Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

‘WHAT you are saying is, that a man is incapable of deciding for himself what is good and what is bad, that everything depends on the environment, that man is the victim of his environment. But as I see it, everything really depends on chance. Listen, I will tell you about something that happened to me personally …’

These words were spoken by our universally respected Ivan Vasilyevich at the end of a discussion we had been having about whether, in order to achieve individual perfection in life, it was first necessary to alter the conditions in which people live. In fact no one had actually argued that it is impossible to decide for oneself what is good and what is bad, but Ivan Vasilyevich had a curious way of answering questions of his own which had arisen in the course of discussion, and using these thoughts of his as a pretext for telling us about episodes which had occurred in his own life. He would frequently lose sight of the reason which had originally set off his narrative, and get carried away by the story, all the more so since he was an exceptionally sincere and truthful story-teller.

And so it was on this particular occasion.

‘I will tell you about something that happened to me personally. My whole life has been like this – not influenced at all by environment, but by something else altogether.’

‘By what, then?’ we asked him.

‘Well, it’s a long story. It will take some telling if you are really going to understand.’

‘Then please go on, and tell us.’

Ivan Vasilyevich reflected for a moment, then nodded his head.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘my whole life was changed by what happened one night, or rather one morning.’

‘So what was it?’

‘The thing was, I had fallen deeply in love. I had been in love many times before, but this time my feelings were something far stronger. It’s a long time ago now; she even has married daughters of her own. Her family name was B—–, yes, Varenka B—–’ (here Ivan Vasilyevich mentioned the family name). ‘Even at fifty she was still an outstanding beauty. But when she was young, at eighteen, she was absolutely enchanting: tall, shapely, graceful, and imposing – yes, really imposing. She always held herself very erect, as though it was not in her nature to do otherwise, with her head thrown slightly back, and this, together with her beauty and her tall stature, and despite her thinness, boniness even, gave her a sort of regal air which might have been intimidating, had it not been for the charming, always joyful smile of her mouth and her wonderful shining eyes, and the general effect of her lovely, youthful being.’

‘What a picture Ivan Vasilyevich is painting for us!’

‘Well, describe her as I may, it is impossible by describing her to make you see her as she really was. But that is not the point. The events I want to tell you about took place in the 1840s. At that time I was a student at a provincial university. Whether it was a good thing or a bad thing I have no idea, but in those days our university contained no intellectual groups, no theories whatever; we were simply young men and we lived as young men typically do – studying, and enjoying ourselves too. I was a very jolly, lively young fellow, and well off into the bargain. I was the owner of a really spirited horse, an ambler; I used to go tobogganing with the young ladies (skating having not yet come into fashion); and I was much given to celebrating with my companions (in those days we never drank anything but champagne; and if there was no money we didn’t drink at all – we never drank vodka instead, as they do nowadays). And my chief delight was going to evening parties and balls. I was a good dancer, and not at all bad-looking.’

‘Come now, there’s no need to be quite so modest,’ put in one of the ladies in our company. ‘We are quite familiar with your daguerreotype portrait. It isn’t true to say that you were not bad-looking – you were handsome.’

‘That is as may be, but that is not the point either. What matters is that just as my love for her was reaching its peak, on the last day of Shrovetide, I attended a ball at the house of the district marshal of the nobility, a genial old man who was wealthy, well known for his hospitality, and a chamberlain at court. His wife, as good-natured as he was, received the guests wearing a puce-coloured velvet gown, a diamond ferronnière on her forehead, and with her ageing, puffy shoulders and bosom on display, as in those portraits of the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna. It was a splendid ball: a beautiful ballroom with galleries for the musicians, and an orchestra, well known at that time, which was made up of serfs belonging to a landowner who was an amateur musician, and a veritable ocean of champagne. Although I was fond of champagne I didn’t drink any, for I was already drunk without wine, drunk with love; but I still danced to the point of exhaustion – quadrilles, waltzes, polkas; and as far as possible of course, I danced them with Varenka. She was wearing a white dress with a pink sash, white kid gloves reaching almost to her slender, pointed elbows, and white satin shoes. The mazurka was filched from me by a most unpleasant engineer by the name of Anisimov – even today I cannot forgive him – who had asked her for this dance almost the moment she arrived, whereas I came in late, having called at the hairdresser’s to collect my gloves. So I did not dance the mazurka with her, but with a German girl whom I had been pursuing some time before. But I’m afraid I treated her quite rudely that evening – not talking to her, not looking at her: I had eyes only for that tall, shapely figure in the white dress with the pink sash, her flushed, radiant face with its dimples, and her gentle, affectionate eyes. I wasn’t the only one either: everybody looked at her and admired her, men and women alike, though she eclipsed them all. It was impossible not to admire her.

‘By decree, so to speak, I danced the mazurka with someone else, but in fact I danced practically all the rest of the time with her. Without the least sign of embarrassment she would walk the whole length of the ballroom and come up to me, and I would jump up from my seat without waiting to be asked, and she would thank me with a smile for my quick-wittedness. When we were led before her so that she could choose a partner, and she was unable to guess the particular “quality” I was supposed to be representing, she was obliged to give her hand to some other young man, but she shrugged her slender shoulders and smiled at me as a sign of her regret and as a consolation.

‘When the figures of the mazurka were being danced to a waltz I danced with her for quite a long time and she, breathless and smiling, said to me “encore”. And I waltzed on and on with her until I was hardly aware of my body at all …’

‘What do you mean, you were hardly aware of your body? I should think you were well aware of it when you had your arm round her waist; and not just your body, but hers as well,’ said one of the guests.

Ivan Vasilyevich suddenly blushed, and replied with annoyance, almost shouting: ‘Yes, that’s modern young people for you. You don’t see anything except the body. In our day it was not like that. The more deeply I was in love, the more disembodied she became for me. Nowadays you look at women’s feet, their ankles, and more besides: you mentally undress the women you are in love with; but for me, as Alphonse Karr would say – he was a good writer, too – the object of my love was always clad in robes of bronze. Not only did we not undress them in our minds, we did our best to cover their nakedness, like the virtuous son of Noah in the Bible. But of course you wouldn’t understand that …’

‘Don’t bother with him. What happened next?’ said one of us.

‘Yes. So there I was dancing with her, and losing all sense of time. The musicians were by now pretty desperately tired, you know how it is towards the end of a ball, and they kept on repeating the same section of a mazurka, and the mothers and fathers had already got up from the card tables and were waiting for supper to be served, and the manservants were running about faster than ever, carrying things. It was gone two o’clock. I had to make the most of those last minutes. Yet again I asked her to dance, and for the hundredth time we floated down the ballroom.

‘ “So may I have the quadrille after supper?” I asked as I led her back to her seat.

‘ “Of course, if they don’t take me home before then,” she said, smiling.

‘ “I won’t allow it,” I said.

‘ “Hand me my fan,” she said.

‘ “It makes me sad even to do that,” I said as I returned her simple white fan to her.

‘ “Well, here you are, just so that you won’t grieve,” she said, plucking a feather from the fan and giving it to me.

‘I took the feather, and could only by a look express my delight and gratitude. I was not only happy and content, I was in a state of bliss, full of goodwill to all; I was no longer myself, but some unearthly being who had no knowledge of evil and was capable only of doing good. I hid away the feather in my glove and stood there, without the strength to walk away from her.

‘ “Look, they are trying to get papa to dance,” she said to me, pointing to the tall, stately figure of her father, a colonel in silver epaulettes, standing in the doorway with the hostess and some other ladies.

‘ “Varenka, come over here,” we heard the hostess, with her diamond ferronnière and Empress Elizaveta shoulders, calling in a loud voice.

‘Varenka went across to the doorway, and I followed.

‘ “Do persuade your father to take a turn with you, ma chère. Come, Pyotr Vladislavich, do please dance with her,” said the hostess to the Colonel.

‘Varenka’s father was a very handsome, stately, tall and youthful-looking elderly man. His face had a high colour, he had white, curled moustaches à la Nicholas I, with white side-whiskers curving down to meet them, and his hair was combed forward over his temples; and the same joyful smile as his daughter’s played in his brilliant eyes and around his lips. He was splendidly built, his broad chest thrust out in the military manner and adorned with just the right quantity of medals, his shoulders powerful, his legs long and well-shaped. He was a military commander with all the bearing of a veteran of the time of Nicholas I.

‘As we approached the doorway the Colonel was making excuses, saying that he had quite forgotten the art of dancing; nevertheless he smiled, reached across with his right hand to draw his sword from its scabbard and handed it to an obliging young man; and putting a suede glove on his right hand – “all according to regulations” as he said with a smile – he took his daughter’s hand and made a quarter turn, waiting for the music to strike up.

‘As soon as the music of the mazurka began, he stamped one foot smartly on the floor and advanced the other, and his tall, bulky figure began, now gently and smoothly, now noisily and energetically with a clicking of soles and of one boot against the other, to move around the ballroom. The graceful figure of Varenka sailed along beside him, imperceptibly shortening or lengthening the steps of her little feet in their white satin shoes. The whole room followed the couple’s every movement. I gazed at them not just with admiration, but with a feeling of rapturous tenderness. I was particularly moved by the sight of his boots, fastened with little straps – good calf-skin boots, not the fashionable pointed sort but old-fashioned boots with square toes and without built-up heels. They were clearly the work of some battalion cobbler. “To bring out his beloved daughter and show her off he doesn’t buy fashionable boots, he puts on his everyday home-made ones,” I thought, and those foursquare toecaps continued to move me. It was obvious that he had once been an excellent dancer, but now he was stout and his legs were not supple enough for all the quick and elegant dance steps he was attempting to execute. All the same, he completed two accomplished circuits of the floor.

‘And when he swiftly parted his feet and brought them together again and, although somewhat heavily, dropped on one knee, and she, smiling as she smoothed down her skirt where he had caught it, described a smooth circle round him, everyone burst into loud applause. Rising again with some effort to his feet, he tenderly and affectionately clasped his daughter’s head between his hands and, kissing her on the forehead, led her across to me, assuming that I was dancing with her. I told him that I was not her escort.

‘ “Well, never mind, you dance this one with her,” he said with a kindly smile as he put his sword back into its scabbard.

‘Just as a single drop poured from a bottle is followed by all the liquid contained inside gushing out in great streams, so my love for Varenka released the entire capacity for love which I had in my soul. At that moment I embraced the whole world in my love. I loved the hostess with her ferronnière and her Imperial bosom, I loved her husband, her guests, her footmen, even Anisimov the engineer who was regarding me with dislike. And for her father with his home-cobbled boots and the same tender smile as his daughter’s, for him I felt at that moment a sort of rapturous affection.

‘The mazurka came to an end and the host and hostess invited their guests to sit down to supper, but Colonel B—– declined, saying that he had to be up early in the morning, and took his leave of them. I was terrified that Varenka too would be taken away, but she and her mother stayed on.

‘When supper was over I danced the promised quadrille with her. And although it seemed to me that I was already infinitely happy, my happiness kept on growing and growing. We neither of us mentioned love; I did not ask her, or indeed ask myself, whether she loved me. It was sufficient for me that I loved her. My only fear was that something might come and spoil my happiness.

‘When I had got home, undressed, and thought about going to sleep, I realized that sleep was quite out of the question. In my hand was the feather from her fan and one of her gloves, which she had given me on leaving just as I was helping first her mother and then her into their carriage. I gazed at these objects, and without closing my eyes saw her standing there before me just as she had looked at the moment when, faced with a choice between two partners, she had been trying to guess the quality I represented, and I had heard her lovely voice say “Pride? Yes?” – and she had joyfully given me her hand; or when at supper she was sipping from her goblet of champagne and had given me a sideways look with her caressing eyes. But most of all I saw her with her father, smoothly circling round him, then surveying the admiring spectators proudly and joyfully, both on her own account and on his. And I could not help including them both in a single feeling of tender affection.

‘At that time I was living with my brother, who has since died. My brother in general had no time for society life and did not go to balls, and now he was preparing for his final examinations and leading a very regular life. He was asleep. I looked at his head buried in the pillow, half-hidden beneath the flannel blanket, and felt affectionately sorry for him – sorry that he neither knew nor shared the happiness I was experiencing. Our household serf Petrusha came in with a candle to help me undress, but I sent him away. The sight of my brother’s sleepy face and tousled hair seemed to me deeply touching. Trying not to make a noise, I tiptoed to my room and sat down on the bed. No, I was too happy, I could not possibly sleep. What was more I felt too warm in the heated rooms, and without taking off my uniform I went quietly into the hallway, put on my overcoat, opened the front door and went out into the street.

‘It was after 4 A.M. when I had left the ball, and what with the journey home and the time spent in the house, two hours had gone by, so that now, when I went out, it was already light. It was regular Shrovetide weather: it was foggy, the snow, saturated with water, was thawing on the roads, and water dripped from every roof. At that time the B—–s lived at the far end of the town next to a large meadow, one end of which was used as a public pleasure-ground and the other was the site of an institute for young ladies. I walked along the deserted lane where our house stood and emerged into the main street, where I began to meet people on foot and draymen with loads of firewood on their sledges, which grazed the underlying surface of the roadway with their runners. And the horses rhythmically swaying their sopping wet heads under the glistening shaft-bows, and the cab-drivers with bast matting on their backs trudging along in enormous boots beside their vehicles, and the houses on each side of the street looming tall in the fog – all this seemed to me extraordinarily precious and filled with meaning.

‘When I came out on to the field where their house was situated I saw at the far end, towards the pleasure-ground, something large and black, and I heard the sounds of fife and drum coming to me from that direction. All this time my mind was still full of music, and now and again I could still hear the melody of the mazurka. But this music was of quite a different kind – harsh and unpleasant.

‘ “Whatever is it?” I wondered as I made my way along the slippery path which had been beaten across the middle of the field, towards the place the sounds were coming from. When I had gone some hundred yards I managed to make out through the fog a crowd of dark figures. They were obviously soldiers. “Most likely a training exercise,” I thought, and I went closer, walking just behind a blacksmith in a greasy sheepskin jacket and an apron, who was carrying something. Some soldiers in black uniforms were standing quite still in two rows facing one another, their rifles at the rest position. Behind them were some drummers, and a fife-player who kept on playing the same shrill and unpleasant tune over and over without a break.

‘ “What are they up to?” I asked the blacksmith, who had stopped beside me.

‘ “They’re thrashing a Tatar for trying to desert,” said the blacksmith angrily, his eyes fixed on a point at the far end of the ranks of men. I too looked in that direction and saw between the rows a fearful sight coming towards me. What was approaching was a man stripped to the waist and lashed to the rifles of two soldiers, who were leading him along. Alongside them walked a tall officer in a greatcoat and peaked cap, whose figure looked to me familiar. His whole body twitching, his feet slapping on the thawing snow, the man who was being punished moved towards me under a hail of blows which poured down on him from both sides, now throwing himself backwards – whereupon the NCOs leading him along on their rifles would thrust him forward, now plunging forward – whereupon the NCOs pulled him back, preventing him from falling. And keeping pace with them, walking with a firm, slightly quivering step, came the tall officer. It was her father, with his rubicund face and his white moustaches and side-whiskers.

‘At each stroke the man being punished, as if in astonishment, turned his face contorted with suffering to the side from which the blow came, and baring his white teeth, kept repeating the same few words. Only when he had got quite close to me could I make out what these words were. He was repeating, in more of a sob than a voice: “Have mercy on me, lads. Have mercy, lads.” But the lads did not have mercy on him, and as the procession drew level with me I saw the soldier standing opposite me step decisively forward, brandish his stick vigorously in the air and bring it whistling down on to the Tatar’s back. The Tatar jerked forward but the NCOs restrained him, and another similar blow fell on him from the other side, followed by another from this side, another from that … The tall Colonel kept alongside: looking now down at his feet, now at the man being punished, he was drawing the air deeply into his lungs, blowing out his cheeks, then slowly letting it out through his protruding lips. When the procession had passed the place where I was standing, I caught between the ranks of soldiers a glimpse of the man’s back. It was such a lurid, wet, red and unnatural-looking sight that I could not believe I was looking at a human body.

‘ “Jesus Christ” – said the blacksmith standing beside me.

‘The procession was now moving away from us. The blows kept on falling from both sides on the stumbling, contorted man, the drums kept on beating and the fife shrilling, and the tall, stately figure of the Colonel kept on walking with the same firm step beside the man who was being punished. All at once the Colonel stopped and quickly approached one of the soldiers.

‘ “I’ll teach you to miss the mark,” I heard his wrathful voice saying. “Going to miss it, are you? Are you?”

‘And I saw his powerful suede-gloved hand strike a puny, terrified soldier full in the face for having failed to bring down his stick hard enough on the Tatar’s bleeding back.

‘ “Give them some fresh sticks!” he shouted, looking round, and as he did so catching sight of me. He pretended not to recognize me, and frowning angrily and menacingly he turned hastily away.

‘I was filled with such a pitch of shame that not knowing where to look, as though I had been apprehended in some shameful act, I lowered my eyes and hurried off home as fast as I could. All the way I had in my ears the beating of the drums and the shrilling of the fife, and I could still hear the words “Have mercy on me, lads”, followed by the self-confident, angry voice of the Colonel shouting “Going to miss it, are you? Are you?” And meanwhile I felt in my heart an almost physical anguish, rising to the point of nausea, so that several times I had to stop and I thought I was going to vomit up all the horror with which this spectacle had filled me. I do not remember how I reached home and got into bed. But as soon as I began to fall asleep I heard and saw it all again, and I leapt out of bed.

‘ “It’s obvious that he knows something which I don’t,” I thought with reference to the Colonel. “If only I knew what he knows, then I should understand what I have just seen, and it would not upset me like this.” But however much I thought, I could not imagine what it was the Colonel knew, and it was not until that evening that I managed to fall asleep, and then only after I had been to visit a friend of mine and we had got completely drunk.

‘Well then, do you suppose I decided there and then that what I had seen was something evil? Not at all. “If it was carried out with such conviction and everyone involved recognized that it was necessary, then they must certainly have known something I did not know,” I thought to myself, and I tried to discover what it was. But however much I tried, discover it I could not. And since I was unable to discover it, I was unable to go into the army as I had earlier intended, and not only did I not serve in the army, but I did not enter government service of any kind, and as you see, I ended up not doing anything very much.’

‘Well, we know about that, how you ended up not doing anything much,’ said one of us. ‘But just tell us this: how many men would end up the same way if there were not men like you to give them the example?’

‘Now that is plain nonsense,’ said Ivan Vasilyevich with genuine irritation.

‘Well, and what happened about that love of yours?’ we all wanted to know.

‘My love? From that day on my love went into a decline. Whenever she fell into a pensive mood, as she frequently did, with that smile on her face, I would immediately remember the Colonel on the square, and I would feel somehow awkward and sickened, so I began to see her less often. And so my love for her gradually dwindled away to nothing. That is how it just is with some affairs, and it is things like that which can alter the whole direction of a man’s life. But you say …’ he concluded.