The Gift (34 page)

And afterwards he was plagued by heartburn. In general he fed on all sorts of odds and ends, being indigent and impractical. Nekrasov’s ditty is appropriate here:

Nikolay Gavrilovich, incidentally, did not smoke without reason—it was precisely Zhukov cigarettes that he used for relieving indigestion (and also toothache). His diary, particularly for the summer and autumn of 1849, contains a multitude of most exact references as to how and where he vomited. Besides smoking, he treated himself with rum and water, hot oil, English salts, centaury with bitter-orange leaves, and constantly, conscientiously, with a kind of odd gusto, employed the Roman method—and probably he would ultimately have died of exhaustion if he (graduated as a candidate and retained at the university for advanced work) had not gone to Saratov.

And then in Saratov … But no matter how much we should like to lose no time in getting out of this back alley, to which talk of patisseries has led us, and cross over to the sunny side of Nikolay Gavrilovich’s life, still (for the sake of a certain hidden continuity) we must hang around here a little longer. Once, in great need, he rushed into a tenement house on the Gorohovaya (there follows a wordy description—with afterthoughts—of the house’s location) and was already adjusting his dress when “a girl in red” opened the door. Catching sight of his hand—he had wanted to hold the door—she let out a cry, “as is usually the case.” The heavy creak of the door, its loose, rusty hook, the stink, the icy cold—all this is dreadful … and yet the queer fellow is quite prepared to debate with himself about true purity, noting with satisfaction that “I didn’t even try to discover whether she was good-looking.” When dreaming, on the
other hand, he looked with a keener eye, and the contingency of sleep was kinder to him than his public destiny—but even here, how delighted he is that when in his dream he thrice kisses the gloved hand of “an extremely fair-haired” lady (the mother of a presupposed pupil sheltering him in his dream, all this in the style of Jean-Jacques), he is unable to reproach himself for a single carnal thought. His memory, too, turned out to be keen-eyed when he recalled that circuitous young yearning for beauty. At the age of fifty in a letter from Siberia he evokes the angelic image of a girl he had once noticed in his youth at an exhibition of Industry and Agriculture: “Now there was a certain aristocratic family walking along,” he narrates in his later, Biblically slow style. “She appealed to me, this girl, verily she appealed to me … I walked alongside about three paces away and admired her … They belonged obviously to the highest society. Everyone saw this from their extraordinarily nice manners [there is a little Dickensian fly in this treacly pathos, as Strannolyubski would remark, but still we must not forget that this is being written by an old man half-crushed by penal servitude, as Steklov would justly put it]. The crowd gave way before them … I was quite free to walk at about three paces distance without taking my gaze off that girl [poor satellite!]. And this lasted for an hour or more.” (Oddly enough, exhibitions in general, for instance the London one of 1862 and the Paris one of 1889, had a strong effect on his fate; thus Bouvard and Pécuchet, when undertaking a description of the life of the Duke of Angoulême, were amazed by the role played in it … by bridges.)

It follows from all this that upon arriving in Saratov he could not help but fall in love with the twenty-year-old daughter of Doctor Sokrat Vasiliev, a gypsyish young lady with earrings hanging from the long lobes of her ears, which were half-concealed by folds of dark hair. A teasing, affected creature, “the cynosure and ornament of provincial balls” (in the words of a nameless contemporary), she seduced and stupefied our clumsy virgin with the rustle of her sky-blue
choux
and the melodiousness of her speech. “Look, what a charming little arm,” she would say, stretching it out toward his misted glasses—a bare, dusky arm with a glistening bloom along it. He rubbed himself with attar of roses and shaved bloodily. And
what serious compliments he thought up! “You should be living in Paris,” he said earnestly, having learned elsewhere that she was a “democrat”; Paris for her, however, meant not the hearth of science but the kingdom of strumpets, so that she was offended.

Before us is “The Diary of my Relations with Her Who now Constitutes my Happiness.” The easily carried-away Steklov refers to this unique production (reminding one most of all of an extremely conscientious business report) as “an exultant hymn of love.” The maker of the report draws up a project for declaring his love (which is accurately put into effect in February, 1853, and approved without delay) with points for and against marriage (he feared, for example, lest his restive spouse should take it into her head to wear male dress—in the manner of George Sand) and with an estimate of expenses when married, which contains absolutely everything—two stearine candles for the winter evenings, ten kopecks’ worth of milk, the theater; and at the same time he notifies his bride that in view of his way of thinking (“I am frightened neither by dirt nor by [setting loose] drunken peasants with clubs, nor by slaughter”) sooner or later he is “sure to get caught,” and for greater honesty he tells her about the wife of Iskander (Herzen), who being pregnant (“excuse me for going into such details”), upon hearing the news that her husband had been arrested in Italy and sent to Russia, “fell dead.” Olga Sokratovna, as Aldanov might have added at this point, would not have fallen dead.

“If some day,” he wrote further, “your name is stained by rumor, so that you cannot hope to have any husband … I will always be ready at one word from you to become your husband.” A chivalrous position, but based on far from chivalrous premises, and this characteristic turn leads us back at once to the familiar path of those earlier quasi fantasies of love, with his detailed thirst for self-sacrifice and the protective coloration of his compassion; which did not prevent him from having his pride smart when his bride warned him that she was not in love with him. His betrothal period had a German touch about it, with Schillerian songs, with a countinghouse of caresses: “I undid at first two and then three buttons on her mantilla …” He urgently wanted her to place her foot (in its blunt-toed, gray bottekin stitched with colored silk) on top of his head:
his voluptuousness fed on symbols. Sometimes he read to her from Lermontov or Koltsov; he read poetry in the monotone of a Psalter lector.

But that which occupies the place of honor in the diary and which is particularly important for an understanding of much of Nikolay Gavrilovich’s fate is his detailed account of the joke ceremonies with which the Saratov evenings were richly adorned. He could not polka nimbly and was a bad dancer of the
Grossvater
, but on the other hand he loved clowning, for even the penguin is not above a certain playfulness when he surrounds the female he courts with a ring of pebbles. Young people, as the phrase goes, would get together, and setting in motion à device of coquetry fashionable in those days and among that set, Olga Sokratovna would feed one or another of the guests at table from a saucer, like a child, while Nikolay Gavrilovich, miming jealousy, would press a napkin to his heart and threaten to pierce his breast with a fork. In her turn she would pretend to be cross with him. He would then beg forgiveness (all this is horribly unfunny) and kiss the exposed parts of her arms, which she tried to hide, saying: “How dare you!” The penguin assumed “a serious, mournful look, because indeed it was possible that I had said something which would have given offense to another (i.e., a less bold girl) in her place.” On holidays he played tricks in the Temple of God, amusing his bride-to-be—but the Marxist commentator (i.e., Steklov) errs in seeing in this “a healthy blasphemousness.” As the son of a priest Nikolay felt quite at home in church (thus the young prince who crowns a cat with his father’s crown is decidedly not expressing any sympathy with popular government). Even less can one reproach him with mocking the Crusaders because he chalked a cross upon the back of everyone in turn: the mark of Olga Sokratovna’s lovesick admirers. And after some more horseplay of the same sort there takes place—let us remember this—a mock duel with sticks.

Now a few years later when he was arrested, the police confiscated this old diary, which was written in an even hand with little striggles and was in a homemade code, with such abbreviations as
weakns! sillns!
(weakness, silliness),
lbrty, =ty
(liberty, equality) and
ch-k (chelovek
, man,—not Cheka, Lenin’s police).

It was deciphered by people who were evidently incompetent, since they made a number of mistakes: for example, they read
dzrya
as
druzya
(friends) instead of
podozreniya
(suspicions), which twisted the sentence “I shall arouse strong suspicions” into “I have strong friends.” Chernyshevski grasped at this and began to maintain that the whole diary was the draft of a novel, a writer’s invention, since he, he said, “did not then have any influential friends, whereas this was obviously a character with powerful friends in the government.” It is not important (although the question is interesting in itself) whether he remembered the actual words in his diary exactly; what is important is that subsequently these words are given a curious alibi in
What to Do?
where their inner “draft” rhythm is fully worked out (for instance in the song of one of the girls at the picnic: “Oh maid, I dwell in gloomy woods, I am an evil friend, and perilous will be my life, and sad will be my end”). Lying in prison and knowing that the dangerous diary was being deciphered, he hastened to send the Senate “examples of my manuscript drafts”; i.e., things which he had written exclusively in order to justify his diary, turning it ex post facto also into some draft for some novel. (Strannolyubski makes the direct supposition that it was this that impelled him to write in jail
What to Do?
—dedicated, by the way, to his wife, and begun on St. Olga’s day.) Therefore he could express his indignation over the fact that a judicial meaning was being given to scenes he had invented. “I place myself and others in various positions and develop them quite fancifully … One ‘I’ speaks of the possibility of arrest, another ‘I’ is beaten with a stick in front of his fiancée.” He hoped, recalling this part of his old diary, that the detailed account of all sorts of parlor games would be regarded in itself as “fanciful,” since a sedate person would hardly … The sad thing was that in official circles he was considered not a sedate person, but precisely a buffoon, and it was in the very buffoonery of his journalist devices in
The Contemporary
that they detected a fiendish infiltration of harmful ideas. And for a complete conclusion of the theme of the Saratov
petits-jeux
let us move on still further, as far as the penal servitude, where their echo still lives in the playlets he composes for his comrades and especially in the novel
The Prologue
(written at the Alexandrov
works in 1866), where there are both a student who unfunnily plays the fool, and a young beauty feeding her admirers. If we add to this that the protagonist (Volgin), when talking to his wife of the danger threatening him, refers to a warning he has given her before marriage, then it is impossible not to conclude that here finally we have a late piece of truth inserted by Chernyshevski to prop up his ancient assertion that his diary was merely an author’s draft … for the very flesh of
The Prologue
, through all the dross of the feeble invention, now seems indeed to be a novelistic continuation of the Saratov jottings.

He was engaged to teach grammar and literature in the gymnasium there and proved to be an extremely popular teacher: in the unwritten classification which the boys applied swiftly and exactly to all the instructors, he was assigned to the type of nervous, absentminded, good-natured fellow who would easily lose his temper but who was also easily led off the subject—to fall at once into the soft paws of the class virtuoso (Fioletov junior in this case): at the critical moment when disaster already seemed inevitable for those who did not know the lesson, and there was only a short time until the caretaker rang his bell, he would ask a saving, delaying question: “Nikolay Gavrilovich, there is something here about the Convention …” and forthwith Nikolay Gavrilovich would kindle, would go to the board and crushing the chalk would draw a plan of the hall where the National Convention of 1792–95 held its meetings (he was, as we know, a great expert at plans), and then, becoming more and more animated, he would also point out the places where the members of every party had sat.

During those years in the provinces he evidently behaved rather imprudently, frightening moderate people and God-fearing youths with the harshness of his views and the brashness of his ways. A slightly touched-up story has been preserved to the effect that the coffin had hardly been lowered at his mother’s funeral before he lit up a cigarette and went off arm-in-arm with Olga Sokratovna, whom he married ten days later. But the upper-formers were swept away by him; some of them subsequently became attached to him with that rapturous ardor with which the young people of this didactic era clung to the teacher who was on the brink of becoming a leader;
as far as “grammar” was concerned, it must be said in all conscience that his charges never learned to handle commas. Were many of their number there forty years later at his funeral? According to some sources there were two, according to others, none at all. And when the funeral procession was about to stop by the Saratov school building in order to chant a litany, the director sent to inform the priest that this, you know, was undesirable, and accompanied by a stumbling, long-skirted October wind, the procession went by.

Much less successful than his career in Saratov was his teaching after his transfer to St. Petersburg, where for several months during 1854 he taught in the Second Cadet Corps. The cadets behaved rowdily at his lessons. Shouting shrilly at the recreants only served to augment the confusion. You couldn’t get very warmed up about Montagnards there! Once during an interval there was some noise in one of the classrooms, the officer on guard went in, barked, and left relative order behind him; in the meantime noise broke out in another classroom which (the interval was now over) Chernyshevski had just entered with his briefcase under his arm. Turning to the officer, he stopped him with a touch of his hand and said with restrained irritation, looking over his glasses: “No, sir, you can’t come here now.” The officer felt insulted; the teacher refused to apologize and left. Thus began the theme of “officers.”