulders with pain as he did so.
Both of us were like drunken men under the influence of the harsh and poignant picture of the torture thus presented to us.
“Read it to me again, do you hear?” Konováloff entreated, picking up the book from the floor, and handing it to me.—“And, see here now, show me the place where it tells about the teeth?”
I showed him, and he riveted his eyes on the lines.
“So it is written: ‘he spat out his teeth with the blood?’ But the letters are just like all the other letters.… O Lord! How it hurt him, didn’t it? Even his teeth.… And what will there be at the end? The execution? Aha! Thank the Lord, they execute a man, all the same!”
He expressed his joy over the execution with so much passion, with so much satisfaction in his eyes, that I shuddered at that compassion which so violently desired death for the tortured Sténka.
The whole of that day passed for us in a strange sort of mist: we talked
incessantly about Sténka, recalled his life, the songs which had been composed about him, his torments. A couple of times Konováloff began to sing ballads, in a ringing baritone voice, and broke off suddenly.
He and I were closer friends from that day forth.
* * * *
I read “The Revolt of Sténka Rázin” to him several times more, “Tarás Bulba”27 and “Poor People.”28 My hearer was also greatly delighted with “Tarás,” but it could not obscure the vivid impression made on him by Kostomároff’s book. Konováloff did not understand Makár Dyévushkin, and Várya. The language of Makár’s letters appeared to him ridiculous, and he bore himself sceptically toward Várya.
“Just look at that, she’s making up to the old man! She’s a sharp one!… And he…what a blockhead he was! But see here, Maxím, drop that long-drawn-out thing. What is there to it? He’s after her, and she’s after him.… They ruined a lot of paper…well, off with them to the pigs on the farm! It’s neither pitiful nor funny: what was it written for?”
I reminded him of the story about the Peasants of Podlípovo, but he did not agree with me.
“Pilá and Sysóika—that’s another pattern entirely! They are live people, they live and struggle…but what are these? They write letters—they’re tiresome! They’re not even human beings, but just so-so—a mere invention. Now if you were to put Tarás and Sténka alongside of them…Heavens! what feats they would have performed! Then Pilá and Sysóika would have…plucked up some spunk, I rather think?”
He had no clear conception of time, and in his imagination, all his beloved heroes existed contemporaneously, only—two of them dwelt in Usólye, one among the “top-knots,”29 on the Vólga.… I had great difficulty in convincing him, that, had Pilá and Sysóika “gone down,” following the Káma down-stream, they would not have met Sténka, and that if Sténka had “kept on through the kazáks of the Don and the Top-knots,” he would not have found Bulba there.30
Konováloff was chagrined when he came to understand the matter. I tried to treat him to the history of Pugatchóff’s revolt,31 as I was desirous of observing how he would bear himself toward Emélka. Konováloff rejected Pugatchóff.
“Akh, the branded rascal—just look at him! He sheltered himself under the Tzar’s name, and got up a revolution.… How many folks he ruined, the dog!… Sténka?—that’s quite another matter, brother. But Pugatchóff, was just a nit, and nothing more. A mighty important mess of victuals, truly! Aren’t there any little books in the style of Sténka? Hunt them up…But fling away that calf of a Makár—he isn’t interesting. You’d better read over again, how they executed Sténka.”
On holidays Konováloff and I went off to the river, or the meadows. We took with us a little vódka, some bread, a book, and set off early in the morning “for the free air,” as Konováloff called these excursions.
We were especially fond of going to “the glass factory.” For some reason or other, this name had been given to a building which stood at a short distance from the town, in the fields. It was a three-story, stone house, with a ruined roof and broken window-frames, and cellars which were filled, all summer long, with liquid, foul-smelling mud. Greenish-gray in hue, half-ruined, as though it were sinking into the earth, it gazed from the fields at the town with the dark eye-sockets of its distorted windows, and seemed a blind singer of religious ballads, hardly treated by Fate, who had been ejected from the city limits, and was in a very pitiful and dying condition. Year after year, the water, at its flood, undermined this house, but it stood indestructibly firm; covered all over, from roof to foundation, with a green crust of mould, guarded by puddles against frequent visits from the police,—it stood on, and, although it had no roof, it afforded shelter to various shady and homeless individuals.
There were always a great many of them in it; tattered, half-starved, afraid of the light of the sun, they dwelt in this ruin like owls, and Konováloff and I were always welcome guests among them, because both he and I, when we left the bakery, each took with us a loaf of bread, and on our way, purchased a measure of vódka, and a whole tray of “hot-stuff “—liver, lights, heart and tripe. At a cost of two or three rubles we provided a very filling treat for “the glass folks,” as Konováloff called them.
They repaid us for these treats by stories, wherein terrible, soul-rending truth was fantastically intermingled with the most ingenuous falsehood. Every tale presented itself to us like a bit of lace, in which the black threads predominated—they represented the truth;—and in which threads of brilliant hues were to be met with—representing the falsehood. This lace fell over brain and heart, and oppressed them both painfully, compressing them with its cruel, torturing varied pattern. “The glass folks” loved us, after their own fashion, and almost always were my attentive auditors. One day I read to them: “For whom is Life in Russia Good?”32 and together with homeric laughter, I heard from them many valuable opinions on that subject.
Every man, who has fought with life, who has been vanquished by it, and who is suffering in the pitiless captivity of its mire, is more of a philosopher than even Schopenhauer himself, because an abstract thought never moulds itself in such an accurate and picturesque form, as does the thought which is directly squeezed out of a man by suffering. The knowledge of life possessed by these people whom life had flung overboard, astonished me by its profundity, and I listened eagerly to their stories, while Konováloff listened to them for the purpose of arguing against the philosophy of the story-teller, and of dragging me into a dispute with himself.
After listening to a story of life and fall, narrated by some fantastically-unclothed fellow, with the physiognomy of a man, with whom one must be strictly on his guard,—after listening to such a story, which always bore the character of a justificatory and defensive statement, Konováloff smiled thoughtfully and shook his head negatively. This was noticed because it was done openly.
“Don’t you believe me, Lesá?” exclaimed the storyteller in distress.
“Yes, I believe you…How is it possible not to believe a man? And even if you perceive that he is lying, believe him, that is to say, listen, and try to understand why he lies? Sometimes a lie shows up a man better than the truth does.… And besides, what truth can any of us tell about ourselves? The nastiest.… But one can invent fine things.… Isn’t that true?”
“Yes.…” assented the story-teller.… “But what were you shaking your head at?”
“What about? Because you reason irregularly.… You tell your story in such a way that a fellow is bound to understand that you yourself didn’t make your life what it is, but that your neighbors and various passers-by made it. But where were you all that time? And why didn’t you offer any resistance to your fate? And the way it turns out is, that we all of us complain about people, yet we are people ourselves, and, of course, others may, also, complain of us. Other people interfere with our lives—and that means that we, also, have interfered with other people’s lives, isn’t that so? Well, then, how is that to be explained?”
“Such a life must be constructed so that everyone will have plenty of room in it, and no one will interfere with the rest,” they sententiously propounded to Konováloff in argument.
“But who ought to construct life?” he retorted triumphantly, and, fearing that they would prove too sharp for him in answering his question, he immediately answered it himself:—“We! We ourselves! And how shall we construct life, if we don’t understand it, and our life has not been a success? So it turns out, brethren, that our sole prop is—ourselves! Well, and we all know what we are like.…”
They replied to him, defending themselves, but he obstinately repeated his opinion: “no one was in anywise to blame concerning them, but each one of us is responsible to himself for himself.”
It was extremely difficult to drive him from his stand on this proposition, and it was extremely difficult for these people to master his point of view. On the
one hand, in his presentation of the matter, they appeared fully competent to construct a free life; on the other—they appeared as weak, puny, decidedly incapable of anything, except making complaints of one another.
It very frequently happened that these discussions, begun at mid-day, ended about midnight, and Konováloff and I returned from “the glass folks” through the darkness and in mud up to our knees.
One day we came near being drowned in a quagmire; on another, we fell into the hands of the police round-up, and spent the night in the station-house, together with a couple of score of assorted friends from the “glass factory,” who turned out to be suspicious characters, from the point of view of the police. Sometimes we did not care to philosophize, and then we went far a-field, in the meadows beyond the river, where there were tiny lakes, abounding in small fish, which entered them at the season of flood-water. Among the bushes, on the shore of one of these lakes, we lighted a bonfire, which we required merely for the purpose of augmenting the beauty of the surroundings, and read a book, or talked about life. And sometimes Konováloff would meditatively suggest:
“Maxím! Let’s stare at the sky!”
We lay down on our backs, and gazed at the fathomless blue abyss above us. At first, we heard the rustle of wings around us, and the plashing of the water in the lake, we felt the earth under us, and around us everything that was there at the moment.… Later on, the blue sky seemed to be gradually drawing us toward it, enfolded our consciousness in mist, we lost the sensation of existence, and, as though tearing ourselves away from the earth, we seemed to be floating in the waste expanse of the heavens, finding ourselves in a semi-conscious, contemplative condition, and endeavoring not to disturb it either by a word or a movement.
Thus we would lie for several hours at a stretch, and return home to our work, renewed in body and soul, and refreshed by this union with Nature.
Konováloff loved Nature with a profound, inexpressible love, which was indicated only by the soft gleam of his eyes, and always, when he was in the fields or on the river, he was completely permeated by a certain pacifically-affectionate mood, which still further heightened his resemblance to a little child. Sometimes he said, with a deep sigh, as he gazed at the sky:
