The Gift

Chapter Four

A SONNET, apparently barring the way, but perhaps, on the contrary, providing a secret link which would explain everything—if only man’s mind could withstand that explanation. The soul sinks into a momentary dream—and now, with the peculiar theatrical vividness of those risen from the dead they come out to meet us: Father Gavriil, a long staff in his hand, wearing a silk, garnet-red chasuble, with an embroidered sash across his big stomach; and with him, already illuminated by the sun, an extremely attractive little boy—pink, awkward, delicate. They draw near. Take off your hat, Nikolya. Hair with a russet glint, freckles on his little forehead, and in his eyes the angelic clarity characteristic of nearsighted children. Afterwards (in the quiet of their poor and distant parishes) priests with names derived from Cypress, Paradise, and Golden Fleece recalled his bashful beauty with some surprise: the cherub, alas, proved to be pasted on tough gingerbread which was too hard for many to bite into.

Having greeted us, Nikolya again dons his hat, a gray, downy top hat, and quietly withdraws, very sweet in his homemade little coat and nankeen breeches, while his father, a kindly cleric who dabbles in horticulture, entertains us with talk of Saratov cherries, plums and pears. A whirl of torrid dust veils the picture.

As is invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary biographies, the little boy was a glutton for books. He excelled in his studies. For his first writing exercise he painstakingly reproduced: “Obey your sovereign, honor him and submit to his laws,” and the compressed ball of his index finger thus remained ink-stained forever. Now the thirties are over and the forties have begun.

At the age of sixteen he had a sufficient grasp of languages to read Byron, Eugène Sue and Goethe (being ashamed to the end of his days of his barbarous pronunciation) and already had a command of seminary Latin, owing to his father’s being an educated man. Besides this he took Polish with a certain Sokolovski, while a local orange merchant taught him Persian—and also tempted him with the use of tobacco.

Upon entering the Saratov seminary, he showed himself there to be a meek pupil and was never once flogged. He was nicknamed “the little toff,” although in fact he was not averse to general fun and games. In the summer he played dibs and took pleasure in bathing; never did he learn to swim, however, nor to fashion sparrows out of clay, nor to make nets for catching tiddlers: the holes came out uneven and the threads got tangled—fish are harder to catch than human souls (but even the souls later escaped through the rents). In winter, in the snowy darkness, a rowdy gang used to tear downhill in a huge, horse-drawn, flat sled while roaring out dactylic hexameters—and the chief of police, in his nightcap, would pull aside his curtain and grin encouragingly, happy that the seminarists’ frolics would frighten off any night burglars.

He would have been a priest, like his father, and would have reached, very likely, a high rank—but for the regrettable incident with Major Protopopov. This was a local landowner, a bon vivant, a wencher, a dog lover: it was his son that Father Gavriil too hastily recorded in the parish register as illegitimate; meanwhile, it transpired that the wedding had been celebrated—without fuss, true, but honorably—forty days before the child’s birth. Dismissed from his post as member of the consistory, Father Gavriil fell into such a depression that his hair turned gray. “That’s how they reward the labors of poor priests,” repeated his wife wrathfully—and it was decided to give Nikolya a secular education. What later became of the young Protopopov—did he find out one day that because of him… ? Was he seized with a sacred thrill …? Or tiring rapidly of the pleasures of ebullient youth… withdrawing …?

Incidentally: the landscape which not long before had with wondrous languor unfolded along the passage of the immortal brichka; all that Russian viatic lore, so untrammeled as to bring tears to the eyes; all the humbleness that gazes from the field, from a hillock, from between oblong clouds; that suppliant, expectant beauty which is ready to rush toward you at the slightest sigh and share your tears; in short, the landscape hymned by Gogol passed unnoticed before the eyes of the eighteen-year-old Nikolay Gavrilovich, who with his mother was traveling in a carriage drawn by their own horses from Saratov to St. Petersburg. The whole way he kept reading a book. It goes without saying that he preferred his “war of words” to the “corn ears bowing in the dust.”

Here the author remarked that in some of the lines he had already composed there continued without his knowledge a fermentation, a growth, a swelling of the pea, or, more precisely: at one or another point the further development of a given theme became manifest—the theme of the “writing exercises” for example: already during his student days Nikolay Gavrilovich was copying out for his own benefit Feuerbach’s “Man is what he eats” (it comes out smoother in German and even better with the help of the spelling now accepted in Russian: chelovek est’ to chto est). We remark also that the theme of “nearsightedness” develops, too, beginning with the fact that as a child he knew only those faces which he kissed and could see only four out of the seven stars of the Great Bear. His first—copper—spectacles donned at the age of twenty. A teacher’s silver spectacles bought for six rubles so as to distinguish his students in the Cadet School. The gold spectacles of a molder of public opinion put on in the days when The Contemporary was penetrating to the most fabulous depths of the Russian countryside. Again copper spectacles, bought at a little trading post beyond Lake Baikal, where they also sold felt boots and vodka. The yearning for spectacles in a letter to his sons from Yakutsk territory—requesting lenses for such and such vision (with a line marking the distance at which he could make out writing). Here the theme of spectacles dims for a time…. Let us follow another theme—that of “angelic clarity.” This is how it develops subsequently: Christ died for mankind because he loved mankind, which I also love, for which I shall also die. “Be a second Savior,” his best friend advises him—and how he glows—oh, timid! Oh, weak! (an almost Gogolian exclamation mark appears fleetingly in his student diary). But the “Holy Ghost” must be replaced by “Common Sense.” Is not poverty the mother of vice? Christ should first have shod everybody and crowned them with flowers and only then have preached morality. Christ the Second would begin by putting an end to material want (aided here by the machine which we have invented). And strange to say, but… something came true—yes, it was as if something came true. His biographers mark his thorny path with evangelical signposts (it is well known that the more leftist the Russian commentator the greater is his weakness for expressions like “the Golgotha of the revolution”). Chernyshevski’s passions began when he reached Christ’s age. Here the role of Judas was filled by Vsevolod Kostomarov; the role of Peter by the famous poet Nekrasov, who declined to visit the jailed man. Corpulent Herzen, ensconced in London, called Chernyshevski’s pillory column “The companion piece of the Cross.” And in a famous Nekrasov iambic there was more about the Crucifixion, about the fact that Chernyshevski had been “sent to remind the earthly kings of Christ.” Finally, when he was completely dead and they were washing his body, that thinness, that steepness of the ribs, that dark pallor of the skin and those long toes vaguely reminded one of his intimates of “The Removal from the Cross”—by Rembrandt, is it? But even this isn’t the end of the theme: there is still the posthumous outrage, without which no holy life is complete. Thus the silver wreath with the inscription on its ribbon To THE APOSTLE OF TRUTH FROM THE INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION OF THE CITY OF kHARKOV was stolen five years later from the ironworked chapel; moreover the cheerful sacrilegist broke the dark-red glass and scratched his name and the date on the frame with a splinter of it. And then a third theme is ready to unfold—and to unfold quite fantastically if we don’t keep an eye on it: the theme of “traveling,” which can lead to God knows what—to a tarantass with a gendarme in azure uniform, and even more—to a Yakutsk sled harnessed to half a dozen dogs. Goodness, that Vilyuisk captain of the police is also called Protopopov! But for the time being all is very pacific. The comfortable traveling carriage rolls on, Nikolay’s mother Eugenia Egorovna dozes with a handkerchief spread over her face, while her son reclines beside her reading a book—and a hole in the road loses its meaning of hole, becoming merely a typographical unevenness, a jump in the line—and now again the words pass evenly by, the trees pass by and their shadow passes over the pages. And here at last is St. Petersburg.

He liked the blueness and transparency of the Neva—what an abundance of water in the capital, how pure that water was (he quickly ruined his stomach on it); but he particularly liked the orderly distribution of the water, the sensible canals: how nice when you can join this with that and that with this; and derive the idea of good from that of conjunction. In the mornings he would open his window and with a reverence still heightened by the general cultural side of the spectacle, would cross himself facing the shimmering glitter of the cupolas: St. Isaac’s, in the process of construction, was all in scaffolding—we’ll write a letter to Father about the “fired gold leaf” of the domes, and one to Grandmother about the locomotive…. Yes, he had actually seen a train—to which poor Belinski (our hero’s predecessor) had so recently looked forward when, with wasted lungs, ghastly, shivering, he had been wont to contemplate for hours through tears of civic joy the construction of the first railway station—that same station, again, on whose platform a few years later the half-demented Pisarev (our hero’s successor), wearing a black mask and green gloves, was to slash a handsome rival over the face with a riding crop.

In my work (said the author), ideas and themes continue to grow without my knowledge or consent—some of them fairly crookedly—and I know what is wrong: “the machine” is getting in the way; I must fish this awkward spillikin out of an already composed sentence. A great relief. The subject is perpetual motion.

The pottering with perpetual motion lasted about five years, until 1853, when—already a schoolteacher and a betrothed man—he burned the letter with diagrams that he had once prepared when he feared he would die (from that fashionable disease, aneurysm) before endowing the world with the blessing of eternal and extremely cheap motion. In the descriptions of his absurd experiments and in his commentaries on them, in this mixture of ignorance and ratiocination, one can already detect that barely perceptible but fatal flaw which gave his later utterances something like a hint of quackery; an imaginary hint, for we must keep in mind that the man was as straight and firm as the trunk of an oak, “the most honest of the honest” (his wife’s expression); but such was the fate of Chernyshevski that everything turned against him: no matter what subject he touched there would come to light—insidiously, and with the most taunting inevitability—something that was completely opposed to his conception of it. He, for instance, was for synthesis, for the force of attraction, for the living link (reading a novel he would kiss the page where the author appealed to the reader) and what was the answer he got? Disintegration, solitude, estrangement. He preached soundness and common sense in everything—and as if in response to someone’s mocking summons, his destiny was cluttered with blockheads, crackbrains and madmen. For everything he was returned “a negative hundredfold,” in Strannolyubski’s happy phrase, for everything he was backkicked by his own dialectic, for everything the gods had their revenge on him; for his sober views on the unreal roses of poets, for doing good by means of novel writing, for his belief in knowledge—and what unexpected, what cunning forms this revenge assumed! What if, he muses in 1848, one attached a pencil to a mercury thermometer, so that it moved according to the changes in temperature? Starting with the premise that temperature is something eternal—But excuse me, who is this, who is this making laborious notes in cipher of his laborious speculations? A young inventor, no doubt, with an infallible eye, with an innate ability to fasten, to attach, to solder inert parts together, having them give birth in result to the miracle of movement—and lo! a loom is already humming, or an engine with a tall smokestack and a top-hatted driver is overtaking a thoroughbred trotter. Right here is the chink with the nidus of revenge, since this sensible young man, who—let us not forget—is only concerned with the good of all mankind, has eyes like a mole, while his blind, white hands move on a different plane from his faulty but obstinate and muscular mind. Everything that he touches falls to pieces. It is sad to read in his diary about the appliances of which he tries to make use—scale-arms, bobs, corks, basins—and nothing revolves, or if it does, then according to unwelcome laws, in the reverse direction to what he wants: an eternal motor going in reverse—why, this is an absolute nightmare, the abstraction to end all abstractions, infinity with a minus sign, plus a broken jug into the bargain.

We—consciously—have flown ahead; let us return to that jogtrot, to that rhythm of Nikolay’s life to which our ear had already become attuned.

He chose the philological faculty. His mother went to pay her respects to the professors in order to cajole them: her voice would acquire flattering overtones and gradually she would begin to wax tearful and blow her nose. Out of all the St. Petersburg products she was most struck by articles made of crystal. Finally “they” (the respectful pronoun he used in speaking of his mother—that wonderful Russian plural which, as later his own aesthetics, “attempts to express quality by quantity”) returned to Saratov. For the road she bought herself an enormous turnip.

At first Nikolay Gavrilovich went to live with a friend, but subsequently he shared an apartment with a cousin and her husband. The plans of these apartments, as of all his other abodes, were drawn by him in his letters. The exact definition of the relations between objects always fascinated him and therefore he loved plans, columns of figures and visual representations of things, the more so since his agonizingly circumstantial style could in no way compensate for the art of literary portrayal, which for him was unattainable. His letters to his relatives are the letters of a model youth: instead of imagination he was prompted by his obliging good nature as to what another would relish. The reverend liked all sorts of events—humorous or horrible incidents—and his son carefully fed him with them over a period of several years. We find mentioned therein Izler’s entertainments, his replicas of Carlsbad—minerashki (miniature spas) at which venturesome St. Petersburg ladies used to ascend in captive balloons; the tragic case of the rowboat overturned by a steamer on the Neva, one of the victims being a colonel with a large family; the arsenic intended for mice, which got into some flour and poisoned over a hundred people; and of course, of course the new fad, table-turning—all gullibility and fraud in the opinion of both correspondents.

Just as in the somber Siberian years one of his principal epistolary chords was the assurance addressed to his wife and children—always on the same high, but not quite correct note—that he had plenty of money, please don’t send money, so in his youth he begs his parents not to worry about him and contrives to live on twenty rubles a month; of this, about two and a half rubles went on white bread and on pastries (he could not bear tea alone, just as he could not bear reading alone; i.e., he invariably used to chew something with a book: over gingerbread biscuits he read The Pickwick Papers, over zwiebacks, the Journal des Débats), while candles and pens, boot polish and soap came to a ruble: he was, let us note, unclean in his habits, untidy, and at the same time had matured grossly; add to this a bad diet, perpetual colic plus an uneven struggle with the desires of the flesh, ending in a secret compromise—and the result was that he looked sickly, his eyes had dimmed, and of his youthful beauty nothing remained except perhaps that expression of a kind of wonderful helplessness which fugitively lit up his face when a man he respected had treated him well (“he was kind to me—a youth timorous and submissive,” he later wrote of the scholar Irinarch Vvedenski, with a pathetic Latin intonation: animula vagula, blandula …); he himself never doubted his unattractiveness, accepting the thought of it but fighting shy of mirrors: even so, when preparing to make a visit sometimes, especially to his best friends, the Lobodovskis, or wishing to ascertain the cause of a rude stare, he would peer gloomily at his reflection, would see the russety fuzz which looked as if stuck onto his cheeks, count the ripe pimples—and then begin to squeeze them, and at that so brutally that afterwards he did not dare to show himself.

The Lobodovskis! His friend’s wedding had produced on our twenty-year-old hero one of those extraordinary impressions, which in the middle of the night cause a youth to sit down in nothing but his underwear to write in his diary. This exciting wedding was celebrated on May 19, 1848; that same day sixteen years later, Chernyshevski’s civil execution was carried out. A coincidence of anniversaries, a card index of dates. That is how fate sorts them in anticipation of the researcher’s needs; a laudable economy of effort.

He felt joyful at this wedding. What is more, he derived a secondary joy from his basic one (“That means I am able to nourish a pure attachment to a woman”)—yes, he was always doing his utmost to turn his heart so that one side was reflected in the glass of reason, or, as his best biographer, Strannolyubski, puts it: “He distilled his feelings in the alembics of logic.” But who could have said that he was occupied at that moment with thoughts of love? Many years later in his flowery Sketches from Life this same Vasiliy Lobodovski made a careless error when he said that his best man at the wedding, the student “Krushedolin,” looked as serious “as if he were subjecting in his mind to an exhaustive analysis certain learned works from England that he had just read.”

French romanticism gave us the poetry of love, German romanticism the poetry of friendship. The young Chernyshevski’s sentimentality was a concession to an epoch when friendship was magnanimous and moist. Chernyshevski cried willingly and often. “Three tears rolled down,” he notes with characteristic accuracy in his diary—and the reader is tormented momentarily with the involuntary thought, can one have an odd number of tears, or is it only the dual nature of the source which makes us demand an even number? “ ‘Remind me not of foolish tears that many times I shed, alas, when my repose oppressive was,’ ” writes Nikolay Gavrilovich in his diary, addressing his wretched youth, and to the sound of Nekrasov’s plebeian rhymery he really does shed a tear: “At this spot in the manuscript there is the trace of a spilled tear,” comments his son Mihail in a footnote. The trace of another tear, far hotter, bitterer and more precious, has been preserved on his celebrated letter from the fortress; but Steklov’s description of this second tear contains, according to Strannolyubski, certain inaccuracies—which will be discussed later. Then, in the days of his exile and especially in the Vilyuisk dungeon—But hold! the theme of tears is expanding beyond all reason… let us return to its point of departure. Now, for example, a funeral is being conducted for a student. In the light blue coffin lies a waxen youth. Another student, Tatarinov (who looked after him when he was ill but who had hardly known him before that) bids him farewell: “He looks long at him, kisses him, and looks again, endlessly …” The student Chernyshevski, jotting this down, is himself faint with tenderness; and Strannolyubski, commenting on these lines, suggests a parallel between them and the sorrowful fragment by Gogol, “Nights at a Villa.”

But to tell the truth… young Chernyshevski’s dreams in connection with love and friendship are not distinguished for their refinement—and the more he yields to them the more clearly comes out their fault—their rationality; he was able to bend the silliest daydream into a logical horseshoe. Musing in detail over the fact that Lobodovski, whom he sincerely admires, is developing tuberculosis, and that in consequence Nadezhda Yegorovna will remain a young widow, helpless and destitute, he pursues a particular aim. He needs a dummy image in order to justify his falling in love with her, so he substitutes for it the urge to assist a poor woman, or in other words sets his love upon a utilitarian foundation. For otherwise the palpitations of a fond heart are not to be explained by the limited means of that rough-hewn materialism, to whose blandishments he had already hopelessly succumbed. And then, only yesterday, when Nadezhda Yegorovna “was sitting without a shawl, and of course her ‘missionary’ [a plain dress] was slit a little at the front and one could see a certain part just below her neck” (a turn of phrase bearing an unusual resemblance to the idiom of literary characters in Zoshchenko’s impersonations of Soviet-bred Philistine simpletons), he had asked himself with honest anxiety whether he would have looked at “that part” in the early days after his friend’s wedding. And so, gradually burying his friend in his dreams, with a sigh, with an air of unwillingness and as if submitting to a duty, he sees himself deciding to marry the young widow—a melancholy union, a chaste union (and all these dummy images are repeated even more fully in his diary when he subsequently obtains the hand of Olga Sokratovna). The actual beauty of the poor woman was still in doubt, and the method which Chernyshevski selected in order to verify her charms predetermined the whole of his later attitude to the concept of beauty.

At first he established the best specimen of grace in Nadezhda Yegorovna: chance provided him with a living picture in an idyllic vein, albeit somewhat cumbersome. “Vasiliy Petrovich knelt on a chair facing its back; she approached and began to tilt the chair; she tilted it a little and then laid her little face against his chest… A candle stood on the tea table… and the light fell well enough on her; i.e., a half-light, because she was in her husband’s shadow, but clear.” Nikolay Gavrilovich looked closely, trying to find something that would not be quite right; he did not find any coarse features, but he still hesitated.

What should one do next? He was constantly comparing her features with the features of other women, but the defectiveness of his eyesight prevented the accumulation of the live specimens essential to a comparison. Willy-nilly he was forced to have recourse to the beauty apprehended and registered by others; i.e., to women’s portraits. Thus from the very beginning the concept of art became for him—a myopic materialist (which in itself is an absurd combination)—something subsidiary and applied, and he was now able by experimental means to test something which love had suggested to him: the superiority of Nadezhda Yegorovna’s beauty (her husband called her “dearie” and “dolly”), that is Life, to the beauty of all other “female heads,” that is Art (“Art”!).

On the Nevski Avenue poetic pictures were exhibited in the windows of Junker’s and Daziaro’s. Having studied them thoroughly he returned home and noted down his observations. Oh, what a miracle! The comparative method always provided the necessary result. The Calabrian charmer’s nose in the engraving was so-so: “Particularly unsuccessful was the glabella as well as the parts lying near the nose, on both sides of its bridge.” A week later, still uncertain whether the truth had been sufficiently tested, or else wishing to revel once again in the already familiar compliancy of the experiment, he went once more to the Nevski to see if there were not some new beauty in a shop window. On her knees in a cave, Mary Magdalene was praying before a skull and cross, and of course her face in the light of the lampad was very sweet, but how much better was Nadezhda Yegorovna’s semi-illumined face! On a white terrace over the sea were two girls: a graceful blonde was sitting on a stone bench with a young man; they were kissing, while a graceful brunette kept a lookout, holding aside a crimson curtain “which separated the terrace from the remaining parts of the house,” as we remark in our diary, for we always like to establish what relation a given detail bears to its speculative environment. Naturally Nadezhda Yegorovna’s little neck is far more pleasing. Hence comes an important conclusion: life is more pleasing (and therefore better) than painting, for what is painting, poetry, indeed all art, in its purest form? It is “a crimson sun sinking into an azure sea”; it is picturesque folds in a dress; it is the “rosy nuances which the shallow writer wastes on illuminating his glossy chapters”; it is garlands of flowers, fays, fauns, Phrynae… The further it goes the cloudier it gets: the rubbishy idea grows. The luxury of feminine forms now implies luxury in the economic sense. The concept of “fantasy” appears to Nikolay Gavrilovich in the shape of a transparent but ample-breasted Sylphide, corsetless and practically naked, who, playing with a light veil, flies down to the poetically poeticizing poet. A couple of columns, a couple of trees—not quite cypresses and not quite poplars—some kind of urn that holds little attraction for Nikolay Gavrilovich—and the supporter of pure art is sure to applaud. Contemptible fellow! Idle fellow! And indeed, rather than all this trash, how could one not prefer an honest description of contemporary manners, civic indignation, heart-to-heart jingles?

One can safely assume that during those minutes when he was glued to the shop windows his disingenuous master’s dissertation, “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality,” was composed in its entirety (it is no wonder that he subsequently wrote it right down, straight from the shoulder, in three nights; but it is more of a wonder how, even after a wait of six years, he nonetheless received a master’s degree for it).

There were languorous and dim evenings when he lay supine on his dreadful leathern couch—a thing of lumps and rents with an inexhaustible (just pull) supply of horsehair—and “my heart beat somehow wondrously from Michelet’s first page, from Guizot’s views, from thoughts of Nadezhda Yegorovna, and all this together,” and then he would begin to sing off-key, in a ululant voice—he sang “the song of Marguerite,” simultaneously thinking of the Lobodovskis’ relations with one another—and “gently tears rolled from my eyes.” Suddenly he would rise from his couch with the decision to see her immediately; it was, we imagine, an October evening, clouds flew overhead, a sour stench came from the saddlers’ and carriage-makers’ workshops on the ground floors of houses painted a dreary yellow, and merchants in smocks and sheepskin coats, keys in hand, were already locking up their stores. One bumped into him but he passed quickly by. A ragged lamplighter, his hand-cart rumbling over the cobbles, was bringing lamp oil to a bleary lamp on a wooden post; he wiped the glass with an oily rag and moved on creakily to the next—a long way off. It was beginning to drizzle. Nikolay Gavrilovich flew along with the swift gait of a poor Gogolian character.

At night he was unable to sleep for a long time, tormented by the questions: would Vasiliy Petrovich Lobodovski manage to educate his wife sufficiently so that she might be a helper to him; and in order to stimulate his friend’s feelings, should he not send, for example, an anonymous letter which would inflame her husband with jealousy? This already foretells the methods used by the heroes of Chernyshevski’s novels. Similar, very carefully calculated but boyishly absurd schemes were thought up by exiled Chernyshevski, old man Chernyshevski, for attaining the most touching objectives. Look how this theme takes advantage of a momentary lack of attention and blossoms out. Halt, roll up again. There is, in fact, no need to go so far ahead. In the student diary one can find the following example of calculation: to print a false manifesto (proclaiming the abolition of conscription) in order to stir up the peasants by a trick; but then he himself abjured it, knowing as a dialectician and a Christian that an inner rot must eat away the whole of a created structure, and that a good end, justifying bad means, will only reveal its fatal kinship with them. Thus politics, literature, painting, even vocal art, were pleasantly entwined with Nikolay Gavrilovich’s amorous emotions (we have returned to the point of departure).

How poor he was, how dirty and sloppy, how far removed from the lure of luxury… Attention! This was not so much proletarian chastity as the natural disregard with which an ascetic treats the prickle of a permanent hair shirt or the bite of sedentary fleas. Even a hair shirt, however, has at times to be repaired. We are present when the inventive Nikolay Gavrilovich contemplates darning his old trousers: he turned out to have no black thread, so what there was he undertook to soak in ink; an anthology of German verse was lying nearby, open at the beginning of William Tell. As a result of his waving the thread about (in order to dry it), several drops of ink fell on the page; the book did not belong to him. He found a lemon in a paper bag behind the window and attempted to get the blots out, but he only succeeded in dirtying the lemon, plus the windowsill where he had left the pernicious thread. Then he sought the aid of a knife and began to scrape (this book with the punctured poems is now in the Leipzig University library; unfortunately it has not been possible to ascertain how it got there). Ink, indeed, was the natural element of Chernyshevski (he literally bathed in it), who used to smear with it the cracks in his shoes when he was out of shoe polish; or else, in order to disguise a hole in his shoe, he would wrap his foot in a black tie. He broke crockery, soiled and spoiled everything. His love for materiality was not reciprocated. Subsequently, during penal servitude, he turned out to be not only incapable of doing any of a convict’s special tasks but also was famous for his inability to do anything at all with his hands (at the same time he was constantly butting in to help his fellow man: “Keep out of what does not concern you, you pillar of virtue,” the other convicts used to say gruffly). We have already glimpsed the confusedly hurrying youth being shoved on the street. He rarely grew angry; once, however, not without pride, he noted how he had revenged himself upon a young cabdriver who had caught him a blow with his shaft: wordlessly diving across the sled between the legs of two startled merchants, he tore out a tuft of his hair. In general, however, he was mild and open to insults, but secretly he felt himself capable of “the most desperate, the most crazy” actions. On the side he began dabbling in propaganda by conversing with mujiks, with an occasional Neva ferryman or an alert pastry cook.

Enter the theme of pastry shops. They have seen a good deal in their time. It was there that Pushkin gulped down a glass of lemonade before his duel; there that Sophia Perovski and her companions each took a portion (of what? history did not quite manage to …) before proceeding to the Canal Quay to assassinate Alexander II. Our hero’s youth had been bewitched by pastry shops, so that later, while on hunger strike in the fortress, he—in What to Do?—filled this or that speech with an involuntary howl of gastric lyricism: “Do you have a pastry shop in the vicinity? I wonder if they have ready-made walnut tarts—to my taste they’re the best of the tarts, Maria Alexeyevna.” But in contradiction to his future recollection, pastry shops and cafés seduced him not at all with their victuals—not with puff pastry made with rancid butter and not even with cherry-jam doughnuts; newspapers, gentlemen, newspapers, that is what they seduced him with! He tried various cafés—choosing such as had the most newspapers, or places where it was simpler and freer. Thus at Wolf’s “both last times, instead of his [read: Wolf’s] white bread I had coffee with a [read: my] five-kopeck-twist, the last time not hiding”-i.e., the first of these last two times (the punctilious detail of his diary causes an itching in the cerebellum) he hid, not knowing how they would accept pastry brought from outside. The place was warm and quiet and only now and then did a southwest little wind blowing from the newspaper pages cause the candle flames to vacillate (“disturbances have already touched the Russia entrusted to us” as the Tsar put it). “May I have the Indépendance belge? Thank you.” The candle flames straighten up, it is quiet (but shots ring out on the Boulevard des Capucines, the révolution is nearing the Tuileries—and now Louis Philippe takes to flight: along the Avenue de Neuilly, in a fiacre).

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.”

The preoccupation with enlightenment, however, had now been formed in him for the rest of his life, and from 1853 to 1862 his journalistic activities were thoroughly imbued with an aspiration to feed the lean Russian reader with a diet of the most variegated information: the portions were huge, the bread supply inexhaustible, and nuts were provided on Sundays; for while stressing how important were the meat dishes of politics and philosophy, Nikolay Gavrilovich never forgot the sweet either. From his review of Amarantov’s Indoor Magic it is clear that he had tried out this entertaining physics at home, and to one of the best tricks, namely “carrying water in a sieve,” he added his own amendment: like all popularizers, he had a weakness for such Kunststücke; nor must we forget that hardly a year had passed since by agreement with his father he had finally abandoned his idea for perpetual motion.

He loved to read almanacs, noting for the general information of the Contemporary subscribers (1855): “A guinea is 6 rubles and 47½ kopecks; the North American dollar is 1 silver ruble and 31 kopecks”; or else he would inform them that “telegraph towers between Odessa and Ochakov have been built from donations.” A genuine encyclopedist, a kind of Voltaire—with the stress, true, on the first syllable—he unstintingly copied out thousands of pages (he was always ready to embrace the rolled-up carpet of any chance subject and unfold the whole of it before the reader), translated a whole library, cultivated all genres right down to poetry, and dreamed to the end of his life of composing “a critical dictionary of ideas and facts” (which recalls Flaubert’s caricature, that “Dictionnaire des idées reçues” whose ironic epigraph—“the majority is always right”—Chernyshevski would have adopted in all seriousness). On this subject he writes to his wife from the fortress, telling her with passion, sorrow, bitterness, about all the titanic works which he will still complete. Later, during all the twenty years of his Siberian isolation, he sought solace in this dream; but then, one year before his death, when he learned of Brockhaus’s dictionary, he saw in it its realization. Then he yearned to translate it (otherwise “they would stuff it with all sorts of rubbish, such as minor German artists”), deeming that such a work would be the crown of his entire life; it turned out that this, too, had been already undertaken.

In the beginning of his journalistic pursuits, writing on Lessing (who had been born exactly a hundred years before him, and a resemblance to whom he himself admitted), he said: “For such natures there exists a sweeter service than service to one’s favorite science—and that is service to the development of one’s people.” Like Lessing, he was accustomed to develop general ideas on the basis of particular cases. And remembering that Lessing’s wife had died in childbirth, he feared for Olga Sokratovna, about whose first pregnancy he wrote to his father in Latin, just as, a hundred years before, Lessing had done.

Let us shed a little light here: on the twenty-first of December, 1853, Nikolay Gavrilovich intimated that according to knowledgeable women his wife had conceived. Her labor was difficult. It was a boy. “My sweety-tweety,” cooed Olga Sokratovna over her first-born—very soon, however, becoming disenchanted with little Sasha. The doctors warned them that a second child would kill her. Still, she became pregnant anew—“somehow in expiation of our sins, against my will,” he wrote plaintively, in dull anguish, to Nekrasov…. No, it was something else, stronger than fear for his wife, that oppressed him. According to some sources, Chernyshevski contemplated suicide during the fifties; he even seems to have drunk—what an awe-inspiring vision: a drunken Chernyshevski! There was no use hiding it—the marriage had turned out unhappy, thrice unhappy, and even in later years, when he had managed with the aid of his reminiscences to “freeze his past into a state of static happiness” (Strannolyubski), nevertheless he still bore the marks of that fateful, deadly heartache—made of pity, jealousy and wounded pride—which a husband of quite a different stamp had experienced and had dealt with in quite a different way: Pushkin.

Both his wife and the infant Victor survived; and in December, 1858, she again almost died, giving birth to a third son, Misha. Amazing times—heroic, prolific, wearing a crinoline—that symbol of fertility.

“They are intelligent, educated, kind, I know it—while I am stupid, uneducated, bad,” Olga Sokratovna would say (not without that spasm of the soul termed nadryv) in reference to her husband’s relatives, the Pypin sisters, who with all their kindness did not spare “this hysteric, this unbalanced wench with her insufferable temper.” How she used to fling the plates around! What biographer can stick the pieces together? And that passion for moving… Those weird indispositions… In her old age, she loved to recall how on a dusty, sunny evening at Pavlovsk, in a phaeton with trotter, she had overtaken Grand Duke Konstantin, suddenly throwing off her blue veil and smiting him with a fiery glance, or how she had deceived her husband with the Polish émigré, Ivan Fyodorovich Savitski, a man renowned for the length of his mustaches: “Raffy [Kanashka, a vulgar nickname] knew about it… Ivan Fyodorovich and I would be in the alcove, while he went on writing at his desk by the window.” One feels very sorry for Raffy; he must have been sorely tormented by the young men who surrounded his wife and were in different stages of amorous intimacy with her. Mme. Chernyshevski’s parties were particularly enlivened by a gang of Caucasian students. Nikolay Gavrilovich hardly ever came out to join them in the parlor. Once, on a New Year’s Eve, the Georgians, led by the guffawing Gogoberidze, burst into his study, dragged him out, and Olga Sokratovna threw a mantilla over him and forced him to dance.

Yes, one pities him—and nevertheless… Well, he could have given her a good thrashing with a strap, sent her to the devil; or even portrayed her with all her sins, wails, wanderings and innumerable betrayals in one of those novels with which he occupied his prison leisure. But no! In The Prologue (and partly in What to Do?) we are touched by his attempts to rehabilitate his wife. There are no lovers around, only reverential admirers; nor is there that cheap coquetry which led men (whom she called mushchinki, an awful diminutive) to think her even more accessible than she really was, and all one finds is the vitality of a witty, beautiful woman. Dissipation becomes emancipation, and respect for her battling husband (some respect she did feel for him, but to no purpose) is made to dominate all her other feelings. In The Prologue the student Mironov, in order to mystify a friend, tells him that Volgin’s wife is a widow. This so upsets Mme. Volgin that she bursts into tears—and likewise the heroine of What to Do?, representing the same woman, pines among giddy clichés for her arrested husband. Volgin leaves the printing office and hurries to the opera house where he carefully scans through a pair of binoculars one side of the auditorium, then the other; whereupon tears of tenderness gush from under the lenses. He came to verify that his wife, sitting in her box, was more attractive and more elegant than anyone else—in exactly the same way as Chernyshevski himself in his youth had compared Nadezhda Lobodovski with “women’s heads.”

And here we find ourselves again surrounded by the voices of his aesthetics—for the motifs of Chernyshevski’s life are now obedient to me—I have tamed its themes, they have become accustomed to my pen; with a smile I let them go: in the course of development they merely describe a circle, like a boomerang or a falcon, in order to end by returning to my hand; and even if any should fly far away, beyond the horizon of my page, I am not perturbed; it will fly back, just as this one has done.

And so: on May 10, 1855, Chernyshevski was defending at the University of St. Petersburg the dissertation with which we are already familiar, “The Relations of Art to Reality,” written in three August nights in 1853; i.e., precisely at that time when “the vague, lyrical emotions of his youth that had suggested to him considering art in terms of a pretty girl’s portrait, had finally ripened and now produced this pulpy fruit in natural correlation with the apotheosis of his marital passion” (Strannolyubski). It was at this public debate that “the intellectual trend of the sixties” was first proclaimed, as old Shelgunov later recalled, noting with discouraging naïveté that the president of the University, Pletnyov, was not moved by the speech of the young scholar whose genius he failed to perceive…. The audience, on the other hand, was in ecstasy. So many people had piled in that some had to stand in the windows. “They descended like flies on carrion,” snorted Turgenev, who must have felt wounded in his capacity of professed aesthete, although he himself was not averse to pleasing the flies.

As often happens with unsound ideas which have not freed themselves of the flesh or have been overgrown by it, one can detect in the “young scholar’s” aesthetic notions his own physical style, the very sound of his shrill, didactic voice. “Beauty is life. That which pleases us is beautiful; life pleases us in its good manifestations…. Speak of life, and only of life [thus continues this sound, so willingly accepted by the acoustics of the century], and if humans do not live humanely—why, teach them to live, portray for them the lives of exemplary men and well-organized societies.” Art is thus a substitute or a verdict, but in no wise the equal of life, just as “an etching is artistically far inferior to the picture” from which it has been taken (a particularly charming thought). “The only thing, however,” pronounced the discourser clearly, “in which poetry can stand higher than reality is in the embellishment of events by the addition of accessory effects and by making the character of the personages described correspond with the events in which they take part.”

Thus in denouncing “pure art” the men of the sixties, and good Russian people after them right up to the nineties, were denouncing—in result of misinformation—their own false conception of it, for just as twenty years later the social writer Carshin saw “pure art” in the paintings of Semiradski (a rank academician)—or as an ascetic may dream of a feast that would make an epicurean sick—so Chernyshevski, having not the slightest notion of the true nature of art, saw its crown in conventional, slick art (i.e., anti-art), which he combated—lunging at nothing. At the same time one must not forget that the other camp, the camp of the “aesthetes”—the critic Druzhinin with his pedantry and tasteless lambency, or Turgenev with his much too elegant “visions” and misuse of Italy—often provided the enemy with exactly that cloying stuff which it was so easy to condemn.

Nikolay Gavrilovich castigated “pure poetry” wherever he found it—in the most unexpected byways. Criticizing a reference book in the pages of The Contemporary (1854), he quoted a list of entries which in his opinion were too long: Labyrinth, Laurel, Lenclos (Ninon de)—and a list of entries which were too short: Laboratory, Lafayette, Linen, Lessing. An eloquent cavil! A motto that fits the whole of his intellectual life! The oleographic billows of “poetry” gave birth (as we have seen) to full-bosomed “luxury”; the “fantastic” took a grim economic turn. “Illuminations… Confetti fluttering down to the streets from balloons,” he enumerates (the subject is the festivities and gifts occasioned by the christening of Louis Napoleon’s son), “colossal bonbonnières descending on parachutes….” And what things the rich have: “Beds of rosewood… wardrobes with hinges and sliding mirrors… damask hangings… And over there the poor toiler….” The link has been found, the antithesis obtained; with tremendous accusatory force and an abundance of articles of furniture, Nikolay Gavrilovich exposes all their immorality. “Is it surprising that the seamstress endowed with good looks little by little slackens her moral principles… Is it surprising that, having changed her cheap muslin dress, washed a hundred times, for Alençon lace, and her sleepless nights of work by a bit of gutting candle for other sleepless nights at a public masquerade or at a suburban orgy she… whirling …” etc. (and, having thought it over, he demolished the poet Nikitin, not because the latter versified badly, but because being an inhabitant of the Voronezh backwoods he had no right whatever to be talking about marble colonnades and sails).

The German pedagogue Kampe, folding his little hands on his stomach, once said: “To spin a pfound of wool is more useful than to write a folume off ferses.” We too, with equally stolid seriousness, are annoyed at poets, at healthy fellows who would be better doing nothing, but who busy themselves with cutting trifles “out of very nice colored paper.” Get it clear, trickster, get it clear, arabesquer, “the power of art is the power of its commonplaces” and nothing more. What should interest a critic most is the conviction expressed in a writer’s work. Volynski and Strannolyubski both note a certain odd inconsistency here (one of those fatal inner contradictions that are revealed all along our hero’s path): the dualism of the monist Chernyshevski’s aesthetics—where “form” and “content” are distinct, with “content” pre-eminent—or, more exactly, with “form” playing the role of the soul and “content” the role of the body; and the muddle is augmented by the fact that this “soul” consists of mechanical components, since Chernyshevski believed that the value of a work was not a qualitative but a quantitative concept, and that “if someone were to take some miserable, forgotten novel and carefully cull all its flashes of observation, he would collect a fair number of sentences that would not differ in worth from those constituting the pages of works we admire.” Even more: “It is sufficient to take a look at the trinkets fabricated in Paris, at those elegant articles of bronze, porcelain and wood, in order to understand how impossible it is nowadays to draw a line between an artistic and an unartistic product” (this elegant bronze explains a lot).

Like words, things also have their cases. Chernyshevski saw everything in the nominative. Actually, of course, any genuinely new trend is a knight’s move, a change of shadows, a shift that displaces the mirror. A serious man, moderate, respecting education, art and crafts, a man who has accumulated a profusion of values in the sphere of thought—who perhaps has shown a fully progressive discrimination during the period of their accumulation but now has no desire whatsoever for them to be suddenly subjected to a reconsideration—such a man is much more angered by irrational innovation than by the darkness of antiquated ignorance. Thus Chernyshevski, who like the majority of revolutionaries was a complete bourgeois in his artistic and scientific tastes, was enraged by “the squaring of boots” or “the extraction of cubic roots from boot tops.” “All Kazan knew Lobachevski,” he wrote to his sons from Siberia in the seventies, “all Kazan was of the unanimous opinion that the man was a complete fool…. What on earth is ‘the curvature of a ray’ or ‘curved space’? What is ‘geometry without the axiom of parallel lines’? Is it possible to write Russian without verbs? Yes, it is—for a joke. Whispers, timid respiration, trills of nightingale. Written by a certain Fet, a well-known poet in his time. An idiot with few peers. He wrote this seriously, and people laughed at him till their sides ached.” (Fet he detested as he also did Tolstoy; in 1856, while buttering up Turgenev—whom he wanted in The Contemporary—he wrote him “that no ‘Youth’s’ [Tolstoy’s Childhood and Adolescence] nor even Fet’s poetry… can sufficiently vulgarize the public for its not being able to …”—there follows a vulgar compliment.)

Once in 1855, when expatiating on Pushkin and wishing to give an example of “a senseless combination of words,” he hastily cited a “blue sound” of his own invention—prophetically calling down upon his own head Blok’s “blue-ringing hour” that was to chime half a century later. “A scientific analysis shows the absurdity of such combinations,” he wrote, unaware of the physiological fact of “colored hearing.” “Isn’t it all the same,” he asked (of the reader in Bakhmuchansk or Novomirgorod, who joyfully agreed with him), “whether we have a blue-finned pike or [as in a Derzhavin poem] a pike with a blue fin [of course the second, we would have cried—that way it stands out better, in profile!], for the genuine thinker has no time to worry about such matters, especially if he spends more time in the public square than he does in his study?” The “general outline” is another matter. It was a love of generalities (encyclopedias) and a contemptuous hatred of particularities (monographs) which led him to reproach Darwin for being puerile and Wallace for being inept (“… all these learned specialties, from the study of butterfly wings to the study of Kaffir dialects”). Chernyshevski had on the contrary a dangerously wide range, a kind of reckless and self-confident “anything-will-do” attitude which casts a doubtful shadow over his own specialized work. “The general interest,” however, was given his own interpretation: his premise was that the reader was most of all interested in the “productive” side of things. Reviewing a magazine (in 1855), he praises such items as “The Thermometric Condition of the Earth” and “Russian Coalfields,” while decisively rejecting as too special the only article one would want to read, “The Geographical Distribution of the Camel.”

Extraordinarily indicative in respect of all this is Chernyshevski’s attempt to prove (The Contemporary for 1856) that the ternary meter (anapaest, dactyl) is more natural to Russian than the binary one (iamb, trochee). The first (except when it is used in the making of the noble, “sacred”—and therefore hateful—dactylic hexameter) seems more natural to Chernyshevski, “more wholesome,” in the way that a bad rider thinks a gallop is “simpler” than trotting. The point, however, was not so much in this as in that “general rule” to which he subjected everything and everyone. Confused by the rhythmic emancipation of Nekrasov’s broad-rolling verse and by Koltsov’s elementary anapaests (“Why asleep, muzhichyók?”) Chernyshevski scented something democratic in the ternary meter, something which charmed the heart, something “free” but also didactic, as opposed to the aristocratic air of the iamb: he believed that poets who wished to convince should use the anapaest. However, this was not all: in Nekrasov’s ternary verse it happens especially often that one-syllable or two-syllable words occur in the unstressed parts of the feet and lose their accentual individuality, while their collective rhythm on the other hand is heightened: the parts are sacrificed to the whole (as for instance in the anapaestic line “Volga, Vólga, in spring overflówing” where the first “Volga” occupies the two depressions of the first foot: Volga Vól). All I have just said is nowhere, of course, examined by Chernyshevski himself, but it is curious that in his own verses, produced by him during the Siberian nights, in that terrible ternary meter whose very shoddiness has a tang of madness about it, Chernyshevski unwittingly parodies Nekrasov’s device and carries it to absurdity by cramming into the depressions two-syllable words normally accented not on the first syllable (as “Volga”) but on the second, and doing it thrice in one line—surely a record: “Remote hills, remote pálms, surprised gírl of the nórth” (verses to his wife, 1875). Let us repeat: all this leaning toward a line created in the image and likeness of definite socio-economic gods was unconscious on Chernyshevski’s part, but it is only by making this tendency clear that one can understand the true background of his strange theory. With all this he had no understanding of the real, violinic essence of the anapaest; neither did he understand the iamb, the most flexible of all measures when it comes to transforming stresses into scuds, into those rhythmical deviations from the meter which according to his memories from the seminary seemed to Chernyshevski unlawful; finally he did not understand the rhythm of Russian prose; it is only natural, therefore, that the very method he applied to prove his theory had its revenge on him: in the passages of prose he quoted he divided the number of syllables by the number of stresses and got the result of three, not the two he would have got, he said, had the binary meter been more becoming to the Russian language; but he did not take into account the main thing: the paeons! For in the very passages he quotes, whole pieces of sentences follow the scudded rhythm of blank verse, the most blue-blooded of all meters; i.e., precisely the iamb!

I am afraid that the cobbler who visited Apelles’ studio and criticized what he did not understand was a mediocre cobbler. Is all really well from the mathematical point of view in those learned economic works of his, whose analysis demands an almost superhuman curiosity on the part of the investigator? Are they really deep, those commentaries of his on Mill (in which he strove to reconstruct certain theories “in keeping with the new plebeian element in thought and life”)? Do all the boots he made really fit? Or is it merely an old man’s coquetry which prompts him twenty years later to recall complacently the errors in his logarithmic calculations concerning the effect of certain agricultural improvements on the grain harvest? Sad, all of this, very sad. Our overall impression is that materialists of this type fell into a fatal error: neglecting the nature of the thing itself, they kept applying their most materialistic method merely to the relations between objects, to the void between objects and not to the objects themselves; i.e., they were the naïvest of metaphysicians precisely at that point where they most wanted to be standing on the ground.

Once in his youth there had been an unfortunate morning: he was called on by a book peddler he knew, old, long-nosed Vasiliy Trofimovich, bent like a babajaga beneath the weight of a huge canvas sack full of prohibited and semiprohibited books. Not knowing foreign languages, hardly able to spell out Roman letters and weirdly pronouncing the titles in a thick peasant way, he guessed instinctively the degree of seditiousness of this or that German. That morning he sold Nikolay Gavrilovich (both of them squatting on their haunches beside a pile of books) a still uncut volume of Feuerbach.

In those days Andrey Ivanovich Feuerbach was preferred to Egor Fyodorovich Hegel. Homo feuerbachi is a cogitating muscle. Andrey Ivanovich found that man differs from the ape only in his point of view; he could hardly, however, have studied the apes. A half-century after him Lenin refuted the theory that “the earth is the sum of human sensations” with “the earth existed before man did”; and to his trade announcement: “We now turn Kant’s unknowable ‘thing in itself,’ into a ‘thing for us,’ by means of organic chemistry,” he added quite seriously that “since alizarin has existed in coal without our knowledge, then things must exist independently of our cognition.” Similarly, Chernyshevski explained: “We see a tree; another man looks at the same object. We see by the reflection in his eyes that his image of the tree looks exactly the same as our tree. Thus we all see objects as they really exist.” All this wild rubbish has its own private hilarious twist: the “materialists’ ” constant appeal to trees is especially amusing because they are all so badly acquainted with nature, particularly with trees. That tangible object which according to Chernyshevski “acts much more strongly than the abstract concept of it” (the Anthropological Principle in Philosophy) is simply beyond their ken. Look what a terrible abstraction resulted, in the final analysis, from “materialism”! Chernyshevski did not know the difference between a plow and the wooden soha; he confused beer with Madeira; he was unable to name a single wild flower except the wild rose; and it is characteristic that this deficiency of botanical knowledge was immediately made up by a “generalization” when he maintained with the conviction of an ignoramus that “they [the flowers of the Siberian taiga] are all just the same as those which bloom all over Russia!” There lurks a secret retribution in the fact that he who had constructed his philosophy on a basis of knowing the world was now placed, naked and alone, amidst the bewitched, strangely luxuriant, and still incompletely described nature of northeast Siberia: an elemental, mythological punishment which had not been taken into account by his human judges.

Only a few years earlier the smell of Gogol’s Petrushka had been explained away by the fact that everything existing was rational. But the time for hearty Russian Hegelianism was now past. The molders of opinion were incapable of understanding Hegel’s vital truth: a truth that was not stagnant, like shallow water, but flowed like blood, through the very process of cognition. The simpleton Feuerbach was much more to Chernyshevski’s taste. There is always a danger, however, that one letter will fall out of the cosmic, and this danger was not evaded by Chernyshevski in his article “Communal Ownership,” when he began to operate with Hegel’s tempting triad, giving such examples as: the gasiformity of the world is the thesis, while the softness of the brain is the synthesis; or, even stupider: a cudgel turning into a carbine. “There lies concealed in the triad,” says Strannolyubski, “a vague image of the circumference controlling all life of the mind, and the mind is confined inescapably within it. This is truth’s merry-go-round, for truth is always round; consequently, in the development of life’s forms a certain pardonable curvature is possible: the hump of truth; but no more.”

Chernyshevski’s “philosophy” goes back through Feuerbach, to the Encyclopedists. On the other hand, applied Hegelianism, working gradually left, went through that same Feuerbach to join Marx, who in his Holy Family expresses himself thus:

I have put it into blank verse so it would be less boring.

Steklov is of the opinion that with all his genius, Chernyshevski cannot rank with Marx, in relation to whom he stands as the Barnaul craftsman Polzunov stands to Watt. Marx himself (“that petty bourgeois to the marrow of his bones” according to the testimony of Bakunin, who could not stand Germans) referred once or twice to the “remarkable” writings of Chernyshevski, but he left more than one contemptuous note in the margins of the chief work on economics “des grossen russischen Gelehrten” (Marx in general disliked Russians). Chernyshevski repaid him in like coin. Already in the seventies he was treating everything new with negligence, with malevolence. He was particularly fed up with economics, which had ceased to be a weapon for him and by this token took on in his mind the aspect of an empty toy, of “pure science.” Lyatski is quite wrong when—with a passion for navigational analogies common to many—he compares the exiled Chernyshevski to a man “watching from a deserted shore the passage of a gigantic ship (Marx’s ship) on its way to discover new lands”; the expression is especially unfortunate in view of the fact that Chernyshevski himself, as if anticipating the analogy and wishing to refute it in advance, said of Das Kapital (sent to him in 1872): “I glanced through but didn’t read it; I tore off the pages one by one and made them into little ships [my italics], and launched them on the Vilyui.”

Lenin considered Chernyshevski to be “the one truly great writer who managed to remain on a level of unbroken philosophical materialism from the fifties right up until 1888” (he knocked one year off). Once, on a windy day, Krupskaya turned to Lunacharski and said to him with soft sorrow: “There was hardly anyone Vladimir Ilyich liked so much… I think he had a great deal in common with Chernyshevski.” “Yes, they undoubtedly had much in common,” adds Lunacharski, who had tended at first to treat this remark with skepticism. “They had in common both clarity of style and mobility of speech… breadth and depth of judgement, revolutionary fire… that combination of enormous content with a modest exterior, and finally their joint moral makeup.” Steklov calls Chernyshevski’s article, “The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy,” the “first philosophical manifesto of Russian communism”; it is significant that this first manifesto was a schoolboy’s rendering, an infantile assessment of the most difficult moral questions. “The European theory of materialism,” says Strannolyubski, rephrasing Volynski somewhat, “took on with Chernyshevski a simplified, muddled, and grotesque form. Passing scornful and impertinent judgment on Schopenhauer, under whose critical fingernail his own saltatory thinking would not have survived for a second, he recognized out of all former thinkers, by a strange association of ideas and according to his mistaken memories, only Spinoza and Aristotle, whom he imagined himself to be continuing.”

Chernyshevski hammered unsound syllogisms together; the moment he had gone the syllogisms collapsed and the nails were left sticking out. In eliminating metaphysical dualism he fell into gnoseological dualism, and having lightheartedly taken matter as the first principle, he got hopelessly lost among concepts presupposing something that creates our perception of the external world itself. The professional philosopher Yurkevich had no trouble at all in pulling him to pieces. Yurkevich kept wondering how does Chernyshevski account for the spatial motion of the nerves being transformed into nonspatial sensation? Instead of replying to the poor professor’s detailed article, Chernyshevski reprinted exactly a third of it in The Contemporary (i.e., as much as was allowed by law) and broke it off in the middle of a word, with no comment. He most definitely did not give a hoot for the opinions of specialists, and he saw no harm in not knowing the details of the subject under examination: details were for him merely the aristocratic element in the nation of our general ideas.

“His head thinks about the problems of humanity… while his hand carries out unskilled labor,” he wrote of his “socially conscious workman” (and we cannot help recalling those woodcuts in ancient anatomical atlases, where a pleasant-faced youth is depicted nonchalantly leaning against a column and showing the educated world all his viscera). But the political regime that was supposed to appear as the synthesis in the syllogism, where the thesis was the commune, resembled not so much Soviet Russia as the Utopias of his day. The world of Fourier, the harmony of the twelve passions, the bliss of collective living, the rose-garlanded workmen—all this could not fail to please Chernyshevski, who was always looking for “coherency.” Let us dream of the phalanstery living in a palace: 1,800 souls—and all happy! Music, flags, cakes. The world is run by mathematics and well run at that; the correspondence which Fourier established between our desires and Newton’s gravity was particularly captivating; it defined Chernyshevski’s attitude to Newton for all his life, and it is pleasant to compare the latter’s apple with Fourier’s apple costing the commercial traveler a whole fourteen sous in a Paris restaurant, a fact that led Fourier to ponder the basic disorder of the industrial mechanism, just as Marx was led to acquaint himself with economic problems by the question of the wine-making gnomes (“small peasants”) in the Moselle Valley: a graceful origination of grandiose ideas.

While defending communal ownership of the land because of its simplifying the organization of associations in Russia, Chernyshevski was prepared to agree to the emancipation of the peasants without land, the ownership of which would have led in the long run to new encumbrances. At this point sparks flash from our pen. The liberation of the serfs! The era of great reforms! No wonder that in a burst of vivid prescience the young Chernyshevski noted in his diary in 1848 (the year somebody dubbed “the vent of the century”): “What if we are indeed living in the times of Cicero and Caesar, when seculorum novus nascitur ordo, and there comes a new Messiah, and a new religion, and a new world? …”

The fifties are now in full fan. It is permitted to smoke on the streets. One may wear a beard. The overture to William Tell is thundered out on every musical occasion. Rumors spread that the capital is being moved to Moscow; that the old calendar is going to be replaced by the new. Under this cover Russia is busily gathering material for Saltikov’s primitive but juicy satire. “What is this talk of a new spirit in the air, I’d like to know,” said General Zubatov, “only the flunkeys have grown rude, otherwise everything has stayed the way it was.” Landowners and notably their wives began to dream terrible dreams not listed in dream books. A new heresy appeared: Nihilism. “A scandalous and immoral doctrine rejecting everything that cannot be palpated,” says Dahl with a shudder, in his definition of this strange word (in which “nihil,” nothing, corresponds as it were to “material”). Persons in holy orders had a vision: an enormous Chernyshevski strides along the Nevsky Prospect wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a cudgel.

And that first rescript in the name of the Vilno governor, Nazimov! And the Tsar’s signature, so handsome, so robust, with two full-blooded, mighty flourishes, which were to be later torn off by a bomb! And the ecstasy of Nikolay Gavrilovich: “The blessing promised to the meek and the peacemakers crowns Alexander the Second with a happiness which no other of Europe’s sovereigns has yet known….”

But soon after the provincial committees were formed, Chernyshevski’s ardor cooled: he was incensed by the self-seeking of the nobles in most of them. His final disillusionment came in the second half of 1858. The size of the compensation! The smallness of the allotments! The tone of The Contemporary became sharp and frank; the expressions “infamous” and “infamy” began pleasantly to enliven the pages of this dullish magazine.

Its director’s life was not rich in events. For a long time the public did not know his face. Nowhere was he seen. Already famous, he remained as it were in the wings of his busy, talkative thought.

Always, as was the custom then, in a dressing gown (spotted even behind with candle grease) he sat all day long in his little study with its blue wallpaper—good for the eyes—and its window overlooking the yard (a view of the log-pile covered with snow), at a large desk heaped with books, printer’s proofs and cuttings. He worked so feverishly, smoked so much and slept so little that the impression he produced was almost frightening: skinny, nervy, his gaze at once blear and piercing, his hands shaky, his speech jerky and distracted (on the other hand he never suffered from headache and naively boasted of this as a mark of a healthy mind). His capacity for work was monstrous, as was, for that matter, that of most Russian critics of the last century. To his secretary Studentski, a former seminarist from Saratov, he dictated a translation of Schlosser’s history and in between, while the latter was taking it down, he himself would go on writing an article for The Contemporary or would read something, making notes in the margins. He was pestered by callers. Not knowing how to escape from an importunate guest, he would, to his own chagrin, get more and more involved in a conversation. Leaning his elbow on the mantelpiece and fiddling with something, he would talk in a shrill, squeaky voice, but whenever his thoughts wandered, he would drawl and chew monotonously, with an abundance of “well’s.” He had a peculiar quiet chuckle (causing Leo Tolstoy to break into a sweat), but when he laughed out loud he went off into fits and roared deafeningly (at which Turgenev, hearing these roulades from afar, would take to his heels).

Such methods of knowledge as dialectical materialism curiously resemble the unscrupulous advertisements for patent medicines, which cure all illnesses at once. Still, such an expedient can occasionally help with a cold. There was quite definitively a smack of class arrogance about the attitudes of contemporary wellborn writers toward plebeian Chernyshevski. Turgenev, Grigorovich and Tolstoy called him “the bedbugstinking gentleman” and among themselves jeered at him in all kinds of ways. Once at Turgenev’s country place, the first two, together with Botkin and Druzhinin, composed and acted a domestic farce. In a scene where a couch was supposed to catch fire, Turgenev had to come out running with the cry… here the common efforts of his friends had persuaded him to utter the unfortunate words which in his youth he had allegedly addressed to a sailor during a fire on board ship: “Save me, save me, I am my mother’s only son.” Out of this farce the utterly talentless Grigorovich subsequently concocted his completely mediocre School of Hospitality, where he endowed one of the characters, the splenetic writer Chernushin, with the features of Nikolay Gavrilovich: mole’s eyes looking oddly askance, thin lips, a flattened, crumpled face, gingery hair fluffed up on the left temple and a euphemistic stench of burnt rum. It is curious that the notorious wail (“Save me,” etc.) is attributed here to Chernushin, which gives color to Strannolyubski’s idea that there was a kind of mystic link between Turgenev and Chernyshevski. “I have read his disgusting book [the dissertation]” writes the former in a letter to his fellow mockers. “Raca! Raca! Raca! You know that there is nothing in the world more terrible than this Jewish curse.”

“This ‘raca’ or ‘raka,’ ” remarks the biographer superstitiously, “resulted seven years later in Rakeev (the police colonel who arrested the anathematized man), and the letter itself had been written by Turgenev on precisely the 12th of July, Chernyshevski’s birthday …” (it seems to us that Strannolyubski is stretching it a bit).

That same year Turgenev’s Rudin appeared, but Chernyshevski attacked it (for its caricature of Bakunin) only in 1860, when Turgenev was no longer necessary to The Contemporary, which he had left as a result of Dobrolyubov’s directing a snake hiss at his “On the Eve.” Tolstoy could not tolerate our hero: “One keeps hearing him,” he wrote, “hearing that thin, nasty little voice of his saying obtuse, nasty things… as he keeps waxing indignant in his corner until someone says ‘shut up’ and looks him in the eye.” “The aristocrats turned into coarse ruffians,” remarks Steklov in this connection, “when they talked with inferiors or about people who were inferior to them socially.” “The inferior,” however, did not remain in debt; knowing how much Turgenev prized every word spoken against Tolstoy, Chernyshevski, in the fifties, freely enlarged upon Tolstoy’s poshlost (vulgarity) and hvastovstvo (bragging)—“the bragging of a thickheaded peacock about a tail which doesn’t even cover his vulgar bottom,” etc. “You are not some Ostrovski or some Tolstoy,” added Nikolay Gavrilovich, “you are an honor to us” (and Rudin was already out—had been out for two years).

The other literary reviews picked at him as much as they could. The critic Dudyshkin (in The National Commentator) huffily aimed his dudeen at him: “Poetry for you is merely chapters of political economy transposed into verse.” His ill-wishers in the mystical camp spoke about Chernyshevski’s “evil lure,” about his physical resemblance to the Devil (for instance, Prof. Kostomarov). Other journalists, of a plainer cast, like Blagosvetlov (who considered himself a dandy and despite his radicalism had as footboy a real, undyed blackamoor) talked about Chernyshevski’s dirty rubbers and German-cum-sexton’s style of dress. Nekrasov stood up for the “sensible fellow” (whom he had got for The Contemporary) with a limp smile, admitting that he had managed to lay the stamp of monotony on the magazine by stuffing it with mediocre tales denouncing bribe-taking and policemen; but he praised his colleague for his fruitful labors: thanks to him the magazine had 4,700 subscribers in 1858 and three years later—7,000. Nikolay Gavrilovich’s relations with Nekrasov were friendly but no more; there is a hint concerning some financial arrangements which displeased him. In 1883, in order to divert the old man, his cousin Pypin suggested that he should write some “portraits of the past.” Chernyshevski depicted his first meeting with Nekrasov with the meticulousness and laboriousness already familiar to us (giving a complex plan of all their mutual movements about the room including practically the number of footsteps), a detailism sounding like an insult inflicted on Father Time and his honest work, if one remembers that thirty years had elapsed since these maneuvers took place. He placed Nekrasov the poet above all others (above Pushkin, above Lermontov and Koltsov). La Traviata made Lenin weep; similarly, Chernyshevski, who confessed that poetry of the heart was even dearer to him than poetry of ideas, used to burst into tears over those of Nekrasov’s verses (even iambic ones!) which expressed everything he himself had experienced, all the torments of his youth, all the phases of his love for his wife. And no wonder: Nekrasov’s iambic pentameter enchants us particularly by its hortatory, supplicatory and prophetic force and by a very individual caesura after the second foot, a caesura which in Pushkin, say, is a rudimentary organ insofar as it controls the melody of the line, but which in Nekrasov becomes a genuine organ of breathing, as if it had turned from a partition into a pit, or as if the two-foot part of the line and the three-foot part had moved asunder, leaving after the second foot an interval full of music. As he listened to these hollow-chested verses, to this guttural, sobbing articulation—

—Chernyshevski could not help thinking that his wife should not hasten to deceive him; could not help identifying the nearness of the end with the shadow of the prison already stretching out toward him. And that was not all: evidently this connection was felt—not in the rational but in the Orphic sense—also by the poet who wrote these lines, for it is precisely their rhythm (“Oh, do not say”) that was echoed with a bizarre haunting quality in the poem he subsequently wrote about Chernyshevski:

Thus Nekrasov’s sounds were pleasing to Chernyshevski; i.e., they happened to satisfy that elementary aesthetic for which he mistook all along his own circumstantial sentimentality. Having described a large circle, having taken in many matters concerning Chernyshevski’s attitude to various branches of knowledge, and yet not having impaired for a moment our smooth curve, we have now returned with new forces to his philosophy of art. Now it is time to sum it up.

Like all the rest of our radical critics having a weakness for easy gain, he eschewed courtly compliments to lady writers, and energetically demolished Evdokia Rastopchin or Avdotia Glinka. “An incorrect and careless patter” (as Pushkin puts it) left him unmoved. Both he and Dobrolyubov flayed literary coquettes with gusto—but in real life… Well, look what was done to them, look how they were twisted and tortured with peals of laughter (water nymphs laugh thus along streams flowing close to hermitages and other places of salvation) by the daughters of Doctor Vasiliev.

His tastes were eminently solid. He was épaté by Hugo. He was impressed by Swinburne (which is not at all strange, come to think of it). In the list of books which he read in the fortress the name of Flaubert is spelled with an “o”—and, indeed, he placed him below Zacher-Masoch and Spielhagen. He loved Béranger the way average Frenchmen loved him. “For goodness’ sake,” exclaims Steklov, “you say that this man was not poetic? Why, do you not know that he would declaim Béranger and Ryleyev with tears of rapture?!” His tastes only congealed in Siberia—and by a strange delicacy of historical fate, Russia did not produce during the twenty years of his banishment a single genuine writer (until Chekhov) whose beginning he had not seen for himself during the active period of his life. From conversations with him in the eighties in Astrakhan it becomes apparent that: “Yes, sir, it is the title of count that made one consider Tolstoy ‘a great writer of the Russian land’ “; and when bothersome visitors asked him whom he thought the best living writer he named a complete nonentity: Maxim Belinski.

In his youth he noted in his diary: “Political literature is the highest literature.” In the fifties when discussing at length Belinski (Vissarion, of course), something the government disapproved of, he followed him in saying that “literature cannot fail to be the handmaiden of one or another ideological trend,” and that writers “incapable of being animated by sympathy toward what is being accomplished around us by the force of historical movement… will never in any circumstances produce anything great,” for “history does not know of any works of art that were created exclusively from the idea of beauty.” In the forties Belinski maintained that “George Sand can unconditionally be included in the roll of European poets (in the German sense of Dichter), while the juxtaposition of Gogol’s name with those of Homer and Shakespeare offends both decency and common sense” and that “not only Cervantes, Walter Scott and Cooper, as artists pre-eminently, but also Swift, Sterne, Voltaire and Rousseau have an incomparably and immeasurably greater significance in the whole history of literature than Gogol.” Belinksi was seconded three decades later by Chernyshevski (when, it is true, George Sand had already ascended to the attic, and Cooper had descended to the nursery), who said that “Gogol is a very minor figure in comparison, for example, with Dickens or Fielding or Sterne.”

Poor Gogol! His exclamation (like Pushkin’s) “Rus!” is willingly repeated by the men of the sixties, but now the troika needs paved highways, for even Russia’s toska (“yearning”) has become utilitarian. Poor Gogol! Esteeming the seminarist in the critic Nadezhdin (who used to write “literature” with three “t”s), Chernyshevski found that his influence on Gogol would have been more beneficial than Pushkin’s, and regretted that Gogol was not aware of such a thing as a principle. Poor Gogol! Why, that gloomy buffoon Father Matvey had also adjured him to renounce Pushkin….

Lermontov came off luckier. His prose jerked from Belinski (who had a weakness for the conquests of technology) the surprising and most charming comparison of Pechorin to a steam engine, shattering all who were careless enough to get under its wheels. In his poetry the middle-class intellectuals felt something of the sociolyrical strain that later came to be called “Nadsonism.” In this sense Lermontov was the first Nadson of Russian literature. The rhythm, the tone, the pale, tear-diluted idiom of “civic” verse up to and including “as victims you fell in the fateful contest” (the famous revolutionary song of the first years of our century), all of this goes back to such Lermontov lines as:

Lermontov’s real magic, the melting vistas in his poetry, its paradisial picturesqueness and the transparent tang of the celestial in his moist verse—these, of course, were completely inaccessible to the understanding of men of Chernyshevski’s stamp.

Now we are approaching his most vulnerable spot; for it has long become customary to measure the degree of flair, intelligence and talent of a Russian critic by his attitude to Pushkin. And this is how it will remain until Russian literary criticism discards its sociological, religious, philosophical and other textbooks, which only help mediocrity to admire itself. Only then will you be free to say what you please: You may then criticize Pushkin for any betrayals of his exigent muse and at the same time preserve both your talent and your honor. Upbraid him for letting one hexameter creep into the pentameters of Boris Godunov (ninth scene), for a metrical error in the twenty-first line of “The Feast During the Plague,” for repeating the phrase “every minute” (pominutno) five times within sixteen lines in “The Blizzard,” but for God’s sake stop that irrelevant chitchat.

Strannolyubski sagaciously compares the critical utterances of the sixties concerning Pushkin with the attitude to him, three decades earlier, of the chief of police Count Benckendorff or that of the director of the third section, Von Fock. In truth, Chernyshevski’s highest praise for a writer, like that of the ruler Nicholas I or the radical Belinski, was: sensible. When Chernyshevski or Pisarev called Pushkin’s poetry “rubbish and luxury,” they were only repeating Tolmachyov, author of Military Eloquence, who in the thirties had termed the same subject: “trifles and baubles.” When Chernyshevski said that Pushkin was “only a poor imitator of Byron,” he reproduced with monstrous accuracy the definition given by Count Vorontsov (Pushkin’s boss in Odessa): “A poor imitator of Lord Byron.” Dobrolyubov’s favorite idea that “Pushkin lacked a solid, deep education” is in friendly chime with Vorontsov’s remark: “One cannot be a genuine poet without constantly working to broaden one’s knowledge, and his is insufficient.” “To be a genius it is not enough to have manufactured Eugene Onegin” wrote the progressive Nadezhdin, comparing Pushkin to a tailor, an inventor of waistcoat patterns, and thus concluding an intellectual pact with the reactionary Count Uvarov, Minister of Education, who remarked on the occasion of Pushkin’s death: “To write jingles does not mean yet to achieve a great career.”

Chernyshevski equated genius with common sense. If Pushkin was a genius, he argued perplexedly, then how should one interpret the profusion of corrections in his drafts? One can understand some “polishing” in a fair copy but this was the rough work itself. It should have flowed effortless since common sense speaks its mind immediately, for it knows what it wants to say. Moreover, as a person ridiculously alien to artistic creation, he supposed that “polishing” took place on paper while the “real work”—i.e., “the task of forming the general plan”—occurred “in the mind”—another sign of that dangerous dualism, that crack in his “materialism,” whence more than one snake was to slither and bite him during his life. Pushkin’s originality filled him with fears. “Poetic works are good when everyone [my italics] says after reading them: yes, this is not only verisimilar, but also it could not be otherwise, for that’s how it always is.”

Pushkin does not figure in the list of books sent to Chernyshevski at the fortress, and no wonder: despite Pushkin’s services (“he invented Russian poetry and taught society to read it”—two statements completely untrue), he was nevertheless above all a writer of witty little verses about women’s little feet—and “little feet” in the intonation of the sixties—when the whole of nature had been Philistinized into travka (diminutive of “grass”) and pichuzhki (diminutive of “birds”)—already meant something quite different from Pushkin’s “petits pieds” something that had now become closer to the mawkish “Füsschen” It seemed particularly astonishing to him (as it did also to Belinski) that Pushkin became so “aloof” toward the end of his life. “An end was put to those friendly relations whose monument has remained the poem ‘Arion,’ ” explains Chernyshevski in passing, but how full of sacred meaning was this casual reference to the forbidden subject of Decembrism for the reader of The Contemporary (whom we suddenly imagine as absentmindedly and hungrily biting into an apple—transferring the hunger of his reading to the apple, and again eating the words with his eyes). Therefore Nikolay Gavrilovich must have been more than a little irritated by a stage direction in the penultimate scene of Boris Godunov, a stage direction resembling a sly hint and an encroachment upon civic laurels hardly deserved by the author of “vulgar driver (see Chernyshevski’s remarks on the poem “Stamboul is by the giaours now lauded”): “Pushkin comes surrounded by the people.”

“Reading over the most abusive critics,” wrote Pushkin during an autumn at Boldino, “I find them so amusing that I don’t understand how I could have been angry at them; meseems, if I wanted to laugh at them, I could think of nothing better than just to reprint them with no comment at all.” Curiously enough, that is exactly what Chernyshevski did with Professor Yurkevich’s article: a grotesque repetition! And now “a revolving speck of dust has got caught in a ray of Pushkin’s light, which has penetrated between the blinds of Russian critical thought,” to use Strannolyubski’s caustic metaphor. We have in mind the following magic gamut of fate: in his Saratov diary Chernyshevski applied two lines from Pushkin’s “The Egyptian Nights” to his courtship, completely misquoting the second one, with a characteristic (for him who had no ear) distortion: “I [he] met the challenge of delight / As warfare’s challenge met I’d have (instead of “As he would meet in days of war / The challenge of a savage battle”). For this “I’d have,” fate—the ally of the muses (and herself an expert in conditional forms), took revenge on him—and with what refined stealth in the evolution of the punishment!

What connection, it seems, could there be between this ill-starred misquotation and Chernyshevski’s remark ten years later (in 1862): “If people were able to announce all their ideas concerning public affairs at… meetings there would be no need to make magazine articles out of them”? However, at this point Nemesis is already awakening. “Instead of writing, one would speak,” continues Chernyshevski, “and if these ideas had to reach everyone who had not taken part in the meeting they could be noted down by a stenographer.” And vengeance unfolds: in Siberia, where his only listeners were the larches and the Yakuts, he was haunted by the image of a “platform” and a “lecture hall,” in which it was so convenient for the public to gather and where the latter would ripple so responsively, for, in the final analysis, he, as Pushkin’s Improvvisatore (he of the “Egyptian Nights”) but a poorer versificator, had chosen for his profession—and later as an unrealizable ideal—variations on a given theme; in the very twilight of his life he composes a work in which he embodies his dream: from Astrakhan, not long before his death, he sends Lavrov his “Evenings at the Princess Starobelski’s” for the literary review Russian Thought (which did not find it possible to print them), and follows this up with “An Insertion”—addressed straight to the printer:

Sorry, sorry, we’ve mixed everything up—got hold of an extract from Pushkin’s “The Egyptian Nights.” Let us restore the situation: “Between the platform and foremost hemicycle of the auditorium [writes Chernyshevski to a nonexistent printer], a little to the right and left of the platform, stood two tables; at the one which was on the left in front of the platform, if you looked from the middle of the hemicycles toward the platform …” etc., etc.—with many more words of the same sort, none of them really expressing anything.

“Here is a theme for you,” said Charski to the improvvisatore. “The poet himself chooses the subjects for his poems; the multitude has no right to direct his inspiration.”

We have been led a long way by the impetus and revolution of the Pushkin theme in Chernyshevski’s life; meanwhile a new character—whose name once or twice has already burst impatiently into our discourse—is awaiting his entrance. Now it is just time for him to appear—and here he comes in the tightly buttoned, blue-collared regulation coat of a university student, fairly reeking of chestnost’ (“progressive principle”), ungainly, with tiny, shortsighted eyes and a scanty Newport Frill (that barbe en collier which seemed so symptomatic to Flaubert); he offers his hand jabwise; i.e., thrusting it oddly forward with the thumb turned out, and introduces himself in a catarrhally confidential little bass: Dobrolyubov.

Their first meeting (summer 1856) was recalled almost thirty years later by Chernyshevski (when he also wrote about Nekrasov) with his familiar wealth of detail, essentially sickly and impotent, but supposed to set off the irreproachability of thought in its transactions with time. Friendship joined these two men in a monogrammatic union which a hundred centuries are incompetent to untie (on the contrary: it becomes even faster in the consciousness of posterity). This is not the place to enlarge upon the literary activities of the younger man. Let us merely say that he was uncouthly crude and uncouthly naïve; that in the satirical review The Whistle he poked fun at the distinguished Dr. Pirogov while parodying Lermontov (the use of some of Lermontov’s lyrical poems as a canvas for journalistic jokes about people and events was in general so widespread that in the long run it turned into a caricature of the very art of parody); let us say also, in Strannolyubski’s words, that “from the push given it by Dobrolyubov, literature rolled down an inclined plane, with the inevitable result, once it had rolled to zero, that it was put into inverted commas: the student brought some literature’ ” (meaning propaganda leaflets). What else can one add? Dobrolyubov’s humor? Oh, those blessed times when “mosquito” was in itself funny, a mosquito settling on someone’s nose twice as funny, and a mosquito flying into a governmental office and biting a civil servant caused the listeners to groan and double up with laughter!

Much more engaging than Dobrolyubov’s obtuse and ponderous critique (all this pleiade of radical critics in fact wrote with their feet) is the frivolous side of his life, that feverish, romantic sportiveness which subsequently supplied Chernyshevski with material for the “love intrigues” of Levitski (in The Prologue). Dobrolyubov was extraordinarily prone to falling in love (here we catch a glimpse of him playing assiduously durachki, a simple card game, with a much-decorated general whose daughter he courts). He had a German girl in Staraya Russa, a strong, onerous tie. From immoral visits to her, Chernyshevski held him back in the full sense of the word: for a long time they would wrestle, both of them limp, scrawny and sweaty—toppling all over the floor, colliding with the furniture—all the time silent, all you could hear was their wheezing; then, stumbling into one another, they would both search for their spectacles beneath the upturned chairs. At the beginning of 1859, gossip reached Chernyshevski that Dobrolyubov (just like d’Anthès), in order to cover his “intrigue” with Olga Sokratovna, wanted to marry her sister (who already had a fiancé). Both the young women played outrageous tricks on Dobrolyubov; they took him to masked balls dressed as a Capuchin or an ice-cream vendor and confided all their secrets in him. Walks with Olga Sokratovna “completely bemused” him. “I know there is nothing to be gained here,” he wrote to a friend, “because not a single conversation goes by without her mentioning that although I am a good man, nevertheless I am too clumsy and almost repulsive. I understand that I should not try to gain anything anyway, since in any case I am fonder of Nikolay Gavrilovich than of her. But at the same time I am powerless to leave her alone.” When he heard the gossip, Nikolay Gavrilovich, who entertained no illusions concerning his wife’s morals, still felt some resentment: the betrayal was a double one; he and Dobrolyubov had a frank explanation and soon afterwards he sailed to London to “maul Herzen” (as he subsequently expressed it); i.e., to give him a good scolding for his attacks on that same Dobrolyubov in the Kolokol (The Bell), a liberal periodical published abroad, but of less radical views than the endemic Contemporary.

Perhaps, however, the object of this meeting was not only to intercede for his friend: Dobrolyubov’s name (especially later, in connection with his death), Chernyshevski very skillfully handled “as a matter of revolutionary tactics.” According to certain reports from the past his main object in visiting Herzen was to discuss the publishing of The Contemporary abroad: everyone had a premonition that soon it would be closed down. But in general this trip is surrounded with such a haze and has left so few traces in Chernyshevski’s writings that one would almost prefer, in spite of the facts, to consider it apocryphal. He who had always been interested in England, he who had nourished his soul on Dickens and his mind on the Times—how avidly he should have gulped it down, how many impressions he should have garnered, how insistently he should later have kept turning back to it in memory! Actually, Chernyshevski never spoke of his journey and whenever anyone really pressed him, he would reply briefly: “Well, what’s there to talk about—there was fog, the ship rocked, what else could there be?” Thus, life itself (how many times now) refuted his axiom: “The tangible object acts much more strongly than the abstract concept of it.”

However that may have been, on the 26th June (New Style?), 1859, Chernyshevski arrived in London (everyone thought that he was in Saratov) and stayed there until the 30th. An oblique ray pierces the fog of these four days: Mme. Tuchkov-Ogaryov walks through a drawing room and into a sunny garden, carrying in her arms her year-old baby girl dressed in a little lace pelerine. In the drawing room (the action takes place in Putney, at Herzen’s house) Alexander Ivanovich is walking back and forth (these indoor walks were very much the thing in those days) with a gentleman of medium height whose face is unattractive “but illumined by a wonderful expression of self-abnegation and submissiveness to fate” (which most likely was merely a trick of the memoirist’s memory, recalling that face through the prism of a fate which had already been accomplished). Herzen introduced his companion to her. Chernyshevski stroked the infant’s hair and said in his quiet voice: “I also have some like this, but I hardly ever see them.” (He used to confuse the names of his children: little Victor was in Saratov, where he soon died, for the fate of children does not forgive such slips of the pen—but he sent a kiss to “little Sasha” who had already been brought back to St. Petersburg). “Say how do you do, give us your hand,” said Herzen rapidly, and then immediately began to reply to something that had been said by Chernyshevski: “Yes, exactly—that’s why they sent them to the Siberian mines”; while Mme. Tuchkov floated into the garden and the oblique ray was extinguished forever.

Diabetes and nephritis added to tuberculosis soon put an end to Dobrolyubov. He was dying in the late autumn of 1861; Chernyshevski paid him a daily call and from there went about his conspiratorial affairs, which were amazingly well concealed from police spies. It is generally considered that he was the author of the proclamation “To the Serfs of Landowners.” “There was not much talk,” recalls Shelgunov (who wrote the one “To the Soldiers”); and evidently not even Vladislav Kostomarov, who printed these appeals, knew with any certainty about Chernyshevski’s authorship. Their style is very reminiscent of Count Rastopchin’s corny little placards against Napoleon’s invasion: “So this is what it comes to, this thorough-true freedom…. And let courts be just and let all be alike before justice…. And what’s the sense of kicking up a ruction in one village only?” If this was written by Chernyshevski (incidentally, “bulga,” “ruction,” is a Volga word), it was in any case touched up by someone else.

According to information stemming from the People’s Freedom organization, Chernyshevski suggested to Sleptsov and his friends in July, 1861, that they form a basic cell of five—the nucleus of an “underground” society. The system consisted in every member forming, moreover, his own cell, and thus knowing only eight people. Only the center knew all the members. All the members were known only to Chernyshevski. This account does not seem free from some stylization.

But let us repeat: he was ideally cautious. After the student disorders of October, 1861, he was put under permanent surveillance, but the agents’ work was not distinguished for its subtlety: Nikolay Gavrilovich had as a cook the wife of the house janitor, a tall, red-cheeked old woman with a somewhat unexpected name: Musa. She was bribed with no trouble—five rubles for coffee, to which she was much addicted. In return Musa used to supply the police with the contents of her employer’s wastebasket.

Meanwhile, on November 17, 1861, at twenty-five years of age, Dobrolyubov died. He was buried in the Volkov cemetery “in a simple oak coffin” (the coffin in such cases is always simple) next to Belinski. “Suddenly there stepped forth an energetic, clean-shaven gentleman,” recalls a witness (Chernyshevski’s appearance was still unfamiliar), and since few people had gathered, and this irritated him, he started to speak of it with detailed irony. While he was speaking, Olga Sokratovna shook with tears, leaning upon the arm of one of those devoted students who were always with her: another, besides his own regulation cap, held the raccoon cap of the “boss,” who with his fur coat unbuttoned—in spite of the frost—took out an exercise book and began in an angry, didactic voice to read from it Dobrolyubov’s lumpy gray poems about honest principles and approaching death; hoarfrost shone on the birches; and a little to one side, next to the doddering mother of one of the gravediggers, in new felt boots and full of humility, stood an agent of the Secret Police. “Yes,” concluded Chernyshevski, “we are not concerned here with the fact that the censorship, by cutting his articles to bits, brought Dobrolyubov to a disease of the kidneys. For his own glory he did enough. For his own sake he had no reason to live longer. For men of such a cast and with such aspirations life has nothing but burning grief to offer. Honest principles—that was his fatal illness,” and pointing with his rolled-up notebook to an adjacent, empty place on the other side, Chernyshevski exclaimed: “There is not a man in Russia worthy of occupying that grave!” (There was: it was occupied soon afterwards by Pisarev.)

It is difficult to escape the impression that Chernyshevski, who in his youth had dreamed of being the leader of a national uprising, was now reveling in the rarefied air of danger surrounding him. This significance in the secret life of his country he acquired inevitably, by agreement with his epoch, a family likeness with which he himself realized. Now, it seemed, he needed only a day, only an hour’s run of luck in the game of history, one moment of passionate union between chance and destiny, in order to soar. A revolution was expected in 1863, and in the cabinet of the future constitutional government he was listed as prime minister. How he nursed that precious ardor within him! That mysterious “something” which Steklov talks about in spite of his Marxism, and which was extinguished in Siberia (although “learning” and “logic” and even “implacability” remained), undoubtedly existed in Chernyshevski and manifested itself with unusual strength just before his banishment to Siberia. Magnetic and dangerous, it was this that frightened the government far more than any proclamations. “This demented gang is thirsting for blood, for outrages,” excitedly said the reports. “Deliver us from Chernyshevski….”

“Desolation… Lone mountain ranges… A myriad lakes and marshes… A shortage of the most essential things… Inefficient postmasters… [All this] exhausts even the patience of genius.” (This is what he had copied into The Contemporary from the geographer Selski’s book on the Yakutsk province—thinking of certain things, supposing certain things—perhaps having a presentiment.)

In Russia the censorship department arose before literature; its fateful seniority has been always in evidence: and what an urge to give it a tweak! Chernyshevski’s activities on The Contemporary turned into a voluptuous mockery of the censorship, which unquestionably was one of our country’s most remarkable institutions. And right then, at a time when the authorities were fearful, for example, lest “musical notes should conceal antigovernmental writings in code” (and so commissioned well-paid experts to decode them), Chernyshevski, in his magazine, under the cover of elaborate clowning, was frenziedly promulgating Feuerbach. Whenever, in articles about Garibaldi or Cavour (one shrinks from computing the miles of small print this indefatigable man translated from the Times), in his commentaries on Italian events, he kept adding in brackets with drilling insistence after practically every other sentence: “Italy,” “in Italy,” “I am talking about Italy”—the already corrupted reader knew that he meant he was talking about Russia and the peasant question. Or else: Chernyshevski would pretend he was chattering about anything that came to mind, just for the sake of incoherent and vacant prattle—but suddenly, striped and spotted with words, dressed in verbal camouflage, the important idea he wished to convey would slip through. Subsequently the whole gamut of this “buffoonery” was carefully put together by Vladislav Kostomarov for the information of the secret police; the work was mean, but it gave essentially a true picture of “Chernyshevski’s special devices.”

Another Kostomarov, a professor, says somewhere that Chernyshevski was a first-rate chess player. Actually neither Kostomarov nor Chernyshevski knew much about chess. In his youth, it is true, Nikolay Gavrilovich once bought a set, attempted even to master a handbook, managed more or less to learn the moves, and messed about with it for quite a time (noting this messing about in detail); finally, tiring of this empty pastime, he turned over everything to a friend. Fifteen years later (remembering that Lessing had got to know Mendelssohn over a chessboard) he founded the St. Petersburg Chess Club, which was opened in January, 1862, existed through spring, gradually declining, and would have failed of itself had it not been closed down in connection with the “St. Petersburg fires.” It was simply a literary and political circle situated in the so-called Ruadze House. Chernyshevski would come and sit at a table, tapping upon it with a rook (which he called a “castle”), and relate innocuous anecdotes. The radical Serno—Solovievich would arrive—(this is a Turgenevian dash) and strike up a conversation with someone in a secluded corner. It was fairly empty. The drinking fraternity—the minor writers Pomyalovski, Kurochkin, Krol—would vociferate in the bar. The first, by the way, did a little preaching of his own, promoting the idea of communal literary work—“Let’s organize,” he said, “a society of writer-laborers for investigating various aspects of our social life, such as: beggars, haberdashers, lamplighters, firemen—and pool in a special magazine all the material we get.” Chernyshevski derided him and a silly rumor went around to the effect that Pomyalovski had “bashed his mug in.” “It’s all lies, I respect you too much for that,” wrote Pomyalovski to him.

In a large auditorium situated in that same Ruadze House there took place on March 2, 1862, Chernyshevski’s first (if you do not count his dissertation defense and the graveside speech in the frost) public address. Officially the proceeds of the evening were to go to needy students; but in actual fact it was in aid of the political prisoners Mihailov and Obruchev, who had recently been arrested. Rubinstein brilliantly performed an extremely stirring march, Professor Pavlov spoke of Russia’s millennium—and added ambiguously that if the government stopped at the first step (the emancipation of the peasants) “it would stop on the brink of an abyss—let those with ears to hear, hear.” (They heard him; he was immediately ex-pulsed.) Nekrasov read some poor but “powerful” verses dedicated to the memory of Dobrolyubov, and Kurochkin read a translation of Béranger’s “The Little Bird” (the captive’s languishment and the rapture of sudden freedom); Chernyshevski’s speech was also on Dobrolyubov.

Greeted with massive applause (the youth of those days had a way of keeping their palms hollowed while they clapped, so that the result resembled a cannon salvo), he stood for a while, blinking and smiling. Alas, his appearance did not please the ladies eagerly awaiting the tribune—whose portrait was unobtainable. An uninteresting, they said, face, haircut à la moujik, and for some reason wearing not tails but a short coat with braid and a horrible tie—“a color catastrophe” (Olga Ryzhkov, A Woman of the Sixties: Memoirs). Besides that he came somehow unprepared, oratory was new to him, and trying to conceal his agitation he adopted a conversational tone which seemed too modest to his friends and too familiar to his ill-wishers. He began by talking about his briefcase (from which he took a notebook), explaining that the most remarkable part of it was the lock with a small cogwheel: “Look, you give it a turn and the briefcase is locked, and if you want to lock it even more positively, it turns a different way and then comes off and goes in your pocket, and on the spot where it was, here on this plaque, there are carved arabesques: very, very nice.” Then in a high, edifying voice he started to read an article by Dobrolyubov that everybody knew, but suddenly broke off and (as in the authorial digressions in What to Do?) chummily taking the audience into his confidence, began to explain in great detail that he had not been Dobrolyubov’s guide; while speaking, he played ceaselessly with his watch chain—something that stuck in the minds of all the memoirists and was to provide a theme for scoffing journalists; but, when you come to think of it, he might have been fiddling with his watch because there was indeed very little free time left to him (four months in all!). His tone of voice, “négligé with spirit” as they used to say in the seminary, and the complete absence of revolutionary insinuations annoyed his audience; he had no success whatsoever, while Pavlov was almost chaired. The memoirist Nikoladze remarks that as soon as Pavlov had been banished from St. Petersburg, people understood and appreciated Chernyshevski’s caution; he himself—subsequently, in his Siberian wilderness, where a live and avid auditorium appeared to him sometimes only in febrile dreams—keenly regretted that lame speech, that fiasco, repining at himself for not having seized that unique opportunity (since he was in any case doomed to ruin!) and not delivering from that lectern in the Ruadze Hall a speech of iron and fire, that very speech which the hero of his novel was about to give, very likely, when upon returning to freedom he took a droshky and cried to the driver: “The Galleries!”

Events went very fast that windy spring. Fires broke out here and there. And suddenly—against this orange-and-black background—a vision. Running and holding on to his hat, Dostoevski sweeps by: where to?

Whit Monday (May 28, 1862), a strong wind is blowing; a conflagration has begun on the Ligovka and then the desperadoes set fire to the Apraxin Market. Dostoevski is running, firemen are galloping “and in pharmacy windows, in gaudy glass globes, upside down are in passing reflected” (as seen by Nekrasov). And over there, thick smoke billows over the Fontanka canal in the direction of Chernyshyov Street, where presently a new, black column arises…. Meanwhile Dostoevski has arrived. He has arrived at the heart of the blackness, at Chernyshevski’s place, and starts to beg him hysterically to put a stop to all this. Two aspects are interesting here: the belief in Nikolay Gavrilovich’s satanic powers, and the rumors that the arson was being carried out according to the same plan which the Petrashevskians had drawn up as early as 1849.

Secret agents, in tones also not void of mystic horror, reported that during the night at the height of the disaster “laughter was heard coming from Chernyshevski’s window.” The police endowed him with a devilish resourcefulness and smelled a trick in his every move. Nikolay Gavrilovich’s family went to spend the summer at Pavlovsk, a few miles from St. Petersburg, and there, a few days after the fires, on June 10th to be precise (dusk, mosquitoes, music), a certain Lyubetski, adjutant major of the Uhlan regiment of the Guards, a dashing fellow, with a name like a kiss, noticed as he was leaving the “vauxhall” two ladies capering about like mad things, and in the simpleness of his heart taking them for young Camelias (loose women), he “made an attempt to grasp them both by the waist.” The four students who were with them surrounded him and threatened him with retribution, announcing that one of the ladies was the wife of the writer Chernyshevski and the other her sister. What, in the opinion of the police, is the husband’s design? He tries to get the case to be submitted to the court of the officers’ association—not out of considerations of honor but merely for the clandestine purpose of bringing military men and university students together. On July 5th he had to visit the Secret Police Department in connection with his complaint. Potapov, its chief, refused his petition, saying that according to his information the Uhlan was prepared to apologize. Chernyshevski curtly renounced any claims and changing the subject asked: “Tell me, the other day I sent my family off to Saratov and am preparing myself to go there for a rest [The Contemporary had already been closed]; but if I should need to take my wife abroad, to a spa—you see she suffers from nervous pains—could I leave without hindrance?” “Of course you could,” replied Potapov good-naturedly; and two days later the arrest took place.

All this was preceded by the following event: a “universal exhibition” has just opened in London (the nineteenth century was unusually fond of exhibiting its wealth—a plentiful and tasteless dowry, which the present one has squandered); gathered there were tourists and merchants, correspondents and spies; one day at an enormous banquet Herzen, in a fit of carelessness, in view of everyone handed a certain Vetoshnikov, who was preparing to leave for Russia, a letter to the radical journalist Serno-Solovievich, who was asked to direct Chernyshevski’s attention to the announcement made in The Bell concerning its willingness to publish The Contemporary abroad. The nimble foot of the messenger had hardly had time to touch Russia’s sands when he was seized.

Chernyshevski was then living near the church of St. Vladimir (later his Astrakhan addresses were also defined by their proximity to this or that holy building) in a house where, before him, had lived Muravyov (later a cabinet minister), whom he was to depict with such helpless loathing in The Prologue. On July 7th two friends had come to see him: Doctor Bokov (who subsequently used to send medical advice to the exile) and Antonovich (a member of “Land and Freedom,” who in spite of his close friendship with Chernyshevski did not suspect that the latter was connected with that society). They were sitting in the drawing room, where they were presently joined by Colonel Rakeev, a thickset black-uniformed police officer with an unpleasant, wolfish profile. He sat down with the air of a guest; actually, he had come to arrest Chernyshevski. Again historical patterns come into that odd contact “which thrills the gamester in a historian” (Strannolyubski): this was the same Rakeev who as an embodiment of the government’s contemptible scurry had whisked Pushkin’s coffin out of the capital into posthumous exile. Having chatted a few minutes for the sake of decorum, Rakeev informed Chernyshevski with a polite smile (which caused Doctor Bokov to “turn chill inside”) that he would like to have a word with him alone. “Then let’s go to my study,” replied the latter and headed for it so precipitately that Rakeev, though not exactly disconcerted—he was too experienced for that—did not consider it possible in his role of guest to follow him with equal speed. But Chernyshevski immediately returned, his Adam’s apple convulsively bobbing as he washed something down with cold tea (swallowed papers according to Antonovich’s sinister guess), and looking over his spectacles, he let his guest enter first. His friends, having nothing better to do (waiting in the drawing room where most of the furniture was shrouded in dust-covers seemed uncommonly bleak), went out for a stroll (“It can’t be… I can’t believe it,” Bokov kept repeating), and when they returned to the house, the fourth in Bolshoy Moskovski street, they were alarmed to see that there now stood at the door—in a kind of meek and thus all the more loathsome expectation—a prison carriage. First Bokov went in to say good-by to Chernyshevski, then—Antonovich. Nikolay Gavrilovich was sitting at his desk, playing with a pair of scissors, while the colonel sat next to it, one leg folded over the other; they were chatting—still for the sake of decorum—about the advantages of Pavlovsk over other holiday areas. “And then the company there is so excellent,” the colonel was saying with a slight cough.

“What, you too are going without waiting for me?” said Chernyshevski, turning to his apostle. “Unfortunately I have to …” replied Antonovich, in deep confusion. “Well, good-by then,” said Nikolay Gavrilovich in a joking tone of voice, and lifting his hand high, he lowered it with a swoop into Antonovich’s: a type of comradely farewell which subsequently became very widespread among Russian revolutionaries.

“And so,” exclaims Strannolyubski at the beginning of the greatest chapter in his incomparable monograph, “Chernyshevski has been seized!” That night the news of the arrest flies around the whole city. Many a breast is swelled with resonant indignation. Many a hand is clenched…. But there were not a few gloating sneers: Aha, they’ve put the ruffian away, removed the “impudent, yowling yokel,” as it was expressed by the (slightly cracked, anyway) lady novelist Kokhanovski. Next, Strannolyubski gives a striking description of the complex work which the authorities had to carry out in order to create the evidence “which should have been there but was not,” for a very curious situation had arisen: judicially speaking there was nothing to fasten on to and they had to build a scaffolding for the law to climb up and work. So they worked with “dummy quantities,” calculating to remove carefully all the dummies only when the emptiness enclosed by the law was filled up by something actual. The case built up against Chernyshevski was a phantom; but it was the phantom of genuine guilt; and then—from outside, artificially, by a roundabout route—they managed to find a certain solution to the problem which almost coincided with the true one.

We have three points: C, K, P. A cathetus is drawn, CK. To offset Chernyshevski, the authorities picked out a retired Uhlan cornet, Vladislav Dmitrievich Kostomarov, who the previous August in Moscow had been reduced to the ranks for printing seditious publications—a man with a touch of madness and a pinch of Pechorinism about him, and also a verse-maker: he left a scolopendrine trace in literature as the translator of foreign poets. Another cathetus is drawn, KP. The critic Pisarev in the periodical The Russian Word writes about these translations, scolding the author for “The magnificent tiara’s Coruscation like a pharos” [from Hugo], praising his “simple and heartfelt” rendering of some lines by Burns (which came out as “And first of all, and first of all / Let all men honest be / Let’s pray that man be to each man / A brother first of all… etc.), and in connection with Kostomarov’s report to his readers that Heine died an unrepentant sinner, the critic roguishly advises the “grim denouncer” to “take a good look at his own public activities.” Kostomarov’s derangement was evidenced in his florid graphomania, in the senseless somnambulistic (even though made-to-order) composition of counterfeit letters studded with French phrases; and finally in his macabre playfulness: he signed his reports to Putilin (a detective): Feofan Otchenashenko (Theophanus Ourfatherson) or Ventseslav Lyutyy (Wenceslaus the Fiend). And, indeed, he was fiendish in his taciturnity, funest and false, boastful and cringing. Endowed with curious abilities, he could write in a feminine hand—explaining this himself by the fact that he was “visited at the full moon by the spirit of Queen Tamara.” The plurality of hands he could imitate in addition to the circumstance (yet one more of destiny’s jokes) that his normal handwriting recalled that of Chernyshevski considerably heightened the value of this hypnotic betrayer. For indirect evidence that the appeal proclamation “To the Serfs of Landowners” had been written by Chernyshevski, Kostomarov was given, first, the task of fabricating a note, allegedly from Chernyshevski, containing a request to alter one word in the appeal; and, secondly, of preparing a letter (to “Aleksey Nikolaevich”) that would furnish proof of Chernyshevski’s active participation in the revolutionary movement. Both the one and the other were then and there concocted by Kostomarov. The forgery of the handwriting is quite evident: at the beginning the forger still took pains but then he seems to have grown bored by the work and to be in a hurry to get it over: to take but the word “I,” ya (formed in Russian script somewhat like a proofreader’s dele). In Chernyshevski’s genuine manuscripts it ends with an outgoing stroke which is straight and strong—and even curves a little to the right—while here, in the forgery, this stroke curves with a kind of queer jauntiness to the left, toward the head, as if the ya were saluting.

While these preparations went on, Nikolay Gavrilovich was held in the Alekseevski Ravelin of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, in close proximity to the twenty-two-year-old Pisarev, who had been imprisoned there four days before him: the hypotenuse is drawn, CP, and the fateful triangle CPK is consolidated. At first, life in prison did not oppress Chernyshevski: the absence of importunate visitors even seemed refreshing… but the hush of the unknown soon began to chafe him. A “deep” matting swallowed without a trace the steps of the sentries pacing along the corridors…. The only sound that came from the outside was a clock’s classic striking which vibrated long in one’s ears…. It was a life whose portrayal demands from a writer an abundance of dots…. It was that unkind Russian isolation from which sprang the Russian dream of a kind multitude. By lifting a corner of the green baize curtain the sentry could look through the peephole in the door at the prisoner sitting on his green wooden bed or on a green chair, wearing a dressing gown of frieze and a peaked cap—one was permitted to keep one’s own headgear as long as it was not a top hat—which does credit to the government’s sense of harmony but creates by the law of negatives a rather tenacious image (as for Pisarev, he sported a fez). He was allowed a goose-quill pen, and one could write on a small green table with a sliding drawer, “whose bottom, like Achilles’ heel, had remained unpainted” (Strannolyubski).

Autumn passed. A small rowan tree grew in the prison yard. Prisoner number nine was not fond of walking; at the beginning, however, he went out every day, reasoning (a quirk of thought extremely characteristic for him) that during this time the cell was searched—consequently a refusal to go out for a walk would cause the administration to suspect he was hiding something there; but when he had become convinced that this was not so (by leaving threads here and there as marks), he sat down to write with a light heart: by winter he had finished his translation of Schlosser and had begun to translate Gervinus and T. B. Macaulay. He also wrote one or two things of his own. Let us recall the “Diary”—and from one of our much earlier paragraphs let us pick up the loose ends of some sentences dealing in advance with his writings in the fortress… or no—let us go, if you please, even further back, to the “lachrymatory theme,” which began to rotate on the initial pages of our mysteriously revolving story.

Before us is Chernyshevski’s famous letter to his wife dated December 5, 1862: a yellow diamond among the dust of his numerous works. We examine this harsh-looking and ugly but amazingly legible handwriting, with its resolute strokes at the tails of the words, with loopy R’s and P’s and the broad, fervent crosses of the “hard signs”—and our lungs dilate with a pure emotion such as we have not experienced for a long time. Strannolyubski justly designates this letter as the beginning of Cherynshevski’s brief flowering. All the fire, all the power of will and mind allotted him, everything that was supposed to burst forth at the hour of a national uprising, to burst forth and clutch in its hold, even if only for a short time, the supreme power… to jerk violently the bridle and perhaps to crimson the lip of Russia, the rearing steed, with blood—all this now found a sick outlet in his correspondence. One can say, in fact, that here was the aim and crown of all his life’s dialectic, which had long been accumulating in muffled depths—these iron, fury-driven epistles to the commission examining his case, which he included in letters to his wife, the exultant rage of his arguments and this chain-rattling megalomania. “Men will remember us with gratitude,” he wrote to Olga Sokratovna, and he turned out to be right: it was precisely this sound which echoed and spread through all the remaining space of the century, making the hearts of millions of intellectual provincials beat with sincere and noble tenderness. We have already referred to that part of the letter where he talks of his plans for compiling dictionaries. After the words “as was Aristotle” come the words: “I have begun speaking, however, of my thoughts: they are a secret; you must not tell anyone about what I say to you alone.” “Here,” comments Steklov, “on these two lines a teardrop has fallen and Chernyshevski had to repeat the blurred letters.” This is not quite right. The teardrop fell (near the fold of the sheet) before the writing of these two lines; Chernyshevski had to rewrite two words, “secret” and “about” (one at the beginning of the first line, the other at the beginning of the second), words which he had started to trace each time on the wet place and which remained therefore unfinished.

Two days afterwards, getting more and more angry and more and more believing in his invulnerability, he began to “maul” his judges. This second letter to his wife can be divided up into points: 1) I told you in connection with the rumors about my possible arrest that I was not mixed up in any affair and that the government would be forced to apologize if it arrested me. 2) I assumed this because I knew they were following me—they boasted that they were doing it very well, and I relied on their boast, for my calculation was that, knowing how I lived and what I did, they would know that their suspicions were groundless. 3) It was a stupid calculation. For I also knew that in our country, people are incapable of doing anything properly. 4) Thus by my arrest they have compromised the government. 5) What can “we” do? Apologize? But what if “he” doesn’t accept the apology, but says: You have compromised the government, it is my duty to explain this to the government. 6) Therefore “we” shall postpone the unpleasantness. 7) But the government asks from time to time whether Chernyshevski is guilty—and finally the government will obtain an answer. 8) It is that answer I am waiting for.

“The copy of a rather curious letter from Chernyshevski,” added Potapov in pencil. “But he is mistaken: no one will have to apologize.”

A few days after that he began to write his novel, What to Do?— and by January 15th he had sent the first portion to Pypin; a week later he sent a second, and Pypin handed both to Nekrasov for The Contemporary, which had again been permitted (beginning with February). At the same time The Russian Word was also allowed after a similar eight-month suspension; and in the impatient expectation of journalistic profit, the dangerous fezzed neighbor had already dipped his pen.

It is gratifying to be able to state that at this juncture some mysterious force resolved to try and save Chernyshevski at least from this mess. He was having a particularly hard time—how could one fail to have compassion? On the 28th, because the government, exasperated by his attacks, had refused him permission to see his wife, he began a hunger strike: hunger strikes were then a novelty in Russia and the exponent they found was clumsy. The guards noticed that he was wasting, but the food seemed to be getting eaten…. When, however, four days later, struck by the putrid smell in the cell, the warders searched it, they established that the solid food had been hidden among the books while the cabbage soup had been poured into cracks. On Sunday, February 3, at about one P.M., the military doctor attached to the fortress examined the prisoner and found that he was pale, his tongue fairly clear, his pulse a little weak—and on that same day at that same hour Nekrasov, on his way home (corner of Liteynaya and Basseynaya streets) in a hackney sleigh, lost the pink-paper package containing two manuscripts, each threaded through at the corners and entitled What to Do? While remembering with the lucidity of despair the whole of his route, he did not recall the fact that when nearing his house he had laid the package beside him in order to take out his purse—and just then the sleigh had turned… a crunch as it skidded… and What to Do? rolled off unnoticed: this was the attempt of the mysterious force—in this case centrifugal—to confiscate the book whose success was destined to have such a disastrous effect upon the fate of its author. But the attempt failed: on the snow near the Maryinski Hospital the pink package was picked up by a poor clerk burdened with a large family. Having plodded home, he donned his spectacles and examined his find… he saw that it was the beginning of some kind of literary work and without a tremor, and not burning his sluggish fingers, he put it aside. “Destroy it!” begged a hopeless voice: in vain. A notice of its loss was printed in the Saint Petersburg Police Gazette. The clerk carried the package to the indicated address, for which he received the promised reward: fifty silver rubles.

In the meantime his jailers had begun to give Nikolay Gavrilovich appetite-stimulating drops; twice he took them and then, suffering greatly, he announced that he would take no more, for he was refusing to eat not from absence of appetite but from caprice. On the morning of the 6th, “owing to lack of experience in discerning the symptoms of suffering,” he ended his hunger strike and had breakfast. On the 12th, Potapov informed the commandant that the commission could not permit Chernyshevski to see his wife until he had completely recovered. The following day the commandant reported that Chernyshevski was well and writing at full blast. Olga Sokratovna came with loud complaints—about her health, about the Pypins, about the shortage of money, and then through her tears began to laugh at the little beard her husband had grown, finally getting even more upset and commencing to embrace him.

“That will do, my dear, that will do,” he kept saying quite calmly—using the tepid tone he invariably maintained in his relations with her: actually he loved her passionately, hopelessly. “Neither I nor anyone else can have any grounds for thinking I shall not be set free,” he told her in parting, with particular emphasis.

Another month passed. On March 23rd there was the confrontation with Kostomarov. Vladislav Dmitrievich glowered and obviously got tangled up in his own lies. Chernyshevski, with a slight smile of disgust, replied abruptly and contemptuously. His superiority was striking. “And to think,” exclaims Steklov, “that at this time he was writing the buoyant What to Do?”

Alas! To write What to Do? in the fortress was not so much surprising as reckless—even for the very reason that the authorities attached it to his case. In general the history of this novel’s appearance is extremely interesting. The censorship permitted it to be published in The Contemporary,” reckoning on the fact that a novel which was “something in the highest degree anti-artistic” would be certain to overthrow Chernyshevski’s authority, that he would simply be laughed at for it. And indeed, what worth, for example, are the “light” scenes in the novel? “Verochka was supposed to drink half a glass for her wedding, half a glass for her shop and half a glass for the health of Julie [a redeemed Parisian prostitute who is now the girl friend of one of the characters!] She and Julie started a romp, with screams and clamor…. They began to wrestle and both fell on the sofa… and they no longer wanted to get up, but only continued screaming and laughing and both fell asleep.” Sometimes the turn of phrase smacks of folksy barrack lore and sometimes of… Zoshchenko: “After tea… she went to her room and lay down. So there she is, reading in her comfy bed, but the book sinks away from her eyes and now Vera Pavlovna is thinking, Why is it that somehow I feel lately somewhat dull sometimes?” There are also many charming solecisms—here is a specimen: when one of the characters, a doctor, has pneumonia and calls in a colleague: “For a long time they palpated the sides of one of them.”

But nobody laughed. Not even the great Russian writers laughed. Even Herzen, who found it “vilely written,” immediately qualified this with: “On the other hand there is much that is good and healthy.” Still, he could not resist remarking that the novel ends not simply with a phalanstery but with “a phalanstery in a brothel.” For of course the inevitable happened: the eminently pure Chernyshevski (who had never been to a brothel), in his artless aspiration to equip communal love with especially beautiful trappings, involuntarily and unconsciously, out of the simplicity of his imagination, had worked his way through to those very ideals that had been evolved by tradition and routine in houses of ill repute; his gay “evening ball,” based on freedom and equality in relations between the sexes (first one and then another couple disappears and returns again), is extremely reminiscent of the concluding dances in Mme. Tellier’s Establishment.

And nevertheless it is impossible to handle this old magazine (March, 1863), containing the first installment of the novel, without a certain thrill; here also is Nekrasov’s poem “Green Noise” (“Endure while you can still endure …”), and the derisive dressing down of Aleksey Tolstoy’s romance Prince Serebryanyy…. Instead of the expected sneers, an atmosphere of general, pious worship was created around What to Do? It was read the way liturgical books are read—not a single work by Turgenev or Tolstoy produced such a mighty impression. The inspired Russian reader understood the good that the talentless novelist had vainly tried to express. It would seem that, having realized its miscalculation, the government should have interrupted the serialization of What to Do? It behaved much more cleverly.

Chernyshevski’s neighbor had now also done some writing. He had been receiving The Contemporary and on October 8th, he sent The Russian Word an article from the fortress, “Thoughts about Russian Novels,” at which the Senate informed the Governor-General that this was nothing else but an analysis of Chernyshevski’s novel, with praise for this work and a detailed exposition of the materialistic ideas in it. In order to characterize Pisarev it was indicated that he was subject to “dementia melancholica,” for which he had been treated: in 1859 he had spent four months in a lunatic asylum.

Just as, in his boyhood, he had arrayed all his notebooks in rainbow covers, so, as a grown man, Pisarev would suddenly abandon some urgent work in order to painstakingly color woodcuts in books, or when going off to the country, would order a red-and-blue summer suit of sarafan calico from his tailor. This professed utilitarian’s mental illness was distinguished by a kind of perverted aesthetic-ism. Once at a student gathering he suddenly stood up, gracefully raised his curved arm, as if requesting permission to speak, and in this sculpturesque pose fell down unconscious. Another time, to the alarm of his hostess and fellow guests, he began to undress, throwing off with gay alacrity his velvet jacket, motley vest, checkered trousers—At this point they overpowered him. Amusingly enough there are commentators who call Pisarev an “epicure,” referring, for example, to his letters to his mother—unbearable, bilious, teeth-clenching phrases about life being beautiful; or else: to illustrate his “sober realism” they quote his outwardly sensible and clear—but actually completely insane—letter from the fortress to an unknown maiden, with a proposal of marriage: “The woman who agrees to lighten and warm my life will receive from me all the love which was spurned by Raissa when she threw herself at the neck of her handsome eagle.”

Now, condemned to a four-year imprisonment for his small part in the general disturbances of the time (which were based in a way on a blind belief in the printed word, especially the secretly printed word), Pisarev wrote about What to Do?, reviewing it bit by bit for The Russian Word as the installments appeared in The Contemporary. Although in the beginning the Senate was puzzled by the novel’s being praised for its ideas instead of being ridiculed because of its style, and expressed the fear that the praises might have a deleterious effect on the younger generation, the authorities soon realized how important it was in the present case to obtain by this method a complete picture of Chernyshevski’s perniciousness, which Kostomarov had only outlined in the list of his “special devices.” “The government,” says Strannolyubski “on the one hand permitting Chernyshevski to produce a novel in the fortress and on the other permitting Pisarev, his fellow captive, to produce articles explaining the intentions of this novel, acted with complete awareness, waiting curiously for Chernyshevski to babble himself out and watching what would come of it—in connection with the abundant discharges of his incubator neighbor.”

The business went smoothly and promised a great deal, but it was necessary to put pressure on Kostomarov since one or two definite proofs of guilt were needed, while Chernyshevski continued to boil and jeer in great detail, branding the commission as “clowns” and “an incoherent quagmire which is completely stupid.” Therefore Kostomarov was taken to Moscow and there the citizen Yakovlev, his former copyist, a drunkard and a rowdy, gave important testimony (for this he received an overcoat which he drank away so noisily in Tver that he was put in a strait-jacket): while doing his copying “on account of the summer weather in a garden pavilion,” he allegedly heard Nikolay Gavrilovich and Vladislav Dmitrievich as they were strolling arm-in-arm (a not implausible detail), talking about greetings from well-wishers to the serfs (it is difficult to find one’s way in this mixture of truth and promptings). At a second interrogation in the presence of a replenished Kostomarov, Chernyshevski said somewhat unfortunately that he had visited him only once and not found him in; then he added forcefully: “I’ll go gray, I’ll die, but I will not change my testimony.” The testimony of his not being the author of the proclamation is written by him in a trembling hand—trembling with rage rather than fright.

However that may have been, the case was coming to an end. There followed the Senate’s “definition”: very nobly it found Chernyshevski’s unlawful dealings with Herzen unproved (for Herzen’s “definition” of the Senate see below, at the end of this paragraph). As for the appeal “To the Serfs of Landowners”… here the fruit had already ripened on the espaliers of forgery and bribes: the absolute moral conviction of the senators that Chernyshevski was the author thereof was transformed into judicial proof by the letter to “Aleksey Nikolaevich” (meaning, apparently, A. N. Pleshcheev, a peaceful poet, dubbed by Dostoevski “an all-round blond”—but for some reason no one insisted too much on Pleshcheev’s part, if any, in the matter). Thus in Chernyshevski’s person they condemned a phantasm closely resembling him; an invented guilt was wonderfully rigged up to look like the real one. The sentence was comparatively light—compared with what one is generally able to devise in this line: he was to be exiled for fourteen years of penal servitude and then to live in Siberia forever. The “definition” went from the “savage ignoramuses” of the Senate to the “gray villains” of the State Council, who completely subscribed to it, and then went on to the sovereign, who confirmed it but reduced the term of penal servitude by half. On May 4, 1864, the sentence was announced to Chernyshevski, and on the 19th, at 8 o’clock in the morning, on Mytninski Square, he was executed.

It was drizzling, umbrellas undulated, the square was beslushed, and everything was wet; gendarmes’ uniforms, the darkened wood of the scaffold, the smooth, black pillar with chains, glossy from the rain. Suddenly the prison carriage appeared. From it emerged, with extraordinary celerity, as if they had rolled out, Chernyshevski in an overcoat and two peasant-like executioners; all three walked with swift steps along a line of soldiers to the scaffold. The crowd lurched forward and the gendarmes pressed back the front ranks; restrained cries sounded here and there: “Close the umbrellas!” While an official read the sentence, Chernyshevski, who already knew it, sulkily looked around him; he fingered his beard, adjusted his spectacles and spat several times. When the reader stumbled and barely got out “soshulistic ideas” Chernyshevski smiled and then, recognizing someone in the crowd, nodded, coughed, shifted his stance: from beneath the overcoat his black trousers concertinaed over his rubbers. People standing near could see on his chest an oblong plaque with an inscription in white: STATE CRIMIN (the last syllable had not gone in). At the conclusion of the reading the executioners lowered him to his knees; the elder one, with a backhander, knocked the cap off his long, combed-back, light auburn hair. The face, tapering chinward, its large forehead shining, was now bent down, and with a resounding crack they managed to break an insufficiently incised sword over him. Then they took his hands, which seemed unusually white and weak, and put them in black irons secured to the pillar: he had to stand that way for a quarter of an hour. The rain increased: the younger executioner picked up Chernyshevski’s cap and jammed it on his inclined head—and slowly, with difficulty, the chains got in his way—Chernyshevski straightened it. Behind a fence to the left one could see the scaffolding of a house under construction; workmen climbed onto the fence from the other side, one could hear the scrape of their boots; they climbed up, hung there, and abused the criminal from afar. The rain fell; the elder executioner consulted his silver watch. Chernyshevski kept turning his wrists slightly without looking up. Suddenly, out of the better-off part of the crowd, bouquets began to fly. The gendarmes, jumping, tried to intercept them in midair. Roses exploded in the air; fleetingly one was able to see a rare combination: a policeman, wreathed. Bobbed-haired ladies in black burnouses threw racemes of lilac. Meanwhile Chernyshevski was hastily released from his chains and his dead body borne away. No—a slip of the pen; alas, he was alive, he was even cheerful! Students ran beside the carriage with cries of “Farewell, Chernyshevski! Au revoir!” He thrust his head out of the window, laughed and shook his finger at the most zealous runners.

“Alas, alive,” we exclaimed, for how could one not prefer the death penalty, the convulsions of the hanged man in his hideous cocoon, to that funeral which twenty-five insipid years later fell to Chernyshevski’s lot. The paw of oblivion began slowly to gather in his living image as soon as he had been removed to Siberia. Oh yes, oh yes, no doubt students for years sang the song: “Let us drink to him who wrote What to Do? …” But it was to the past they drank, to past glamour and scandal, to a great shade… but who would drink to a tremulous little old man with a tic, making clumsy paper boats for Yakut children somewhere in those fabulous backwoods? We affirm that his book drew out and gathered within itself all the heat of his personality—a heat which is not to be found in its helplessly rational structures but which is concealed as it were between the words (as only bread is hot) and it was inevitably doomed to be dispersed with time (as only bread knows how to go stale and hard). Today, it seems, only Marxists are still capable of being interested by the ghostly ethics contained in this dead little book. To follow easily and freely the categorical imperative of the general good, here is the “rational egoism” which researchers have found in What to Do? Let us recall for comic relief Kautski’s conjecture that the idea of egoism is connected with the development of commodity production, and Plekhanov’s conclusion that Chernyshevski was nevertheless an “idealist,” since it comes out in his book that the masses must catch up with the intelligentsia out of calculation—and calculation is an opinion. But the matter is simpler than that: the idea that calculation is the foundation of every action (or heroic accomplishment) leads to absurdity: in itself calculation can be heroic! Anything which comes into the focus of human thinking is spiritualized. Thus the “calculation” of the materialists was ennobled; thus, for those in the know, matter turns into an incorporeal play of mysterious forces. Chernyshevski’s ethical structures are in their own way an attempt to construct the same old “perpetual motion” machine, where matter moves other matter. We would very much like this to revolve: egoism-altruism-egoism-altruism… but the wheel stops from friction. What to do? Live, read, think. What to do? Work at one’s own development in order to achieve the aim of life, which is happiness. What to do? (But Chernyshevski’s own fate changed the businesslike question to an ironic exclamation.)

Chernyshevski would have been transferred to a private domicile much sooner if it had not been for the affair of the Karakozovites (adherents of Karakozov, who attempted to assassinate Alexander the Second in 1866): it was made clear at their trial that they had wanted to give Chernyshevski the opportunity of escaping from Siberia and heading a revolutionary movement—or at least publishing a political review in Geneva; and checking the dates, the judges found in What to Do? a forecast of the date of the attempt on the Tsar’s life. The protagonist Rakhmetov, on his way abroad, “said among other things that three years later he would return to Russia, because, it seemed, not then, but three years later [a highly significant repetition typical of our author], he would be needed in Russia.” Meanwhile the last part of the novel was signed on April 4, 1863, and exactly three years later to the day the attempt took place. Thus even figures, Chernyshevski’s goldfish, let him down.

Rakhmetov is forgotten today; but in those years he created a whole school of life. With what piety its readers imbibed the sporty, revolutionary element in the novel: Rakhmetov, who “adopted a boxer’s diet,” followed also a dialectical regime: “Therefore if fruit was served he absolutely ate apples and absolutely did not eat apricots (since the poor did not); oranges he ate in St. Petersburg, but did not eat in the provinces, because you see in St. Petersburg the common people eat them, while in the provinces they do not.”

Where did that young, round little face suddenly flit from, with its large, childishly prominent forehead and cheeks like two cups? Who is this girl resembling a hospital nurse, wearing a black dress with a white turn-down collar and a little watch on a cord? It is Sophia Perovski, who is to hang for the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. Coming to Sebastopol in 1872, she toured the surrounding villages on foot in order to become acquainted with the life of the peasants: she was in her period of Rakhmetovism—sleeping on straw, living on milk and gruels. And returning to our initial position we repeat: Sophia Perovski’s instantaneous fate is a hundred times more to be envied than the fading glory of a reformer! For as copies of The Contemporary with the novel, passing from hand to hand, became more and more tattered, so did Chernyshevski’s enchantments fade; and the esteem for him, which had long since turned into a sentimental convention, was no longer able to make hearts glow when he died in 1889. The funeral passed quietly. There were few comments in the newspapers. At the requiem held for him in St. Petersburg the workmen in town clothes, whom the dead man’s friends had brought for the sake of atmosphere, were taken by a group of students for plainclothesmen and insulted—which restored a certain equilibrium: was it not the fathers of these workmen who had abused the kneeling Chernyshevski from over the fence?

On the day following that mock execution, at dusk, “with shackles on my feet and a head full of thoughts,” Chernyshevski left St. Petersburg forever. He traveled in a tarantass, and since “to read books on the way” was permitted only beyond Irkutsk, he was extremely bored for the first month and a half of the journey. On July 23rd they brought him at last to the mines of the Nerchin mountain district at Kadaya: ten miles from China, four thousand six hundred from St. Petersburg. He was not made to work much. He lived in a badly caulked cottage and suffered from rheumatism. Two years passed. Suddenly a miracle happened: Olga Sokratovna prepared to join him in Siberia.

During most of his imprisonment in the fortress she, it is said, had been coursing about in the provinces and caring so little about her husband’s fate that her relatives even wondered whether she was not deranged. On the eve of the public disgrace she had sped back to St. Petersburg, and on the morning of the 20th had sped off again. We would never have believed her capable of making the trip to Kadaya if we had not known her ability to move easily and hectically from one place to another. How he awaited her! Starting at the beginning of summer in 1866, together with seven-year-old Misha and a Dr. Pavlinov (Dr. Peacock—we are again entering the sphere of beautiful names), she got as far as Irkutsk, where she was held up for two months; there they stayed in a hotel with the enchantingly idiotic name (possibly distorted by biographers but most probably selected with particular care by sly fate) of Hotel de Amour et Co. Dr. Pavlinov was not permitted to go any further: he was replaced by a captain in the gendarmes, Hmelevski (a perfected edition of the dashing Pavlovsk hero), passionate, drunken, and brazen. They arrived on August 23rd. In order to celebrate the meeting of man and wife, one of the exiled Poles, a former cook of Count di Cavour, the Italian statesman of whom Chernyshevski had once written so much and so caustically, baked one of those pastries on which his late master had been wont to stuff himself. But the meeting was not a success: it is amazing how everything bitter and heroic which life manufactured for Chernyshevski was invariably accompanied by a flavoring of vile farce. Hmelevski hovered about and would not leave Olga Sokratovna alone; in her gypsy eyes there lurked something hunted but also enticing—against her will, perhaps. In return for her favors he is even alleged to have offered to arrange her husband’s escape, but the latter resolutely refused. In short, the constant presence of this shameless man made things so difficult (and what plans we had made!) that Chernyshevski himself persuaded his wife to set out on the return journey, and this she did on August 27th, having stayed thus, after a three-month journey, only four days—four days, reader!—with the husband whom she was now leaving for seventeen odd years. Nekrasov dedicated Peasant Children to her. It is a pity he did not dedicate to her his Russian Women.

During the last days of September, Chernyshevski was transferred to Aleksandrovski Zavod, a settlement twenty miles from Kadaya. He spent the winter there in prison, together with some Karakozovites and rebellious Poles. The dungeon was equipped with a Mongolian specialty—“stakes”: posts dug vertically into the ground and surrounding the prison in a solid ring. In June of the following year, having completed his probationery term, Chernyshevski was released on parole and took a room in the house of a sexton, a man who looked very much like him: gray purblind eyes, a sparse beard, long, tangled hair…. Always a little drunk, always sighing, he would sorrowfully answer the questions of the curious with “The dear fellow keeps writing and writing!” But Chernyshevski stayed there no more than two months. His name was taken in vain at political trials. The half-witted artisan Rozanov testified that the revolutionaries wanted to catch and cage “a bird with royal blood in order to ransom Chernyshevski.” Count Shuvalov sent the Irkutsk Governor-General a telegram: THE AIM OF THE EMIGRES IS TO FREE CHERNYSHEVSKI (STOP) PLEASE TAKE ALL POSSIBLE MEASURES IN REGARD TO HIM. Meanwhile the exile Krasovski, who had been transferred at the same time as he, had fled (and perished in the taiga, after having been robbed), so that there was every reason to jail dangerous Chernyshevski once again and to deprive him for a month of the right to correspondence.

Suffering intolerably from drafts, he never removed either his fur-lined dressing gown or his lambskin shapka. He moved about like a leaf blown by the wind, with a nervous stumbling gait, and his shrill voice could be heard now here and now there. His trick of logical reasoning was intensified—“in the manner of his father-in-law’s namesake,” as Strannolyubski so whimsically puts it. He lived in the “office”: a spacious room divided by a partition; along the entire wall in the larger part there ran a low “sleeping shelf,” in the nature of a platform; there, as if on a stage (or the way in zoos they exhibit a melancholy beast of prey among its native rocks) stood a bed and a table, which were essentially the natural furnishings of his whole life. He used to get up after midday, would drink tea all day and lie reading the whole time; he would sit down to do some real writing only at midnight, since during the day his immediate neighbors, some nationalist Poles who were completely indifferent to him, would indulge in fiddling and torture him with their unlubricated music: by profession they were wheelwrights. To the other exiles he used to read on winter evenings. They noticed once that although he was calmly and smoothly reading a tangled tale, with lots of “scientific” digressions, he was looking at a blank notebook. A gruesome symbol!

It was then that he wrote a new novel. Still full of the success of What to Do? he expected much from it—most of all he expected the money which, printed abroad, the novel was supposed one way or another to bring in for his family. The Prologue is extremely autobiographical. When referring to it once, we spoke of its peculiar attempt to rehabilitate Olga Sokratovna; it conceals a similar attempt, in Strannolyubski’s opinion, to rehabilitate the author’s own person, for, underlining on the one hand Volgin’s influence, which reaches the point where “high dignitaries sought his favors through his wife” (because they supposed he had “connections with London”; i.e., with Herzen, of whom the newly fledged liberals were mortally afraid), the author on the other hand insists obstinately on Volgin’s suspiciousness, timidity and inactivity: “To wait and wait as long as possible, to wait as quietly as possible.” One gets the impression that the stubborn Chernyshevski wants to have the last word in the quarrel, putting firmly on record what he had repeatedly said to his judges: “I must be considered on the basis of my actions and there were no actions and could not have been any.”

Concerning the “light” scenes in The Prologue we had better keep silent. Through their morbidly circumstantial eroticism one can make out such a throbbing tenderness for his wife that the least quotation from them might appear to be exaggerated derision. Instead let us listen to this pure sound—in his letters to her during those years: “My dearest darling, I thank you for being the light of my life.”… “I would be even here one of the happiest men in the world if it did not occur to me that this fate, which is very much to my personal advantage, is too hard in its effects on your life, my dear friend.”… “Will you forgive me the grief to which I have subjected you?”

Chernyshevski’s hopes for literary profits were not realized: the émigrés not only misused his name but also pirated his works. And entirely fatal for him were the attempts made to free him, attempts which were in themselves courageous but which seem senseless to us, who can see from the hilltop of time the disparity between the image of a “fettered giant” and the real Chernyshevski whom these efforts by his would-be saviors only enraged: “These gentlemen,” he said later, “didn’t even know that I can’t ride a horse.” This inner contradiction resulted in nonsense (a particular shade of nonsense already long known to us). It is said that Ippolit Myshkin, disguised as a gendarme officer, went to Vilyuisk where he demanded of the district police chief that the prisoner be handed over to him, but spoiled the whole business by putting his shoulder knot on the left side instead of the right. Before this, namely in 1871, there was Lopatin’s attempt in which everything was absurd: the way he suddenly abandoned the Russian translation of Das Kapital that he was making in London, in order to get for Marx, who had learned to read Russian, “den grossen russischen Gelehrten”; his journey to Irkutsk in the guise of a member of the Geographical Society (with the Siberian residents taking him for a government inspector incognito); his arrest following a tip-off from Switzerland; his flight and capture; and his letter to the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia in which he told him all about his project with inexplicable frankness. All this only worsened Chernyshevski’s situation. Legally his settlement was supposed to begin on August 10, 1870. But only on December 2nd was he moved to another place, to a place which turned out to be far worse than penal servitude—to Vilyuisk.

“Forsaken by God in a dead end of Asia,” says Strannolyubski, “in the depths of the Yakutsk region, far to the northeast, Vilyuisk was nothing but a hamlet standing on a huge pile of sand heaped up by the river, and surrounded by a boundless bog overgrown by taiga scrub.” The inhabitants (500 people) were: Cossacks, half-wild Yakuts, and a small number of low middle-class citizens (whom Steklov describes very picturesquely: “The local society consisted of a pair of officials, a pair of clerics and a pair of merchants”—as if he were talking about the Ark). There Chernyshevski was lodged in the best house, and the best house turned out to be the jail. The door of his damp cell was lined with black oilcloth; the two windows which anyway were right up against the palisade were barred up. In the absence of any other exiles, he found himself in complete solitude. Despair, helplessness, the consciousness of having been deceived, a dizzy feeling of injustice, the ugly shortcomings of arctic life, all this almost drove him out of his mind. On the morning of July 10, 1872, he suddenly began to break the door lock with a pair of tongs, shaking all over, and mumbling, and crying out: “Has the sovereign or a minister come that the police sergeant dares to lock the door at night?” By winter he had calmed down a bit, but from time to time there were certain reports… and here we are granted one of those rare correlations that constitute the researcher’s pride.

Once (in 1853), his father had written him (regarding his A Tentative Lexicon of the Hypatian Chronicle): “You would do better to write some tale or other… tales are still in fashion in good society.” Many years afterwards Chernyshevski informs his wife that he has thought up in his prison and wants to set down in writing “an ingenious little tale” wherein he will portray her in the form of two girls: “It will be quite a good little tale [repeating his father’s rhythm]. If only you knew how much I have laughed to myself when depicting the various noisy frolics of the younger one, how much I cried with tenderness when depicting the pathetic meditations of the elder!” “At night Chernyshevski,” reported his jailers, “sometimes sings, sometimes dances and sometimes weeps and sobs.”

The mail went out of Yakutsk once a month. The January number of a St. Petersburg magazine was received only in May. He tried to cure the illness he had developed (goiter) with the aid of a textbook. The exhausting catarrh of the stomach that he had known as a student now returned with new peculiarities. “I am nauseated by the subject of ‘peasants’ and ‘peasant ownership of the land,’ ” he wrote to his son, who had thought to interest him by sending him some books on economics. The food was repulsive. He ate almost nothing but cooked cereals: straight from the pot—with a silver tablespoon, of which almost a quarter was worn away on the pot’s earthenware sides during the twenty years that he himself was wearing away. On warm summer days he would stand for hours with his trousers rolled up in a shallow stream (which could hardly have been beneficial); or, with his head wrapped in a towel against the mosquitoes, which made him look like a Russian peasant woman, he would stroll along forest paths with his plaited mushroom basket, never plunging into the denser wildwood. He would forget his cigarette case under a larch, which he was some time in learning to distinguish from a pine. The flowers which he gathered (whose names he did not know) he wrapped in cigarette paper and sent to his son Misha, who acquired that way “a small herbarium of the Vilyuisk flora”: thus did Princess Volkonski in Nekrasov’s poem about the Decembrists’ wives bequeath her grandchildren “a collection of butterflies, plants of Chita.” Once an eagle appeared in his yard… “it had come to peck at his liver,” remarks Strannolyubski, “but did not recognize Prometheus in him.”

The pleasure which he had experienced in his youth from the orderly disposition of the St. Petersburg waters now received a late echo: from nothing to do he dug out canals—and almost flooded one of the Vilyuisk residents’ favorite roads. He quenched his thirst for spreading culture by teaching manners to Yakuts, but just as before, the native would remove his cap at a distance of twenty paces and in that position would meekly freeze. The practicality and good sense he used to advocate now dwindled to his advising the water-carrier to substitute a regular yoke of wood for the crook made of hair, which cut his palms; but the Yakut did not change his routine. In the little town where all they did was play cards and have passionate discussions about the price of Chinese cotton, his yearning for activity in public affairs led him to the Old-Believers, about whose plight Chernyshevski wrote an extraordinarily long and detailed memoir (including even Vilyuisk gossip) and coolly sent it off addressed to the Tsar, with the friendly suggestion he pardon them because they “esteem him as a saint.”

He wrote a lot but burned almost everything. He informed his relatives that the results of his “learned work” would undoubtedly be accepted sympathetically; this work was ashes and a mirage. Out of the whole heap of writings which he produced in Siberia, besides The Prologue, only two or three stories and a “cycle” of unfinished “novellas” have been preserved…. He also wrote poems. In texture they are no different from those versificatory tasks which he had once been given in the seminary, when he had reset a psalm of David in the following manner:

In 1875 (to Pypin) and again in 1888 (to Lavrov) he sends “an ancient Persian poem”: a ghastly thing! In one of the strophes the pronoun “their” is repeated seven times (“Their country is barren, Their bodies are fleshless, And through their torn garments their ribs one can tell. Their faces are broad, and their features are flattened; Upon their flat features the soul does not dwell”) while in the monstrous chains of the genitive case (“Of howls of the ache of their craving for blood”) now, at the parting with literature, under a very low sun, there is evidence of the author’s familiar leaning toward congruity, toward links. To Pypin he writes heartrending letters expressing his stubborn desire to thwart the administration and occupy himself with literature: “This thing [The Academy of Azure Mountains, signed Denzil Elliot—purporting to be from the English] is of high literary merit…. I am patient, but—I hope no one intends to prevent me from working for my family…. I am famous in Russian literature for the carelessness of my style…. When I want to I can also write in all sorts of good styles.”

“What is [this] hymn to the Maid of the Skies? An episode from the prose story of Empedocles’ grandson… And what is the story of Empedocles’ grandson? One of the innumerable stories in The Academy of Azure Mountains. The Duchess of Cantershire has set off with a company of fashionable friends on a yacht through the Suez Canal to the East Indies in order to visit her tiny kingdom at the foot of the Azure Mountains, near Golconda. There they do what intelligent and good people of fashion do: They tell stories—stories that will follow in the next packages from Denzil Elliot to the editor of The Messenger of Europe” (Stasyulevich—who did not print any of this).

One feels dizzy, the letters swim and fade in one’s eyes—and here we again pick up the theme of Chernyshevski’s spectacles. He asked his relatives to send him new ones, but in spite of his efforts to explain it particularly graphically, he nonetheless made a mess of it, and six months later he received from them number “four and a half instead of five or five and a quarter.”

He gave an outlet to his passion for instruction by writing to Sasha about the mathematician Fermat, to Misha about the struggle between Popes and Emperors, and to his wife about medicine, Carlsbad, and Italy…. It ended the way it was bound to end: the authorities requested him to stop writing “learned letters.” This so offended and shook him that for over six months he did not write any letters at all (the authorities never saw the day when they would get from him those humble petitions which, for instance, Dostoevski used to dispatch from Semipalatinsk to the strong of this world). “There is no news from Papa,” wrote Olga Sokratovna to her son in 1879. “I wonder if he, my dear one, is still alive,” and she can be forgiven much for this intonation.

Yet one more jackanapes with a name ending in “ski” suddenly pops up as an extra: on March 15, 1881, “your unknown pupil Vitevski,” as he recommends himself, but according to police information a tippling doctor at the Stavropol district hospital, sends him a wire to Vilyuisk protesting with completely superfluous heat against an anonymous opinion that Chernyshevski was responsible for the assassination of the Tsar: “Your works are filled with peace and love. You never desired this (i.e., the assassination).” Whether because of these artless words or because of something else, the government softened and in the middle of June it showed its jail tenant a bit of thoughtful kindness: it had the walls of his domicile papered in “gris perle with a border,” and the ceiling covered with calico, which in toto cost the exchequer 40 rubles and 88 kopecks; i.e., somewhat more than Yakovlev’s overcoat and Musa’s coffee. And already the following year the haggling over Chernyshevski’s ghost was concluded, after negotiations between the Volunteer Security Guards (the secret police) and the executive committee of the underground People’s Freedom concerning the preservation of law and order during Alexander the Third’s coronation, with the decision that if the latter went off smoothly, Chernyshevski would be freed: thus he was bartered in exchange for tsars—and vice versa (a process that subsequently found its material expression when the Soviet authorities substituted in Saratov his statue for that of Alexander the Second). A year later, in May, a petition was submitted in his sons’ names (he, of course, knew nothing of this), in the most florid and tear-jerking style imaginable. The Minister of Justice, Nabokov, made the appropriate report and “His Majesty deigned to permit the transfer of Chernyshevski to Astrakhan.”

At the end of February, 1883 (overburdened time was already having difficulty in dragging his destiny), the gendarmes, without a word of the resolution, suddenly took him to Irkutsk. No matter—leaving Vilyuisk was in itself a happy event, and more than once during the summer voyage up the long Lena (revealing such kinship with the Volga in its meanders) the old man broke into a dance, chanting dactylic hexameters. But in September the voyage ended and with it the sensation of freedom. On the very first night Irkutsk appeared as the same kind of casemate in the deepest of provincial backwoods. In the morning he was visited by the chief of the gendarmerie, Keller. Nikolay Gavrilovich sat leaning his elbow on the table and did not respond at once. “The Emperor has pardoned you,” said Keller, and repeated it even louder, seeing that the other was apparently half-asleep or beclouded. “Me?” said the old man suddenly, then stood up, placed his hands on the herald’s shoulders and, shaking his head, burst into tears. In the evening, feeling as if convalescent after a long illness, but still weak, with a delicious mist permeating his being, he had tea at the Kellers’, talking incessantly and telling the latters’ children “more or less Persian fairy tales—about asses, roses, robbers…” as one of his hearers recalled. Five days later he was taken to Krasnoyarsk, from there to Orenburg—and in the late autumn at between six and seven in the evening he drove with post-horses through Saratov; there, in the yard of an inn by the gendarmery, in the mobile darkness, a wretched little lamp swayed so much in the wind that one simply could not distinguish properly Olga Sokratovna’s changeable, young, old, young face wrapped in a woolen kerchief—she had rushed headlong to this unhoped-for meeting; and that same night Chernyshevski (who could tell his thoughts?) was dispatched further.

With great mastery and with the utmost vividness of exposition (it might almost be taken for compassion) Strannolyubski describes his installation in his Astrakhan residence. No one met him with open arms, he was invited by no one, and very soon he understood that all the grandiose plans which had been his only support in exile must now melt away in an inanely lucid and quite imperturbable stillness.

To his Siberian illnesses Astrakhan added yellow fever. He frequently caught cold. He suffered acute palpitations of the heart. He smoked heavily and untidily. But worst of all, he was extremely nervous. He had an odd way of jumping up in the middle of a conversation—an abrupt movement stemming as it were from the day of his arrest, when he had dashed into his study, forestalling the funest Rakeyev. On the street he could be mistaken for a little old artisan: stoop-shouldered, wearing a cheap summer suit and a crumpled cap. “But tell me…” “But don’t you think…” “But…”: casual busybodies used to bother him with absurd questions. The actor Syroboyarski kept on asking him “Shall I marry or no?” There were two or three last little denunciations which fizzed like damp fireworks. The company he kept consisted of some local Armenians—grocers and haberdashers. Educated people were surprised by the fact that somehow he did not take much interest in public affairs. “Well, what do you want,” he would reply cheerlessly, “what can I make of it all? Why, I haven’t even once attended a trial by jury, not once been to a meeting of the zemstvo…”

Hair smoothly parted, with uncovered ears too big for her, and with a “bird’s nest” just below the crown of her head—here she is again with us (she has brought candy and kittens from Saratov); there is on her long lips that same mocking half-smile, the martyred line of her brows is still sharper, and the sleeves of her dress are now puffed out above the shoulders. She is already past fifty (1833-1918) but her character is still the same, neurotically naughty; her hysterical fits culminate sometimes into convulsions.

During these last six years of his life, poor, old, unwanted Nikolay Gavrilovich translates with machine-like steadiness volume after volume of Georg Weber’s Universal History for the publisher Soldatenkov—and at the same time, moved by his ancient, irrepressible need to air his opinions, he tries gradually to smuggle through Weber some of his own ideas. He signs his translation “Andreyev”; and in his review of the first volume (in The Examiner, February 1884) a critic remarks that this “is a kind of pseudonym, since in Russia there are as many Andreyevs as there are Ivanovs and Petrovs”; this is followed by stinging allusions to the heaviness of the style and by a small reprimand: “There was no need for Mr. Andreyev to dilate in his Foreword on the merits and demerits of Weber, who has long been known to the Russian reader. His textbook came out as early as the fifties and simultaneously three volumes of his Course of Universal History in the translation of E. and V. Korsh…. He would be well advised not to ignore the works of his predecessors.”

E. Korsh, a lover of arch-Russian terminology instead of that accepted by German philosophers, was by now an eighty-year-old man, an assistant of Soldatenkov’s, and in this capacity he proofread the “Astrakhan translator,” introducing corrections which enraged Chernyshevski, who in letters to the publisher set about “mauling” Evgeniy Fyodorovich according to his old system, at first demanding furiously that the proofreading be given to somebody else “who understands better that there is not another man in Russia who knows the Russian literary language as well as I do,” and then, when he had got his own way, employing another device: “Can I really be interested in such trifles? However, if Korsh wants to continue to read the proofs, ask him not to make corrections, they are indeed ridiculous.” With no less bitter pleasure he also mauled Zaharyin, who out of the goodness of his heart had spoken to Soldatenkov regarding a monthly payment (of 200 rubles) to Chernyshevski in view of Ogla Sokratovna’s extravagance. “You were fooled by the effrontery of a man whose mind has been befuddled by drunkenness,” wrote Chernyshevski to Soldatenkov, and setting in motion the whole apparatus of his logic—rusty, creaky but still as wriggly as ever, he at first justified his ire by the fact that he was being taken for a thief who wished to acquire capital, and then explained that his anger was actually only a sham for Olga Sokratovna’s sake: “Thanks to the fact that she learned of her extravagance from my letter to you, and I didn’t give in to her when she asked me to soften my expression, there were no convulsions.” At this point (the end of 1888) another brief review happened along—by now on Weber’s tenth volume. The terrible state of his mind, wounded pride, an old man’s crotchetiness and the last, hopeless attempts to shout down the silence (a feat even more difficult than Lear’s attempt to shout down the storm), all this must be remembered when you read through his spectacles the review on the inside of the pale-pink cover of The Messenger of Europe:

“It would seem,” remarks Strannolyubski here (somewhat mixing his metaphors), “that with this careless kick destiny had given the last suitable touch to the chain of retribution it had forged for him.” But that is not so. There remains for our inspection one more—most terrible, most complete, ultimate punishment.

Of all the madmen who tore Chernyshevski’s life into shreds, the worst was his son; not the youngest, of course, Mihail (Misha), who lived a quiet life, lovingly working away at tariff questions (he was employed in the railroads department): he had been evolved from his father’s “positive number” and was a good son, for at the time (1896–98) when his prodigal brother (which makes a moralistic picture) was publishing his Fantastic Tales and a collection of futile poems, he was piously beginning his monumental edition of his late father’s works, which he had practically brought to conclusion when he died, in 1924, surrounded by general esteem—ten years after Alexander (Sasha) had died suddenly in sinful Rome, in a small room with a stone floor, declaring his superhuman love for Italian art and crying in the heat of wild inspiration that if people would only listen to him life would be different, different! Created apparently out of everything that his father could not stand, Sasha, hardly out of his boyhood, developed a passion for everything that was weird, chimerical, and incomprehensible to his contemporaries—he lost himself in E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Poe, was fascinated by pure mathematics, and a little later he was one of the first in Russia to appreciate the French “poètes maudits.” The father, vegetating in Siberia, was unable to look after the development of his son (who was brought up by the Pypins) and what he learned he interpreted in his own way, the more so since they concealed Sasha’s mental disease from him. Gradually, however, the purity of this mathematics began to irritate Chernyshevski—and one can easily imagine with what feelings the youth used to read those long letters from his father, beginning with a deliberately debonair joke and then (like the conversations of that Chekhov character who used to begin so well—“an old alumnus, you know, an incurable idealist …”) concluding with irate abuse; this passion for mathematics enraged him not only as a manifestation of something nonutilitarian: by jeering at everything modern, Chernyshevski whom life had outdistanced would unburden himself concerning all the innovators, eccentrics and failures of this world.

His kindhearted cousin, Pypin, in January 1875, sends him to Vilyuisk an embellished description of his student son, informing him of what might please the creator of Rakhmetov (Sasha, he wrote, had ordered an eighteen-pound metal ball for gymnastics) and what must be flattering to any father: with restrained tenderness, Pypin, recalling his youthful friendship with Nikolay Gavrilovich (to whom he was much indebted), relates that Sasha is just as clumsy, just as angular as his father was, and also laughs as loud in the same treble tones…. Suddenly, in the autumn of 1877, Sasha joined the Nevski infantry regiment, but before he reached the active army (the Russo-Turkish war was in progress) he fell ill with typhus (in his constant misfortunes one is aware of a legacy from his father, who also used to break everything and drop everything). Returning to St. Petersburg he lived alone, giving lessons and publishing articles on the theory of probability. After 1882 his mental ailment was aggravated, and more than once he had to be placed in a nursing-home. He was afraid of space, or more exactly, he was afraid of slipping into a different dimension—and in order to avoid perishing he clung continuously to the safe, solid—with Euclidean pleats—skirt of Pelageya Nikolaevna Fanderflit (née Pypin).

From Chernyshevski, who had now moved to Astrakhan, they continued to hide this. With a kind of sadistic obstinacy, with pedantic callousness matching that of any prosperous bourgeois in Dickens or Balzac, he called his son in his letters “a big ludicrous freak” and an “eccentric pauper” and accused him of a desire “to remain a beggar.” Finally Pypin could stand it no longer and explained to his cousin with a certain warmth that although Sasha may not have become “a cold and calculating businessman,” he had in compensation “acquired a pure and honorable soul.”

And then Sasha came to Astrakhan. Nikolay Gavrilovich saw those radiant, bulging eyes, heard that strange, evasive speech… Having entered the service of the oilman Nobel, and being entrusted to accompany a bargeload along the Volga, Sasha, en route, one sultry, oil-soaked, satanic noon, knocked the bookkeeper’s cap off, threw the keys into the rainbow water, and went home to Astrakhan. That same summer four of his poems appeared in The Messenger of Europe; they show a gleam of talent:

(Incidentally, let us note the ghost of an additional syllable in “life’s hou-urs” matching zhiz-en’, instead of zhizn’ which is extremely characteristic of unbalanced Russian poets of the woebegone sort: a flaw corresponding, it would seem, to something lacking in their lives, something that might have turned life into song. The last line quoted has however an authentic poetic ring.)

The joint domicile of father and son was a joint hell. Chernyshevski drove Sasha to agonizing insomnia with his endless admonitions (as a “materialist” he had the fanatic effrontery to suppose that the main cause of Sasha’s disorder was his “pitiful material condition”), and he himself suffered in a way that he had not done even in Siberia. They both breathed easier when that winter Sasha went away—at first to Heidelberg with the family in which he was tutor and then to St. Petersburg “because of the need to get medical advice.” Petty, falsely funny misfortunes continued to spatter him. Thus we learn from a letter of his mother’s (1888) that while “Sasha was pleased to go out for a stroll, the house in which he was living burned down,” and everything that he possessed burned with it; and, by now utterly destitute, he moved to the country house of Strannolyubski (the critic’s father?).

In 1889, Chernyshevski received permission to go to Saratov. Whatever emotions this might have awakened in him, these were in any case poisoned by an intolerable family worry: Sasha, who had always had a pathological passion for exhibitions, suddenly undertook a most extravagant and happy trip to the notorious Exposition universelle in Paris—having at first got stuck in Berlin, where it was necessary to send him money in the consul’s name with a request to dispatch him back; but no: when he received the money Sasha made his way to Paris, had his fill “of the wonderful wheel, of the gigantic, filigree tower”—and again was penniless.

Chernyshevski’s feverish work on huge masses of Weber (which turned his brain into a forced labor factory and represented in fact the greatest mockery of human thought) did not cover unlooked-for expenditures—and day after day dictating, dictating, dictating, he felt that he could not go on, could not go on turning world history into rubles—and in the meantime he was also tormented by the panicky fear that from Paris, Sasha would come crashing into Saratov. On October 11th, he wrote Sasha that his mother was sending him the money for his return to St. Petersburg, and—for the millionth time—advised him to take any job and do everything that his superiors might tell him to do: “Your ignorant, ridiculous sermons to your superiors cannot be tolerated by any superiors” (thus ends the “theme of writing exercises”). Continuing to twitch and mutter, he sealed the envelope and himself went to the station to mail the letter. Through the town whirled a cruel wind, which on the very first corner chilled the hurrying, angry little old man in his light coat. The following day, despite a fever, he translated eighteen pages of close print; on the 13th he wanted to continue, but he was persuaded to desist; on the 14th delirium set in: “Inga, inc [nonsense words, then a sigh] I’m quite unsettled… Paragraph… If some thirty thousand Swedish troops could be sent to Schleswig-Holstein they would easily rout all the Danes’ forces and overrun… all the islands, except, perhaps Copenhagen, which will resist stubbornly, but in November, in parentheses put the ninth, Copenhagen also surrendered, semicolon; the Swedes turned the whole population of the Danish capital into shining silver, banished the energetic men of the patriotic parties to Egypt… Yes, yes, where was I… New paragraph …” Thus he rambled on for a long time, jumping from an imaginary Weber to some imaginary memoirs of his own, laboriously discoursing about the fact that “the smallest fate of this man has been decided, there is no salvation for him… Although microscopic, a tiny particle of pus has been found in his blood, his fate has been decided …” Was he talking about himself, was it in himself that he felt this tiny particle that had kept mysteriously impairing all he did and experienced in life? A thinker, a toiler, a lucid mind, populating his utopias with an army of stenographers—he had now lived to see his delirium taken down by a secretary. On the night of the 16th he had a stroke—he felt the tongue in his mouth to be somehow thick; after which he soon died. His last words (at 3 A.M. on the 17th) were: “A strange business: in this book there is not a single mention of God.” It is a pity that we do not know precisely which book he was reading to himself.

Now he lay surrounded by the dead tomes of Weber; a pair of spectacles in their case kept getting into everybody’s way.

Sixty-one years had passed since that year of 1828 when the first omnibuses had appeared in Paris and when a Saratov priest had noted down in his prayer book: “July 12th, in the third hour of morning, a son born, Nikolay… Christened the morning of the 13th before mass. Godfather: Archpriest Fyod. Stef. Vyazovski …” This name was subsequently given by Chernyshevski to the protagonist and narrator of his Siberian novellas—and by a strange coincidence it was thus, or nearly thus (F.V……ski) that an unknown poet signed, in the magazine Century (1909, November), fourteen lines dedicated, according to information which we possess, to the memory of N. G. Chernyshevski—a mediocre but curious sonnet which we here give in full: