Fifty-Two Stories

SPRING

THE SNOW HAS NOT YET LEFT THE GROUND, but spring is already calling on the soul. If you have ever convalesced from a grave illness, you know the blissful state when you swoon from vague presentiments and smile without any reason. Evidently that is the state nature is experiencing now. The ground is cold, mud mixed with snow sloshes under your feet, but everything around is so cheerful, affectionate, friendly! The air is so clear and transparent that it seems if you climbed up on a dovecot or a belfry you could see the whole universe from end to end. The sun shines brightly, and its rays, playing and smiling, bathe in the puddles along with the sparrows. The river swells and darkens; it is already awake, and will start roaring any day now. The trees are bare, but already living, breathing.

In that season it feels good to drive dirty water along the gutters with a broom or a shovel, to send toy boats down the streams, or crack the stubborn ice with your heels. It also feels good to drive pigeons high up into the heavens, or to climb trees and tie birdhouses in them. Yes, everything feels good in that happy time of year, especially if you’re young, love nature, and if you’re not capricious, hysterical, and your job does not oblige you to sit between four walls from morning till evening. It’s not good if you’re sick, if you’re pining away in an office, if you keep company with the muses.

Yes, in spring one should not keep company with the muses.

Just look how good, how nice ordinary people feel. Here’s the gardener Pantelei Petrovich, bright and early, sporting a broad-brimmed straw hat, and quite unable to part with the little stub of a cigar he picked up this morning on the path; look at him standing, arms akimbo, outside the kitchen window, telling the cook about the boots he bought the day before. His whole long and narrow figure, for which the servants call him “scrimpy,” expresses self-satisfaction and dignity. He looks upon nature with the awareness of his superiority over it, and there is in his gaze something proprietary, peremptory, and even supercilious, as if, sitting in his greenhouse or pottering in the garden, he has learned about the vegetable kingdom something that no one else knows.

It would be useless to explain to him that nature is majestic, awesome, and filled with wondrous charms, before which the proud man should bow his head. It seems to him that he knows everything, all the secrets, charms, and wonders, and for him the beautiful spring is as much of a slave as the narrow-chested, haggard woman who sits in the shed of the greenhouse and ladles out meatless cabbage soup to his children.

And the huntsman Ivan Zakharov? This one, in his tattered woollen coat and with galoshes on his bare feet, sits by the stable on an overturned barrel and makes wads out of old corks. He’s preparing for woodcock season. In his imagination he pictures the way he will take, with all its footpaths, ice-filled hollows, brooks; closing his eyes, he sees a long, straight row of tall, slender trees, under which he will stand with his gun, trembling from the evening coolness, from sweet excitement, and straining his keen hearing; he imagines the hoarse sounds of a woodcock; he already hears all the bells ringing away in the nearby monastery after the vigil, while he stands at the hunt…He feels good, he is boundlessly, senselessly happy.

But now take a look at Makar Denisych, a young man who works for General Stremoukhov as not quite a clerk, not quite a junior manager. His salary is twice that of the gardener, he wears a white shirt front, smokes expensive tobacco, is always well-fed and well-dressed, and on meeting the general always has the pleasure of shaking his plump white hand with its big diamond ring, but despite all that how unhappy he is! He is eternally among books, subscribes to twenty-five roubles’ worth of magazines, and writes, writes…He writes every evening, every afternoon, while the rest are napping, and he puts all he writes into his big trunk. At the very bottom of that trunk lie his neatly folded trousers and waistcoats; on top of them are an unsealed packet of tobacco, a dozen or so pillboxes, a crimson scarf, a cake of glycerine soap in a yellow wrapper, and many other such goods, and to the side of the trunk timidly cling stacks of written-upon paper, as well as two or three issues of Our Province, in which stories and reports by Makar Denisych have been published. The whole district considers him a writer, a poet; they all see something peculiar in him, do not like him, say he talks differently, walks differently, smokes differently, and once, at a general court session to which he had been summoned as a witness, he let slip inappropriately that he was occupied with literature, and blushed as deeply as if he had stolen a chicken.

Here he is, in a dark blue coat, a plush hat, and with a cane in his hand, slowly walking down the drive…He takes five steps, stops, and fixes his eyes on the sky or on an old rook sitting in a fir tree.

The gardener stands, arms akimbo, sternness is written on the huntsman’s face, and Makar Denisych stoops, coughs timidly, and looks around sourly, as if spring crushes and stifles him with its vapors, its beauty!…His soul is filled with timidity. Instead of ecstasies, joys, and hopes, spring evokes in him only some sort of vague desires, which trouble him, and so he walks along, unable to figure out what he needs. In fact, what does he need?

“Ah, greetings, Makar Denisych!” He suddenly hears the voice of General Stremoukhov. “So, has the mail come yet?”

“Not yet, Your Excellency,” replies Makar Denisych, looking at the carriage in which the hale and hearty general sits with his little daughter.

“Splendid weather! Spring is here!” says the general. “Going for a stroll? Getting inspired?”

But in his eyes is written: “Giftlessness! Mediocrity!”

“Ah, my dear fellow!” says the general, taking up the reins. “What a wonderful little piece I read today over coffee! A trifle, just two pages, but so charming! Too bad you don’t know French, I’d give it to you to read…”

The general hastily, sketchily retells the content of the story he read, and Makar Denisych listens and feels embarrassed, as if it is his fault that he is not a French writer who writes little pieces.

“I don’t understand what he found good in it,” he thinks, following the disappearing carriage with his eyes. “The content is banal, hackneyed…My stories are much more substantial.”

A worm begins to gnaw at Makar. Authorial vanity is painful, it is an infection of the soul; whoever suffers from it no longer hears the singing of the birds, nor sees the shining of the sun, nor sees the spring…It takes only the slightest touch of this sore spot for the whole body to shrink with pain. The poisoned Makar walks on further and through the garden gate comes out onto the dirty road. There, his whole body jouncing on a high britzka, Mr. Bubentsov is hurrying somewhere.

“Ah, Mister Writer!” he cries. “Hello there!”

If Makar Denisych were merely a clerk or a junior manager, no one would dare speak to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a “writer,” he is giftlessness, mediocrity!

Such people as Mr. Bubentsov understand nothing about art and have little interest in it, but when they happen to meet up with giftlessness and mediocrity, they are implacable, merciless. They are ready to forgive anyone you like, only not Makar, this wretched misfit whose manuscripts are lying in a trunk. The gardener broke an old ficus and has let many expensive plants rot; the general does nothing and lives off of other people’s work; Mr. Bubentsov, when he was justice of the peace, heard cases only once a month and, in hearing them, stammered, confused the laws, and poured out drivel, but all this is forgiven, goes unnoticed; but not to notice the giftless Makar, who writes mediocre poetry and stories, to pass him over in silence without saying something offensive—is impossible. The general’s daughter-in-law slaps her maids in the face and gets as foul-mouthed as a washerwoman during card games, the priest’s wife never pays her card-playing debts, the landowner Flyugin stole a dog from the landowner Sivobrazov—nobody cares. But the fact that Our Province recently returned a third-rate story to Makar is known to the whole district, and gives rise to mockery, long conversations, opprobrium, and instead of Makar Denisych he is now called Makarka.

If there’s something wrong with his writing, they don’t try to explain why it’s “wrong,” they simply say:

“Again that son of a bitch wrote some rubbish!”

Makar is prevented from enjoying the spring by the thought that they do not understand him, do not wish to and cannot understand him. For some reason it seems to him that if they were to understand him, everything would be wonderful. But how can they understand whether he is talented or not, if no one in the whole district reads anything, or else they read in such a way that it would be better not to read at all. How instill in General Stremoukhov that that little French piece is a worthless, flat, banal, hackneyed little piece, how instill it in him, if he has never read anything else but such flat, worthless little pieces?

And how the women annoy Makar!

“Ah, Makar Denisych!” they usually say to him. “What a pity you weren’t at the marketplace today! If you’d seen how comically those two peasants fought, you’d certainly have written about it!”

All this is trifles, of course, and a philosopher would pay no attention, would disregard it, but Makar feels as if he’s on hot coals. His soul is filled with a feeling of loneliness, orphanhood, anguish, the same anguish that is experienced only by very lonely people and great sinners. Never, not once in his life, has he stood arms akimbo the way the gardener stands. Only rarely, maybe once in five years, somewhere in the forest, or on the road, or on a train, meeting another misfit as wretched as himself, and looking him in the eye, does he suddenly revive for a moment, and the other man revives as well. They talk for a long time, argue, admire, praise, laugh, so that, looking at them, you might take them for madmen.

But usually even these rare moments do not come without poison. As if for a laugh, Makar and the wretched fellow he meets deny each other’s talent, do not accept each other, envy, hate, become vexed, and finally part as enemies. And so their youth wears out, melts away, joyless, loveless, friendless, without inner peace, and without all that sullen Makar so loves to describe in the evenings, in moments of inspiration.

And with youth spring also passes.

1886