Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (614 page)

* * * * *

She is fond of the word “compromise,” and often uses it; “I am incapable of compromise….” “A board which has the shape of a parallelepiped.”

* * * * *

The hereditary honorable citizen Oziaboushkin always tries to make out that his ancestors had the right to the title of Count.

* * * * *

“He is a perfect dab at it.” “O, O, don’t use that expression; my mother is very particular.”

* * * * *

I have just married my third husband … the name of the first was Ivan Makarivitch … of the second Peter … Peter … I have forgotten.

* * * * *

The writer Gvozdikov thinks that he is very famous, that every one knows him. He arrives at S., meets an officer who shakes his hand for a long time, looking with rapture into his face. G. is glad, he too shakes hands warmly…. At last the officer: “And how is your orchestra? Aren’t you the conductor?”

* * * * *

Morning; M.’s mustaches are in curl papers.

* * * * *

And it seemed to him that he was highly respected and valued everywhere, anywhere, even in railway buffets, and so he always ate with a smile on his face.

* * * * *

The birds sing, and already it begins to seem to him that they do not sing, but whine.

* * * * *

N., father of a family, listens to his son reading aloud J.J. Rousseau to the family, and thinks: “Well, at any rate, J.J. Rousseau had no gold medal on his breast, but I have one.”

* * * * *

N. has a spree with his step-son, an undergraduate, and they go to a brothel. In the morning the undergraduate is going away, his leave is up; N. sees him off. The undergraduate reads him a sermon on their bad behavior; they quarrel. N: “As your father, I curse you.” — “And I curse you.”

* * * * *

A doctor is called in, but a nurse sent for.

* * * * *

N.N.V. never agrees with anyone: “Yes, the ceiling is white, that can be admitted; but white, as far as is known, consists of the seven colors of the spectrum, and it is quite possible that in this case one of the colors is darker or brighter than is necessary for the production of pure white; I had rather think a bit before saying that the ceiling is white.”

* * * * *

He holds himself exactly as though he were an icon.

* * * * *

“Are you in love?” — “There’s a little bit of that in it.”

* * * * *

Whatever happens, he says: “It is the priests.”

* * * * *

Firzikov.

* * * * *

N. dreams that he is returning from abroad, and that at Verzhbolovo, in spite of his protests, they make him pay duty on his wife.

* * * * *

When that radical, having dined with his coat off, walked into his bedroom and I saw the braces on his back, it became clear to me that that radical is a bourgeois, a hopeless bourgeois.

* * * * *

Some one saw Z., an unbeliever and blasphemer, secretly praying in front of the icon in the cathedral, and they all teased him.

* * * * *

They called the manager “four-funneled cruiser,” because he had already gone “through the chimney” (bankrupt) four times.

* * * * *

He is not stupid, he was at the university, has studied long and assiduously, but in writing he makes gross mistakes.

* * * * *

Countess Nadin’s daughter gradually turns into a housekeeper; she is very timid, and can only say “No-o,” “Yes-s,” and her hands always tremble. Somehow or other a Zemstvo official wished to marry her; he is a widower and she marries him, with him too it was “Yes-s,” “No-o”; she was very much afraid of her husband and did not love him; one day he happened to give a loud cough, it gave her a fright, and she died.

* * * * *

Caressing her lover: “My vulture.”

* * * * *

For a play: If only you would say something funny. But for twenty years we have lived together and you have always talked of serious things; I hate serious things.

* * * * *

A cook, with a cigarette in her mouth, lies: “I studied at a high school … I know what for the earth is round.”

* * * * *

“Society for finding and raising anchors of steamers and barges,” and the Society’s agent at all functions without fail makes a speech, à la N., and without fail promises.

* * * * *

Super-mysticism.

* * * * *

When I become rich, I shall have a harem in which I shall keep fat naked women, with their buttocks painted green.

* * * * *

A shy young man came on a visit for the night: suddenly a deaf old woman came into his room, carrying a cupping-glass, and bled him; he thought that this must be the usual thing and so did not protest; in the morning it turned out that the old woman had made a mistake.

* * * * *

Surname: Verstax.

* * * * *

The more stupid the peasant, the better does the horse understand him.

THEMES, THOUGHTS, NOTES, AND FRAGMENTS.

… How stupid and for the most part how false, since if one man seeks to devour another or tell him something unpleasant it has nothing to do with Granovsky.

[Footnote 1: A well-known Radical professor, a Westerner.]

* * * * *

I left Gregory Ivanovitch’s feeling crushed and mortally offended. I was irritated by smooth words and by those who speak them, and on reaching home I meditated thus: some rail at the world, others at the crowd, that is to say praise the past and blame the present; they cry out that there are no ideals and so on, but all this has already been said twenty or thirty years ago; these are worn-out forms which have already served their time, and whoever repeats them now, he too is no longer young and is himself worn out. With last year’s foliage there decay too those who live in it. I thought, we uncultured, worn-out people, banal in speech, stereotyped in intentions, have grown quite mouldy, and, while we intellectuals are rummaging among old rags and, according to the old Russian custom, biting one another, there is boiling up around us a life which we neither know nor notice. Great events will take us unawares, like sleeping fairies, and you will see that Sidorov, the merchant, and the teacher of the school at Yeletz, who see and know more than we do, will push us far into the background, because they will accomplish more than all of us put together. And I thought that were we now to obtain political liberty, of which we talk so much, while engaged in biting one another, we should not know what to do with it, we should waste it in accusing one another in the newspapers of being spies and money-grubbers, we should frighten society with the assurance that we have neither men, nor science, nor literature, nothing! Nothing! And to scare society as we are doing now, and as we shall continue to do, means to deprive it of courage; it means simply to declare that we have no social or political sense in us. And I also thought that, before the dawn of a new life has broken, we shall turn into sinister old men and women and we shall be the first who, in our hatred of that dawn, will calumniate it.

* * * * *

Mother never stops talking about poverty. It is very strange. In the first place, it is strange that we are poor, beg like beggars, and at the same time eat superbly, live in a large house; in the summer we go to our own country house, and generally speaking we do not look like beggars. Evidently this is not poverty, but something else, and rather worse. Secondly, it is strange that for the last ten years mother has been spending all her energy solely on getting money to pay interest. It seems to me that were mother to spend that terrible energy on something else, we could have twenty such houses. Thirdly, it seems to me strange that the hardest work in the family is done by mother, not by me. To me that is the strangest thing of all, most terrible. She has, as she has just said, a thought on her brain, she begs, she humiliates herself; our debts grow daily and up till now I have not done a single thing to help her. What can I do? I think and think and cannot make it out. I only see clearly that we are rushing down an inclined plane, but to what, the devil knows. They say that poverty threatens us and that in poverty there is disgrace, but that too I cannot understand, since I was never poor.

* * * * *

The spiritual life of these women is as gray and dull as their faces and dresses; they speak of science, literature, tendencies, and the like, only because they are the wives and sisters of scholars and literary men; were they the wives and sisters of inspectors or of dentists, they would speak with the same zeal of fires or teeth. To allow them to speak of science, which is foreign to them, and to listen to them, is to flatter their ignorance.

* * * * *

Essentially all this is crude and meaningless, and romantic love appears as meaningless as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people. But when one listens to music, all this is: that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one woman is alive — gray-haired, she is sitting in a box in the theatre, quiet and majestic, and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless, since in nature everything has a meaning. And everything is forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive.

* * * * *

Olga Ivanovna regarded old chairs, stools, sofas, with the same respectful tenderness as she regarded old dogs and horses, and her room, therefore, was something like an alms-house for furniture. Round the mirror, on all tables and shelves, stood photographs of uninteresting, half-forgotten people; on the walls hung pictures at which nobody ever looked; and it was always dark in the room, because there burnt there only one lamp with a blue shade.

* * * * *

If you cry “Forward,” you must without fail explain in which direction one must go. Do you not see that, if without explaining the direction, you fire off this word simultaneously at a monk and at a revolutionary, they will proceed in precisely opposite directions?

* * * * *

It is said in Holy Writ: “Fathers, do not irritate your children,” even the wicked and good-for-nothing children; but the fathers irritate me, irritate me terribly. My contemporaries chime in with them and the youngsters follow, and every minute they strike me in the face with their smooth words.

* * * * *

That the aunt suffered and did not show it gave him the impression of a trick.

* * * * *

O.I. was in constant motion; such women, like bees, carry about a fertilizing pollen….

* * * * *

Don’t marry a rich woman — she will drive you out of the house; don’t marry a poor woman — you won’t sleep; but marry the freest freedom, the lot and life of a Cossack. (Ukrainian saying.)

* * * * *

Aliosha
: “I often hear people say: ‘Before marriage there is romance, and then — goodbye, illusion!’ How heartless and coarse it is.”

* * * * *

So long as a man likes the splashing of a fish, he is a poet; but when he knows that the splashing is nothing but the chase of the weak by the strong, he is a thinker; but when he does not understand what sense there is in the chase, or what use in the equilibrium which results from destruction, he is becoming silly and dull, as he was when a child. And the more he knows and thinks, the sillier he becomes.