Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence

by Lodge, Kirsten; Rosen, Margo Shohl; Dashevsky, Grigory

  Until Novikov left Moscow, Sergey Petrovich did the same work day after day and compared himself with his companion, in whom he seemed to catch a glint of the superman. He observed his face, movements and thoughts and blushed when Novikov caught his dull but attentive glances. Late in the night, when Novikov was already asleep, Sergey Petrovich listened to his quiet, even breathing and thought that Novikov even breathed differently from him. And that sleeping man, whom he used to love, now seemed to him alien and mysterious, and everything about him was a riddle: his deep breathing, and his thoughts, hidden beneath the bulge of his skull, and his birth and death. And it was incomprehensible that two men were lying there under one roof, but that for each of them everything was different, separate and unlike the other’s; each had his own thoughts and life.

  Sergey Petrovich felt no grief when Novikov was sent away from Moscow. Those twenty-four hours Novikov spent with him, packing his things and cursing, passed by unnoticed, and then the two of them were at the train station. They were sober, since there was only enough money for the journey.

  “I shouldn’t have given you Nietzsche, Sergey Petrovich,” said Novikov with that stiff politeness that was one of the oddities of their life together and never left them even in their drunken moments in the trees lining the boulevard.

  “Why, Nikolai Grigorevich?”

  Novikov was silent, and Sergey Petrovich added, “It’s not likely that I’ll be reading him. I’ve had enough already.”

  The third bell rang.

  “Well, good-bye.”

  “Will you write?” Sergey Petrovich asked.

  “No. I don’t like to write letters. But you write to me.”

  After a moment of indecision, they embraced each other awkwardly, not knowing how many kisses were necessary, and Novikov departed. And, now alone, Sergey Petrovich realised that he had long wished for and anticipated this day, when he would be alone with Nietzsche, and no one would disturb them. And indeed, from that moment on no one did.

  III

  To all outward appearances, Sergey Petrovich’s life changed drastically. He stopped going to his lectures and his laboratory altogether and put to one side the thesis he had started writing, “Comparative Characteristics of Fatty and Aromatic Hydrocarbons.” He also stopped visiting his fellow students and showed up only for student meetings, and then only briefly. On one occasion a large group of students went to the brothel and found Sergey Petrovich there, and the amazing thing was that he was completely sober. As in the past, he blushed when they started to make fun of him, and when he got drunk he started singing and babbling in his tongue-tied way about some Zarathustra. In the end he started to cry, and then wanted to fight, and he called them all idiots and himself a superman. After that episode, which fuelled a lot of laughter, Sergey Petrovich was for some time completely lost from view.

  Since the day of his birth, Sergey Petrovich’s head had never worked so much and so hard as during those short days and long nights. His bloodless brain refused to obey him, and instead of the truth he sought, it produced standard formulas, concepts and phrases. Worn out and exhausted, he was like a workhorse carrying a heavy load up a hill, unable to catch its breath and falling to its knees until the cruel whip urged it on. And the whip was his vision, the mirage of the superman who had attained his rightful strength, happiness and freedom. For minutes at a time a dense fog would enshroud his thoughts, but then the superman’s rays would dispel it, and Sergey Petrovich would see his life as clearly and distinctly as if it had been sketched or described by another person. These were not thoughts, strictly logical and expressed in words—these were visions.

  He saw a man called Sergey Petrovich, who was barred from everything that makes life happy or bitter, yet profound and human. Religion and morality, science and art all existed—but not for him. Instead of a passionate and active faith, the kind that moves mountains, he sensed in himself a shapeless lump, where ritual habit entwined with banal superstitions. He was not so bold as to renounce God, and not so strong as to believe in Him, and he didn’t have the sense of morality and the emotions that go with faith. He didn’t like people and could not experience that great bliss, the equal of which the earth has never yet created: to work for people’s sake and to die for them. But he could not hate them, either, and he was fated never to experience the searing pleasure of battling against others like himself and the demonic joy of victory over principles sacrosanct to all people. He could neither raise himself up so high, nor fall so low as to rule over life and people—in the first case standing above their laws and himself creating them, in the second being beyond all that people found so necessary and terrifying. Sergey Petrovich read in the newspapers about people who murdered, stole and raped, and each time his reading ended with the same recurring thought: but I couldn’t do that. On the street he met people who had sunk to the very bottom of the sea of human existence, and here, too, he would say: but I couldn’t do that. Occasionally he would hear and read about heroic people who met their death in the name of an idea or of love, and he would think: but I couldn’t do that. And he envied them all, both the sinners and the saints, and his ears would echo with the pitiless, true words of Zarathustra, “If you are failing in life, if a venomous worm is devouring your heart, know this: in death you shall succeed.”

  Sergey Petrovich felt no need to commit evil, but he did want to be good. Books and people had instilled in him this desire, which was strong, but fruitless and agonising, like the agonising thirst for light felt by a man blind from birth. He thought about his future, and there was no place in it for good. When he graduated from the university, Sergey Petrovich planned to work in the Customs Service, but no matter how hard he thought, he could not figure out what good he would accomplish as a customs clerk. He could already imagine what he would be like: honest, thorough, hardworking. He saw how he would slowly and steadily climb the ladder of promotions, and having achieved a middling rank, there he would stay, beaten down by the passing years, his scarce means and illness. He realised that his merits in the face of life’s cruelties would be appreciated, and that he would celebrate his thirtieth anniversary of civil service, as his father had not long ago. At the celebration speeches would be given, and he would listen to them and weep with emotion, as his father had wept, and kiss and be kissed by little old grey-haired men just like him, who themselves had been or would be similarly honoured, men chewed up and spat out by life. Then he would die with the thought that he was leaving behind a dozen children who were just like him, and the Smolensk News would print a short obituary, which would say at the end that a useful and honest worker had died. And this eulogy already seemed bitter and painful to Sergey Petrovich, like the lash of a whip on living, naked flesh. And it was painful because people, wanting to tell a pleasant fib, told the offensive and indisputable truth. And Sergey Petrovich thought that if people always understood what their tongues pronounced, they wouldn’t dare talk about other people’s usefulness and thus insult the already insulted.

  Sergey Petrovich did not immediately understand what made him useful, and for a long time his brain thrashed and shuddered under the pressure of a labour beyond its strength. But then the fog was dispersed beneath the bright rays of the superman, and what had been an insoluble riddle became simple and clear. He was useful, useful by virtue of his many qualities. He was useful for the marketplace as that nameless “someone” who buys boots, sugar and kerosene, and as part of the masses that build palaces for the strong of the earth; he was useful for statistics and history as that nameless unit that is born and dies, and on the basis of which the laws of population movement are studied; he was useful for progress, too, since he had a stomach and a body sensitive to cold, thus sending thousands of wheels and machines into humming activity. And the more Sergey Petrovich walked the streets and looked around and behind himself, the more obvious his usefulness became. And at first he found it an interesting discovery, and with new curiosity he gazed at the homes of the wealthy
and their luxurious carriages, and he took the omnibus an extra time on purpose so as to provide someone with the usefulness of his five-kopeck piece, but it soon began to bother him that he couldn’t take a step without being useful to someone, since his usefulness was beyond his control.

  And then he discovered in himself another kind of usefulness, and this was the most bitter and insulting of all, and it caused him to blush with shame and pain. It was the usefulness of a corpse, with which the laws of life and death could be studied, or the usefulness of a helot, made drunk so that others would see how bad it is to drink. Sometimes at night, during this period of spiritual rebellion, Sergey Petrovich imagined the books that would be written about him or men like him. He clearly saw the printed page, many printed pages, and on them his own name. He saw the people who wrote these books, who founded their fortunes, happiness and fame on him, on Sergey Petrovich. Some would tell about how pathetic he was, no good for anyone or anything; they weren’t laughing at or making fun of him—no, they were trying to depict his sorrow so pitifully so that people would weep, and his joy so they would laugh. With the naïve egoism of sated, strong people who conversed with other strong people, they would try to show that there was something human even in such beings as Sergey Petrovich; they would argue passionately that such as he felt pain when they were beaten and pleasure when caressed. And if these writers were talented and succeeded in showing what they wanted to show, monuments would be raised to them, the pedestals of which would seem to be granite, but would actually be made of innumerable Sergey Petroviches. Other people would also feel sorry for Sergey Petrovich, but their discussions about him would be based on what the first group had said, and they would assiduously argue about the origins of such people and what to do with them, and what steps were necessary to prevent this type of thing in the future.

  He was useful to the capitalist as the source of his wealth, to the writer as a step to his monument, to the scientist as a unit of measure that would bring him closer to the discovery of the truth, to the reader as an object for the exercise of charitable feelings—this was the usefulness Sergey Petrovich found in himself. And his whole soul was overcome by shame and the blind rage of a man who, long unaware that people were making fun of him, turns around and sees their bared teeth and pointing fingers for the first time. Life, which he had long ago accepted as a fact, looked him straight in the face with her deep eyes, and they were cold, serious and horrifyingly inscrutable in their severe simplicity. All that had until now haunted him dimly and manifested itself in indistinct daydreams and dull longing, suddenly spoke loudly and imperiously. His “I”—the one thing he had considered uniquely true and independent from both his weak brain and his dull heart, rose in indignation within him and demanded everything to which it had a right.

  “I don’t want to be mute material for the happiness of others: I want to be happy, strong and free myself, and that is my right,” uttered Sergey Petrovich, articulating the secret thought that haunts the minds of many people and makes them unhappy, but is spoken aloud so rarely and with so much difficulty.

  And at that moment, when he pronounced that clear and exact phrase for the first time, he realised that he was pronouncing judgment on what people called “Sergey Petrovich,” and that he could never be either strong or free. And he rebelled against nature, which had so depersonalised him, revolted like a slave whose chains had chafed his body to bloody sores, but who had long been unaware of the humiliation of his abject servitude as he submissively bowed his back beneath the overseer’s whip. He felt like a horse that had miraculously been given human consciousness and intelligence at the very moment when the whip scourged its back, but possessed neither the voice nor the strength to protest. And the longer, heavier and more pitiless the oppression became, the more furious was the rebel’s rage.

  It was during this period that Novikov received his first letter from Sergey Petrovich, very long and barely comprehensible, since Sergey Petrovich was in absolutely no condition to couch all that he saw so clearly and plainly in the form of thoughts and words. And Novikov did not answer the letter, since he did not like to write letters and was much too busy with drinking, books and language lessons. However, he did tell a friend of his, whom he was taking around with him to various pubs, about Sergey Petrovich, about the letter and about Nietzsche, and he laughed at how Nietzsche, who loved the strong so much, was being turned into a proselytiser for the poor in spirit and the weak.

  The first consequence of his outrage was that Sergey Petrovich turned back to his half-forgotten and naïve dreaming. But he no longer recognised his dreams, so altered were they by the consciousness of his right to happiness. And despairing of himself as a human being, Sergey Petrovich began to wonder whether happiness might nonetheless be possible for him even under the given circumstances. After all, happiness is so vast and multifaceted; a man denied the possibility of being happy in one thing will find his happiness elsewhere. And the answer Sergey Petrovich found for himself persuaded him to revolt against people as he had already rebelled against nature.

  IV

  Sergey Petrovich lived not far from the Smolensk students’ dining hall in a big, four-storey building, populated from top to bottom by women who let rooms of their flats and the students who rented them. He had a small but clean room, and his flatmates turned out to be quiet people, not drinkers, so the atmosphere was equally conducive to studying and thinking. If there was anything unpleasant about it, it was the constant smoke from the kitchen in the mornings. But Sergey Petrovich had quit studying, and for most of the day his room remained empty and dark.

  He walked an awful lot, untiringly, and his tall, thin figure in its faded cap could be met with on all the streets of Moscow. One freezing cold, but sunny day he made it all the way to Sparrow Hills, and from there looked a long time at Moscow, blanketed in rosy fog and smoke and the sparkling veil of its river and gardens. It was easier to think while walking, and moreover what he saw eased the work of thought, just as an illustration in a text helps weak minds grasp what is written. Like a landowner who has realised that he is ruined and takes one last tour around his estate, summing up the sad losses, Sergey Petrovich did his summing up, and his totals were equally sad. Everything he saw conveyed that relative happiness was a possibility for him, too, but at the same time he would never be truly happy—never.

  There was only one thing that could make Sergey Petrovich happy: possession of what he loved in life and deliverance from what he hated. He did not believe Hartmann—who was always sated and insisted that possession of what one desired could only result in disappointment—and he thought, as did Novikov, that the philosophy of pessimism was created to console and deceive people who were deprived of everything other people had. And he was sure that he could achieve happiness, if only someone would give him money—that freedom that wanders the world and is minted by slaves for their masters.

  Sergey Petrovich was industrious by nature, but he did not like work and suffered beneath its weight, since his work was never the kind that can be pleasurable. In school he had had to study things that were uninteresting and alien to him, and sometimes even contrary to his reason and conscience—and then the work became torture. At university the work was easier, less hectic and more reasonable, but gave just as little pleasure to the intellect, and any lessons Sergey Petrovich now gave were just the flipside of those he’d had in school and just as much torture. And his future work as a customs clerk boded the very same joylessness and dutiful tedium. Only in the summertime, at home in Smolensk, did Sergey Petrovich find relief in simple, rude work: he did carpentry, made wooden rifles and arrows for his little brothers, fixed the garden fences and benches and dug the garden beds, turning up the spongy, lustrous earth with his burnished trowel. And this was a pleasure and a joy to do, but it wasn’t the kind of work that was intended for the son of a civil servant with a good education. Other people who were miserable because their abilities were not suited for their work some
times broke out of their moulds and did whatever they wanted, becoming workers, farmers or beggars. But those were strong and courageous people, of whom there are not many on earth, and Sergey Petrovich felt weak, diffident and controlled by some extraneous will, like a locomotive that only a catastrophe can wrench from the rails laid down by unknown hands. Moreover, he could not even imagine how he could possibly rid himself of his proper attire, his flat and his classes, and stagger down roads as a ragged beggar or walk behind the plough. And the first thing that could bring him closer to happiness would be freedom from his alienating and unpleasant labour. And he had the right to this freedom, since he had seen men like himself—born of woman the same as he, with nerves and a brain—who did no work at all and devoted themselves only to things that brought them joy.

  “And what others have, I have the right to have,” thought Sergey Petrovich in this period of rebellion against nature and people.

  Why couldn’t pleasurable occupations be found for him as well? The greatest joy for him would be coming to know nature. Not penetration into her deepest secrets—that would demand intellect—but unmediated knowledge by sight, smell and all the senses. He loved living nature with a tender and even passionate, but deeply hidden love, which no one but Novikov suspected. The smallest blade of grass in the spring, the white trunk of a birch emerging from the soft, fragrant earth, with black, thin little twigs clinging to its soft breast—these things riveted his attention and made his heart rejoice. He did not understand why he so loved this black earth, though she had caused him so much sorrow, but when he caught sight of the first patch of earth freed from the cold, dead snow in the springtime, and seeming to breathe beneath the sun, he felt like giving it a long, tender kiss, as one would kiss a beloved woman. And, fated to spend his entire life in a narrow, four-cornered box, on dusty, noisy streets, beneath the dirty urban sky, he envied the beggars whose sleep was guarded by the stars, and who knew and saw so much. But in his own life he had never seen and would never see anything but a birch tree, a little grass, shallow streams and small hummocks. Sometimes he would read beautiful and in all likelihood accurate descriptions of the sea and mountains, but his weak imagination would not be able to produce living images of them. And he wanted to see for himself if it was true that the sea is so deep and endless, whether it was blue or green or even red, whether tall waves travelled over it, while above them fluffy white clouds or black, terrifying storm clouds flew across a dark blue sky. And whether it was true that mountains are so high, sheer and forested, with blue, foggy cliffs, and glittering snowy peaks jutting into the green skies.