The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (54 page)

“We have no candles,” said Nikita.

“No?”

“And we had none yesterday either,” said Nikita.

The artist remembered that in fact they had not had any candles yesterday, so he calmed down and fell silent.
He allowed himself to be undressed and put on his well- and much-worn dressing gown.

“And the landlord also came,” said Nikita.

“Well, so he came for money?
I know,” the artist said, waving his hand.

“He didn’t come alone,” said Nikita.

“With whom, then?”

“I don’t know … some policeman.”

“Why a policeman?”

“I don’t know why.
He says the rent isn’t paid.”

“Well, so what will come of it?”

“I don’t know.
He said, ‘If he doesn’t want to pay, he can move out.’ They’re both coming back tomorrow”

“Let them,” Chartkov said with sad indifference.
And a dreary state of mind came over him completely.

Young Chartkov was an artist with a talent that promised much: in flashes and moments his brush bespoke power of observation, understanding, a strong impulse to get closer to nature.
“Watch out, brother,” his professor had told him more than once, “you have talent; it would be a sin to ruin it.
But you’re impatient.
Some one thing entices you, some one thing takes your fancy—and you occupy yourself with it, and the rest can rot, you don’t care about it, you don’t even want to look at it.
Watch out you don’t turn into a fashionable painter.
Even now your colors are beginning to cry a bit too loudly.
Your drawing is imprecise, and sometimes quite weak, the line doesn’t show; you go for fashionable lighting, which strikes the eye at once.
Watch out or you’ll fall right into the English type.
Beware.
You already feel drawn to the world: every so often I see a showy scarf on your neck, a glossy hat … It’s enticing, you can start painting fashionable pictures, little portraits for money.
But that doesn’t develop talent, it ruins it.
Be patient.
Ponder over every work, drop showiness—let the others make money.
You won’t come out the loser.”

The professor was partly right.
Sometimes, indeed, our artist liked to carouse or play the dandy—in short, to show off his youth here and there.
Yet, for all that, he was able to keep himself under control.
At times he was able to forget everything and take up his brush, and had to tear himself away again as if from a beautiful, interrupted dream.
His taste was developing noticeably.
He still did not understand all the depth of Raphael, but was already carried away by the quick, broad stroke of Guido, paused before Titian’s portraits, admired the Flemish school.
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The dark surface obscuring the old paintings had not yet been entirely removed for him; yet he already perceived something in them, though inwardly he did not agree with his professor that the old masters surpassed us beyond reach; it even seemed to him that the nineteenth century was significantly ahead of them in certain things, that the imitation of nature as it was done now had become somehow brighter, livelier, closer; in short, he thought in this case as a young man thinks who already understands something and feels it in his proud inner consciousness.
At times he became vexed when he saw how some foreign painter, a Frenchman or a German, sometimes not even a painter by vocation, with nothing but an accustomed hand, a quick brush, and bright colors, would produce a general stir and instantly amass a fortune.
This would come to his mind not when, all immersed in his work, he forgot drinking and eating and the whole world, but when he would finally come hard up against necessity, when he had no money to buy brushes and paints, when the importunate landlord came ten times a day to demand the rent.
Then his hungry imagination enviously pictured the lot of the rich painter; then a thought glimmered that often passes through a Russian head: to drop everything and go on a spree out of grief and to spite it all.
And now he was almost in such a situation.

“Yes!
be patient, be patient!” he said with vexation.
“But patience finally runs out.
Be patient!
And on what money will I have dinner tomorrow?
No one will lend to me.
And if I were to go and sell all my paintings and drawings, I’d get twenty kopecks for the lot.
They’ve been useful, of course, I feel that: it was not in
vain that each of them was undertaken, in each of them I learned something.
But what’s the use?
Sketches, attempts—and there will constantly be sketches, attempts, and no end to them.
And who will buy them, if they don’t know my name?
And who needs drawings from the antique, or from life class, or my unfinished
Love of Psyche
, or a perspective of my room, or the portrait of my Nikita, though it’s really better than the portraits of some fashionable painter?
What is it all, in fact?
Why do I suffer and toil over the ABC’s like a student, when I could shine no worse than the others and have money as they do?”

Having said that, the artist suddenly shuddered and went pale: gazing at him, peering from behind the canvas on the easel, was someone’s convulsively distorted face.
Two terrible eyes were fixed directly on him, as if preparing to devour him; on the mouth was written the threatening command to keep silent.
Frightened, he wanted to cry out and call Nikita, who had already managed to set up a mighty snoring in the front room; but suddenly he stopped and laughed.
The feeling of fear instantly subsided.
It was the portrait he had bought, which he had quite forgotten about.
Moonlight illuminated the room and, falling on it, endowed it with a strange aliveness.
He began studying it and cleaning it.
Wetting a sponge, he went over it several times, washed off almost all the dust and dirt that had accumulated and stuck to it, hung it on the wall before him, and marveled still more at the extraordinary work: the whole face almost came to life, and the eyes stared at him so that he finally gave a start and stepped back, saying in an amazed voice, “It stares, it stares at you with human eyes!” A story he had heard long ago from his professor suddenly came to his mind, about a certain portrait by the famous Leonardo da Vinci, which the great master had labored over for several years and still considered unfinished, but which, according to the words of Vasari,
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everyone nevertheless considered a most perfect and finished work of art.
Most finished of all in it were the eyes, at which his contemporaries were amazed; even the tiniest, barely visible veins were not omitted but were rendered on the canvas.
But here, in the portrait now before him, there was nevertheless something strange.
This was no longer art: it even destroyed the harmony
of the portrait itself.
They were alive, they were human eyes!
It seemed as if they had been cut out of a living man and set there.
Here there was not that lofty pleasure which comes over the soul at the sight of an artist’s work, however terrible its chosen subject; here there was some morbid, anguished feeling.
“What is it?” the artist asked himself involuntarily.
“It’s nature all the same, its living nature—why, then, this strangely unpleasant feeling?
Or else the slavish, literal imitation of nature is already a trespass and seems like a loud, discordant cry?
Or else, if you take the subject indifferently, unfeelingly, with no feeling for it, it inevitably stands out only in its terrible reality, not illumined by the light of some incomprehensible, ever-hidden thought, stands out in that reality which is revealed only when, wishing to understand a beautiful man, one arms oneself with an anatomical knife, cuts into his insides, and sees a repulsive man?
Why, then, does simple, lowly nature appear with one artist in such a light that you have no lowly impression; on the contrary, it seems as if you enjoy it, and after that everything around you flows and moves more calmly and evenly?
And why, with another artist, does that same nature seem low, dirty, though he has been just as faithful to nature?
But no, some radiance is missing.
Just as with a natural landscape: however splendid, it still lacks something if there’s no sun in the sky.”

He went up to the portrait again, so as to study those wondrous eyes, and noticed with horror that they were indeed staring at him.
This was no longer a copy from nature, this was that strange aliveness that would radiate from the face of a dead man rising from the grave.
Either it was the light of the moon bringing delirious reveries with it and clothing everything in other images, opposite to positive daylight, or there was some other cause, only suddenly, for some reason, he felt afraid to be alone in the room.
He quietly withdrew from the portrait, turned away and tried not to look at it, and yet his eyes, of themselves, involuntarily cast sidelong glances at it.
Finally he even became frightened of walking about the room; it seemed to him that some other would immediately start walking behind him, and he kept timorously looking back.
He had never been a coward; but his imagination and nerves were sensitive, and that evening he was unable to explain this involuntary
fear to himself.
He sat in the corner, but there, too, it seemed to him that someone was about to look over his shoulder into his face.
Not even the snores of Nikita resounding from the front room could drive away his fear.
Finally, timorously, without raising his eyes, he stood up, went behind his screen, and got into bed.
Through a chink in the screen he could see his room lit up by moonlight, and directly opposite him he could see the portrait on the wall.
The eyes were fixed still more terribly, still more meaningly, on him, and seemed not to want to look at anything but him.
Filled with an oppressive feeling, he decided to get up, grabbed a bedsheet, and, going over to the portrait, covered it completely.

Having done so, he went back to bed more calmly, began thinking about the poverty and pitifulness of the artist’s lot, about the thorny path that lay before him in this world; and meanwhile his eyes involuntarily looked through the chink in the screen at the sheet-covered portrait.
The moonlight intensified the whiteness of the sheet, and it seemed to him that the terrible eyes even began to glow through the cloth.
In fear, he fixed his eyes on it more intently, as if wishing to assure himself that it was nonsense.
But finally, indeed now … he saw, saw clearly: the sheet was no longer there … the portrait was all uncovered and staring, past whatever was around it, straight into him, simply staring into his insides … His heart went cold.
And he saw: the old man stirred and suddenly leaned on the frame with both hands.
Finally he propped himself on his hands and, thrusting out both legs, leaped free of the frame … Now all that could be seen through the chink in the screen was the empty frame.
The noise of footsteps sounded in the room, finally coming closer and closer to the screen.
The poor artists heart began to pound harder.
Breathless with fear, he expected the old man to look behind the screen at any moment.
And then he did look behind the screen, with the same bronze face, moving his big eyes.
Chartkov tried to cry out and found that he had no voice, tried to stir, to make some movement, but his limbs would not move.
Open-mouthed and with bated breath, he looked at this terrible phantom, tall, in a loose Asian robe, waiting for what he would do.
The old man sat down almost at his feet and then took something from under the folds of his loose garment.
It
was a sack.
The old man untied it and, taking it by the corners, shook it upside down: with a dull sound, heavy packets shaped like long posts fell to the floor, and each was wrapped in blue paper and had “1,000 Gold Roubles” written on it.
Thrusting his long, bony hands from the wide sleeves, the old man began to unwrap the packets.
Gold gleamed.
However great the oppressive feeling and frantic fear of the artist, still all of him gazed at the gold, staring fixedly as it was unwrapped by the bony hands, gleaming, clinking thinly and dully, and then wrapped up again.
Here he noticed one packet that had rolled farther away than the rest, just near the leg of his bed, by its head.
He seized it almost convulsively and looked fearfully to see whether the old man would notice.
But it seemed the old man was very busy.
He gathered up all his packets, put them back into the sack, and, without looking at him, went out from behind the screen.
Chartkov’s heart pounded heavily as he heard the shuffle of the retreating steps in the room.
He clutched his packet tighter in his hand, his whole body trembling over it, when suddenly he heard the footsteps approaching the screen again—evidently the old man had remembered that one packet was missing.
And now—he looked behind the screen again.
Filled with despair, the artist clutched the packet in his hand with all his might, tried as hard as he could to make some movement, cried out—and woke up.

He was bathed in a cold sweat; his heart could not have pounded any harder; his chest was so tight that it was as if the last breath was about to fly out of it.
“Could it have been a dream?” he said, clutching his head with both hands; but the terrible aliveness of the apparition was not like a dream.
Awake now, he saw the old man going into the frame, even caught a glimpse of the skirts of his loose clothing, and his hand felt clearly that a moment before it had been holding something heavy.
Moonlight lit up the room, drawing out of its dark corners now a canvas, now a plaster arm, now some drapery left on the floor, now trousers and a pair of unpolished boots.
Only here did he notice that he was not lying in bed but standing right in front of the portrait.
How he got there—that he simply could not understand.
He was still more amazed that the portrait was all uncovered and there was in fact no sheet
over it.
In motionless fear he gazed at it and saw living, human eyes peer straight into him.
Cold sweat stood out on his brow; he wanted to back away, but felt as if his feet were rooted to the ground.
And he saw—this was no longer a dream—the old man’s features move, his lips begin to stretch toward him, as if wishing to suck him out … With a scream of despair, he jumped back—and woke up.