Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence

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

  Was it true?

  A deep, whistling breath from the depths of his dusty lungs lifted Sergey Petrovich’s breast and drove the timid, yet rapturous smile from his flat face. And he envied even more than beggars those who possessed the sea and the mountains.

  Once, as he was meandering about the city and picking out from the crowd those who were free and powerful and those who were forever deprived of freedom, Sergey Petrovich saw a shop sign showing a stereoscopic panorama, and he went over to have a closer look. It depicted the mountains, lakes and castles of Ludwig of Bavaria. The colour photographs passed one after the other before his eyes and were so alive and clear that he could sense the air and the high, blue sky, and the water sparkled like real water, and the forests and castles were reflected in it. A white steamship, festively decked out and sparkling clean, was raising foamy furrows with its bow, and men, women and children, dressed in their Sunday best, were standing or sitting on the deck, and it seemed one could even make out the joyous smiles on their faces. Then he saw a castle with gleaming white towers and notched terraces above the green forests that cascaded down into the valley, and he could see the inside of the castle as well: majestic halls, an endless number of paintings, the regal splendour of heavy brocade and velvet, and light pouring in through the high Gothic windows and slipping along the parquet floors. And in one of the windows, someone was sitting with his back to Sergey Petrovich, someone calm and indifferent, who was gazing down to where mountain peaks were all that could be seen against the bright sky. For some time Sergey Petrovich scrutinised the seated, motionless figure, and it seemed to him he could see everything the other man saw: forests, valleys and steely dark blue lakes, and he felt how clean and fresh the air that man was breathing must be. And it seemed to him that there, within those majestic halls with ceilings that receded into the distance like the sky, and windows from which half the world could be seen, there couldn’t possibly be such a thing as melancholy and sorrowful thoughts. And the most important and most surprising thing Sergey Petrovich saw was this: he saw how the man sat with his leg oddly tucked up under himself with the sole of his boot sticking out in just the way Sergey Petrovich would have tucked up his own leg if it had been he, and that man was breathing mountain air and could wander through the majestic halls. With a sudden flood of rage and anguish, Sergey Petrovich ground his teeth and started forward, as if he were going to fling the motionless, seated fellow into the abyss below, and he banged his forehead and nose painfully against the frame that held the glass. And then he was ashamed at the thought that his rage was a pretence and predicated on the existence of the frame, and that if he had seen that fellow in reality, he would not have dared to lay a hand on him. Shy and humble, a man who shuddered at the sight of a butchered chicken, he was not even capable of rage.

  When Sergey Petrovich stepped out of the panorama room onto the crooked, hunchbacked Moscow lane, from which yardmen were sweeping snow while drivers cut through on their sledge runners, the thought occurred to him that there were no facts a man was obliged to accept.

  After nature came music and art in all the forms that Sergey Petrovich’s limited understanding could grasp, and that could fill his life and make it interesting and varied. After these came romantic love, which his heart craved. At concerts, in theatres and on the street he saw beautiful, well-bred ladies, full of elegance and nobility, and he wanted their love. He remembered one of them, having passed her several times, and he dreamt of her, but she had never once even looked at him and did not even know he existed. He was disgusted when he remembered his love for the girl who weeded the garden beds and stank of manure and sweat, and it was disgusting to think of other women, just as coarse, who would love him and talk to him about roubles and their odious work. He painfully desired the love of that one woman, the one whose name he did not know, and who did not understand all that tormented him and people like him. And as a man who had never had money, he thought that it could give him love, and as a man who had never known romantic love, he thought that it could give him happiness.

  It was just during this period that Sergey Petrovich paid a visit to the brothel, where he ran into his fellow students, and he purposely decided not to drink, so as to understand more clearly what falls to the lot of men like him in the world.

  The more deeply Sergey Petrovich examined life, the more impotent and worthless nature came to seem in his eyes, so senselessly did she distribute her gifts. And in the place of debased nature another terrible and mighty power arose before his glazed eyes—money. Blinded, lost, he began to think that money had power even over nature. And his weak brain gave in to the deceit, and in his heart a new hope was kindled. He took a silver rouble out of his pocket and turned it in his hands with a feeling of strange curiosity and disbelief, as if he were seeing that glittering coin for the first time. They didn’t fall out of the sky, these coins, and he had earned this one and could earn many more, and then he would have in his hands a mighty force with power over nature itself. And like every man who has had a flicker of hope, he began to think not about how to realise it, but about what he would do once it had been fulfilled. And these several days were a respite for Sergey Petrovich, and he climbed as high as possible, so as later to crash down to the ground all the more spectacularly, never to rise again. He took it as a given that he already had a million, and dreamt of the sea, of mountains and of the woman whose name he didn’t know, and who hadn’t the slightest inkling of his existence.

  But it was impossible to stop the thought once it had begun working, urged on as it was by a whip as stinging as the vision of the superman—he who had attained his rightful strength, happiness and freedom. And once the thought had flashed in front of Sergey Petrovich’s weary eyes, he discovered with amazement that, just as before, he was yielding to impossible, childish dreams. There were many paths to money, but in front of each was a stumbling block barring Sergey Petrovich’s way. He could not steal any more than he could kill, since his actions were being directed not by his own mind, but by an alien, unknown will. The work he was capable of doing could not yield riches, and anything else—playing the stock markets, a factory, a job with a huge salary, art, marriage to a rich woman, anything that was permitted by the law and his conscience and would make him wealthy in a day or a year—none of this could ever be his, any more than intelligence could be. And when Sergey Petrovich realised that money would not rectify nature’s injustices, but would only make them worse, and that people always finish off those already wounded by nature—despair crushed his hope, and darkness seized his soul. Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.

  And then a new period began in Sergey Petrovich’s life. He stayed home all the time and went only to the dining hall, where he appeared only just before it closed so as not to meet any students he knew. Day and night he lay on his bed or paced back and forth, and his neighbours and landlady quickly got used to the monotonous sound of footsteps, such as is sometimes heard from prison cells: one-two-three forward, one-two-three back. A book lay on the table, and although it was closed and covered with dust, from inside it a calm, firm and merciless voice rumbled, “If you are failing in life, if a venomous worm is devouring your heart, know this: in death you shall succeed.”

  V

  Since it was impossible to be the victor, the only answer was death. And Sergey Petrovich decided to die and thought that death would be his victory.

  The thought of death was not new: it had occurred to him before, as it occurs to everyone whose path is strewn with stones, but it had been just as fruitless and unproductive as the dreams of having millions. Now, though, Sergey Petrovich saw it as a solution, and death became not merely desirable and possible—it was inevitable and imminent. A way out of the cage had opened, and although it led to darkness and the unknown, Sergey Petrovich didn’t care. He dimly believed in a new life and was not afraid of it, since he would take with him only his free “I
,” dependent on neither a weak brain nor a dull heart, while his body would be spoils for the earth, and let the earth make a new heart and brain of it. And when he sensed in himself a calm readiness for death, for the first time in his life he experienced a profound, proud joyfulness, the joy of a slave breaking his chains.

  “I am not a coward,” said Sergey Petrovich, and this was the first praise he had ever heard from himself, and he accepted it proudly.

  The thought of death ought to have dispelled all concerns for life and for his body, which no longer served any purpose. But the opposite was true for Sergey Petrovich: in the final days of his life he once again became the scrupulously neat and tidy man he had been before. He was amazed that he had allowed his room and desk to lie in disarray for so long, and he tidied up, putting his books back in order, the way they had always been in the past. He put the thesis he had started on the very top—subsequently it would go to Novikov—and in pride of place, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He did not even open Nietzsche and was completely indifferent to the book, which, apparently, he had not finished, judging by the pencilled notes in the margins that went only as far as the middle of the third part. Perhaps he was afraid that he would find something new and unexpected there, and that this would destroy all his long and exhausting work, which had left the impression of a vivid and terrifying dream.

  Then Sergey Petrovich went to the city bathhouse, swam in the cold pool with pleasure, and having run into a fellow student on the street, went with him to a pub, “Bavaria,” where he drank a bottle of beer. At home, rosy from the baths, clean, in a white linen shirt, he sat for a long time over his tea with raspberry jam, then asked his landlady for a needle and began to mend the jacket of his uniform. It was an old one, tight and forever ripping at the armpits, and Sergey Petrovich had already had to mend it several times. His thick, awkward fingers had trouble gripping the small needle, which lost itself in the rotten grey material. Sergey Petrovich devoted several days to the preparation of potassium cyanide, and when the poison was ready, he gazed with pleasure at the little vial, thinking not about the death contained within it, but about how well he had done the work. The landlady, a little, dark woman who used to be someone’s mistress, apparently suspected something, because she was very glad when Sergey Petrovich displayed signs of returning to his usual working life. She came into his room and nattered on at length about how bad it was for young people to be by themselves all the time, and she told him about a certain acquaintance of hers who had been a police officer with a good income, but took to drinking vodka to lift his black moods, and ended up at Khitrov Market, where he now writes petitions and letters for a glass of vodka. She subsequently retold the story about the police officer to all the students who came there, adding that even then she had noticed the similarity between her acquaintance’s fate and Sergey Petrovich’s.

  “Stop by for some tea,” she would invite Sergey Petrovich, without, however, any ulterior motive. “Or better yet, you ought to get out and see your mates. It isn’t right how no one comes to see you, and you never go anywhere, either.”

  Sergey Petrovich followed her advice and made the rounds of almost all his fellow students, but did not stay anywhere for long.

  Later the students maintained that Sergey Petrovich’s descent into madness was already clearly evident, and they were amazed they had not noticed it at the time. Sergey Petrovich, usually reticent and shy even with his closest friends, now chatted about the most trivial things, and reminisced about Novikov as if he were his equal, even reproaching him for being superficial. Moreover, he was cheerful and laughed often. One rather young student had it that Sergey Petrovich even sang, but everyone said that this was an exaggeration. But they unanimously agreed that there was definitely something strange about Sergey Petrovich, and they didn’t notice it at the time only because nobody ever paid much attention to him. And certain people, condemning the indifference and egotism of their fellow students especially harshly, raised an interesting question about that lack of attention: would it have been possible to save Sergey Petrovich at that decisive moment in his life? And they concluded that it certainly would have been possible—not by the force of someone’s strong reason, but by the influence of someone close to him—his mother or a woman who might have loved him. They supposed that during that whole period Sergey Petrovich was in a state of mental torpor, like a hypnotic trance in which one’s own or someone else’s idea holds complete sway over one’s will. Reason would not have relieved his state of mind, but love might have brought Sergey Petrovich to his senses. His mother’s cry from the heart, the look on her face, so dear and beloved with all the little wrinkles he had known since childhood, her tears, which even a coarsened lout would have found unbearable to behold—all of this could have brought Sergey Petrovich back to reality. A kind and honest fellow, he would never have dared to bring death into his mother’s heart and he would have gone on living, if not for himself, then for those who loved him. Many faint-hearted souls bent on suicide have been kept on earth by the knowledge that they are needed by those who love them, and they have gone on living after that, strengthened by the thought that it takes more courage to live than to die. And there have been even more who have forgotten why they wanted to commit suicide, and have even come to regret that life is so short.

  And with renewed bitterness some of the students attacked others and angrily reproached them for their disgraceful indifference. A ten-word telegram sent to Sergey Petrovich’s mother might have saved a human life. For those of the students who were always the first to see the social significance of any event, this case led to thoughts and discussions about the lack of connection among the students, the absence of shared interests and intellectual isolation. For a while self-improvement circles became popular, where books on social questions were read and reports written.

  Sergey Petrovich had decided to kill himself on Friday, the 11th of December, when many of the students were planning to leave for the Christmas holidays. On the morning of that day he went to the post office, where he sent a hefty registered letter to Novikov in Smolensk, tucking the receipt away in his wallet. In the letter he reported his death and the reasons for it, the latter laid out in outline form, and the whole letter produced the impression that he was writing not about himself, but about some other fellow, whom he found rather boring. In the afternoon Sergey Petrovich had lunch at the students’ dining hall, where he lingered a long time and talked with people he knew, and after lunch he slept, also for quite a long time and very soundly, so it was already after ten o’clock when he got up. The samovar was brought in, and the students on the other side of the wall heard the monotonous sound of pacing: one-two-three forward, one-two-three back. When the sleepy housemaid came late that night to take away the samovar and dishes, Sergey Petrovich kept talking with her, as if wishing she would stay a little longer, and—as she later said—he was very pale.

  Sergey Petrovich in no way anticipated what would happen to him on this evening, which he thought would be the last of his life. He was completely calm and cheerful and he didn’t think about death, just as on the other days. He started thinking about it only an hour or so before the moment he was to take the poison. And his thoughts came from somewhere far away, and they were fragmented and confused. First he thought about his landlady, and then about how he would be lying there and what he would look like. For a minute his thoughts got sidetracked to memories of childhood, and particularly the death of his uncle. He had died at their house, and they sent Sergey Petrovich—at that time seven-year-old Seryozha—to the home of family friends. As he crossed the entrance hall, already dressed for the journey, he glanced into the main room and saw the table where they always dined, and on it, facing him, the motionless soles of a pair of feet in white cotton socks. He saw them for only a second, but remembered them his whole life, and for a long time he imagined death itself exclusively in the form of the motionless soles of a pair of feet in white cotton socks. Then he remembered
a relatively recent episode, when he had seen a very poor and very strange funeral. It was strange because not a single person on the whole street, neither passers-by nor drivers, paid it any attention at all, and it seemed that they did not even see it, since no one removed his hat. Four pallbearers carried the coffin, which was covered with something dark, and they marched in step and so quickly that the coffin was rocking as if on waves, and the edge of the cover lifted with the breeze each time the coffin sank down. And neither clergy nor bereaved were to be seen.

  When Sergey Petrovich’s mind returned from these memories, it became amazingly sharp, precise and bright, like a knife that had been honed. For another moment it hesitated indecisively, taking note of the surrounding quiet, the extinguished samovar, the ticking of the pocket watch on the table, and suddenly, as if it had found what it needed, it fashioned a picture of Sergey Petrovich’s funeral that was so real, vivid and horrifying that he shuddered, and his hands got cold. With the same merciless, terrifying veracity it sketched the ensuing moments one after another: the black, crooked maw of the grave, the hard, cramped coffin, the greenish patina on his uniform buttons, and the process of his body’s decomposition. And it seemed that it was not Sergey Petrovich himself doing the thinking, but rather as if before his eyes a gigantic hand was displaying in quick succession all the indescribable hues of his life and death.