“Not enough!” Aglaia screamed.
The young man gave a smile. He reached for another hundred-rouble note.
“I am not empowered to go any higher,” he said politely. “In a month you will be receiving the next installment.”
Saranin was running around the room.
“Into the window! Into the window!” he was screaming. “You damned Armenian! What have you done to me?”
And suddenly he settled by another three inches or so.
X.
Saranin’s helpless tears, Saranin’s anguish … What do Strigal and his partners care about that?
They paid. They are asserting their rights. The cruel rights of the capital.
Under the sway of Mammon, even a senior civil servant and the holder of a decoration occupies a position which fully corresponds to his exact dimensions, but which in no way accords with his pride. A Lilliputian dressed in the latest style runs around in the window of a fashionable store. Sometimes he is lost in contemplation of the pretty girls—so enormous!—sometimes he angrily shakes his little fists at boys who laugh at him.
At the windows of Strigal and Co. there is a crowd.
In the store of Strigal and Co. the clerks are knocked off their feet.
The workshop of Strigal and Co. is deluged with orders.
Strigal and Co. are basking in glory. Strigal and Co. are expanding their workshops.
Strigal and Co. are rich. Strigal and Co. are buying up houses.
Strigal and Co. are magnanimous: they feed Saranin royally, they spare no expense for his wife.
Aglaia is already getting a thousand a month.
Aglaia has also found other sources of income.
And acquaintanceships.
And lovers. And diamonds.
And carriages. And a house.
Aglaia feels cheerful and satisfied. She has filled out even more. She wears high-heeled shoes. She selects charming hats of gigantic dimensions.
When she visits her husband she pets him and feeds him from her finger, as if he were a bird. Saranin, in a dress suit with short tails, patters around on the table before her and squeaks something. His voice is piercing, like the whine of a mosquito. But the words are inaudible.
Puny little people may speak, but their peeping is inaudible to people of larger dimensions—Aglaia, Strigal, and his entire company. Aglaia, surrounded by clerks, listens to the squealing and peeping of this person. She chortles. She goes away.
Saranin is carried to the window where a full apartment has been set up for him in a nest of soft fabrics, its open side facing the public.
The tough street kids see a tiny little man sitting down at the table and starting to write petitions. Tiny, tiny petitions for the restoration of his rights that have been violated by Aglaia and by Strigal and Co. He writes. He sticks them into a tiny envelope. The kids die laughing.
Aglaia, meanwhile, takes her seat in a resplendent carriage. She is going for a drive before dinner.
XI.
Neither Aglaia nor Strigal and Co. gave any thought to how all this would end. They were content with the present. It seemed that there would be no end to the rain of gold that showered on them. But the end came. A most ordinary one. One that should have been anticipated.
Saranin kept getting tinier. Every day several new suits were made for him, each time smaller.
And suddenly, just after he had put on some tiny new trousers, he became altogether miniscule, before the eyes of the astonished clerks. He swam out of his tiny trousers. And he had already become as small as the head of a pin.
There blew a light draft of air. Saranin, as tiny as a dust speck, rose into the air. He whirled around. He merged with a cloud of dust specks dancing in a sunbeam.
He disappeared.
All searches were in vain. Nowhere could Saranin be found.
Aglaia, Strigal and Company, the police, the clergy, the authorities—all were at a complete loss.
How was Saranin’s disappearance to be officially formulated?
Finally, after consultation with the Academy of Sciences, it was decided to consider him as having been sent on a mission with a scientific purpose.
Then they forgot about him.
Saranin came to an end.
(1905) Translated by Maurice Friedberg
Andrei Bely
[Boris Nicholaievich]
(1880–1934)
__________________________________
Demon
But why does He, you whisper dreaming,
Disturb the muse of pallid days?
Pale porphyry—a pallid Demon—
I make my foray from the Shades.
You see how Space, my pitch-black raiment,
Slips down my form in dark cascade,
My hand—my endless arm extended—
Has raised on high a Comet’s blade.
Let not your blushing gazes teeter:
From racing rains, the Meteor
Cuts clean across the cosmic Ether.
See now—such is my boundless World.
Moscow, 1907
Translated by A.L. and M.K.
Petersburg
[from] The Prologue
< … > Nevsky Prospect possesses a striking attribute: it consists of a space for the circulation of the public. It is delimited by numbered houses. The numeration proceeds house by house, which considerably facilitates the finding of the house one needs. Nevsky Prospect, like any prospect, is a public prospect, that is: a prospect for the circulation of the public (not of air, for instance). The houses that form its lateral limits are-hmmm … yes: … for the public. Nevsky Prospect in the evening is illuminated by electricity. But during the day Nevsky Prospect requires no illumination.
Nevsky Prospect is rectilineal (just between us), because it is a European prospect; and any European prospect is not merely a prospect, but (as I have already said) a prospect that is European, because … yes …
For this very reason, Nevsky Prospect is a rectilineal prospect. Nevsky Prospect is a prospect of no small importance in this un-Russian-but nonetheless-capital city. Other Russian cities are a wooden heap of hovels.
And strikingly different from them all is Petersburg.
But if you continue to insist on the utterly preposterous legend about the existence of a Moscow population of a million-and-a-half, then you will have to admit that the capital is Moscow, for only capitals have a population of a million-and-a-half; but as for provincial cities, they do not, never have had, and never will have a population of a million-and-a-half. And in conformance with this preposterous legend, it will be apparent that the capital is not Petersburg.
But if Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no Petersburg. It only appears to exist.
However that may be, Petersburg not only appears to us, but actually does appear—on maps: in the form of two small circles, one set inside the other, with a black dot in the center; and from precisely this mathematical point, which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it exists: from here, from this very point surges and swarms the printed book; from this invisible point speeds the official circular.
[from] Chapter the First
in which an account is given of a certain worthy person, his mental games, and the ephemerality of being
A time of terror it has been,
Still fresh in painful recollection …
Of it, my friends-for amity-
I now take up my retrospection.
My story will be full of woe …
Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman
Translated by by A.L. and M.L.
APOLLON APOLLONOVICH ABLEUKHOV
Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was of venerable stock: he had Adam as his ancestor. But that is not the main thing: it is more important that one member of this venerable stock was Shem, progenitor of the Semitic, Hessitic, and red-skinned peoples.
Here let us make a transition to ancestors of an age not so remote.
Their plac
e of residence was the Kirghiz-Kaisak Horde, whence, in the reign of the Empress Anna Ioannovna, Mirza Ab-Lai, the great-great-grandfather of the senator, valiantly entered the Russian service, having received, upon Christian baptism, the name Andrei and the sobriquet Ukhov. For brevity’s sake, Ab-Lai-Ukhov was later changed to Ableukhov, plain and simple.
This was the great-great-grandfather who was the source of the stock.
< … >
THE CARRIAGE FLEW INTO THE FOG
An icy drizzle sprayed streets and prospects, sidewalks and roofs. It sprayed pedestrians and rewarded them with the grippe. Along with the fine dust of rain, influenza and grippe crawled under the raised collars of a schoolboy, a student, a clerk, an officer, a shady type. The shady type cast a dismal eye about him. He looked at the prospect. He circulated, without the slightest murmur, into an infinity of prospects—in a stream of others exactly like him—amidst the flight and din, listening to the voice of automobile roulades.
And—he stumbled on the embankment, where everything came to an end: the voice of the roulades and the shady type himself. From far, far away, as though farther off than they should have been, the islands sank and cowered in fright; and the buildings cowered; it seemed that the waters would sink and that at that instant the depths, the greenish murk would surge over them. And over this greenish murk the Nikolaevsky Bridge thundered and trembled in the fog.
On this sullen morning the doors of a yellow house flew open. The windows of the house gave onto the Neva. And a gold-braided lackey rushed to beckon the coachman. Gray horses bounded forward and drew up a carriage on which was depicted a coat of arms: a unicorn goring a knight.
A jaunty police officer passing by the carriage porch gave a stupid look and snapped to attention when Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, in a gray coat and a tall black top hat, with a stony face resembling a paperweight, ran rapidly out of the entryway and still more rapidly ran onto the footboard of the carriage, drawing on a black suede glove as he ran.
Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov cast a momentary, perplexed glance at the police officer, the carriage, the coachman, the great black bridge, the expanse of the Neva, where the foggy, many-chimneyed distances were so wanly etched, and whence Vasilievsky Island looked back at him in fright.
The lackey in gray hastily slammed the carriage door. The carriage flew headlong into the fog; and the police officer who had happened by glanced over his shoulder into the dingy fog, where the carriage had flown headlong. He sighed and moved on. The lackey looked there too: at the expanse of the Neva, where the foggy, many-chimneyed distances were so wanly etched, and whence Vasilievsky Island looked back at him in fright.
Here, at the very beginning, I must break the thread of my narrative, in order to introduce the reader to the scene of action of a certain drama.
SQUARES, PARALLELEPIPEDS, CUBES
There, where nothing but a foggy damp hung suspended, at first appeared the dull outline, then descended from heaven to earth the dingy, blackish gray St. Isaac’s Cathedral: at first appeared the outline and then the full shape of the equestrian monument of Emperor Nicholas I. At its base the shaggy hat of a Nicholas grenadier thrust out of the fog.
The carriage was flying toward Nevsky Prospect.
Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was gently rocking on the satin seat cushions. He was cut off from the scum of the streets by four perpendicular walls. Thus he was isolated from people and from the red covers of the damp trashy rags on sale right there at this intersection.
Proportionality and symmetry soothed the senator’s nerves, which had been irritated both by the irregularity of his domestic life and by the futile rotation of our wheel of state.
His tastes were distinguished by their harmonious simplicity.
Most of all he loved the rectilineal prospect; this prospect reminded him of the flow of time between the two points of life.
There the houses merged cubelike into a regular, five-story row. This row differed from the line of life: for many a wearer of diamond-studded decorations, as for so many other dignitaries, the middle of life’s road had proven to be the termination of life’s journey.
Inspiration took possession of the senator’s soul whenever the lacquered cube cut along the line of the Nevsky: there the numeration of the houses was visible. And the circulation went on. There, from there, on clear days, from far, far away, came the blinding blaze of the gold needle, the clouds, the crimson ray of the sunset. There, from there, on foggy days–nothing, no one.
And what was there were lines: the Neva and the islands. Probably in those distant days, when out of the mossy marshes rose high roofs and masts and spires, piercing the dank greenish fog in jags—
—on his shadowy sails the Flying Dutchman winged his way toward Petersburg from there, from the leaden expanses of the Baltic and German Seas, in order here to erect, by delusion his misty lands and to give the name of islands to the wave of onrushing clouds.
Apollon ApoIlonovich did not like the islands: the population there was industrial and coarse. There the many-thousand human swarm shuffled in the morning to the many-chimneyed factories. The inhabitants of the islands are reckoned among the population of the Empire; the general census has been introduced among them as well.
Apollon Apollonovich did not wish to think further. The islands must be crushed! Riveted with the iron of the enormous bridge, skewered by the arrows of the prospects …
While gazing dreamily into that illimitability of mists, the statesman suddenly expanded out of the black cube of the carriage in all directions and soared above it. And he wanted the carriage to fly forward, the prospects to fly to meet him—prospect after prospect, so that the entire spherical surface of the planet should be embraced, as in serpent coils, by blackish gray cubes of houses; so that all the earth, crushed by prospects, in its lineal cosmic flight should intersect, with its rectilineal principle, unembraceable infinity; so that the network of parallel prospects, intersected by a network of prospects, should expand into the abysses of the universe in planes of squares and cubes: one square per “solid citizen,” so that….
After the line, the figure which soothed him more than all other symmetries was the square.
At times, for hours on end, he would lapse into an unthinking contemplation of pyramids, triangles, parallelepipeds, cubes, and trapezoids.
While dwelling in the center of the black, perfect, satin-lined cube, Apollon Apollonovich revelled at length in the quadrangular walls. Apollon Apollonovich was born for solitary confinement. Only his love for the plane geometry of the state had invested him in the polyhedrality of a responsible position.
* * *
The wet, slippery prospect was intersected by another wet prospect at a ninety-degree right angle. At the point of intersection stood a policeman.
And exactly the same kind of houses rose up, and the same kind of gray human streams passed by there, and the same kind of yellow-green fog hung there.
But parallel with the rushing prospect was another rushing prospect with the same row of boxes, with the same numeration, with the same clouds.
There is an infinity of rushing prospects with an infinity of rushing, intersecting shadows. All of Petersburg is an infinity of the prospect raised to the nth degree.
Beyond Petersburg, there is nothing.
THE INHABITANTS OF THE ISLANDS STARTLE YOU
It was the last day of September.
On Vasilievsky Island, in the depths of the Seventeenth Line, a house enormous and gray looked out of the fog. A dingy staircase led to the floors. There were doors and more doors. One opened.
And a stranger with the blackest of small mustaches appeared on its threshold.
Rhythmically swinging in his hand was a not exactly small and yet not very large bundle tied up in a dirty napkin with a red border design of faded pheasants.
The staircase was black, strewn with cucumber peels and a cabbage leaf crushed under foot. The stranger slipped on it.
He t
hen grasped the railing with one hand; the other hand (with the bundle) described a zigzag. The stranger wished to protect the bundle from a distressing accident, from falling onto the stone step, because the movement of his elbow mimicked a tightrope walker’s turn.
Then, meeting the porter, who was climbing the stairs with a load of aspen wood over his shoulder, the stranger began to show increased concern about the fate of the bundle, which might catch against a log.
When the stranger reached the bottom, a black cat underfoot hitched up its tail and cut across his path, dropping chicken innards at the stranger’s feet. And a spasm contorted his face.
Such movements are peculiar to young ladies.
And movements of precisely this same kind sometimes mark those of our contemporaries who are exhausted by insomnia. The stranger suffered from insomnia: his smoke-redolent habitation hinted at that. And the bluish tinge of the delicate skin of his face also bore witness.
The stranger remained standing in the courtyard, a quadrangle completely paved with asphalt and pressed in from all sides by the five stories of the many-windowed colossus. Stacked in the middle of the courtyard were damp cords of aspen wood. And visible through the gate was a section of the windswept Seventeenth Line.
Oh, you lines!
In you has remained the memory of Petrine Petersburg.
The parallel lines were once laid out by Peter. And some of them came to be enclosed with granite, others with low fences of stone, still others with fences of wood. Peter’s line turned into the line of a later age: the rounded one of Catherine, the regular ranks of colonnades.
Left among the colossi were small Petrine houses: here a timbered one, there a green one, there a blue, single-storied one, with the bright red sign “Dinners Served:” Sundry odors hit you right in the nose: the smell of sea salt, of herring, of hawsers, of leather jacket and of pipe, and of nautical tarpaulin.
Oh, lines!
How they have changed: how grim days have changed them!
The stranger recalled: on a summer evening, in the window of that gleaming little house, an old woman was chewing her lips. Since August the window had been shut. In September a brocade-lined coffin was brought.
Worlds Apart Page 47
