Fifty-Two Stories

A BREAKDOWN

I

Mayer, a medical student, and Rybnikov, studying in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, went one evening to their friend, the law student Vassilyev, and invited him to go with them to S——v Lane. Vassilyev first protested for a long time, then got dressed and went with them.

He knew of fallen women only by hearsay and from books, and never once in his life had been in the houses where they lived. He knew that there were such immoral women, who, under the pressure of fatal circumstances—milieu, bad upbringing, poverty, and so on—were forced to sell their honor for money. They do not know pure love, have no children, no legal rights; their mothers and sisters lament over them like the dead, science treats them as evil, men speak familiarly to them. Yet, despite all that, they do not lose the image and likeness of God.¹ They are all conscious of their sin and hope for salvation. They could employ the means leading to salvation on the most vast scale. It is true that society does not forgive people their past, but for God Saint Mary of Egypt is considered no lower than the other saints.² Whenever Vassilyev happened to recognize a fallen woman in the street by her dress or manners, or saw one portrayed in a satirical magazine, he remembered a story he once read somewhere: a certain young man, pure and self-sacrificing, fell in love with a fallen woman and offered to make her his wife, and she, considering herself unworthy of such happiness, poisoned herself.

Vassilyev lived in one of the lanes off Tverskoy Boulevard. When he and his friends left the house, it was about eleven o’clock. The first snow had fallen a little earlier, and everything in nature was under the sway of this young snow. The air smelled of snow, snow softly crunched underfoot, the ground, the roofs, the trees, the benches on the boulevards—everything was soft, white, young, and that made the houses look different than the day before, the lamps shone brighter, the air became more transparent, the clatter of the carriages was muffled, and a feeling that resembled this white, young, fluffy snow asked to enter one’s soul along with the fresh, light, frosty air.

“ ‘Without my will to these sad shores,’ ” the medic began to sing in a pleasant tenor, “ ‘a mysterious force doth draw me…’ ”³

“ ‘Behold the mill…,’ ” the artist joined in. “ ‘Already ’tis in ruin…’ ”

“ ‘Behold the mill…Already ’tis in ruin…,’ ” repeated the medic, raising his eyebrows and sadly shaking his head.

He fell silent, rubbed his forehead, trying to remember the words, then sang loudly and so well that the passersby turned to look at him:

“ ‘Here once I would freely meet with my free love…’ ”

The three men stopped at a restaurant and, without taking off their overcoats, drank two glasses of vodka each at the bar. Before drinking his second, Vassilyev noticed a piece of cork in his vodka, brought the glass up to his eyes, and looked at it for a long time, frowning nearsightedly. The medic misunderstood his expression and said:

“Well, what are you staring at? Please, no philosophy! Vodka’s given us to be drunk, sturgeon to be eaten, women to be visited, snow to be walked on. Live for at least one evening as a human being!”

“But I didn’t mean…,” said Vassilyev, laughing. “Did I refuse?”

The vodka warmed his insides. He looked tenderly at his friends, admired and envied them. How balanced everything was in these healthy, strong, cheerful people, how everything in their minds and souls was finished and smooth! They sing, and they passionately love the theater, and they draw, and they talk and drink a lot, and don’t have a headache the next day; they are poetic, and dissolute, and tender, and bold; they know how to work, to be indignant, to laugh for no reason, to say silly things; they are hot-headed, honest, self-sacrificing, and, as human beings, no worse in any way than he, Vassilyev, who watches his every step and every word, is self-conscious, prudent, and ready to elevate the least trifle to the level of a problem. And he wished to live like his friends for at least one evening, to let himself go, to free himself from his own self-control. Must he drink vodka? Then he will drink, even if his head splits with pain tomorrow. They take him to the women? He goes. He will laugh, fool around, respond merrily to the comments of passersby…

He stepped out of the restaurant laughing. He liked his friends—one in a crumpled broad-brimmed hat with a pretense to artistic disorder, the other in a sealskin cap, not a poor man, but with the pretense of belonging to the educated bohemians; he liked the snow, the pale light of the lamps, the sharply outlined black tracks left by the soles of passersby on the first snow; he liked the air and especially that transparent, tender, naïve, as if virginal hue which can be observed in nature only twice a year: when everything gets covered with snow, and in spring on clear days or moonlit evenings when the ice is breaking up on the river.

“ ‘Without my will to these sad shores,’ ” he sang in a low voice, “ ‘an unknown force doth draw me…’ ”

And all along the way for some reason he and his friends could not free their tongues of this motif, and all three sang it mechanically, not in time with each other.

Vassilyev’s imagination pictured how he and his friends, in about ten minutes, knock on the door, how they steal to the women through dark corridors and dark rooms, how he lights a match in the darkness and suddenly sees a suffering face and a guilty smile. The unknown blonde or brunette will probably have her hair down and be wearing a white bed jacket; she will be frightened by the light, become terribly embarrassed, and say: “For God’s sake, what are you doing! Blow it out!” All this was scary, but intriguing and new.

II

From Trubnaya Square the friends turned off to Grachevka Street and soon entered the lane which Vassilyev knew of only by hearsay. Seeing two rows of houses with brightly lit windows and wide-open doors, hearing the merry sounds of pianos and fiddles—sounds that flew out of all the doors and mixed into a strange confusion, as if in the darkness above the roofs an invisible orchestra were tuning up. Vassilyev was surprised and said:

“So many houses!”

“That’s nothing!” said the medic. “In London there are ten times more. There’s around a hundred thousand such women there.”

Cabbies sat on their boxes as calmly and indifferently as in all lanes; the same people walked along the sidewalks as on other streets. No one hurried, no one hid his face in his collar, no one shook his head reproachfully…And in this indifference, in the sonorous confusion of pianos and fiddles, in the bright windows, in the wide-open doors, one felt something quite overt, brazen, bold, and sweeping. In the old days it must have been just as merry and noisy at the slave markets, and people’s faces and gaits must have expressed the same indifference.

“Let’s begin right from the beginning,” said the artist.

The friends entered a narrow corridor lit by a lamp with a reflector. When they opened the door to the front hall, a man in a black frock coat, with an unshaven lackey face and sleepy eyes, rose lazily from a yellow divan. It smelled like a laundry and of vinegar as well. From the front hall, the door led to a brightly lit room. The medic and the artist stopped in the doorway and, craning their necks, both looked in at once.

“Bona-serra, signori, rigoletto-ugonotti-traviata!” the artist began, bowing theatrically.

“Havanna-tarakana-pistoletto!” said the medic, pressing his hat to his chest and making a low bow.

Vassilyev stood behind them. He, too, would have liked to make a theatrical bow and say something silly, but he merely smiled, felt an awkwardness that resembled shame, and waited impatiently for what would follow. In the doorway appeared a little blonde of seventeen or eighteen, with bobbed hair, in a short light-blue dress with a white aiglet on her breast.

“Why are you standing in the doorway?” she said. “Take your coatses off and come in.”

The medic and the artist, still speaking Italian, went into the reception room. Vassilyev hesitantly followed them.

“Take your coatses off, gentlemen!” the lackey said sternly. “It’s not done like that.”

Besides the blonde there was another woman in the room, very plump and tall, with a non-Russian face and bare arms. She was sitting by the piano and laying out a game of patience on her knees. She paid no attention at all to the visitors.

“Where are the other young ladies?” asked the medic.

“They’re having tea,” said the blonde. “Stepan,” she shouted, “go tell the young ladies that some students have come!”

A little later a third girl came into the room. This one was wearing a bright red dress with blue stripes. Her face was made up heavily and ineptly, her forehead was hidden behind her hair, her eyes stared unblinking and frightened. On coming in, she immediately began to sing a song in a loud, crude contralto. Behind her appeared a fourth young lady, then a fifth…

In all this Vassilyev saw nothing either new or intriguing. It seemed to him that this room, the piano, the mirror in its cheap gilt frame, the aiglet, the dress with blue stripes, and these dull, indifferent faces, he had already seen somewhere, and more than once. But of the darkness, the silence, the secrecy, the guilty smile that he had expected to meet here and that frightened him, he saw not even a trace.

Everything was ordinary, prosaic, and uninteresting. Only one thing slightly aroused his curiosity—the terrible, as if purposely contrived tastelessness that could be seen in the cornices, the absurd paintings, the dresses, the aiglet. In this tastelessness there was something characteristic, distinctive.

“How poor and stupid it all is!” thought Vassilyev. “What in all this rubbish I see now can tempt a normal man, urge him to commit a terrible sin—to buy a living human being for a rouble? I can understand any sin for the sake of glamour, beauty, grace, passion, taste, but here what is there? For the sake of what do people sin here? However…better not to think!”

“Beardy, treat me to some porter!” the blonde addressed him.

Vassilyev suddenly became embarrassed.

“With pleasure…,” he said, bowing politely. “Only pardon me, ma’am, but I…I won’t drink with you. I don’t drink.”

Five minutes later the friends were already on their way to another house.

“So, why did you order porter?” the medic said angrily. “Some millionaire! To throw away six roubles just like that, for nothing, to the wind!”

“If she wants it, why not give her that pleasure?” Vassilyev justified himself.

“You gave pleasure not to her, but to the madam. The madams get them to ask for treats, because they profit from it.”

“ ‘Behold the mill…,’ ” the artist sang. “ ‘Already ’tis in ruin…’ ”

On coming to the second house, the friends only stood in the front hall, but did not go into the reception room. Just as in the first house, a figure in a frock coat and with a sleepy lackey face rose from a divan in the front hall. Looking at this lackey, at his face and shabby frock coat, Vassilyev thought: “How much must an ordinary, simple Russian man live through before fate brings him here as a lackey? Where was he before, and what did he do? What awaits him? Is he married? Where is his mother, and does she know that he works here as a lackey?” And now in each house Vassilyev involuntarily paid attention first of all to the lackey. In one of the houses, the fourth in line it seemed, the lackey was a small, scrawny, dried-up man with a watch chain on his waistcoat. He was reading The Leaflet⁴ and paid no attention to the men coming in. Looking at his face, Vassilyev thought for some reason that a man with such a face could steal, and kill, and lie under oath. And in fact the face was interesting: a big forehead, gray eyes, a flattened little nose, thin, tight lips, and a dull and at the same time insolent expression, like a young hound chasing down a hare. Vassilyev thought it would be nice to touch this lackey’s hair: was it stiff or soft? Most likely stiff, like a dog’s.

III

The artist, having tossed off two glasses of porter, somehow suddenly became drunk and unnaturally animated.

“Let’s go to another!” he commanded, waving his arms. “I’ll take you to the best one!”

Having brought his friends to the house which in his opinion was the best, he expressed a firm desire to dance a quadrille. The medic began to grumble about having to pay the musicians a rouble, but agreed to be his vis-à-vis. They began to dance.

The best house was just as bad as the worst one. There were the same mirrors and paintings, the same hairstyles and dresses. Looking at the furnishings and costumes, Vassilyev now saw that this was not tastelessness, but something that might be called the taste or even the style of S——v Lane, and that could not be found anywhere else, something of a piece with its ugliness, not accidental but developed over time. After having been in eight houses, he was no longer astonished by the colors of the dresses, or the long trains, or the bright bows, or the sailor suits, or the thick purplish rouge on the cheeks; he realized that here it had to be that way, that if even one of these women were to dress like a human being, or if a decent etching were hung on the wall, the general tone of the whole lane would suffer.

“How ineptly they sell themselves!” he thought. “Can they possibly not understand that vice is captivating only when it is beautiful and hidden, when it wears the cover of virtue? Modest black dresses, pale faces, sad smiles, and darkness have a stronger effect than these gaudy adornments. Stupid women! If they don’t understand it themselves, their visitors might have taught them…”

A girl in a Polish costume with white fur trim came and sat beside him.

“Nice dark-haired boy, why aren’t you dancing?” she asked. “Why are you so bored?”

“Because it’s boring.”

“Just treat me to some Lafite. Then it won’t be boring.”

Vassilyev made no reply. He kept silent, then asked:

“What time do you go to sleep?”

“Towards six.”

“And when do you get up?”

“Sometimes at two, and sometimes at three.”

“What do you do when you get up?”

“We drink coffee, then at six we have dinner.”

“And what do you have for dinner?”

“The usual things…Cabbage soup or some other, beefsteak, dessert. Our madam treats the girls well. Why are you asking all this?”

“Just to make conversation…”

Vassilyev wanted to talk with the girl about many things. He felt a strong desire to find out where she was born, whether her parents were living, and if they knew she was here; how she wound up in this house, whether she was happy and content or sad and oppressed by dark thoughts; and whether she had hopes of ever getting out of her present situation…But he simply could not think up what to begin with and how to formulate the question so as not to appear indiscreet. He thought for a long time and then asked:

“How old are you?”

“Eighty,” the young lady joked, laughing as she watched the capers the dancing artist performed with his arms and legs.

Suddenly she burst out laughing at something and uttered a long, cynical phrase, so loudly that everyone could hear it. Vassilyev was taken aback, and, not knowing what expression to give his face, forced himself to smile. He was the only one to smile; all the others—his friends, the musicians, and the women—did not even glance at his companion, as if they had not heard.

“Treat me to some Lafite,” the girl said again.

Vassilyev felt an aversion to her white fur trim and her voice and walked away from her. It now seemed stuffy and hot to him, and his heart began to pound slowly but hard, like a hammer: one! two! three!

“Let’s leave here!” he said, pulling the artist’s sleeve.

“Wait, let us finish.”

While the artist and the medic were finishing the quadrille, Vassilyev, so as not to look at the women, studied the musicians. The piano was played by a fine-looking old man in spectacles, whose face resembled Marshal Bazaine’s;⁵ the violin by a young man with a brown little beard, dressed in the latest fashion. The young man’s face was not stupid, not wasted, but, on the contrary, intelligent, young, fresh. He was dressed fastidiously and with taste, he played with feeling. A puzzle: how did he and this decent, fine-looking old man wind up here? Why weren’t they ashamed to be here? What did they think about when they looked at the women?

If the people playing the piano and violin had been bedraggled, hungry, gloomy, drunk, with wasted or stupid faces, their presence might have been understandable. Now, though, Vassilyev understood nothing. He recalled a story he had read once about a fallen woman, and he now thought this human image with a guilty smile had nothing in common with what he was seeing here. It seemed to him that he was seeing not fallen women, but some other, totally separate world, alien and incomprehensible to him; if he had seen this world earlier on the stage of a theater or read about it in a book, he would not have believed it…

The woman with the white fur trim burst out laughing again and loudly uttered a repulsive phrase. A squeamish feeling came over him. He blushed and left the room.

“Wait, we’re coming too!” the artist called after him.

IV

“Just now, while we were dancing, I had a conversation with my partner,” the medic said, when all three of them came outside. “It was about her first romance. He, her hero, was some kind of bookkeeper in Smolensk, who had a wife and five children. She was seventeen and lived with her father and mother, who traded in soap and candles.”

“How did he win over her heart?” asked Vassilyev.

“He bought her fifty roubles’ worth of underwear. What the hell!”

“Anyhow he managed to worm her romance out of his partner,” Vassilyev thought about the medic. “And I don’t know how…”

“Gentlemen, I’m going home!” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know how to behave here. Besides, I’m bored and disgusted. Where’s the fun of it? If only they were human beings, but they’re savages and animals. I’m leaving, do as you like.”

“Now, Grisha, Grigory, dear heart…,” said the artist in a tearful voice, snuggling up to Vassilyev. “Come on! We’ll go to one more, and curse them all…Please! Grigoriants!”

They talked Vassilyev into it and led him up the stairs. In the carpeting, in the gilt banisters, in the porter who opened the door, and in the panels that decorated the front hall, the same S——v Lane style could be felt, but improved, more impressive.

“Really, I’m going home!” Vassilyev said, taking off his coat.

“Now, now, dear heart…,” said the artist, kissing him on the neck. “Don’t throw a tantrum…Be a good friend, Gri-Gri! We’ve come together, and we’ll leave together. What a brute you are, really.”

“I can wait for you outside. By God, it disgusts me here.”

“Now, now, Grisha…It disgusts you, but just observe it! Understand? Observe!”

“One must look at things objectively,” the medic said seriously.

Vassilyev went into the reception room and sat down. Besides him and his two friends, there were many visitors in the room: two infantry officers, a gray-haired and balding gentleman in gold-rimmed spectacles, two moustacheless students from the land-surveying institute, and a very drunk man with an actor’s face. The girls were all occupied with these visitors and paid no attention to Vassilyev. Only one of them, dressed like Aïda,⁶ glanced sideways at him, smiled at something, and said, yawning:

“Here’s a dark-haired boy…”

Vassilyev’s heart was pounding and his face was burning. He felt ashamed before the visitors for his presence there, and also disgusted and tormented. He was tormented by the thought that he, a decent and affectionate man (as he had considered himself until then), hated these women and felt nothing but loathing for them. He was not sorry for these women, or for the musicians, or for the lackeys.

“It’s because I’m not trying to understand them,” he thought. “They all resemble animals more than people, but still they are people, they have souls. I must understand them and only then judge them…”

“Grisha, don’t go, wait for us!” the artist shouted and disappeared.

Soon the medic also disappeared.

“Yes, I must try to understand, not do like this…,” Vassilyev went on thinking.

And he started peering intently into each woman’s face and searching for a guilty smile. But either he did not know how to read faces, or none of these women felt any guilt: on each face he read only a dull expression of humdrum, banal boredom and contentment. Stupid eyes, stupid smiles, sharp, stupid voices, insolent gestures—and nothing else. Apparently each of them in the past had a romance with a bookkeeper and fifty roubles of underwear, and in the present no delight in life except coffee, a three-course dinner, wine, the quadrille, and sleeping until two in the afternoon…

Not finding a single guilty smile, Vassilyev began to search for an intelligent face. And his attention fixed on a pale, slightly sleepy, tired face…It was a brunette, no longer young, dressed in an outfit covered with sequins; she was sitting in an armchair, looking down and thinking about something. Vassilyev walked back and forth and, as if accidentally, sat down beside her.

“I should begin with something banal,” he thought, “and then gradually go on to the serious…”

“What a pretty little outfit you have,” he said and touched the golden fringe of her shawl with his finger.

“I wear what I’ve got…,” the brunette said listlessly.

“What province are you from?”

“Me? From far away…Chernigov.”

“That’s a good province. Life’s good there.”

“It’s always good where we’re not.”

“A pity I’m not able to describe nature,” Vassilyev thought. “I could move her by descriptions of nature in Chernigov. She must love it, since she was born there.”

“Are you bored here?” he asked.

“Of course I’m bored.”

“Why don’t you leave this place, if you’re bored?”

“Where should I go? Begging, or something?”

“Begging is better than living here.”

“How do you know? Do you beg?”

“I did, when I couldn’t pay for my schooling. But even if I didn’t beg, it’s clear anyway. A beggar, whatever else, is a free man, and you’re a slave.”

The brunette stretched and followed with her sleepy eyes a waiter who was carrying glasses and seltzer water on a tray.

“Treat me to some porter,” she said and yawned again.

“Porter…,” thought Vassilyev. “And what if your brother or your mother came in here now? What would you say? And what would they say? There’d be porter then, I can just picture it…”

Suddenly he heard weeping. A fair-haired gentleman with a red face and angry eyes quickly came out of the room where the lackey had carried the seltzer water. He was followed by the tall, plump madam, who was shouting in a shrill voice:

“No one has allowed you to slap girls in the face! We have better visitors than you, and they don’t go hitting people! Charlatan!”

A row ensued. Vassilyev became frightened and turned pale. In the next room someone was sobbing, genuinely, as an insulted person does. And he realized that in fact people lived here, real people, who, as everywhere, get insulted, suffer, weep, ask for help…The intense hatred and feeling of disgust gave way to a sharp feeling of pity and anger at the offender. He rushed to the room where the weeping came from; behind the row of bottles that stood on the marble tabletop, he made out a suffering, tear-drenched face, reached his arms out to it, took a step towards the table, but recoiled at once in horror. The weeping girl was drunk.

Making his way through the noisy crowd that surrounded the fair-haired man, he lost heart, turned chicken like a little boy, and it seemed to him that in this alien, incomprehensible world he would be hunted down, beaten, showered with dirty words…He tore his coat from the rack and rushed headlong down the stairs.

V

Pressing against the fence, he stood by the house waiting for his comrades to come out. The sounds of pianos and fiddles, merry, rollicking, impudent, and sad, mingled in the air into a sort of chaos, and this mingling as before resembled an invisible orchestra tuning up in the darkness above the roofs. If you looked up into this darkness, the whole black background was speckled with white, moving dots: it was snowing. Snowflakes, falling into the light, circled lazily in the air like down, and still more lazily fell to the ground. Snow whirled densely around Vassilyev and clung to his beard, eyelashes, eyebrows…The cabbies, the horses, the passersby were white.

“How can it snow in this lane?” Vassilyev thought. “Curse these houses!”

His legs, weary from having run down the stairs, were giving way under him; he was breathless, as if he had been climbing a mountain; his heart was pounding so hard he could hear it. He was tormented by the desire to get out of the lane quickly and go home, but he wanted still more to wait for his comrades and vent his painful feeling on them.

There was much in those houses he did not understand, the souls of the perishing women still remained a mystery to him, but it was clear to him that things were much worse than one might have thought. If that guilty woman who had poisoned herself was called fallen, then it was hard to find a suitable name for all the ones who were now dancing to that muddle of sounds and uttering long, repulsive phrases. They were not perishing, they had already perished.

“There is vice,” he thought, “but there is no consciousness of guilt or hope for salvation. They are bought and sold, drowned in wine and vileness, but, like sheep, they are dumb, indifferent, and without understanding. My God, my God!”

It was also clear to him that here everything that is called human dignity, personhood, the image and likeness of God, is defiled to its very foundation, “totaled,” as drunkards say, and that the fault for it was not only with the lane and the stupid women.

A crowd of students, white with snow, went past him, laughing and talking merrily. One of them, tall and thin, stopped, looked into Vassilyev’s face, and said in a drunken voice:

“One of ours! Smashed, brother? A-ha-ha, brother! Never mind, live it up! Go on! Keep at it, old boy!”

He took Vassilyev by the shoulders and pressed his wet, cold moustache to his cheeks, then slipped, staggered, and, waving both arms, cried:

“Hold on! Don’t fall!”

And, laughing, he ran to catch up with his comrades.

Through the noise the artist’s voice was heard:

“Don’t you dare beat women! I won’t allow it, devil take you! What scoundrels!”

The medic appeared in the doorway of the house. He looked around and, seeing Vassilyev, said in alarm:

“You’re here? Listen, by God, it’s decidedly impossible to go anywhere with Egor! I don’t understand what got into him! He started a scandal! Do you hear? Egor!” he shouted into the doorway. “Egor!”

“I won’t allow you to beat women!” the artist’s piercing voice came from above.

Something heavy and bulky rolled down the stairs. It was the artist flying down headlong. He had obviously been thrown out.

He got up from the ground, dusted off his hat, and with an angry, indignant face shook his fist up the stairs and shouted:

“Scoundrels! Butchers! Bloodsuckers! I won’t allow it! To beat a weak, drunken woman! Ahh, you…”

“Egor…Come on, Egor…” the medic started pleading. “I give you my word of honor, I’ll never go with you again. Word of honor!”

The artist gradually calmed down, and the friends went home.

“ ‘Without my will to these sad shores,’ ” the medic began to sing, “ ‘a mysterious force doth draw me…’ ”

“ ‘Behold the mill…’ ” the artist joined in a little later. “ ‘Already ’tis in ruin…’ Holy Mother, the snow’s really pouring down! Grishka, why did you leave? You’re a coward, an old woman, and nothing more.”

Vassilyev walked behind his friends, looked at their backs, and thought:

“One of two things: either it only seems to us that prostitution is evil, and we exaggerate, or, if prostitution is in fact as evil as we commonly think, then these dear friends of mine are as much slave-owners, rapists, and murderers as those residents of Syria and Cairo portrayed in Niva.⁷ Now they sing, laugh, reason sensibly, but didn’t they just exploit hunger, ignorance, and stupidity? They did—I witnessed it. What has their humaneness, medicine, art got to do with it? The learning, art, and lofty feelings of these murderers remind me of a joke about lard. Two robbers killed a beggar in the forest. They started dividing up his clothes and found a piece of pork lard in his bag. ‘What luck,’ says the one, ‘let’s have a bite.’ ‘No, how can we?’ the other says in horror. ‘Have you forgotten it’s Wednesday?’⁸ And they didn’t eat it. Having killed a man, they left the forest convinced that they were good observers of the fast. The same with these two: they buy women, and go off thinking they’re artists and scholars…”

“Listen, you two!” he said angrily and sharply. “Why do you come here? Don’t you understand how terrible it is? Your medicine says that each of these women dies prematurely of consumption or something else; art tells us that morally she dies even before that. Each of them dies, because in the course of her life she receives an average of, let’s say, five hundred men. Each woman is killed by five hundred men. And you are among those five hundred! Now, if you both go to this and other similar places two hundred and fifty times in your life, the two of you will have killed one woman! Isn’t that clear? Isn’t that terrible? The two of you, or three, or five, kill one stupid, hungry woman! Ah, my God, isn’t that terrible?”

“I just knew it would end like this,” the artist said, wincing. “We should have nothing to do with this fool and blockhead! So you think you’ve got great thoughts and ideas in your head now? No, devil knows what, only not ideas! You’re looking at me now with hatred and disgust, but in my opinion you’d do better to build twenty more of these houses than look like that. There’s more vice in this look of yours than in this whole lane! Let’s go, Volodya, to hell with him! A fool, a blockhead, and nothing more…”

“We human beings do kill each other,” the medic said. “It’s immoral, of course, but philosophy won’t help here. Goodbye!”

At Trubnaya Square the friends said goodbye and parted. Left alone, Vassilyev walked quickly down the boulevard. He was afraid of the darkness, afraid of the snow that poured down in big flakes and seemed intent on covering the whole world; he was afraid of the streetlamps, palely glimmering through the billows of snow. His soul was seized by an unaccountable, fainthearted fear. There were some rare passersby, but he timorously avoided them. It seemed to him that women, only women, were coming from everywhere and looking at him from everywhere…

“It’s beginning,” he thought. “The breakdown is beginning…”

VI

At home he lay on the bed and said, shuddering all over:

“Alive! Alive! My God, they’re alive!”

He fantasized, trying very hard to imagine to himself now the brother of the fallen woman, now her father, now the fallen woman herself, with her painted cheeks, and it all horrified him.

It seemed to him for some reason that he had to resolve this question immediately, at all costs, and that it was not someone else’s question, but his own. With great effort, he overcame his despair and, sitting on his bed, holding his head in his hands, began to think: how to save all the women he had seen that day? As an educated man, he knew the method for resolving various questions very well. And, agitated as he was, he held strictly to this method. He recalled the history of the question, the literature about it, and by three o’clock he was already pacing up and down trying to remember all the attempts put into practice at the present time for saving women. He had a great many good friends and acquaintances who lived in the furnished rooms of Falzfein, Galyashkin, Nechaev, Echkin. Among them were not a few honest and self-sacrificing men. Some of them had attempted to save women…

“All of these not very numerous attempts,” thought Vassilyev, “can be divided into three groups. Some, having bought a woman out of the brothel, would rent her a room, buy her a sewing machine, and she would become a seamstress. And having bought her out, willy-nilly, he made her his kept woman; then, on finishing his studies, he would leave and hand her over to some other decent man, like some sort of object. And the fallen woman remained fallen. Others, having bought her out, also rented her a furnished room, bought the inevitable sewing machine, and set about on literacy, sermonizing, reading books. The woman lived and sewed as long as it was interesting and new, but then, getting bored, she would start receiving men in secret from the preacher, or would run away and go back to where she could sleep until three o’clock, drink coffee, and have good dinners. The third group, the most ardent and self-sacrificing, took a bold, resolute step. They married. And when the insolent, spoiled, or stupid downtrodden animal became a wife, a homemaker, and then a mother, it turned her life and worldview upside down, so that in the wife and mother it was hard to recognize the former fallen woman. Yes, marriage is the best and perhaps the only way.”

“But it’s impossible!” Vassilyev said aloud and fell back on the bed. “I’m the first who couldn’t marry! For that you need to be a saint, to know no hatred and feel no revulsion. But suppose that I, the medic, and the artist overcome ourselves and get married, and they all marry us. What would be the result? The result? The result would be that while they’re getting married here, in Moscow, the bookkeeper from Smolensk will be corrupting a new batch, and that batch will swarm here to the vacant places, along with others from Saratov, Nizhni-Novgorod, Warsaw…And where to put the hundred thousand from London? From Hamburg?”

The lamp, which was running out of kerosene, began to smoke. Vassilyev did not notice it. He started pacing again and went on thinking. Now he put the question differently: What must be done so that fallen women are no longer needed? For that it is necessary that the men who buy them and do them in feel all the immorality of their slave-owning role and are horrified. The men must be saved.

“Science and the arts are obviously no help…,” thought Vassilyev. “The only solution here is to become an apostle.”

And he began to dream of how, the very next evening, he would stand at the corner of the lane and say to every passerby:

“Where are you going and for what? Have fear of God!”

He would turn to the indifferent cabbies and say to them:

“Why are you standing here? Why aren’t you indignant, outraged? You believe in God, and you know that it’s sinful, that people will go to hell for that, so why are you silent? True, they’re strangers to you, but they, too, have fathers, brothers, just as you do…”

One of his friends once said of Vassilyev that he was a talented man. There are talents for writing, acting, painting, but he had a special talent—for being human. He possessed a refined, superb sense of pain in general. As a good actor reflects other people’s movements and voices in himself, so Vassilyev could reflect other people’s pain in his soul. Seeing tears, he wept; next to a sick person, he himself became sick and moaned; if he saw violence, it seemed to him that the violence was being done to him, he became afraid like a little boy and, turning coward, ran for help. Other people’s pain chafed him, roused him, brought him to a state of ecstasy, and so on.

Whether this friend was right, I don’t know, but what Vassilyev experienced when it seemed to him that the question had been resolved was very much like inspiration. He wept, laughed, recited aloud the words he would speak the next day; he felt an ardent love for the people who would listen to him and stand beside him at the corner of the lane in order to preach; he sat down to write letters, made vows to himself…

All this was like inspiration also in that it did not last long. Vassilyev soon became tired. The London, Hamburg, and Warsaw women weighed on him in their mass as mountains weigh upon the earth; he quailed before this mass, felt at a loss; he remembered that he had no gift for words, that he was cowardly and fainthearted, that indifferent people would hardly want to listen to him and understand him, a third-year law student, a timid and insignificant man, that a true apostolic calling consisted not only in preaching, but also in acts…

When it became light and carriages were already clattering in the street, Vassilyev lay motionless on the divan staring at a single spot. He was no longer thinking about women, or men, or becoming an apostle. All his attention was concentrated on the inner pain that tormented him. It was a dull, aimless, indefinite pain, which resembled both anguish and fear in the highest degree, and also despair. He could point to where it was: in his chest, under his heart; but he had nothing to compare it with. In the past he had had a bad toothache, had had pleurisy and neuralgia, but it was all nothing compared to this inner pain. In the face of this pain, life appeared disgusting. His dissertation, an excellent piece of work, already written, the people dear to him, the saving of perishing women—all that still yesterday he had loved or been indifferent to, now, on recollection, annoyed him in the same way as the noise of the carriages, the running of the floor boys, the daylight…If right now, before his eyes, someone were to perform a deed of mercy or of outrageous violence, either would have made an equally disgusting impression on him. Of all the thoughts that lazily wandered in his head, only two did not annoy him: one, that at every moment it was in his power to kill himself; the other, that the pain would not last longer than three days. The second he knew from experience.

After lying there for a while, he got up and, wringing his hands, paced, not up and down as usual, but in a square along the walls. In passing he looked at himself in the mirror. His face was pale and pinched, his temples sunken, his eyes had become bigger, darker, more fixed, as if they were someone else’s, and expressed an unbearable inner suffering.

At noon the artist knocked on the door.

“Grigory, are you there?” he asked.

Receiving no answer, he stood for a minute, pondered, and answered himself in Ukrainian:

“Nobody. Went off to the university, curse him.”

And he left. Vassilyev lay down on the bed and, hiding his head under the pillow, began to weep from pain, and the more his tears flowed, the more terrible his inner pain became. When it grew dark, he remembered about the tormenting night ahead of him, and was overcome by terrible despair. He quickly got dressed, ran out of his room, and, leaving his door wide open, with no need or purpose went outside. Not asking himself where to go, he walked quickly along Sadovaya Street.

Snow poured down as the day before; it was a thaw. Thrusting his hands into his sleeves, trembling and afraid of noises, of horsecar bells, and of passersby, Vassilyev went along Sadovaya to the Sukharev Tower, then to the Red Gate, and from there turned onto Basmannaya Street. He stopped at a pot-house and drank a big glass of vodka, but felt no better for that. On reaching Razgulyai, he turned right and set off along lanes he had never been on in his life before. He came to the old bridge where the Yauza flows and from where you can see long rows of lights in the windows of the Red Barracks. To divert his inner pain with some new sensation or a different pain, not knowing what to do, weeping and trembling, Vassilyev unbuttoned his overcoat and his frock coat and offered his bared chest to the wet snow and wind. But that also did not lessen the pain. Then he bent over the railing of the bridge and looked down at the black, turbulent Yauza, and he felt like throwing himself down headlong, not out of revulsion for life, not to commit suicide, but at least to hurt himself and divert one pain with another. But the black water, the darkness, the deserted banks covered with snow, were frightening. He shuddered and went on. He went along the Red Barracks, then back and descended into some sort of grove, from the grove to the bridge again…

“No, home, home!” he thought. “At home it seems better…”

And he went back. On returning home, he tore off his wet overcoat and hat, began to pace along the walls, and went on pacing tirelessly until morning.

VII

When the artist and the medic came to see him the next day, he rushed about the room, in a torn shirt and with bitten hands, groaning with pain.

“For God’s sake!” he sobbed, seeing his friends. “Take me wherever you like, do whatever you know, but for God’s sake save me quickly! I’ll kill myself!”

The artist turned pale and was at a loss. The medic also nearly wept, but, in the belief that medics must in all circumstances remain coolheaded and serious, said coldly:

“You’re having a breakdown. But never mind. We’ll go to the doctor right now.”

“Wherever you like, only quickly, for God’s sake!”

“Don’t get worked up. You’ve got to control yourself.”

Their hands trembling, the artist and the medic dressed Vassilyev and led him outside.

“Mikhail Sergeich has been wanting to meet you for a long time,” said the medic as they went. “He’s a very nice man and knows his business extremely well. He graduated in ’eighty-two and already has a huge practice. With students he behaves like he’s one of them.”

“Quickly, quickly…,” Vassilyev urged.

Mikhail Sergeich, a plump, fair-haired doctor, met the friends courteously, professionally, coldly, and smiled with only one cheek.

“The artist and Mayer have already told me about your illness,” he said. “I’m very glad to be of help. Well, sir? I humbly invite you to sit down…”

He seated Vassilyev in a big armchair by the desk and moved a box of cigarettes towards him.

“Well, sir?” he began, stroking his knees. “Let’s get to work…How old are you?”

He asked questions, and the medic answered them. He asked whether Vassilyev’s father had any particular illnesses, whether he was given to bouts of drinking, was notably cruel or in any way odd. He asked the same things about his grandfather, mother, sisters and brothers. On learning that Vassilyev’s mother had an excellent voice and occasionally performed in the theater, he suddenly perked up and asked:

“Sorry, sir, but can you recall whether the theater was your mother’s passion?”

Twenty minutes went by. Vassilyev was tired of the way the doctor kept stroking his knees and saying the same things all the time.

“As far as I understand from your questions, doctor,” he said, “you would like to know if my illness is hereditary. It is not.”

After that, the doctor asked whether at a young age Vassilyev had had any secret vices, head injuries, passions, oddities, particular predilections. Half the questions usually asked by diligent doctors can be ignored without any detriment to one’s health, but Mikhail Sergeich, the medic, and the artist looked as though if Vassilyev failed to answer even one question all would be lost. Receiving answers, the doctor for some reason wrote them down on a piece of paper. On learning that Vassilyev had already completed courses in natural science and was now studying law, the doctor fell to thinking…

“Last year he wrote an excellent paper…,” said the medic.

“Sorry, don’t interrupt me, you keep me from concentrating,” the doctor said and smiled with one cheek. “Yes, of course, and this plays a role in anamnesis. Intense mental effort, overstrain…Yes, yes…Do you drink vodka?” he addressed Vassilyev.

“Very rarely.”

Another twenty minutes went by. The medic began in a low voice to express his opinion about the immediate causes of the breakdown and told how two days ago he, the artist, and Vassilyev had gone to S——v Lane.

The indifferent, restrained, cold tones in which his friends and the doctor talked about the women and about the wretched lane seemed strange to him in the highest degree…

“Doctor, tell me just one thing,” he said, restraining himself so as not to be rude, “is prostitution evil or not?”

“Who’s disputing it, dear boy?” said the doctor, looking as if he had resolved all these questions for himself long ago. “Who’s disputing it?”

“You’re a psychiatrist?” Vassilyev asked rudely.

“Yes, sir, a psychiatrist.”

“Maybe you’ve all got it right!” Vassilyev said, getting up from the chair and starting to pace up and down. “Maybe so! But to me all this seems astonishing! I studied in two departments—that’s seen as a great feat; I wrote a paper which three years from now will be thrown out and forgotten, and for that I’m praised to the skies; but because I can’t speak of fallen women as coolheadedly as about these chairs, you send me to the doctor, call me crazy, feel sorry for me!”

For some reason, Vassilyev suddenly felt an unbearable pity for himself, and his comrades, and all those he had seen two days ago, and for this doctor. He burst into tears and fell back into the armchair.

The friends looked questioningly at the doctor. He, with the expression of someone who understood perfectly well his tears and his despair, as if he felt himself an expert in this line, went up to Vassilyev and silently gave him some drops to drink, and then, when he calmed down, undressed him and started testing the sensitivity of his skin, his knee reflexes, and all the rest.

And Vassilyev felt better. On leaving the doctor’s office, he already felt embarrassed, the noise of the carriages did not seem so annoying, and the heaviness under his heart was getting lighter and lighter, as if it was melting away. In his hand he had two prescriptions: one for potassium bromide, the other for morphine…He had taken it all before!

Outside he stood for a while, pondered, and, saying goodbye to his friends, lazily trudged off to the university.

1889