My God, what joy! It was her! Again her! But now she looked quite different. Oh, how nicely she sits by the window of a bright little house in the country! Her attire breathes the kind of simplicity that swathes only the thoughts of a poet. The way her hair is arranged… Oh, Creator, what a simple hairstyle and how it becomes her! A short kerchief was lightly thrown onto her shapely little neck; everything about her was modest, everything about her bore the secret, inexplicable sense of good taste. How sweet was her graceful walk! How musical was the sound of her steps and of her simple little dress! How pretty was her arm, encircled by a bracelet made of hair!16 She spoke to him with tears in her voice: “Do not despise me. I am not at all the person you take me for. Look at me, look carefully and tell me: Am I really capable of what you think I am?”—“Oh! No, no! Let he who dares to think that, let him…” But he woke up, deeply moved, devastated, with tears in his eyes. “It would be better if you had not existed at all! If you had not lived in the world but had been the creation of an inspired artist! I would never have left the canvas, I would have eternally looked at you and kissed you. I would have lived and breathed through you, as through the most splendid daydream, and I would have been happy then. No desires would have extended any further. I would have summoned you as a guardian angel in sleep and in waking, and I would have awaited you when I had occasion to depict the divine and the holy. But now… what a horrible life! What use is her life? Is the life of a madman pleasant for his relatives and friends, who once loved him? My God, what is our life! An eternal discord between dreams and substance!”
Such were the ideas that constantly occupied him. He thought of nothing, he ate almost nothing, and he awaited evening and his desired vision with impatience, with the passion of a lover. The constant directing of his thoughts at a single object finally took such power over his whole existence and imagination that his desired image appeared to him almost every day, always in a situation that was the opposite of reality, because his thoughts were quite pure, like the thoughts of a child. By means of these dreams the object itself somehow became pure and was completely transformed.
The drafts of opium made his thoughts white-hot, and if ever there had been a man enamored to the last degree of madness, impetuously, horribly, ruinously, restlessly, that unfortunate man was he.
Of all his dreams one was more delightful for him than all the rest. In it he saw his studio, he was so cheerful, he sat so pleasurably with his palette in his hands! And she was right there. She was already his wife. She was sitting next to him, leaning her charming elbow on the back of his chair, and was looking at his work. In her languid, tired eyes was depicted a burden of bliss; everything in his room breathed of paradise; it was so bright, so neat and clean. Oh, Creator! She bent her charming little head on his chest… He had never had a better dream. After it he got up feeling fresher and less absentminded than before. Strange thoughts were born in his head. “Perhaps,” he thought, “she has been inveigled into debauchery by some horrible involuntary chance occurrence; perhaps the movements of her soul are inclined to repentance; perhaps she would herself wish to tear herself out of her horrible condition. Can I really tolerate her ruin with indifference, especially when all I have to do is offer my hand to save her from foundering?” His thoughts extended even further. “No one knows me,” he said to himself, “and no one cares about me, and I don’t care about anyone either. If she expresses pure repentance and changes her way of life, I will marry her. I should marry her, and I will probably do much better than many men who marry their housekeepers or even the most contemptible creatures, as so often happens. But my feat will be selfless and perhaps even great. I will return to the world the most splendid of its adornments.”
Having formed such a harebrained plan, he felt color flaming up on his face. He went up to the mirror and took fright at his own sunken cheeks and pale face. He began to get dressed with great care. He washed up, smoothed his hair, put on a new tailcoat and a dandyish waistcoat, threw on his cloak and went out into the street. He breathed in the fresh air and felt freshness in his heart, like a convalescent person who has decided to go out for the first time after a lengthy illness. His heart pounded when he approached the street he had not set foot on since their fateful meeting.
It took him a long time to find the building; his memory seemed to have betrayed him. He walked down the street twice and didn’t know which building to stop in front of. Finally one of them seemed to him to be the one. He quickly ran up the stairs and knocked at the door. The door opened, and who came out to meet him? His ideal, his mysterious image, the original of his dreamy pictures, the one he lived by, lived so horribly, so tormentingly, so sweetly. She herself was standing before him. He began to tremble; he could hardly keep on his feet from weakness, as he was seized by a burst of joy. She stood before him looking just as splendidly beautiful, although her eyes were sleepy, and pallor was stealing onto her face, which was no longer quite as fresh—but all the same she was splendid.
“Oh!” she cried when she saw Piskaryov, and she rubbed her eyes (it was already two o’clock). “Why did you run away from us the other day?”
He collapsed onto a chair and looked at her.
“I just now woke up; they brought me home at seven o’clock this morning. I was so drunk,” she added with a smile.
Oh, it would be better if you were mute and completely deprived of speech, than to utter such things! She had suddenly showed him her whole life as if in a panorama. Nevertheless, despite all this, he steeled his heart and made up his mind to try and see if his exhortations would have any effect on her. Gathering his courage, in a trembling and at the same time ardent voice he began to represent her horrible situation to her. She listened to him attentively and with the feeling of amazement that we express when we see something unexpected and strange. With a slight smile she looked at her friend who was sitting in the corner, who had stopped cleaning out her comb and was also listening to the new preacher with great attention.
“It’s true, I’m poor,” Piskaryov finally said after a long and didactic exhortation, “but we will toil, we will vie with each other in striving to improve our life. There is nothing more pleasant than to be obligated to one’s own self for everything. I will sit working on my paintings, you will sit next to me and inspire my work while embroidering or doing some other kind of handiwork, and we will not suffer any want.”
“How could that be!” she interrupted his speech with an expression of contempt. “I’m not a laundress or a seamstress, and I’m not about to start working.”
My God! Her whole base, contemptible life was expressed in these words—a life filled with emptiness and idleness, the true companions of debauchery.
“Marry me!” caught up her friend, who up to then had been sitting silently in the corner. “If I become a wife, I’ll sit just like this!”
While saying this she put a stupid expression on her pitiful face, which made the beauty burst out laughing.
Oh, this was too much! He had no strength to endure this. He rushed out, having lost all feelings and thoughts. His mind became turbid. Stupidly, with no goal, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, he wandered around all day. No one would have been able to tell whether he spent the night somewhere or not. It was not until the next day that by some stupid instinct he arrived at his apartment, pale, looking horrible, with disheveled hair and traces of madness on his face. He locked himself in his room and would not let anyone in, and asked for nothing. Four days passed, and his locked-up room did not open a single time. Finally a week passed, and his room was still locked up. They threw themselves at the door, they started calling him, but there was no answer. Finally they broke the door down and found his lifeless corpse with its throat cut. The bloody razor lay on the floor. One could tell from the convulsively spread arms and the terribly distorted face that his hand had been unsteady and that he had suffered for a long time before his sinful soul had left his body.
Thus the vic
tim of a mad passion perished, poor Piskaryov—quiet, timid, humble, as simple-hearted as a child, carrying within himself a spark of talent that would perhaps have blazed broadly and brightly in the course of time. No one wept over him; no one was to be seen near his inanimate corpse but the usual figure of the district police inspector and the indifferent countenance of the police physician. They transported his coffin quietly, without any religious rites, to Okhta. The only person walking after it and crying was a soldier-watchman, and only because he had drunk one too many liters of vodka.17 Even Lieutenant Pirogov failed to come to look at the corpse of the poor unfortunate man to whom in life he had given his lofty patronage. By the way, he had no time for this at all: He was occupied by an extraordinary event. But let us turn to him.
I do not like corpses and deceased people, and I always find it unpleasant when my path is crossed by a long funeral procession and a disabled soldier, dressed in a sort of Capuchin cloak, takes some snuff with his left hand because his right hand is holding a torch.18 I always feel annoyance in my soul when I see a rich catafalque and a coffin lined with velvet; but my annoyance is mixed with sadness when I see a drayman pulling a pauper’s pine coffin, not covered with anything, and with just one old beggar woman who met them at the crossroads and has gone trudging after them because she has nothing else to do.
It seems that we left Lieutenant Pirogov at the point when he parted with poor Piskaryov and went rushing after the blonde. This blonde was a light, rather interesting little creature. She kept stopping in front of every store and feasting her eyes on the sashes, kerchiefs, earrings, gloves, and other trifles that were displayed in the windows, constantly twirling around, gaping in all directions, and looking behind her. “You are mine, my little darling!” Pirogov said with self-confidence, continuing his pursuit and covering his face with the collar of his overcoat so as not to encounter any of his acquaintances. But it wouldn’t hurt to inform the reader what kind of person Lieutenant Pirogov was.
But before we say what kind of person Lieutenant Pirogov was, it wouldn’t hurt to say a few things about the society to which Pirogov belonged. There are officers who constitute a kind of intermediate class of society in St. Petersburg. At an evening party or a dinner at the home of a state councillor or an actual state councillor, who has earned his rank by virtue of forty years of labor, you will always find one of them. A few pale daughters, as colorless as St. Petersburg, of whom some are past their prime, a tea table, a piano, domestic dancing—all of this is inseparable from the bright epaulet that shines in the lamplight, between a well-mannered blonde and the black tailcoat of a brother or a friend of the family. It is extremely difficult to stir up these cold-blooded maidens and get them to laugh. For that you need great skill or rather no skill at all. You have to talk in a way that is neither too intelligent nor too funny, so that your talk is full of the kind of trivia that women like. In this area one must give the abovementioned gentlemen their due. They have a particular talent for making these colorless beauties laugh and listen. Exclamations smothered by laughter: “Oh, stop it! Aren’t you ashamed to make me laugh so?”—these exclamations are their best reward.
Among the higher classes these officers appear very seldom, or rather never. They have been crowded out by what they call in those circles aristocrats, but all the same they are considered learned and well-educated people. They love to expound on literature; they praise Bulgarin, Pushkin, and Grech, and speak with contempt and witty barbs about A. A. Orlov.19 They do not miss a single public lecture, whether it is about bookkeeping or even forestry. In the theater, no matter what the play, you will always find one of them, unless the play is something like Filatka, which greatly offends their fastidious taste.20 They are constantly at the theater. They are the most advantageous people for the theater administration. They especially like to hear good poetry in a play, and they also like to loudly call the actors back to the stage. Many of them who teach in state institutions or prepare students to enter state institutions are finally able to acquire a cabriolet and a pair of horses. Then their circle becomes more expansive. They finally manage to marry a merchant’s daughter who knows how to play the piano, who has a hundred thousand or so in cash and a heap of bearded relatives. But they cannot attain such an honor until they have earned at least the rank of colonel. Because Russian beards, despite the fact that they still smell faintly of cabbage, do not by any means want to see their daughters married to anyone other than a general or at least a colonel.21
Such are the main features of this sort of young man. But Lieutenant Pirogov had many talents that belonged to him alone. He could superbly declaim lines of verse from Dmitry Donskoy and Woe from Wit, and he was particularly skilled at emitting smoke rings from his pipe so successfully that he could suddenly string about ten of them one after another.22 He could very pleasantly tell the joke about how a cannon is one thing and a unicorn gun is quite another.23 But it is difficult to list all the talents with which fate had endowed Pirogov. He loved to talk about an actress and a dancer, but not in the same harsh terms in which a young ensign expresses himself on that subject. He was very satisfied with his rank, to which he had been recently promoted, and although sometimes he would lie on a divan and say: “Oh, oh! Vanity, all is vanity! What does it signify that I am a lieutenant?”—secretly he was very flattered by his new dignity. He would often try to hint at it in conversation, and once on the street when he ran across a copying clerk who seemed to him to be impolite, he immediately stopped him and in a few harsh words gave him to understand that it was a lieutenant standing before him, and not some other kind of officer. He tried to expound this all the more eloquently in view of the fact that two quite handsome ladies were passing by. In general Pirogov displayed a passion for everything elegant and gave his encouragement to the artist Piskaryov, but this perhaps arose from the fact that he very much wished to see his own manly physiognomy in a portrait. But that’s enough about Pirogov’s qualities. Man is such a wondrous being that sometimes it’s impossible to list all his virtues right away—the more closely you look, the more new peculiarities appear, and to describe them would be an endless task.
So Pirogov did not cease pursuing the unknown woman, engaging her with questions from time to time, to which she would answer sharply, abruptly, and with indistinct sounds. Through the dark Kazan Gates they entered Meshchanskaya Street, a street of tobacco stores and groceries, German craftsmen, and Finnish nymphs.24 The blonde started running faster and flitted through the gates of a somewhat dingy building. Pirogov followed her. She ran up a dark, narrow staircase and went through a door that Pirogov also maneuvered his way through. He found himself in a large room with black walls and a sooty ceiling. A heap of iron screws, metalworker’s tools, shining coffeepots, and candlesticks was on the table; the floor was littered with copper and iron filings. Pirogov immediately put two and two together and saw that this was the apartment of an artisan. The unknown woman flitted through a side door. He very nearly hesitated for a moment, but following the Russian rule, he resolved to go forward. He entered a room that was quite unlike the first one and was very neatly arranged, showing that the master of the house was a German. He was struck by an unusually strange sight.
Before him sat Schiller—not the Schiller who wrote William Tell and the History of the Thirty Years’ War, but the famous Schiller, the master tinsmith of Meshchanskaya Street. Next to Schiller stood Hoffmann—not the writer Hoffmann, but the fairly good shoemaker from Ofitserskaya Street, a great friend of Schiller.25 Schiller was drunk and was sitting on a chair, stamping his foot and saying something heatedly. All this would not have amazed Pirogov, but he was amazed by the extraordinarily strange position of the figures. Schiller was sitting with his somewhat thick nose stuck out and his head raised upward, and Hoffmann was holding him by this nose with two fingers and twirling the blade of his shoemaker’s knife on its very surface. These two personages were speaking German, and therefore Lieutenant Pirogov, whose knowledge of
German did not go beyond “guten Morgen,”* could not understand what was going on. Schiller’s words, however, consisted of the following: “I do not want it, I do not need a nose!” he said, waving his arms. “I use three pounds of snuff on one nose per month. And I pay in a Russian nasty store, because a German store doesn’t keep Russian snuff, I pay in a Russian nasty store forty kopecks for each pound; that comes to a ruble twenty kopecks; twelve times a ruble twenty kopecks comes to fourteen rubles forty kopecks. Do you hear, my friend Hoffmann? For one nose, fourteen rubles forty kopecks! And on holidays I use rappee, because I don’t want to take Russian nasty snuff on holidays. I sniff two pounds of rappee per year, at two rubles a pound. Six plus fourteen—twenty rubles forty kopecks on snuff alone.26 It’s highway robbery! I ask you, my friend Hoffmann, isn’t that right?” Hoffmann, who was drunk himself, answered in the affirmative. “Twenty rubles forty kopecks! I am a Swabian German; I have a king in Germany. I do not want my nose! Cut my nose off! Here’s my nose!”
And if not for the sudden appearance of Lieutenant Pirogov, Hoffmann would without doubt have cut off Schiller’s nose for no good reason, because he had already brought his knife into the position he used for cutting out a sole.
It seemed very annoying to Schiller that an unknown, uninvited person was so inappropriately interfering with him. Despite the fact that he was in the intoxicating daze of beer and wine, he felt that it was unseemly to be found in such a state and in the middle of such an action in the presence of an outside witness. Meanwhile Pirogov made a slight bow and said with his characteristic pleasantness: “Please excuse me…”
“Get out!” Schiller drawled.
Lieutenant Pirogov was taken aback. This kind of treatment was quite new to him. The smile that had started to faintly appear on his face suddenly disappeared. With a sense of aggrieved dignity he said:
The Nose and Other Stories Page 16
