The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  The pleasure which he had experienced in his youth from the orderly disposition of the St. Petersburg waters now received a late echo: from nothing to do he dug out canals—and almost flooded one of the Vilyuisk residents’ favorite roads. He quenched his thirst for spreading culture by teaching manners to Yakuts, but just as before, the native would remove his cap at a distance of twenty paces and in that position would meekly freeze. The practicality and good sense he used to advocate now dwindled to his advising the water-carrier to substitute a regular yoke of wood for the crook made of hair, which cut his palms; but the Yakut did not change his routine. In the little town where all they did was play cards and have passionate discussions about the price of Chinese cotton, his yearning for activity in public affairs led him to the Old-Believers, about whose plight Chernyshevski wrote an extraordinarily long and detailed memoir (including even Vilyuisk gossip) and coolly sent it off addressed to the Tsar, with the friendly suggestion he pardon them because they “esteem him as a saint.”

  He wrote a lot but burned almost everything. He informed his relatives that the results of his “learned work” would undoubtedly be accepted sympathetically; this work was ashes and a mirage. Out of the whole heap of writings which he produced in Siberia, besides The Prologue, only two or three stories and a “cycle” of unfinished “novellas” have been preserved.… He also wrote poems. In texture they are no different from those versificatory tasks which he had once been given in the seminary, when he had reset a psalm of David in the following manner:

  Upon me lay one duty only—

  To mind my father’s flock of sheep,

  And hymns I early started singing

  For to extol the Lord withal.

  In 1875 (to Pypin) and again in 1888 (to Lavrov) he sends “an ancient Persian poem”: a ghastly thing! In one of the strophes the pronoun “their” is repeated seven times (“Their country is barren, Their bodies are fleshless, And through their torn garments their ribs one can tell. Their faces are broad, and their features are flattened; Upon their flat features the soul does not dwell”) while in the monstrous chains of the genitive case (“Of howls of the ache of their craving for blood”) now, at the parting with literature, under a very low sun, there is evidence of the author’s familiar leaning toward congruity, toward links. To Pypin he writes heartrending letters expressing his stubborn desire to thwart the administration and occupy himself with literature: “This thing [The Academy of Azure Mountains, signed Denzil Elliot—purporting to be from the English] is of high literary merit.… I am patient, but—I hope no one intends to prevent me from working for my family.… I am famous in Russian literature for the carelessness of my style.… When I want to I can also write in all sorts of good styles.”

  Weep ye, O! for Lilybaeum;

  We with you together weep.

  Weep ye, O! for Agrigentum;

  Reinforcements we await.

  “What is [this] hymn to the Maid of the Skies? An episode from the prose story of Empedocles’ grandson … And what is the story of Empedocles’ grandson? One of the innumerable stories in The Academy of Azure Mountains. The Duchess of Cantershire has set off with a company of fashionable friends on a yacht through the Suez Canal to the East Indies in order to visit her tiny kingdom at the foot of the Azure Mountains, near Golconda. There they do what intelligent and good people of fashion do: They tell stories—stories that will follow in the next packages from Denzil Elliot to the editor of The Messenger of Europe” (Stasyulevich—who did not print any of this).

  One feels dizzy, the letters swim and fade in one’s eyes—and here we again pick up the theme of Chernyshevski’s spectacles. He asked his relatives to send him new ones, but in spite of his efforts to explain it particularly graphically, he nonetheless made a mess of it, and six months later he received from them number “four and a half instead of five or five and a quarter.”

  He gave an outlet to his passion for instruction by writing to Sasha about the mathematician Fermat, to Misha about the struggle between Popes and Emperors, and to his wife about medicine, Carlsbad, and Italy.… It ended the way it was bound to end: the authorities requested him to stop writing “learned letters.” This so offended and shook him that for over six months he did not write any letters at all (the authorities never saw the day when they would get from him those humble petitions which, for instance, Dostoevski used to dispatch from Semipalatinsk to the strong of this world). “There is no news from Papa,” wrote Olga Sokratovna to her son in 1879. “I wonder if he, my dear one, is still alive,” and she can be forgiven much for this intonation.

  Yet one more jackanapes with a name ending in “ski” suddenly pops up as an extra: on March 15, 1881, “your unknown pupil Vitevski,” as he recommends himself, but according to police information a tippling doctor at the Stavropol district hospital, sends him a wire to Vilyuisk protesting with completely superfluous heat against an anonymous opinion that Chernyshevski was responsible for the assassination of the Tsar: “Your works are filled with peace and love. You never desired this (i.e., the assassination).” Whether because of these artless words or because of something else, the government softened and in the middle of June it showed its jail tenant a bit of thoughtful kindness: it had the walls of his domicile papered in “gris perle with a border,” and the ceiling covered with calico, which in toto cost the exchequer 40 rubles and 88 kopecks; i.e., somewhat more than Yakovlev’s overcoat and Musa’s coffee. And already the following year the haggling over Chernyshevski’s ghost was concluded, after negotiations between the Volunteer Security Guards (the secret police) and the executive committee of the underground People’s Freedom concerning the preservation of law and order during Alexander the Third’s coronation, with the decision that if the latter went off smoothly, Chernyshevski would be freed: thus he was bartered in exchange for tsars—and vice versa (a process that subsequently found its material expression when the Soviet authorities substituted in Saratov his statue for that of Alexander the Second). A year later, in May, a petition was submitted in his sons’ names (he, of course, knew nothing of this), in the most florid and tear-jerking style imaginable. The Minister of Justice, Nabokov, made the appropriate report and “His Majesty deigned to permit the transfer of Chernyshevski to Astrakhan.”

  At the end of February, 1883 (overburdened time was already having difficulty in dragging his destiny), the gendarmes, without a word of the resolution, suddenly took him to Irkutsk. No matter—leaving Vilyuisk was in itself a happy event, and more than once during the summer voyage up the long Lena (revealing such kinship with the Volga in its meanders) the old man broke into a dance, chanting dactylic hexameters. But in September the voyage ended and with it the sensation of freedom. On the very first night Irkutsk appeared as the same kind of casemate in the deepest of provincial backwoods. In the morning he was visited by the chief of the gendarmerie, Keller. Nikolay Gavrilovich sat leaning his elbow on the table and did not respond at once. “The Emperor has pardoned you,” said Keller, and repeated it even louder, seeing that the other was apparently half-asleep or beclouded. “Me?” said the old man suddenly, then stood up, placed his hands on the herald’s shoulders and, shaking his head, burst into tears. In the evening, feeling as if convalescent after a long illness, but still weak, with a delicious mist permeating his being, he had tea at the Kellers’, talking incessantly and telling the latters’ children “more or less Persian fairy tales—about asses, roses, robbers …” as one of his hearers recalled. Five days later he was taken to Krasnoyarsk, from there to Orenburg—and in the late autumn at between six and seven in the evening he drove with post-horses through Saratov; there, in the yard of an inn by the gendarmery, in the mobile darkness, a wretched little lamp swayed so much in the wind that one simply could not distinguish properly Olga Sokratovna’s changeable, young, old, young face wrapped in a woolen kerchief—she had rushed headlong to this unhoped-for meeting; and that same night Chernyshevski (who could tell his thoughts?) was dispatched fur
ther.

  With great mastery and with the utmost vividness of exposition (it might almost be taken for compassion) Strannolyubski describes his installation in his Astrakhan residence. No one met him with open arms, he was invited by no one, and very soon he understood that all the grandiose plans which had been his only support in exile must now melt away in an inanely lucid and quite imperturbable stillness.

  To his Siberian illnesses Astrakhan added yellow fever. He frequently caught cold. He suffered acute palpitations of the heart. He smoked heavily and untidily. But worst of all, he was extremely nervous. He had an odd way of jumping up in the middle of a conversation—an abrupt movement stemming as it were from the day of his arrest, when he had dashed into his study, forestalling the funest Rakeyev. On the street he could be mistaken for a little old artisan: stoop-shouldered, wearing a cheap summer suit and a crumpled cap. “But tell me …” “But don’t you think …” “But …”: casual busybodies used to bother him with absurd questions. The actor Syroboyarski kept on asking him “Shall I marry or no?” There were two or three last little denunciations which fizzed like damp fireworks. The company he kept consisted of some local Armenians—grocers and haberdashers. Educated people were surprised by the fact that somehow he did not take much interest in public affairs. “Well, what do you want,” he would reply cheerlessly, “what can I make of it all? Why, I haven’t even once attended a trial by jury, not once been to a meeting of the zemstvo …”

  Hair smoothly parted, with uncovered ears too big for her, and with a “bird’s nest” just below the crown of her head—here she is again with us (she has brought candy and kittens from Saratov); there is on her long lips that same mocking half-smile, the martyred line of her brows is still sharper, and the sleeves of her dress are now puffed out above the shoulders. She is already past fifty (1833-1918) but her character is still the same, neurotically naughty; her hysterical fits culminate sometimes into convulsions.

  During these last six years of his life, poor, old, unwanted Nikolay Gavrilovich translates with machine-like steadiness volume after volume of Georg Weber’s Universal History for the publisher Soldatenkov—and at the same time, moved by his ancient, irrepressible need to air his opinions, he tries gradually to smuggle through Weber some of his own ideas. He signs his translation “Andreyev”; and in his review of the first volume (in The Examiner, February 1884) a critic remarks that this “is a kind of pseudonym, since in Russia there are as many Andreyevs as there are Ivanovs and Petrovs”; this is followed by stinging allusions to the heaviness of the style and by a small reprimand: “There was no need for Mr. Andreyev to dilate in his Foreword on the merits and demerits of Weber, who has long been known to the Russian reader. His textbook came out as early as the fifties and simultaneously three volumes of his Course of Universal History in the translation of E. and V. Korsh.… He would be well advised not to ignore the works of his predecessors.”

  E. Korsh, a lover of arch-Russian terminology instead of that accepted by German philosophers, was by now an eighty-year-old man, an assistant of Soldatenkov’s, and in this capacity he proofread the “Astrakhan translator,” introducing corrections which enraged Chernyshevski, who in letters to the publisher set about “mauling” Evgeniy Fyodorovich according to his old system, at first demanding furiously that the proofreading be given to somebody else “who understands better that there is not another man in Russia who knows the Russian literary language as well as I do,” and then, when he had got his own way, employing another device: “Can I really be interested in such trifles? However, if Korsh wants to continue to read the proofs, ask him not to make corrections, they are indeed ridiculous.” With no less bitter pleasure he also mauled Zaharyin, who out of the goodness of his heart had spoken to Soldatenkov regarding a monthly payment (of 200 rubles) to Chernyshevski in view of Ogla Sokratovna’s extravagance. “You were fooled by the effrontery of a man whose mind has been befuddled by drunkenness,” wrote Chernyshevski to Soldatenkov, and setting in motion the whole apparatus of his logic—rusty, creaky but still as wriggly as ever, he at first justified his ire by the fact that he was being taken for a thief who wished to acquire capital, and then explained that his anger was actually only a sham for Olga Sokratovna’s sake: “Thanks to the fact that she learned of her extravagance from my letter to you, and I didn’t give in to her when she asked me to soften my expression, there were no convulsions.” At this point (the end of 1888) another brief review happened along—by now on Weber’s tenth volume. The terrible state of his mind, wounded pride, an old man’s crotchetiness and the last, hopeless attempts to shout down the silence (a feat even more difficult than Lear’s attempt to shout down the storm), all this must be remembered when you read through his spectacles the review on the inside of the pale-pink cover of The Messenger of Europe:

  … Unfortunately it appears from the Foreword that the Russian translator has remained true to his simple duties as a translator only in the first six volumes, but beginning with the seventh volume he has laid upon himself a new duty … “to clean up” Weber. It is hardly possible to be grateful to him for the kind of translation where the author is “refurbished,” and such an authoritative author, at that, as Weber.

  “It would seem,” remarks Strannolyubski here (somewhat mixing his metaphors), “that with this careless kick destiny had given the last suitable touch to the chain of retribution it had forged for him.” But that is not so. There remains for our inspection one more—most terrible, most complete, ultimate punishment.

  Of all the madmen who tore Chernyshevski’s life into shreds, the worst was his son; not the youngest, of course, Mihail (Misha), who lived a quiet life, lovingly working away at tariff questions (he was employed in the railroads department): he had been evolved from his father’s “positive number” and was a good son, for at the time (1896–98) when his prodigal brother (which makes a moralistic picture) was publishing his Fantastic Tales and a collection of futile poems, he was piously beginning his monumental edition of his late father’s works, which he had practically brought to conclusion when he died, in 1924, surrounded by general esteem—ten years after Alexander (Sasha) had died suddenly in sinful Rome, in a small room with a stone floor, declaring his superhuman love for Italian art and crying in the heat of wild inspiration that if people would only listen to him life would be different, different! Created apparently out of everything that his father could not stand, Sasha, hardly out of his boyhood, developed a passion for everything that was weird, chimerical, and incomprehensible to his contemporaries—he lost himself in E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Poe, was fascinated by pure mathematics, and a little later he was one of the first in Russia to appreciate the French “poètes maudits.” The father, vegetating in Siberia, was unable to look after the development of his son (who was brought up by the Pypins) and what he learned he interpreted in his own way, the more so since they concealed Sasha’s mental disease from him. Gradually, however, the purity of this mathematics began to irritate Chernyshevski—and one can easily imagine with what feelings the youth used to read those long letters from his father, beginning with a deliberately debonair joke and then (like the conversations of that Chekhov character who used to begin so well—“an old alumnus, you know, an incurable idealist …”) concluding with irate abuse; this passion for mathematics enraged him not only as a manifestation of something nonutilitarian: by jeering at everything modern, Chernyshevski whom life had outdistanced would unburden himself concerning all the innovators, eccentrics and failures of this world.

  His kindhearted cousin, Pypin, in January 1875, sends him to Vilyuisk an embellished description of his student son, informing him of what might please the creator of Rakhmetov (Sasha, he wrote, had ordered an eighteen-pound metal ball for gymnastics) and what must be flattering to any father: with restrained tenderness, Pypin, recalling his youthful friendship with Nikolay Gavrilovich (to whom he was much indebted), relates that Sasha is just as clumsy, just as angular as his father was, and also l
aughs as loud in the same treble tones.… Suddenly, in the autumn of 1877, Sasha joined the Nevski infantry regiment, but before he reached the active army (the Russo-Turkish war was in progress) he fell ill with typhus (in his constant misfortunes one is aware of a legacy from his father, who also used to break everything and drop everything). Returning to St. Petersburg he lived alone, giving lessons and publishing articles on the theory of probability. After 1882 his mental ailment was aggravated, and more than once he had to be placed in a nursing-home. He was afraid of space, or more exactly, he was afraid of slipping into a different dimension—and in order to avoid perishing he clung continuously to the safe, solid—with Euclidean pleats—skirt of Pelageya Nikolaevna Fanderflit (née Pypin).

  From Chernyshevski, who had now moved to Astrakhan, they continued to hide this. With a kind of sadistic obstinacy, with pedantic callousness matching that of any prosperous bourgeois in Dickens or Balzac, he called his son in his letters “a big ludicrous freak” and an “eccentric pauper” and accused him of a desire “to remain a beggar.” Finally Pypin could stand it no longer and explained to his cousin with a certain warmth that although Sasha may not have become “a cold and calculating businessman,” he had in compensation “acquired a pure and honorable soul.”