Selected Stories

In Spring

THE SNOW HAS NOT YET melted from the earth, but the soul cries out for spring. If you have ever had the experience of recuperating from a serious illness, you know that beatific state in which your heart is filled with foreboding but you smile without reason. Nature appears to be going through just such an experience at the moment. The earth is cold, mud and snow squelch underfoot, and yet, how joyful, sweet, and gracious is the atmosphere! The air is so clear and transparent that if you were to climb up to a dovecote or a belfry you could see the entire universe, it seems, from one end to the other. The sun shines brightly, its smiling rays playing in pools of water with the sparrows. The rivulet awakes, swells, and grows murky; any day now it will begin to roar. The trees, though bare, give signs of living, breathing.

At such times it is good to take a broom or spade and drive the muddy water into gutters, to set boats to sail, or to dig your heels into the stubborn ice. It is also good to chase pigeons up into the sky, or to climb trees and catch starlings. In fact, everything is good at this happy time of year, especially if you are young and love nature, if you are not moody or hysterical, and if your work does not confine you within four walls from morning to night. But, it is not good if you are ill, if you are pining away in an office, or are in any way connected with the Muses. Yes, one should avoid having anything to do with the Muses in spring.

See how well, how splendidly, the simple people feel! Here is the gardener, Pantelei Petrovich, prematurely decked out in his wide-brimmed straw hat, and inseparable from the little cigar butt he picked up in the lane early this morning. Look, now; he stands arms akimbo before the kitchen window and tells the cook how he bought himself a pair of boots yesterday, his long, narrow frame, which won him the nickname “Stringbean,” expressing self-satisfaction and dignity. His attitude toward nature is one of superiority over her. There is something proprietary, imperious, even disdainful, in his glance, as if, while sitting in his greenhouse or rummaging in the garden, he had made some particular discovery pertaining to the vegetable kingdom, something previously unknown to the world. It would be useless to explain to him that nature is sublime, formidable, and full of wonder-working miracles, before which a proud man should bow down. It seems to him that he knows everything—all mysteries, charms, and miracles; for him lovely spring is a slave no different from his narrow-chested, emaciated wife, who sits in the shed off the greenhouse, feeding her children Lenten soup.

And the hunter, Ivan Zakharov? Wearing a thick, worn jacket, and with galoshes on his otherwise bare feet, he sits on an upturned cask near the stables, making a wadding for his gun out of an old cork. He is preparing to go hunting. Closing his eyes, he visualizes the road that he will take, the paths with water beneath the snow, the brooks; he sees a long straight row of shapely trees under which he will stand, holding his gun, straining his sharp ear, and shivering from the chill of the evening air and his pleasurable emotion. He imagines that he hears the spitting sound the woodcock makes, the peal of bells that follows vespers in the neighboring monastery. … All is well with him; he is immeasurably, unreasonably happy.

But now, let us take a look at Makar Denisych, the young man who serves General Stremoykhov as a clerk or junior manager of his estate. He earns twice as much as the gardener, wears a white shirt front, smokes two-ruble tobacco, is always well-dressed and well-fed, and has the pleasure, when meeting him, of squeezing the general’s plump white hand with the massive diamond ring on it. But, in spite of all this, how unhappy he is! He is forever at his books; his subscriptions to journals run to twenty-five rubles; and he writes and writes. … He writes every evening, he writes every day after dinner, he writes when others sleep, and he hides it all in his big trunk. On the bottom of the trunk are his neatly folded trousers and waistcoats; on top of these, a packet of tobacco with an unbroken seal, ten pillboxes, a crimson scarf, a piece of glycerine soap in a yellow wrapper, and all sorts of other things. Squeezed unobtrusively into one corner is a pile of papers covered with his handwriting, together with two or three copies of Our Province, the magazine in which his stories and correspondence have been published.

The entire district considers him a literary man, a poet. He is looked upon as someone out of the ordinary, but he is not liked. Everyone says there is something queer about the way he talks, the way he walks, and smokes.

One day, when summoned to be a witness in the district court, he irrelevantly gave his occupation as “writer,” and then blushed as though he had been caught stealing a chicken.

Here he is, slowly walking in the lane, dressed in a blue overcoat, a plush hat, and carrying a walking stick. … He takes five steps, stops and stares into the sky or at an old rook sitting in a fir tree.

The gardener stands with his hands on his hips, the hunter has a crusty look, but Makar Denisych stoops, timidly coughs, and wears a bilious expression, as though spring weighed heavily upon him, suffocating him with her beauty. His soul is brimming with timidity; instead of exultation, joy, and hope, spring engenders in him vague and troublesome desires. And now he is walking up and down, unable to decide what it is he wants. As a matter of fact, what does he want?

“Ah, good day, Makar Denisych!” He suddenly hears General Stremoykhov’s voice. “So, they haven’t brought the mail yet?”

“Not yet, Your Excellency.” Makar Denisych examines the carriage in which the jovial, robust general sits with his little daughter.

“Wonderful weather! A real spring day! Are you taking a stroll? Getting inspiration, I dare say!” But in his eyes Makar Denisych reads: “Untalented! Mediocrity!”

“Ah, my boy,” the general says as he takes up the reins, “what a beautiful little piece I read over my coffee this morning! A trifle of only two pages, but how charming! It’s a pity you don’t know French, I’d give it to you to read. …” Hurriedly, in snatches, he recounts the little story, while Makar Denisych listens uncomfortably, feeling as though he were to blame for not being the Frenchman who wrote the piece.

“I don’t understand what he sees in that!” he thinks as he watches the carriage disappear from sight. “It’s common-place, trite. My stories have much more content.”

He is gnawed by envy. Author’s egotism is a sickness of the soul; he who contracts it no longer hears the songs of birds, nor sees the sunshine and the spring; touch him but lightly on his weak spot and the whole organism contracts in pain. The infected Makar walks on and, passing through a garden gate, comes out onto the muddy road.

A high barouche rushes by with Mr. Bubentsov bobbing up and down in it.

“Hi, there, Author!” he shouts.

If Makar Denisych were merely a clerk or a junior manager, no one would dare to address him in that condescending, casual tone; but he is “a writer” he is untalented, mediocre!

Those of Mr. Bubentsov’s ilk understand nothing of art, and are even less interested in it; however, when they meet the untalented they are merciless, inexorable. They could forgive anyone except Makar, the unfortunate eccentric whose manuscripts lie in a trunk.

The gardener once broke an ancient rubber plant, and left some expensive plants to rot; the general has never done anything but live off others; Mr. Bubentsov, when he was justice of the peace, held court only once a month, and then he stuttered, talked all sorts of nonsense, and made a muddle of the law. All these things have been overlooked and forgiven, but they cannot overlook, cannot pass in silence, when they meet the untalented writer of indifferent verse and stories—they have to say something offensive.

That the general’s sister-in-law slaps her maid and makes a row like a washerwoman when she plays cards; that the priest’s wife never pays her losses; that the landowner Flyugin stole the landowner Sivobrakov’s dog—no one made anything of these matters; but the fact that not long ago Our Province returned a poor story to Makar was known throughout the whole district, and brought forth gibes, endless talk, and indignation. Now they called him “Macaco.”

If there is anything wrong about the way someone writes, they don’t try to explain why it’s “not right.” They simply say: “Again that son-of-a-bitch has written something silly!”

Makar was prevented from enjoying the spring by the thought that he was not understood, that no one wanted to understand him or was even capable of it. Somehow, it seemed to him that if he were understood everything would be perfect. But how could he be understood—talented or not—when no one in the entire district ever read anything, or read only what was better left unread? How could he make General Stremoykhov understand that his little French piece was insignificant, flat, banal, trite—how, since he never read anything other than that sort of thing?

And the women—how they irritated him!

“Ah, Makar Denisych,” they would say to him, “what a pity you weren’t in the market place today! If you could have seen what an amusing quarrel took place between two men, you would certainly have written it up!”

All this was petty, of course, and a philosopher would have disregarded it, but Makar was constantly on hot coals. He felt solitary, orphaned, with a loneliness known only to bachelors and great sinners. Never once in his entire life had he stood arms akimbo like the gardener. Occasionally, perhaps once in five years, on the road, in the woods, or in a railway coach, he met another unfortunate eccentric like himself, and looking each other in the eye, they both brightened momentarily. Long conversations followed, arguments; in their delight with each other they were carried away and laughed so much that anyone catching sight of them might have thought they had lost their minds.

But, in general, even these rare moments did not pass untainted. At first, as a joke, Makar and his new acquaintance disclaimed each other’s talent, unable to accept each other; envy, hatred, anger followed, and they parted enemies.

Thus his youth languished and wore away, without joy or love or friendship; without peace of mind; without everything, in fact, that he liked to write about during his moments of inspiration in the evenings.

And the spring passed with his youth.

—1886