by Maxim Gorky
“What are you doing?”
The people saw that he was unusually meek and this, together with his personality, caused them to confide in him. They confessed to him all of which they were guilty, and even revealed to him their inmost thoughts. One of them wanted to steal something and to evade being punished for it, another wanted to cheat somebody, a third simply wanted to slander somebody. All of them, like genuine Russians, wanted to get out of having any duties in life, and to forget all their obligations.
He said to them:
“Oh, give up all this, because it is said: ‘All existence is suffering, but it becomes suffering through desire; hence, in order to destroy suffering, you must destroy desire.’ Let us cease to desire and all evil will disappear of its own accord; truly it will.”
The people, of course, were glad. It seemed reasonable and was very simple. Where they happened to stand they lay down. They all felt relieved.
After what interval is not recorded, but there came a time when Igemon noticed that all was peace around him, and he was struck by fear. Still he tried to put on a brave face:
“The rogues are pretending.”
Meanwhile, the insects, continuing to fulfil their natural obligations, were beginning to multiply in an unnatural way, and becoming more and more arrogant in their actions.
“What silence,” thought Igemon, wriggling and scratching himself all over.
He called a willing citizen to him:
“Come, free me from the superfluous.”
He answered:
“I cannot.”
“What?”
“I cannot, because even if they do annoy you, they are living things, and——”
“I will make a corpse of you this minute.”
“As you will.”
And so in everything; they all answered him with one voice:
“As you will.”
But as soon as he asked them to fulfil his will he found it a most tedious task. Igemon’s palace was falling to pieces; it was overrun with rats, which ate up the deeds, and died of the resultant poisoning. Igemon himself was sinking deeper and deeper into inaction. He lay on the sofa daydreaming about the past. How good life was in those days! The inhabitants tried to resist his orders in all kinds of ways. Some of them had to be executed, which meant obituary feasts with pancakes and free drinks. Or a citizen would embark upon some new enterprise; it was necessary to go and stop him, which meant travelling expenses. When he reported to the proper quarter that in the district entrusted to him all the inhabitants had been exterminated he used to receive a special bonus and a fresh batch was sent into the district.
Igemon was daydreaming about the past, but his neighbours, the Igemons of other tribes, lived as they had lived before, on the old basis. The inhabitants opposed them on every occasion, and as vigorously as they could. All was noise and disorder. The Igemons rushed hither and thither, without any special object. They found it profitable and, in a general way, interesting.
And the thought struck Igemon:
“By Jove! the citizen has fooled me.”
He jumped up, rushed through the whole district, shaking people, pummelling them, and shouting:
“Get up! Wake up! Arise!”
It was no good. He seized them by their collars, but the collars were rotten and broke away.
“The devils,” shouted Igemon, greatly agitated. “What are you doing? Look at your neighbours—even China——”
The inhabitants were silent as they clung to the soil.
“O Lord!” said Igemon in disgust, “what is to be done?”
And he resorted to deception; he bent over an inhabitant and whispered into his ear:
“Oh, citizen, the fatherland is in danger. It is, I swear. By all that’s holy! it is in great danger. Get up; it is necessary to resist. They say that all kinds of activities will be allowed. Citizen!” But the dying citizen only murmured: “My fatherland is in God.”
The others were simply silent, like offended corpses.
“The cursed fatalists!” shouted Igemon in despair. “Get up! All kinds of resistance is allowed.”
One who had been a jolly fellow, and had distinguished himself by knocking out people’s teeth, raised himself a little, looked round and said:
“What shall we resist? There is nothing to resist.”
“But the vermin?”
“We are used to it.”
Igemon’s reason received the last shock. He got up and roared in awe-inspiring tones:
“I permit you everything, fellows; save yourselves; do what you like; everything is permitted—eat each other.”
The calm and quiet were delightful! Igemon saw that all was over.
He started to cry aloud; hot tears ran down his cheeks; he tore his hair and roared, calling upon them:
“Citizens, dear fellows, what am I to do? Must I make a revolution myself? Bethink yourselves; it is historically necessary; it is nationally inevitable. You see that it is impossible for me alone to make a revolution. I have not even police for that, the vermin have eaten them.”
The citizens only blinked their eyes; even if they had been pierced by a stake they would not have uttered a sound.
So they all died in silence, and Igemon, in utter despair, last of all.
From this it follows that even in patience we must observe a certain amount of moderation.
MAKING A SUPERMAN
The wisest of the citizens pondered the following problem:—
“What does it mean? Wherever one looks everything is at sixes and sevens.”
And after much thought they concluded:
“It is because we have no personality. It is necessary for us to create a central thinking organ which shall be quite free from any sort of bias, which shall be capable of raising itself above everything, which shall stand out from everything and everybody—in the same way as a goat from amongst a flock of sheep.” Somebody said:
“Brothers, have we not already suffered enough from central personalities?” They did not like this.
“That seems to savour of politics, and even of civic sorrow.”
Somebody insisted:
“But how can we ignore politics if politics penetrate everything? The facts are that the prisons are overcrowded, that in the hard labour prisons it is impossible to turn round; and to remedy this we must enlarge the scope of our rights.”
But they answered him sternly:
“This, sir, is idealism, and it is time you left it alone. A new man is wanted, and nothing else.”
After this they set to work to create a man according to the methods referred to in the traditions of the holy fathers: they spat on the ground, and began to mix the spittle with earth. Then they smeared themselves up to the ears with the mixture, but the results were poor. In their eagerness they trampled rare flowers into the ground, and destroyed useful cereals. They tried hard, they sweated in the earnestness of their efforts; but there was no result—nothing but a waste of words and mutual accusations of creative incapacity. They even put the elements out of patience by their zeal: whirlwinds began to blow, the heat became intense, it thundered, and the rain poured down in torrents; the ground became sodden, and the whole atmosphere saturated with heavy odours, so that it was difficult to breathe.
However, from time to time this wrestling with the elements seemed to come to an end, and a new personality came into God’s world.
There was general rejoicing everywhere, but it was short-lived, and soon turned into oppressive embarrassment. For, if a new personality arose out of the peasant soil, it became forthwith a polished merchant, and, starting business at once, began to sell the fatherland piecemeal to foreigners—first of all at forty-five copecks6 a plot, and afterwards going to such lengths that it wanted to sell a whole district, with all its live stock and thinking mac
hines.
If they stirred up a new man on merchant soil he either was born a degenerate or at once became a bureaucrat. If they did it on a nobleman’s estate, beings arose, as they had done before, who seemed intent upon swallowing up the whole revenue of the state. On the soil of the middle class and petty property-owners all sorts of wild thistles grew: agents-provocateurs, Nihilists, pacifists, and goodness knows what.
“But we already have all these in a sufficient quantity,” the wise citizens confessed to each other.
And they were sadly puzzled.
“We have made some kind of mistake in the technique of creation,” they said.
“But what was the mistake?”
They sat in the mud and thought very hard.
Then they began to upbraid one another:
“You, Selderey Lavrovich, you spit too much, and in all directions.”
“And you, Kornishon Lukich, are too faint-hearted to do likewise.”
The newly born Nihilists, pretending to be Vaska Buslayeffs, looked at everything with contempt and shouted:
“Oh, you vegetables, try and think what place is best, and we will help you to spit on it.”
And they spat and spat.
They all seemed bored and irritable with one another; and they were covered with mud.
Just at that time Mitya Korofyshkin, nicknamed “Steel Claw,” who was playing truant from school, passed by. He was a pupil in the second class of the Miamlin Gymnasium, and was known as a collector of foreign stamps. As he passed he saw the people sitting in a puddle and spitting, deep in thought.
“Grown-ups, and they bespatter themselves like that!” thought Mitya contemptuously; which was natural in one of his tender years.
He peeped to see if there was not a teacher in their midst, and not noticing one he inquired:
“What are you doing in the puddle, uncles?”
One of the citizens, resenting the question, immediately began to argue:
“Where do you see a puddle? It is simply a reflection of the primordial chaos.”
“And what are you doing?”
“We are trying to create a new man. We are sick of people like you.”
Mitya became interested.
“After whose likeness?”
“What do you mean? We want to create somebody unlike anyone else. Go away.”
As Mitya was a child, and not yet versed in the secrets of nature, he, of course, was glad of the opportunity to be present at such an important affair, and he asked them simply:
“Will you make him with three legs?”
“What are you saying?”
“How funnily he will run!”
“Go away, boy.”
“Or with wings! What a fine thing it would be! Make him with wings, by Jove! and let him kidnap teachers, like the condor did in The Children of Captain Grant. There, of course, the condor does not kidnap a teacher, but it would be better if he did kidnap the teacher.”
“Boy, you are talking nonsense, and it is sinful nonsense. Remember your prayers before and after your lessons.”
But Mitya was a boy with a fertile imagination, and he became very excited.
“As the teacher is going to the gymnasium it will grab him by the collar and carry him away to somewhere in the air, it makes no difference where. The teacher will simply kick and drop all his books—I hope the books will never be found.”
“Boy, have reverence for your elders.”
“And the teacher shouts to his wife from above: ‘Good-bye, I am going to heaven like Elijah and Enoch,’ And his wife kneels in the middle of the road and whimpers: ‘My school teacher! Oh, my school teacher!’”
They got quite angry with him.
“Get away, you are jabbering nonsense. There are many who can do that. You are beginning too soon.”
They drove him away, but he stopped before he had gone far, thought a while, and asked:
“Do you really mean it?”
“Of course.”
“And it won’t work?”
They sighed sullenly and said:
“No; leave us alone.”
Then Mitya moved a little farther away, put out his tongue and mocked them:
“I know why! I know why!”
He ran away, but they chased him, and as they were used to changing the scene of their operations and running from place to place they soon caught him. Then they began to beat him.
“Oh, you scamp…cheeking your elders.”
Mitya cried and implored:
“Uncles, I will give you a Soudanese stamp—I have a duplicate.… I will make you a present of my penknife——”
But they tried to frighten him with the headmaster’s name.
“Uncles, really and truly, I will never tease you again. Now I have really guessed why a new man cannot be created.”
“Speak!”
“Don’t hold me so tight!”
They released him all but his hands, and he said to them:
“Uncles, it is not the proper soil. The soil is no good, on my word of honour. You may spit as much as you like, nothing will come of it. For, when God created Adam in his image, the land belonged to nobody. Now it all belongs to someone or other; therefore man now belongs to somebody. Spitting makes no difference whatever.”
They were so dumbfounded that they dropped their hands; Mitya rushed away from them, and making a trumpet of his hands shouted:
“You red-skinned Comanches! Iroquois!”
But they all went back to the puddle, and the wisest of them said:
“Colleagues, let us resume our occupation. Let us forget this boy, for he is very likely a socialist in disguise.”
Oh, Mitya, Mitya!
6Elevenpence.—Trans.
IN THE WORLD
Translated by Mrs. Gertrude M. Foakes
CHAPTER I
I went out into the world as “shop-boy” at a fashionable boot-shop in the main street of the town. My master was a small, round man. He had a brown, rugged face, green teeth, and watery, mud-colored eyes. At first I thought he was blind, and to see if my supposition was correct, I made a grimace.
“Don’t pull your face about!” he said to me gently, but sternly. The thought that those dull eyes could see me was unpleasant, and I did not want to believe that this was the case. Was it not more than probable that he had guessed I was making grimaces?
“I told you not to pull your face about,” he said again, hardly moving his thick lips.
“Don’t scratch your hands,” his dry whisper came to me, as it were, stealthily. “You are serving in a first-class shop in the main street of the town, and you must not forget it. The door-boy ought to stand like a statue.”
I did not know what a statue was, and I couldn’t help scratching my hands, which were covered with red pimples and sores, for they had been simply devoured by vermin.
“What did you do for a living when you were at home?” asked my master, looking at my hands.
I told him, and he shook his round head, which was closely covered with gray hair, and said in a shocked voice:
“Rag-picking! Why, that is worse than begging or stealing!”
I informed him, not without pride:
“But I stole as well.”
At this he laid his hands on his desk, looking just like a cat with her paws up, and fixed his eyes on my face with a terrified expression as he whispered:
“Wha—a—t? How did you steal?”
I explained how and what I had stolen.
“Well, well, I look upon that as nothing but a prank. But if you rob me of boots or money, I will have you put in prison, and kept there for the rest of your life.”
He said this quite calmly, and I was frightened, and did not like him any more.
Besides the master, there were serving in the shop my cousin, Sascha Jaakov, and the senior assistant, a competent, unctuous person with a red face. Sascha now wore a brown frock-coat, a false shirt-front, a cravat, and long trousers, and was too proud to take any notice of me.
When grandfather had brought me to my master, he had asked Sascha to help me and to teach me. Sascha had frowned with an air of importance as he said warning:
“He will have to do what I tell him, then.”
Laying his hand on my head, grandfather had forced me to bend my neck.
“You are to obey him; he is older than you both in years and experience.”
And Sascha said to me, with a nod:
“Don’t forget what grandfather has said.” He lost no time in profiting by his seniority.
“Kashirin, don’t look so goggle-eyed,” his master would advise him.
“I—I’m all right,” Sascha would mutter, putting his head down. But the master would not leave him alone.
“Don’t butt; the customers will think you are a goat.”
The assistant smiled respectfully, the master stretched his lips in a hideous grin, and Sascha, his face flushing, retreated behind the counter. I did not like the tone of these conversations. Many of the words they used were unintelligible to me, and sometimes they seemed to be speaking in a strange language. When a lady customer came in, the master would take his hands out of his pockets, tug at his mustache, and fix a sweet smile upon his face—a smile which wrinkled his cheeks, but did not change the expression of his dull eyes. The assistant would draw himself up, with his elbows pressed closely against his sides, and his wrists respectfully dangling. Sascha would blink shyly, trying to hide his protruding eyes, while I would stand at the door, surreptitiously scratching my hands, and observing the ceremonial of selling.
Kneeling before the customer, the assistant would try on shoes with wonderfully deft fingers. He touched the foot of the woman so carefully that his hands trembled, as if he were afraid of breaking her leg. But the leg was stout enough. It looked like a bottle with sloping shoulders, turned neck downward.
One of these ladies pulled her foot away one day, shrieking:
