‘He still hasn’t woken up, Your Excellency. You must bear that in mind, sir. It’s because he’s not used to it, sir. Once he’s awake, he’ll behave quite differently, sir.’
‘Leave him alone,’ the General repeated.
‘Vasily Vasilyevich! Hey, Your Excellency!’ a new voice called out loudly and unabashedly from just beside Avdotya Ignatyevna; it was an insolent, aristocratic voice, with fashionably languid articulation and a cheeky drawl. ‘I’ve been observing you all for the last two hours. Yes, I’ve been lying here three days now. Remember me, Vasily Vasilyevich? Klinevich. We used to meet at the Volokonskys, where, goodness knows why, you too were received.’
‘What! Count Pyotr Petrovich… but surely you can’t… and so young… How sorry I am!’
‘I’m sorry myself, only it’s all the same to me now, and I want to make the most of wherever I am. And I’m not Count but Baron, just a mere baron. We’re just mangy little barons – and how we came to be barons, I don’t know, and I don’t give a damn. I’m just a scoundrel, from the pseudo-beau monde, with a reputation for being a “charming scapegrace”. My father was some kind of minor general and my mother was once received en haut lieu.11 Last year Siffel the Jew and I forged fifty thousand worth of counterfeit bank notes, but then I informed on him and Yulka Charpentier de Lusignan12 took all the money with her to Bordeaux. And just imagine, I was already well and truly betrothed – to the Shchevalevsky girl, three months short of sixteen, still at her boarding school, and with a dowry of around ninety thousand. Avdotya Ignatyevna, do you remember how you seduced me about fifteen years ago, when I was just a fourteen-year-old page?’
‘So it’s you, you scoundrel! Well, at least God’s sent you to us now. Without you it’s been –’
‘You were wrong to blame the bad smell on your tradesman neighbour. I just kept quiet and laughed to myself. It’s me – I had to be buried in a nailed-down coffin.’
‘How loathsome you are! But I’m glad all the same. You can’t imagine, Klinevich, you simply can’t imagine the absence of life and wit down here.’
‘Quite so, quite so, and it’s my intention to introduce something rather novel. Your Excellency – no, not you, Pervoyedov – Your Excellency, the other one, Mister Tarasevich, the privy councillor! Answer me! It’s Klinevich. It’s me who used to take you to Mademoiselle Furie during Lent. Can you hear me?’
‘I can hear you, Klinevich, and I’m very glad, and believe me –’
‘No, I don’t believe a single word – and I don’t give a damn. I’d simply love to kiss you, my dear old man, but thank God I can’t. Do you know, gentlemen, what this grand-père got up to? He died three or four days ago and – can you imagine it? – he left the fund he administered short of no less than four hundred thousand. It was a fund for widows and orphans and for some reason he ran it all on his own, and the books ended up not being audited for nearly eight years. I can well imagine all the long faces now, and the names he’s been called. A voluptuous thought, isn’t it? All last year I kept wondering how a nasty old seventy year old with gout and arthritis could still have so much strength left for debauchery – and now I know! Those widows and orphans – the mere thought of them must have been enough to inflame his ardour! I knew about it for some time, I was the only one, Charpentier told me, and as soon as I found out, it was in Holy Week, I went and said to him, in the friendliest of tones, “Give me twenty-five thousand – or you’ll be audited tomorrow.” Well, just imagine, he only had around thirteen thousand just then, so it seems he chose the right time to die. Grand-père, grand-père, can you hear me?’
‘Cher Klinevich, I agree with you entirely, and really there was no need for you to… go into such detail. There is so much suffering and torment in life, and so little recompense. I wished finally to find peace and, as far as I can see, here too I can hope to make the most of –’
‘I’ll bet he’s already sniffed out Katiche13 Berestova.’
‘Katiche? What Katiche?’ the old man’s voice quavered lasciviously.
‘What Katiche, eh? Well, she’s over to the left, five yards from me, and ten from you. This is her fifth day here, and if you knew, grand-père, what a little bitch she is. From a good family, well educated and – a fiend, a fiend to the nth degree! I never showed her to anyone up above, I was the only one who knew. Katiche, say something for yourself!’
‘Hee, hee, hee!’ came the cracked sound of the voice of a little girl, but in it was something as sharp as the prick of a needle. ‘Hee-hee-hee.’
‘Is… she… blonde?’ came the three-note staccato of grand-père’s babyish voice.
‘Hee-hee-hee!’
‘I have… I have for a long time,’ the old man began breathlessly, in his babyish voice, ‘cherished the dream of a little blonde, around fifteen years old, and in exactly such surroundings as these.’
‘You monster!’ exclaimed Avdotya Ignatyevna.
‘That’ll do!’ said Klinevich. ‘I can see we have first-rate material here. Soon we’ll have our lives arranged in the best possible way. The main thing is to have a good time – but how much time is there left? Hey, you from some Ministry or other, Lebezyatnikov – isn’t that what I heard someone call you?’
‘Lebezyatnikov, Court Councillor, Semyon Yevseyich, at your service, and with the very, very greatest of pleasure!’
‘I don’t give a damn about your pleasure, but you seem to have some idea of what’s what round here. First of all, tell me (I’ve been wondering about this since yesterday) how is it we can talk here? After all, we’re dead, yet we’re talking; we seem to move, yet we’re not moving any more than we’re talking. What’s going on?’
‘If you so wish, Baron, Platon Nikolayevich could explain this to you better than I can.’
‘Who’s Platon Nikolayevich? Don’t mumble – get to the point.’
‘Platon Nikolayevich, our local home-grown philosopher and Master of Sciences. He’s published several little books of philosophy, but he’s been fast asleep for three months now and it’s impossible to shake him awake. Once a week he mutters a few words that have nothing to do with anything.’
‘Get to the point!’
‘He explains it all in the very simplest way: namely, that we were wrong, while we were still alive, to take our death up above for death. Here the body seems to come to life once again, the remnants of life concentrate together, but only in our consciousness. It’s as if – I don’t know how best to put it – life keeps going out of inertia. Everything is concentrated – in his view – somewhere in our consciousness, and it all keeps going for another two or three months, sometimes even six months. There’s one fellow here, for example, who’s almost completely decomposed, but every six weeks or so he still mutters some little word, something quite meaningless of course, about some kind of bean – bobok, bobok – which means that in him too an imperceptible spark of life still flickers.’
‘How ridiculous. How is it then that I have no sense of smell, yet can smell the stench?’
‘That… heh, heh… Well, here our philosopher is all in a fog. On the subject of the sense of smell he observed that the stench we smell here is, so to say, a moral stench… heh, heh… a stench, as it were of the soul, so that we should have time, during these two or three months to reconsider… and that this, so to speak, is the final mercy… Only I think, Baron, that this is just mystical raving, entirely excusable in his position.’
‘That’ll do. I’m sure the rest is all nonsense too. The main thing is: two or three months of life, and then – bobok. I propose we spend these two months as enjoyably as possible, and that to this end we should base our lives on different principles. Ladies and gentlemen! I propose we should feel ashamed of nothing!’
‘Oh yes, yes, let’s be ashamed of nothing!’ cried a number of voices, and, surprisingly, there were even some quite new voices that must have belonged to people who had newly awoken. An engineer, who had by then fully come to, thundered his consent in a bass voice and with e
special eagerness. Little Katiche giggled gleefully.
‘Oh, how I long to feel ashamed of nothing!’ Avdotya Ignatyevna exclaimed in rapture.
‘Listen, if even Avdotya Ignatyevna wants to feel ashamed of nothing…’
‘No, no, no, Klinevich. Up there, whatever you may think, I still felt ashamed, but here, I terribly, terribly want to feel ashamed of nothing.’
‘As I understand it, Klinevich,’ said the engineer in his bass voice, ‘what you are proposing is that we arrange our, so to speak, life here according to new and rational principles.’
‘I don’t give a damn about all that. We can wait for Kudeyarov – he was brought in yesterday. When he wakes up, he’ll explain everything to you. He’s a real personality, a giant of a personality! Tomorrow I think they’ll be dragging in another scientist, probably a certain officer, and – in three or four days if I’m not mistaken – some newspaper columnist, probably along with his editor. To hell with them, though! We shall have a little group of our own and everything will be arranged perfectly. Meanwhile, though, I want there to be no lying. That’s what I want, because that’s what matters most of all. It’s impossible to live on earth and not lie, because living and lying are synonymous, but here, just for the fun of it, we’ll have no lying. Devil take it, the grave does – like it or not – have some meaning! We can all tell our stories out loud and no longer feel ashamed of anything. Let me tell you about myself first of all. I was a lover of flesh, you know. Up above, all that was bound with rotten cords. Away with all cords and let us live these two months in the most shameless truth! Let’s strip naked and bare ourselves!’
‘Let’s bare ourselves, let’s bare ourselves!’ they all shouted at the tops of their voices.
‘I terribly, terribly want to bare myself!’ squealed Avdotya Ignatyevna.
‘Oh… oh… oh, I can see it’s going to be fun here. I don’t want to go to Eck!’
‘No. I could live a little. No, you know, I could live a little!’
‘Hee, hee, hee,’ giggled Katiche.
‘The main thing is that no one can forbid us, and though I can see that Pervoyedov is angry, he still can’t lay a hand on me. Grand-père, do you agree?’
‘I completely, completely agree, and with the greatest of pleasure, provided Katiche will be the first to give us her au-to-bio-graphy.’
‘I protest, I protest with all my might,’ General Pervoyedov declared resolutely.
‘Your Excellency!’ said the vile Lebezyatnikov. Lowering his voice and babbling in excited haste, he went on, ‘Your Excellency, it really is in our own interest to agree. There’s that girl, you know… and, in short, well, you know…’
‘The girl, I grant you that, but…’
‘It’s in our own interest, Your Excellency, I swear by God it is! Well, let’s just see what happens, let’s at least give it a try.’
‘They won’t let me rest even in the grave!’
‘In the first place, General, you weren’t resting but playing cards, and, in the second place, we don’t give a damn about you anyway!’ drawled Klinevich.
‘My dear sir, I ask you not to forget yourself.’
‘What? You can’t lay a finger on me, but I can carry on teasing you as if you were Yulka’s lapdog. And first of all, ladies and gentlemen, what kind of general can he be down here? He was a general up there, but here – pooh!’
‘No, not pooh… Here too I –’
‘Here you will rot away in your coffin, and all that will be left of you is six brass buttons.’
‘Bravo, Klinevich! Ha-ha-ha!’ bellowed more loud voices.
‘I served my sovereign… I have a sword –’
‘Your sword is only good for sticking mice, and anyway, you never even drew it.’
‘That makes no difference, sir. I constituted a part of the whole.’
‘There are all kinds of parts in a whole.’
‘Bravo, Klinevich, bravo! Ha-ha-ha!’
‘I don’t understand what a sword is,’ declared the engineer.
‘We’ll run from the Prussians like mice. They’ll make mincemeat of us!’14 shouted a distant voice I had not heard before, positively choking with glee.
‘A sword, sir, means honour!’ – and that shout was the last I heard from the General. This was followed by hubbub and uproar, by long and furious howls, and I could make out nothing but Avdotya Ignatyevna’s hysterically impatient squeals: ‘Come on, come on now! Oh, when are we going to start feeling ashamed of nothing?’
‘Oh-oh-oh! Verily my soul is passing through torments!’ came the voice of the simple tradesman, and –
And here I sneezed. This happened suddenly and unintentionally, but its effect was remarkable: everything dissolved like a dream, there was just deathly silence. Yes, the silence was truly sepulchral. I don’t think it was a matter of them feeling shame in my presence: they had resolved, after all, to feel ashamed of nothing! I waited another five minutes or so – and not a word, not a sound. Nor is it to be supposed that they were afraid of being reported to the police, for what could the police have done? I am forced to conclude that those under the ground must, after all, have some secret unknown to mortals and which they are careful to conceal from mortals.
‘Well, my dears,’ I thought, ‘I shall visit you again.’ And with that I left the graveyard.
No, this I cannot tolerate; truly I cannot! What disturbs me is not bobok (so this is what bobok amounts to!).
No – but debauchery in such a place, the debauching of last hopes, depravity of worn-out and rotting corpses, and not even sparing the last moments of consciousness. These moments are given to them, bestowed on them, and… And worst of all, worst of all – in such a place! No, this I cannot tolerate…
I’ll visit other classes of grave, I’ll listen everywhere. That’s it, I must listen everywhere, and not just from the edge, so as to develop an understanding.
But I’ll go back to this lot without fail. They promised their autobiographies and all kinds of funny stories. Pah! But I’ll go back, I’ll go without fail; it’s a matter of conscience!
I’ll take this to The Citizen. The portrait of one of their editors was also in the exhibition. Maybe he’ll print it.
First published in 1873
Translated by Robert Chandler
LEV NIKOLAYEVICH TOLSTOY (1828–1910)
Born near Tula into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy was orphaned in 1837. His next guardians, a grandmother and an aunt, also died. He and his four siblings were sent to another aunt in Kazan. Tolstoy studied at Kazan University, first in the Faculty of Oriental Languages, then in that of Law, but he failed to graduate. From 1852 to 1856 he served in the Army, seeing action in the Caucasus and the Crimea; he commanded an artillery battery during the siege of Sebastopol, and it was his Sebastopol Sketches (1855–6)that first made his name. He married Sofya Behrs in 1862, and from then lived mainly on his family estate in Yasnaya Polyana.
Tolstoy was as fiercely moralistic as he was sensual. His social conscience led him to establish a school for his peasants; the primer he wrote for it ran to twenty-eight editions in his lifetime. Between 1879 and 1881 he wrote A Confession, an account of a spiritual crisis that led him to renounce all of his previous writing as immoral. His wife’s sceptical attitude towards his new piety exacerbated the already severe difficulties between them, and Tolstoy tried unsuccessfully to leave home in 1884. In 1885 he founded a publishing house, Posrednik (‘The Intermediary’), which provided educational and morally improving literature at a price the poor could afford; three million books were sold in 1889 alone. After several attempts, Tolstoy gave up meat, alcohol and tobacco in 1888. Between 1891 and 1893 he organized famine relief in the province of Ryazan. The International Tolstoy Society was founded in 1900 to promote his ascetic and pacifist ideals. In 1901 the Orthodox Church (denounced by Tolstoy as having nothing to do with Christianity) excommunicated him. He died at Astapovo railway station, soon after leaving home on an undefined q
uest – or perhaps just to escape his increasingly unhappy marriage.
No one in Europe around the beginning of the twentieth century enjoyed greater moral and spiritual authority than Tolstoy. Maksim Gorky once joked that there could be no room for God and Tolstoy in one universe, since they would be like two bears in one den. Tolstoy’s teachings influenced, among others, Mahatma Gandhi and the founders of the kibbutz movement.
Tolstoy’s most famous novels, War and Peace (1865–9) and Anna Karenina (1875–7), are by no means his only important works. His early autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth has a unique charm. His novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich examines the wish to deny the reality of death. The Kreutzer Sonata, another short novel, constitutes a plea for absolute chastity. The long novel Resurrection proclaims the need for the rebirth both of the individual and of society. And Tolstoy’s last major work of fiction, Hadji Murat, is a sympathetic portrait of a famous Chechen leader.
Tolstoy believed, at least after his spiritual crisis, that the function of art was to provide moral instruction. In What is Art? (1897) he picked out ‘God Sees the Truth, but Waits’ – an expanded version of a fable told by Platon Karatayev in the last pages of War and Peace – as one of only two examples of his own work that he still considered ‘good art’. The tension between Tolstoy the artist and Tolstoy the moralist is embodied in this story’s textual history. In what has long been considered the standard text, Aksyonov tells a white lie when questioned by the Governor, saying, ‘I’ve seen nothing and I know nothing.’ In 1885, however, Tolstoy’s disciple Chertkov wrote to him to say that he was troubled by this: ‘he is resorting to a deliberate lie in order to save his comrade. Moreover, this very act gives the impression of being the greatest deed of his life. But this act could remain such even if he were freed from deceit. Aksyonov could say that he did not dig the tunnel and remain silent about whether or not he knew who did.’1 Tolstoy was evidently convinced by Chertkov’s argument, and he rewrote Aksyonov’s speech; it is this later version that I have translated.
Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics) Page 14
