The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887-91

A Dreary Story

(FROM AN OLD MAN’S MEMOIRS)

I

There lives in Russia an eminent Professor Nikolay Stepanovich Such-and-Such, a Privy Councillor and a man of great distinction. He has so many decorations, both Russian and foreign, that whenever he wears them his students call him the ‘icon-stand’. He moves in the very best circles: at least, over the past twenty-five–thirty years he has been on the most intimate terms with every single famous Russian scholar. Nowadays he has no one to make friends with. But if we turn to the past we’ll find that the long list of his celebrated friends ends with such names as Pirogov,¹ Kavelin² and the poet Nekrasov³ who bestowed on him their most sincere and warmest friendship. He’s a member of all Russian and three foreign universities. And so on… All this – and a lot more might be added – makes up my so-called ‘name’.

This name of mine is very popular. It’s familiar to every literate Russian and is mentioned in foreign lecture-rooms with an additional ‘honoured’ or ‘distinguished’. It’s one of those few fortunate names it would be a sign of bad taste to abuse or take in vain in public or in print. And that is only right. You see, my name is closely associated with the concept of a celebrated, richly gifted and unquestionably useful man. I am hard-working, with the stamina of an ox, which is important, and I have talent, which is even more important. What’s more, while I’m on the subject, I’m a well-bred, modest and decent fellow. Never have I poked my nose into literature or politics, never have I sought popularity by arguing with ignoramuses, never have I delivered speeches at dinners or at my colleagues’ funerals… Generally speaking, there’s not a single blemish on my scholarly name – and it has no reason to complain. It is fortunate.

The bearer of this name – myself – I would describe as a man of sixty-two, bald, with false teeth and an incurable nervous tic. I’m as dull and ugly as my name is brilliant and impressive. My head and hands tremble with weakness. Like one of those heroines in Turgenev,⁴ my neck resembles the skinny handle of a doublebass, my chest is hollow, my shoulders narrow. When I talk or lecture my mouth twists to one side. When I smile my face is a mass of ghastly, senile wrinkles. There is nothing inspiring about my pathetic figure. Perhaps only when I’m suffering from the tic do I have that special look which is bound to arouse in any observer the grimly inspiring thought: ‘That man’s obviously not long for this world.’

I still lecture fairly well, as I always have done; as before, I can still hold my audience’s attention for two hours. My fervour, my elegant exposition and my humour almost completely conceal the defects of my voice, which is dry, harsh and sing-song, like a sanctimonious preacher’s. But I write badly. The portion of my brain that controls the faculty of writing has refused to function. My memory is fading, my thoughts have little consistency and whenever I put them to paper I always feel that I have lost the knack of linking them organically, that my phrasing is monotonous and my language sketchy and feeble. Often I don’t write what I mean. When I’m writing the conclusion I’ve already forgotten the beginning. Often I forget ordinary words and I always have to waste a great deal of energy to avoid superfluous phrases and unnecessary parentheses – both of which are unmistakable proof of my declining mental faculties. Amazingly, the simpler the subject the more painful the effort. I feel far more at ease and intelligent with scientific articles than with letters of congratulation or with memoranda. And another thing: I find it easier to write in German or English than in Russian.

As for my present mode of life I must give first place to the insomnia from which I’ve been suffering of late. If someone were to question me as to what constitutes the fundamental, basic feature of my life now I would reply: insomnia. From force of habit I still undress and go to bed exactly at midnight. I fall asleep quickly, but between one and two o’clock I wake up, feeling that I haven’t slept a wink. I get out of bed and light a lamp. For an hour or two I pace up and down and look at those long-familiar pictures and photographs. When I am weary of walking I sit down at my table and stay there motionless, thinking of nothing, desiring nothing. If there’s a book in front of me I draw it towards me and mechanically read it, without any interest. This was how I read in one night an entire novel with the odd title: What Song the Swallow Sang.⁵ Or to occupy my mind I force myself to count to a thousand or imagine a colleague’s face, trying to remember when and under what circumstances he joined the Faculty. I like to listen for sounds. Sometimes my daughter Liza will mutter something rapidly in her sleep two rooms away, or my wife will cross the drawing-room and invariably she’ll drop the matchbox; or the warped cupboard will creak; or the lamp burner will suddenly start humming – for some reason all these sounds excite me.

To lie awake at night is to be conscious every minute that you are not normal, and that is why I so long for the morning and the day, when I have the right not to sleep. Many wearisome hours pass before the cock crows in the yard – he is my first herald of good tidings. The moment he crows I know that within an hour the house-porter will wake up and come upstairs for some reason, angrily coughing. And then the light will gradually grow pale at the windows, voices will ring out in the street.

My day begins when my wife arrives. She enters in her petticoat, her hair undone, but washed and smelling of flower-scented eau-de-Cologne and looking as if she has come in by accident. Every time she says the same thing, ‘Sorry, I only dropped in for a moment… Had another bad night?’

Then she puts the lamp out, sits by the table and starts talking. I’m no prophet, but I know in advance what she’s going to talk about – the same thing every morning. Usually, after anxious inquiries about my health, she’ll suddenly mention our son, who is an army officer stationed in Warsaw. After the twentieth of every month we send him fifty roubles – and this is our main topic of conversation.

‘Of course, it’s hard for us,’ my wife sighs, ‘but it’s our duty to help until he can finally fend for himself. The boy’s in a strange country, his pay’s not very much… But if you like we can send him forty roubles instead of fifty next month. What do you think?’

Everyday experience might have taught my wife that constant talk about expenses doesn’t reduce them in any way, but my wife refuses to learn from experience and every morning she regularly discusses our officer son and tells me that bread, thank God, is cheaper, but sugar is two copecks dearer – and all this as if she were communicating some important news.

I listen, mechanically agree and probably because I’ve had a bad night, strange, inappropriate thoughts grip me. I look at my wife and I wonder like a child. In bewilderment I ask myself if this extremely stout, clumsy old woman with her dull look of petty anxiety and fear that we might starve, her eyes clouded by constant brooding over debts and privation, who can talk of nothing but expenses and who smiles only when prices come down – could this woman possibly be the same slim Varya with whom I once fell in love so passionately for her fine, lucid mind, her pure soul, her beauty, because she felt ‘sympathy’ for my studies as Desdemona did for Othello?⁶ Could this really be the same Varya, my wife who once bore me a son?

I gaze intently into this flabby, clumsy old woman’s face, trying to discover my Varya, but of her past self nothing remains except her concern for my health and her habit of calling my salary ‘our salary’, my cap ‘our cap’. It pains me to look at her and to provide her with a few scraps of comfort I let her say what she likes – and I even keep quiet when she criticizes people unfairly or picks on me for not going into private practice or publishing textbooks.

Our conversations always end the same way. My wife suddenly remembers that I haven’t had my tea and takes fright.

‘What am I sitting here for?’ she says, getting up. ‘The samovar’s been on the table for ages and here I am chattering away. Heavens, I’ve become so forgetful!’

She quickly goes out but she stops at the door to ask, ‘Did you know we owe Yegor five months’ wages? We mustn’t let the servants’ wages run up, I’ve told you that so many times! It’s far easier paying them ten roubles a month than fifty every five months!’

In the doorway she stops again to say, ‘The one I feel most sorry for is our Liza. She’s a student at the Conservatoire, she’s always mixing in good society, yet just look how she’s dressed! That fur coat would make anyone ashamed to be seen in the street with it. It wouldn’t matter so much if she were anyone’s daughter, but everyone knows that her father is a famous professor, a Privy Councillor!’

And after reproaching me with my name and position she finally leaves. So begins my day. Nor does it get any better.

While I’m drinking my tea in comes my daughter Liza in her fur coat and little hat, carrying some music books – all ready to go to the Conservatoire. She is twenty-two, but she looks younger. She’s pretty and a bit like my wife when she was young. She kisses me affectionately on the temple and hand.

‘Good morning, Papa. How are you?’ she asks.

As a child she was very fond of ice cream and I often took her to a café. Ice cream was her criterion of excellence. If she wanted to praise me she would say, ‘Papa, you’re all ice creamy!’ One of her fingers would be called ‘pistachio’, another ‘cream’, another ‘raspberry’ – and so on. Usually when she came in to say good morning I would sit her on my knee and kiss her fingers.

‘Vanilla… pistachio… lemon…’ I would say.

And even now, for old time’s sake, I still kiss Liza’s fingers and mutter, ‘Pistachio, cream, lemon…’, but it somehow doesn’t sound right. I’m as cold as ice cream myself, I feel embarrassed. When my daughter comes in and touches my temple with her lips I give a sudden start, as if stung by a bee, produce a forced smile and turn my face away. Ever since I first began to suffer from insomnia one question has constantly been nagging me: my daughter often sees me, an elderly, distinguished man, blush painfully because I haven’t paid our footman his wages. She sees how often my worrying over petty debts makes me stop work and thoughtfully pace the room for hours on end. So why has she never once come to see me without her mother’s knowledge to whisper, ‘Papa, here’s my watch, my bracelets, earrings, dresses… pawn the lot, you need the money’? When she sees her mother and myself trying to keep up appearances why doesn’t she give up the expensive pleasure of studying music? I could never accept her watch, or bracelets or any other sacrifices – God forbid! I don’t need them.

And this leads me to think of my son, the army officer in Warsaw. He is an intelligent, honest and sober person. But that’s not enough for me. I fancy that if I had an old father and knew that there were times when he was ashamed of being so poor, I would give up my commission to someone else and take a job as a labourer. Such thoughts about my children poison me. But what good are these thoughts? Only a narrow-minded or embittered man can harbour malicious thoughts about ordinary mortals for not being heroes. But enough of that.

At a quarter to ten I have to go and deliver a lecture to my dear boys. I get dressed and walk down the road I have known for thirty years and which has a history of its own for me. Here is the large grey building with the chemist’s shop. Here there used to be a small house with an ale bar – there I planned my thesis and wrote my first love letter to Varya, in pencil, on a page with the heading Historia Morbi.⁷ Next comes the grocer’s, once kept by a little Jew who sold me cigarettes on credit and later by a fat woman who was fond of the students because ‘every one of them had a mother’. Now it’s occupied by a red-haired shopkeeper – a very phlegmatic man who drinks his tea from a copper teapot. And here are the grim university gates that have long needed repairing, a bored janitor in a sheepskin jacket, a broom, heaps of snow… Such gates cannot make a healthy impression on a bright young boy from the provinces who imagines that the Temple of Learning really is a temple. All in all, the dilapidated university buildings, the gloomy corridors and grimy walls, the lack of light, the dismal aspect of the steps, coat-hooks and benches play a leading role as a conditioning factor in the history of Russian pessimism. And here is our garden. I fancy it has grown neither better nor worse since I was a student. I do not like it. It would have been much more sensible to have grown some lofty pines and fine oaks there instead of shrivelled-up limes, yellow acacias and skimpy, clipped lilacs. Most students’ moods are influenced by their environment, therefore they should be able to see only what is noble, impressive and elegant at all times at their place of study. God preserve them from spindly trees, broken windows, grey walls and doors upholstered with torn oil-cloth.

When I approach my own entrance the door is flung open and I’m met by my old colleague, contemporary and namesake, Nikolay the porter. He lets me in, clears his throat and says, ‘It’s very frosty, Professor!’ Or if my fur coat is damp: ‘It’s raining, Professor!’

Then he runs on ahead and opens all the doors on the way. In my study he solicitously takes off my coat, at the same time managing to communicate some item of university news. Thanks to the close camaraderie that exists between all university porters and caretakers, he knows simply everything that is going on in all four faculties, in the registry, the Vice-Chancellor’s study and the library. There’s absolutely nothing he doesn’t know about. When the latest news is a Dean’s or Vice-Chancellor’s resignation, for example, I can hear him talking to the young janitors, naming candidates for the vacancy, explaining that So-and-So wouldn’t be approved by the Minister, or that So-and-So would turn it down himself. Then he goes into fantastic detail about some mysterious papers that were received in the registry about a secret conversation alleged to have taken place between the Minister and a trustee – and so on. If you spare all the details, in general he’s almost always right. His descriptions of each candidate’s character, although highly original, turn out to be correct as well. If you need to know in what year someone defended a thesis, took up his post, retired or died, then call on this old soldier’s prodigious memory and he will not only tell you the year month and day, but will also furnish all the details that accompanied this or that event. Only someone who loves his work can have such a memory.

He is a custodian of university traditions. From the porters who were his predecessors he has inherited many legends of university life and to this repository of wealth he has added many riches of his own, acquired during years of service. Many are the stories he will tell you – long or short – if you so desire. He can tell of extraordinary sages who knew everything, of remarkable scholars who would go without sleep for weeks on end, of science’s innumerable martyrs and victims. In his stories good always triumphs over evil, the weak over the strong, the wise over fools, the humble over the proud, the young over the old… There’s no need to take all his cock-and-bull stories and fables at their face value, but if you sift them you will be left with what is truly important: our fine traditions and the names of real, universally recognized heroes.

In our society all information about the academic world is confined to a few anecdotes about the phenomenal absent-mindedness of elderly professors and two or three witticisms variously ascribed to Gruber,⁸ myself or Babukhin.⁹ For an educated public this is rather feeble. If people loved learning, scholars, students as Nikolay does, its literature would long ago have included entire epics, legends and chronicles which it unfortunately lacks these days.

Whenever he tells me the news Nikolay assumes a grave expression and we get down to business. If an outsider could observe the ease with which Nikolay uses scientific terminology at these times he might easily conclude that here was an academic masquerading as an old campaigner. Incidentally, those rumours about the erudition of university porters are greatly exaggerated. True, Nikolay knows more than a hundred Latin terms, can put a skeleton together, can occasionally prepare specimens or amuse the students with some long, learned quotation. But a simple theory such as the circulation of the blood, let’s say, is as great a mystery to him now as it was twenty years ago.

At a table in my study, bent low over a book or some preparation, sits Pyotr Ignatyevich my demonstrator, a hard-working, modest but untalented man of about thirty-five, already bald and with a fat belly. He slaves away from dawn to dusk, reads a great deal and can remember everything he has read – in this respect he’s a perfect treasure. But in all other respects he’s a mere drudge – in other words a learned blockhead. The drudge-like features that distinguish him from someone of genuine talent are as follows: his horizon is narrow and severely restricted to his speciality; outside his special subject he is like a child. I can remember going into his office one morning and saying, ‘What terrible news! I’ve heard that Skobelev’s¹⁰ died.’

Nikolay crosses himself, but Pyotr Ignatyevich turns to me and asks, ‘Who is this Skobelev?’

Another time – this was somewhat earlier – I tell him that Professor Perov¹¹ has died and my dear old Pyotr Ignatyevich asks ‘What did he lecture on?’

I fancy that if Patti¹² sang into his ear, if hordes of Chinese invaded Russia, if there was an earthquake, he wouldn’t turn a hair and would calmly keep squinting down his microscope. In short, ‘What’s Hecuba to him?’¹³ I would give anything to see this dry old stick in bed with his wife.

Another feature is his fanatical faith in the infallibility of science and above all in everything written by Germans. He has great confidence in himself and in his preparations, he knows the purpose of life and is a total stranger to those doubts and disappointments which make more talented people go grey. There’s his cringing deference to authority and complete absence of any desire for independent thought. It’s impossible to make him change his mind about anything and it’s impossible to argue with him. Just try and argue with a man who is firmly convinced that medicine is queen of the sciences, that doctors are a superior breed and that medical traditions are the finest. The sole surviving tradition from medicine’s tarnished past is the white tie, still worn by doctors. For scholars and any educated person there can only be traditions that apply to the university as a whole, without distinction between medicine, law, etc. But it’s hard for Pyotr Ignatyevich to agree with this and he is prepared to argue with you until doomsday.

I have a clear picture of his future. In the course of his life he’ll make a few hundred preparations of unparalleled purity, write many dreary but very decent articles, turn out a dozen or so conscientious translations. But he’ll never set the world alight. For that you need imagination, inventiveness, vision, but Pyotr Ignatyevich is blessed with none of these things. In brief, he’s not a master in science, but a journeyman.

Pyotr Ignatyevich, Nikolay and I speak in an undertone. We feel a little uneasy. You always have this special kind of feeling when you can hear your audience booming away like the sea on the other side of the lecture-room door. Thirty years haven’t inured me to this feeling and I have it every morning. Nervously I button up my frock-coat, ask Nikolay unnecessary questions, get cross. I may seem to be behaving like a coward, but this is something quite different from cowardice, something which I can neither put a name to nor describe.

‘Well then, it’s time to go in,’ I say.

And we proceed into the hall, in the following order: first is Nikolay with the preparations or charts, then myself – and after me lumbers the old drudge, head humbly bowed. Or, when it’s necessary, a corpse is carried in first on a stretcher, followed by Nikolay, and so on. On my appearance the students stand up, then they sit down and the roar of the sea suddenly subsides: the ocean is becalmed.

I know what I’m about to lecture on, but have no idea how I’m going to lecture, what I shall begin with and how I shall conclude. I haven’t a single sentence ready in my mind. But I only have to cast my eyes over the lecture-hall (it is built like an amphitheatre) and utter the obligatory: ‘At last week’s lecture we stopped at…’ for the sentences to spring from my inner self in long procession – and then I’m off! I speak with irrepressible speed and passion and feel that no earthly power could stem the flow of words. To lecture well – so that your audience will profit from your lecture and not be bored – you need not only talent but a certain knack, experience, the clearest possible awareness of your own strengths, of your audience and the subject of your lecture. Besides that, you need to be on your toes, to be ever-vigilant and never lose sight of your objective for one moment.

A good conductor does twenty things at once when interpreting a composer: he reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer, motions sideways towards the drums or French horns, and so on. That is just what I do when lecturing. Before me are one hundred and fifty faces, all different, with three hundred eyes staring straight at me. My aim is to vanquish this many-headed hydra. If I can keep their level of concentration and comprehension clearly in mind every minute of my lecture, then they are in my power. My other enemy dwells within me. This is the infinite variety of forms, phenomena and laws, and the mass of ideas – my own and other people’s – conditioned by them. Every minute I must be skilful enough to snatch from this vast body of material what is most important and vital and at the same time keep pace with the speed of my thoughts and present them in a form that will be intelligible to the hydra and arouse its attention; at the same time I must be ever-vigilant, so that I convey my ideas not simply as they happen to accumulate, but in the specific order which is essential for the correct composition of the picture I’m trying to paint. Further, I endeavour to use polished language, to ensure that my definitions are brief and precise, my phraseology as simple and elegant as possible. Every minute I have to hold myself in check and remember that I have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In brief, I have my work cut out. At one and the same time I have to play the scholar, the pedagogue and the orator – and woe betide me if the orator gets the better of the pedagogue and scholar, or vice versa.

After lecturing for about a quarter or half an hour, you suddenly notice that the students are beginning to stare at the ceiling or at Pyotr Ignatyevich. One of them feels for his handkerchief, another fidgets in his seat, another smiles at his own thoughts… This means their attention is flagging and action is necessary. I seize the first opportunity and crack a joke. The one hundred and fifty faces grin broadly, eyes gaily sparkle, the sea briefly roars. I laugh as well. Their concentration has been revived and I can continue.

No debate, diversion or game has ever given me such enjoyment as lecturing. Only when lecturing have I been able to let myself go completely and come to understand that inspiration is not an invention of poets, but really does exist. And I don’t think that even after his most piquant labour Hercules ever felt such voluptuous exhaustion as I do after lecturing.

All that is in the past – now lecturing is nothing but sheer torture for me. Barely half an hour goes by before I start to feel an overwhelming weakness in my legs and shoulders. I sit in an armchair, but I am not used to lecturing sitting down. A minute later I get up and continue standing – then I sit down again. My mouth goes dry, my voice grows hoarse, my head spins… To hide my condition from the audience I keep drinking water, cough, frequently blow my nose as if I have a cold, casually make irrelevant jokes and finish by announcing the break before I should. But above all I feel ashamed.

My conscience and reason tell me that the best thing I could do now would be to deliver a valedictory lecture to my boys, to say one last word to them, to give them my blessing and surrender my post to a younger and stronger man than myself. But as God is my judge I lack the courage to act according to my conscience.

Unfortunately I am neither philosopher nor theologian. I know perfectly well that I have no more than six months to live. I think I should really be concerned most of all with the gloom beyond the grave and the ghosts that will haunt my sepulchral slumbers. But for some reason my heart rejects these questions, although my mind fully recognizes their full import. Now that I am on the brink of death only science has any interest for me – it is the same as twenty to thirty years ago. When I draw my last breath I shall still believe that science is the most important, beautiful and vital thing in man’s life, that it always has been and always will be the highest manifestation of love and that only through science will man conquer nature and himself. Although this belief may appear naïve and based on false assumptions, it’s not my fault if this is what I believe and not otherwise. This is my creed and I am powerless to destroy it.

But this is beside the point. All I ask is for people to indulge my weakness and to understand that to tear from his professorial chair and his students a man for whom the fate of the bone medulla is of more interest than the ultimate purpose of the universe would be equivalent to seizing him and nailing him in his coffin without waiting for him to die.

Because of my insomnia and the strain of fighting my increasing weakness strange things are happening to me. In the middle of my lecture tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin to smart and I feel a passionate, hysterical urge to stretch my hands out and complain out loud. I want to shout out loud that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to death and that within about six months another person will be holding sway in the lecture-hall. I want to cry out that I’ve been poisoned. New thoughts that I’ve never known before have poisoned the last few days of my life and they continue to sting my brain like mosquitoes. Just now my position seems so terrible that I want my entire audience to leap from their seats in horror and rush panic-stricken for the exit, shrieking in despair.

Such moments are not easy to endure.

II

After the lecture I stay at home and work. I read journals, theses, or prepare my next lecture; sometimes I do some writing. My work is constantly interrupted as I have to receive visitors.

The door bell rings. It’s a colleague who has come to discuss some academic matter. He enters with his hat and walking-stick. Thrusting both at me he says, ‘I’ve just dropped in for a minute… only a minute! Now, don’t get up, my dear colleague! Just a couple of words…’

From the start we try to show each other how exceptionally polite we are and how terribly delighted we are to see each other. I sit him in an armchair and he makes me sit as well – as we do this we carefully stroke each other’s waist, touch each other’s buttons and it seems that we are feeling each other and are afraid of burning our fingers. We both laugh, although we don’t say anything amusing. Seated in our chairs, we lean our heads towards each other and speak in subdued voices. However cordially disposed we might be to each other, we cannot help gilding our conversation with all kinds of pretentious piffle like: ‘As you so justly deigned to observe’, or ‘As I already had the honour of informing you.’ And we cannot help laughing out loud if one of us cracks a joke, however poor. His business completed, my colleague abruptly gets up, waves his hat at my work and begins to say goodbye. Again we paw each other, again we laugh. I see him into the hall. Here I help him on with his fur coat, but he makes every effort to decline so signal an honour. Then, when Yegor opens the front door, my colleague assures me that I will catch cold, but I pretend that I’m prepared to accompany him right out into the street even. Finally, when I’m back in my study, my face is still smiling – from inertia I suppose.

A little later the bell rings again. Someone enters the hall, spends a long time removing his coat and coughing. Yegor announces that a student has arrived. ‘Ask him in,’ I tell Yegor. A minute later in comes a young man of pleasant appearance. For the past year relations between us have been strained: he makes a dreadful hash of his exams and I give him the lowest mark. Every year I have about seven young hopefuls like him whom I fail – or ‘plough’ in student slang. Those who fail their exams, either through inability or sickness, usually bear their cross patiently and don’t try to bargain with me. The only ones who come to my house to bargain are the sanguine, expansive types for whom hard cramming spoils their appetite and prevents them from going to the opera regularly. To the first I am merciful, the latter I keep ‘ploughing’ all year round.

‘Please sit down,’ I tell my visitor. ‘What is it?’

‘Sorry to trouble you, professor,’ he begins, faltering and not looking me in the eye. ‘I wouldn’t have taken the liberty of disturbing you if… I… er… I’ve sat your exam five times and I’ve been… er… ploughed every time. I’m begging you, please be good enough to pass me, because…’

The argument all these idlers defend themselves with is invariably the same: they have passed all their other subjects with distinction, only in mine have they come to grief, which is all the more surprising, since they have always studied my subject so diligently and know it backwards. They have failed because of some mysterious misunderstanding.

‘Forgive me, my friend,’ I tell my visitor, ‘but I cannot pass you. Go and study your lecture notes a bit more and come and see me again. Then we shall see.’

A pause. I have the urge to make my student suffer a little for preferring beer and the opera to learning and I say with a sigh, ‘I think it would be best if you gave up medicine altogether. If someone of your ability can’t pass his exams it’s obvious you have neither the desire nor the vocation to become a doctor.’

The young hopeful’s face lengthens. ‘I’m sorry, professor, but it would be very odd if I did that, to say the least,’ he laughs. ‘Study for five years and then suddenly chuck it all in!’

‘Well, why not? It’s better to lose five years than spend the rest of your life doing something you don’t like.’

But immediately I feel sorry for him and hasten to add, ‘Well, do as you like. Study a bit more and then come and see me again.’

‘When?’ the idler asks in an empty voice.

‘Whenever you like. How about tomorrow?’

And in his good-natured eyes I can read, ‘All right, I’ll come, but you’ll only plough me again, you bastard!’

‘Of course,’ I say, ‘you won’t know any more medicine even if you sit my exam another fifteen times. But it’s all good character training – for that you should be grateful.’

Silence follows. I get up and wait for my visitor to leave, but he stands there looking out of the window, fingering his beard and thinking. The whole thing’s becoming a bore.

The young hopeful’s voice is agreeably mellow, his eyes are intelligent and mocking, his complacent face is somewhat bloated from too much beer-drinking and lying around on his sofa for hours. No doubt he could tell me many interesting things about the opera, his love affairs, his fellow-students of whom he is very fond, but unfortunately it isn’t the done thing to discuss such matters. Yet I would gladly listen.

‘Professor! On my word of honour, if you pass me I’ll… er…’

The moment we arrive at ‘word of honour’ I gesture in despair and sit at my desk. The student ponders for another minute.

‘In that case, goodbye,’ he says dejectedly. ‘I’m sorry…’

‘Goodbye, old chap. Look after yourself.’

Hesitantly he goes into the hall, slowly puts on his coat and probably spends a long time when he’s out in the street mulling everything over again. And then, failing to think up anything except ‘old devil’ with regard to myself, he goes into a cheap restaurant for a glass of beer and something to eat, then back home to bed. May your ashes rest in peace, honest toiler!

The bell rings for the third time. In comes a young doctor wearing a new black suit, gold-rimmed spectacles and – naturally – a white tie. He introduces himself. I sit him down and ask what I can do for him. Rather nervously, this youthful devotee of learning tells me first that this year he has passed his qualifying exam for his doctorate: it only remains to write the thesis. He would like me to supervise him and he would be awfully obliged if I could suggest a subject.

‘Delighted to be of assistance, my dear colleague,’ I say, ‘but let’s first see if we agree about what a thesis is. The word is generally taken to mean an essay which is the product of original work. Isn’t that so? But compositions written on someone else’s subject and under someone else’s guidance have a different name…’

The candidate says nothing. I fly into a rage and leap from my chair. ‘Why do you all come to me!’ I shout angrily. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. Do you think I’m running a shop? I don’t peddle research subjects! For the umpteenth time I’m asking you all to leave me in peace! Apologies for being so blunt, but I’m really sick to death of all this!’

The candidate makes no reply – only a slight flush appears around his cheekbones. His face expresses profound respect for my distinguished name and erudition, but I can see from his eyes that he despises my voice, my pathetic figure, my nervous gestures. In my wrath I strike him as some kind of freak.

‘This isn’t a shop!’ I fume. ‘Why don’t you want to be independent – that’s what amazes me! Why do you find freedom so repellent?’

I say a great deal, but still he remains silent. In the end I gradually calm down – and of course I give in. The candidate will get a subject not worth a brass farthing from me, he’ll write a thesis of no use to anyone, under my supervision, he’ll defend it with merit in a tedious oral and be awarded a higher degree that is of no use to him.

The doorbell could go on ringing for ever, but for the moment I shall confine myself to four visits. It rings a fourth time and I hear familiar footsteps, the rustle of a dress, a dear voice.

Eighteen years ago an oculist colleague of mine died, leaving a seven-year-old daughter Katya and sixty thousand roubles. In his will he appointed me guardian. Until she was ten, Katya lived with my family, then she was sent to boarding-school and spent only the summer holidays with us. I never had the time to take care of her education and supervised it only in fits and starts, which is why I can say very little about her childhood.

The first thing I remember about her and which remains a fond memory is the extraordinary trustfulness she showed when she came into my house and with which she let herself be treated by doctors, a trustfulness which always illumined her little face. She would sit somewhere out of the way with her cheek bandaged, invariably looking attentively at something – whether it was myself writing or leafing through a book, or my wife bustling about the house, or the cook peeling potatoes in the kitchen, or the dog playing, her eyes always expressed the same thing: ‘Everything that happens in this world is wise and wonderful.’ She was inquisitive and very fond of talking to me. Seated at the table opposite me she would sometimes follow my movements and ask questions. She was interested in what I was reading, what I did at the university, whether I was scared of corpses, what I did with my salary.

‘Do students fight at the university?’ she would ask.

‘Yes they do, my dear.’

‘Do you make them go down on their knees?’

‘Yes I do.’

She found it funny that the students fought and that I made them go down on their knees and she would burst out laughing. She was a gentle, patient, good child. I often happened to see something taken away from her, saw her punished without reason, or her curiosity left unsatisfied. At such times a touch of sadness would colour her perpetually trusting expression – and that was all. I was incapable of standing up for her, but only when I saw her sadness did I long to draw her close to me and comfort her like some old nanny with the words: ‘My poor darling orphan!’

I also remember how she loved dressing up and sprinkling herself with scent. In this respect she was like me: I too am fond of nice clothes and perfume.

I do regret that I had neither the time nor the inclination to observe the origin and growth of that passion which took possession of Katya when she was fourteen or fifteen. I mean her passionate love for the theatre. When she came home from school for the summer holidays she would talk of nothing with such delight and enthusiasm as plays and actors. She would exhaust us with her endless talk of the theatre. My wife and children wouldn’t listen and I alone lacked the courage to refuse her an audience. Whenever she felt like sharing her excitement she would come into my study and plead, ‘Nikolay Stepanych, let me talk about the theatre with you!’

I would point at the clock and say, ‘You’ve got half an hour. Begin!’

Later she started bringing home by the dozen portraits of actors and actresses whom she worshipped. Then she tried several times to get parts in amateur theatricals and finally, when she finished boarding-school, she announced that she was born to be an actress.

I never shared Katya’s enthusiasm for the theatre. As I see it, if a play’s any good there’s no need to trouble actors in order to get the intended impression – reading should suffice. If a play’s bad, no acting will make it good.

When I was young I often went to the theatre and now my family takes a box about twice a year, to give me ‘an airing’. Of course, this does not entitle me to criticize the theatre and I won’t say much about it. In my view the theatre hasn’t improved over the past thirty to forty years. It’s still impossible to get a glass of water in the corridors or the foyer, the attendants still fine me twenty copecks for my fur coat, although I can see nothing dishonourable in wearing warm clothes in winter. The orchestra still plays in the intervals without the slightest need for it, adding a new, unsolicited impression to that which has already been conveyed by the play. The gentlemen still go to the bar in the intervals to drink spirits. If there’s no progress in small matters there’s no point in seeking it in the really important ones. When an actor, cloaked from head to foot in theatrical traditions and prejudices, tries to declaim that simple, straightforward soliloquy ‘To be or not to be’ in a way that is far from simple – and for some reason invariably accompanied by hissing and general bodily convulsions – when he tries to convince me at all costs that Chatsky,¹⁴ who talks so much with fools and is in love with a foolish girl, is a very clever man and that Woe from Wit isn’t a dull play, the stage seems to exhale that same old routine which bored me so much forty years ago, when I was regaled with classical lamentations and breast-beating. And on each occasion I leave the theatre more conservative than when I went in. You can convince the sentimental, gullible herd that the theatre in its present state is a school, but anyone who knows what a school really is will not rise to this bait. I cannot predict what will happen in fifty or a hundred years, but as things are the theatre can serve only as a kind of diversion. But this kind of entertainment is too expensive to be enjoyed in the long term. It deprives the state of thousands of healthy, talented young men and women who might have become good doctors, farmers, schoolmistresses, officers had they not devoted themselves to the stage. It robs the public of the evening hours, the best time for intellectual work and friendly conversation – not to mention the wasted money and moral damage to the theatre-goer when he sees murder, fornication or slander badly handled on the stage.

Katya’s views were completely different. She assured me that even in its present state the theatre was superior to lecture-rooms, books – superior to anything in this world. The stage was a force that united all the arts, the actors were missionaries. No art or science on its own could have such a strong, beneficial influence on the human soul as the stage and it was no surprise that third-rate actors enjoyed greater popularity in Russia than the finest scholar or artist. And no public activity could give so much pleasure and satisfaction as the stage.

So one fine day Katya joined a theatrical troupe and went off – to Ufa¹⁵ I think – taking a great deal of money with her, a host of rainbow-hued hopes and grandiose notions about the venture.

Her first letters written on the journey were marvellous. I read them and was simply amazed that those small sheets of paper could contain so much youth, spiritual purity, heavenly innocence and at the same time such subtle and business-like judgements as would have done credit to a keen male intellect. The Volga, the countryside, the towns she visited, her colleagues, her successes and failures – these she did not so much describe as glorify in song. Every line breathed that trustfulness which I was used to seeing on her face – and with all this there were masses of grammatical mistakes and practically no punctuation.

Barely six months passed when I received a highly romantic, rapturous letter beginning: ‘I’m in love.’ In it was enclosed a photograph of a young man with clean-shaven face, broad-brimmed hat and a plaid draped over one shoulder. The following letters were just as splendid, but now punctuation marks made an appearance, there were no more grammatical mistakes and there was a strong masculine flavour to them. What a wonderful idea it would be, wrote Katya, to build a large theatre somewhere on the Volga. It had to be a limited company and rich businessmen and shipowners must be brought in to invest in it. There would be lots of money, the takings would be tremendous and the actors would perform on a partnership basis. This was all very well in theory, but I feel such schemes can only originate in a male head.

Anyway, everything clearly went well for eighteen months or two years: Katya was in love, she had faith in her work and she was happy. But then I began to notice in her letters unmistakable signs of decline. It began with complaints about her colleagues – the first and most ominous symptom. If a young scholar or literary man embarks on his career bitterly complaining about other scholars or literary men it’s a sure sign he is already worn out and unfit for the work. Katya wrote that her companions skipped rehearsals and never knew their parts. By the absurd plays they put on, by their behaviour on stage, every one of them showed utter contempt for the public. For the sake of box-office receipts – which was all they could talk about – serious actresses sank to singing music-hall songs, while tragic actors performed in sketches satirizing deceived husbands, the pregnancies of unfaithful wives and so on. The amazing thing is – generally speaking – that the provincial stage hasn’t folded up to now and that it can still hang on by such a rotten, tenuous thread.

In reply I wrote Katya a long and admittedly very boring letter. Amongst other things I wrote: ‘I’ve often chatted with elderly actors – the nicest of people and very well-disposed towards me. From my conversations with them I learned that in their work they were guided less by their own intelligence and freedom of choice than by fashion and society’s mood. The best of them in their time had happened to act in tragedies, operettas, Parisian farces and in pantomimes, and in whatever they performed they felt they were on the right road and were doing something useful. So, as you can see, you mustn’t look for the reason for this evil in the actors themselves but somewhere deeper, in the art itself and the whole of society’s attitude to it.’ My letter only irritated Katya. ‘We’re talking at cross purposes,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t mean those exceedingly worthy people who are well-disposed towards you, but a gang of rogues who have absolutely no sense of decency. They are a pack of savages who went onto the stage only because no one else would employ them – these people call themselves artists only because they have the cheek to. Not one genuine talent among them, but plenty of mediocrities, drunkards, schemers and scandalmongers. I just cannot tell you how bitter it makes one feel that the art I love so dearly has fallen into the clutches of those who are loathsome to me. Bitter, because even the best of men only observe evil from the distance, don’t wish to come any nearer and instead of taking a stand write platitudes and pointless sermons in the most ponderous style…’ – and so on, in the same vein.

Shortly afterwards I received the following letter: ‘I have been cruelly deceived. I cannot go on living. Dispose of my money as you think best. I loved you as a father and as my only friend. Farewell!’

He too belonged to the ‘pack of savages’, so it turned out. Later on I was able to guess from certain hints that she attempted suicide: apparently she tried to poison herself. I could only suppose she must have been seriously ill after that, since the next letter was from Yalta, where the doctors had most probably sent her. In her last letter she asked me to send her (in Yalta) one thousand roubles as soon as possible and it finished with these words: ‘I’m sorry this letter’s so depressing. Yesterday I buried my baby.’ After living for about a year in Yalta she came home.

She travelled for about four years and I must confess that throughout those four years I played a pretty unenviable and strange part as far as she was concerned. Earlier, when she announced that she was going on the stage and then wrote about her love affair; when she was overcome by sporadic fits of extravagance; when time and again I had to respond to her demands by sending one thousand, two thousand roubles; when she wrote that she intended taking her life and then about the death of her child – on each occasion I became flustered and all my concern for her fate amounted to was a great deal of reflection and the penning of long, boring letters which I needn’t have written at all. And yet, all said and done, I was like a father to her and loved her as my own daughter!

Now Katya lives about a quarter of a mile from me. She has taken a five-roomed flat and installed herself quite comfortably and in her own distinctive taste. If someone were to make a sketch of her surroundings the predominant mood would be one of indolence. For indolent bodies there are soft couches and soft stools; for indolent legs soft carpets; for indolent eyes faded, dull or matt colours; for the indolent spirit an abundance of cheap fans and trifling pictures on the walls, where originality of execution prevails over content, an excessive number of small tables and shelves crammed with absolutely worthless, useless junk, amorphous rags instead of curtains… All this, together with a phobia of bright colours, proportion and space – not to mention spiritual sloth – shows a perversion of natural taste into the bargain. For days on end Katya lies on her couch reading – mostly novels and short stories. She leaves the house only once a day, in the afternoon, to come and see me.

I am at my work, while Katya sits silently on a nearby sofa, wrapped up in her shawl as if she’s feeling the cold. Whether it’s because I’m so fond of her or because I’ve grown used to her frequent visits since she was a little girl, her presence doesn’t stop me concentrating. Now and then I mechanically ask her something and I get a sharp rejoinder; or when I want a moment’s relaxation I turn towards her and watch her pensively browsing through some medical journal or the newspaper. It is then that I notice she has lost that earlier trusting look. Now her expression is cold, apathetic, vacant, the kind you find with passengers who have to wait a long time for their train. She still dresses beautifully and simply, but carelessly. Her dress and hair have taken a great deal of punishment from lying for days on end on sofas and rocking-chairs – that is plain to see. No longer is she inquisitive, which she was before. No longer does she ask me questions – it’s as if she has sampled everything in life and does not expect to hear anything new.

Towards four o’clock there are sounds of movement in the hall and drawing-room: Liza is back from the Conservatoire, bringing some of her female friends home with her. I can hear them playing the piano, trying out their voices and laughing out loud. Yegor is laying the table, making the crockery rattle.

‘Goodbye,’ says Katya. ‘I won’t drop in on your family today – I hope they’ll forgive me. I don’t have the time. Come and see me.’

As I see her into the hall she looks me up and down sternly and says irritably, ‘You’re getting even thinner! Why don’t you go and see a doctor? I’ll drive over to Sergey Fyodorovich’s and get him to come and have a look at you.’

‘It’s not necessary, Katya.’

‘I don’t understand why your family does nothing about it. A fine lot, I must say!’

Impulsively she puts on her fur coat and two or three hairpins invariably fall to the floor from her carelessly arranged hair. She is too lazy and in too much of a hurry to tidy it. She clumsily hides the straggling locks under her hat and leaves.

When I enter the dining-room my wife asks, ‘Was that Katya just now? Why didn’t she come and see me? It’s really most odd!’

‘Mama!’ Liza says reproachfully. ‘If she doesn’t want to – then blow her! It’s not for us to go down on our knees!’

‘As you like, but it shows total disregard. Sitting in the study for three hours without a thought for us! Well, she can do as she likes.’

Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is beyond my comprehension and one must probably be a woman to understand it. I would stake my life that out of the hundred and fifty young men whom I see almost every day in my lecture-room, and out of the hundred elderly ones I happen to meet every week, you would be hard put to find even one capable of understanding this hatred and revulsion for Katya’s past – I mean her extra-marital pregnancy and illegitimate child. On the other hand I can’t remember a single woman or young girl of my acquaintance who would not have nurtured these feelings, whether consciously or instinctively. And that’s not because women are more virtuous or any purer than men. After all, virtue and chastity aren’t very different from vice if they are not free of malice. I explain this simply as women’s backwardness. That dreary feeling of compassion and those pangs of conscience that modern men experience at the sight of misfortune tell me far more about culture and moral development than hatred and revulsion. Modern women are just as given to tears and are as insensitive as they were in the Middle Ages. And I think that those who advise them to be educated like men are completely in the right.

The other reasons why my wife doesn’t like Katya are for having been an actress, for her ingratitude, pride, weird behaviour and for all those innumerable vices that one woman always manages to find in another.

Besides myself and my family two or three of my daughter’s friends, together with Aleksandr Adolfovich Gnekker, Liza’s admirer and suitor, are dining with us. Gnekker is a young, fair-haired man, no more than thirty, of medium height, very stout, broad-shouldered, with reddish sideburns around his ears and a dyed moustache, which makes his podgy, smooth face look like a toy. He is wearing a very short jacket, an embroidered waistcoat, trousers with a large check pattern – very wide at the top and narrow at the bottom – and yellow, flat-heeled shoes. His eyes protrude like a crab’s, his tie resembles a crab’s neck and I even think that young man’s whole body smells of crab soup. He calls every day, but no one in my family knows anything about his background, where he was educated or what his income is. He neither plays nor sings, but he has some sort of connection with music and singing, sells pianos for someone somewhere, is frequently at the Conservatoire, knows all the celebrities and arranges concerts. He criticizes music with an air of great authority and I’ve noticed that everyone is keen to agree with him.

Rich people always have their parasites around them and it’s the same with the arts and sciences. It seems that there is no art or science in this world which is free of ‘foreign bodies’ such as this Mr Gnekker. I am no musician and perhaps I may be wrong about Gnekker – whom I hardly know, as it happens. But the air of authority and dignity with which he stands by the piano and listens when someone sings or plays strikes me as all too suspicious.

You may be a fine gentleman or person of high distinction a hundred times over, but if you have a daughter you can never be secure from the petty bourgeois atmosphere that match-making, courtship and weddings often bring into your house and into your state of mind. I, for example, can never reconcile myself to that triumphant expression on my wife’s face whenever Gnekker is dining with us, nor can I reconcile myself to those bottles of Lafite, port and sherry which are brought out especially for him, so that he can see with his own eyes how grandly and sumptuously we live. Nor can I stomach that erratic laughter of Liza’s, a habit she picked up at the Conservatoire, and the way she screws up her eyes whenever we have male visitors. But above all I just cannot understand why a person who is so utterly alien to my habits, my academic interests, to the whole tenor of my life and who is so completely different from those I love, should come and dine with me every day. My wife and the servants whisper mysteriously that he is the ‘fiancé’, but I still cannot understand the reason for his presence: it fills me with as much bewilderment as if they’d seated a Zulu next to me at the table. Also, I find it strange that my daughter, whom I look upon as a child, should like that tie, those eyes, those soft cheeks…

Previously I either enjoyed my dinner or felt indifferent towards it, but now it only arouses boredom or irritation. Ever since I became a professor and started hob-nobbing with the Faculty deans, for some reason my family has considered it necessary to make drastic changes in our diet and dining habits. Instead of those simple dishes to which I was used in my student days and as an ordinary doctor they now feed me with a kind of thick soup with objects resembling white icicles floating around in it, and kidneys in madeira. My civil rank (equivalent to a general’s) and my fame have robbed me forever of cabbage soup, savoury pies, goose with apple sauce and bream with buckwheat. And they have also deprived me of Agasha my maid, a chatty, amusing old woman in whose place Yegor, a dull-witted arrogant young fellow, now serves dinner with a white glove in his right hand. The intervals between courses are short, but they seem excruciatingly long because there is nothing to fill them. Gone are the former gaiety, spontaneous conversation, the jokes and the laughter; gone are those mutual endearments and the joy which used to infect the children, my wife and myself when we gathered at the dinner-table. For a busy man like myself dinner was a time of relaxation and happy reunion: for my wife and children it was like a holiday – admittedly very brief – but bright and joyful, since they knew that for half an hour I didn’t belong to science, nor to my students, but to them alone and no one else. No more getting tipsy from one glass of wine, no more Agasha, no more bream with buckwheat, no more of those commotions which always accompanied every little dinner-time incident – for example, the cat and the dog fighting under the table or Katya’s bandage falling from her cheek into her soup.

To describe the dinners we have now is just an unappetizing as eating them. My wife’s face wears a look of solemnity, of affected seriousness and that habitual worried expression of hers as she anxiously inspects our plates and says, ‘I see you don’t like the roast… Tell me, you don’t really like it, do you?’ And I have to reply, ‘You’re worrying for nothing, dear, it’s very tasty…’ And to this she retorts, ‘You always stand up for me, Nikolay, you never tell the truth. Why is Mr Gnekker eating so little?’ – and so it goes on throughout the entire meal. Liza laughs her staccato laugh and screws up her eyes. I look at both women and only now over dinner do I clearly see that the inner lives of the two of them have long escaped my field of vision. I have the feeling that once I lived in a house with a real family, but that now I’m dining as a guest of someone who isn’t really my wife and that what I’m seeing is not my real daughter Liza. Both have undergone a marked change and I’ve failed to notice the long process which brought about this change. So it’s no wonder that I can’t make anything of it. How did this change come about? I don’t know. Perhaps the whole trouble is that God gave my wife and daughter less strength than he gave me. From childhood I’ve been used to withstanding external pressure and have steeled myself pretty well. Such disasters in life as fame, becoming a professor, moving from modest comfort to living beyond one’s means, mixing with celebrities and so on have scarcely touched me and I have remained immune to them, unscathed. But all of this has fallen on my unsteeled wife and daughter like a great pile of snow and crushed them.

Gnekker and the young ladies talk of fugues, counterpoint, singers and pianists, Bach and Brahms, while my wife, afraid of being suspected of musical ignorance, gives them a responsive smile and murmurs, ‘Charming!… Really?… Go on!…’ Gnekker eats solidly, jokes solidly and lends a condescending ear to the young ladies’ remarks. From time to time he has the urge to talk bad French and then – for some mysterious reason – he finds it necessary to address me as votre excellence.

But I feel glum. It’s obvious I inhibit all of them as much as they inhibit me. I have never been closely acquainted with class antagonism before, but something exactly like that bedevils me now. I seek only bad qualities in Gnekker, in no time do I find them and I’m tormented by the thought that a man who is outside my circle should aspire to my daughter’s hand. His presence affects me badly in yet another way. Usually when I’m on my own or with people I like, I never ponder my own merits – and if I do they strike me as footling, as though I had become a scholar only yesterday. But with people like Gnekker around my merits strike me as the loftiest mountain, whose summit is lost in the clouds and around whose foothills slither Gnekkers barely visible to the naked eye.

After dinner I go into my study and light my only pipe of the day – a relic of my filthy old habit of puffing smoke from dawn to dusk. While I am smoking my wife comes in and sits down for a chat. Just as in the morning I know in advance what we are going to talk about.

‘You and I must have a serious talk, Nikolay,’ she begins. ‘It’s about Liza. Why do you turn a blind eye?’

‘To what?’

‘You pretend not to notice a thing – and that’s bad. You mustn’t be so indifferent. Gnekker is serious about Liza. What do you say to that?’

‘I really can’t say if he’s a bad person as I don’t know him well enough. But I’ve told you a thousand times that I don’t like him.’

‘But this is impossible, impossible…’

She gets up and walks around excitedly.

‘You can’t possibly take such an attitude to a serious step like this!’ she says. ‘When our daughter’s happiness is at stake you must put aside all personal considerations. I know you don’t like him. Very well… But if we refuse him now and break it off, what guarantee is there that Liza won’t bear a grudge against us for the rest of her life? Goodness knows, eligible bachelors are few and far between these days and it’s quite likely someone else will never turn up. He’s deeply in love with Liza and she’s fond of him. Of course, he doesn’t have a proper job, but that can’t be helped. God willing, he’ll find something in time. He’s from a good family and he’s well off.’

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘He told us himself. His father has a big house in Kharkov and an estate nearby. In short, Nikolay, you’ll definitely have to go to Kharkov.’

‘Why?’

‘You can make inquiries there… You know some professors there and they’ll help you. I’d go myself but I’m a woman, I can’t…’

‘I’m not going to Kharkov,’ I say sullenly.

My wife takes fright and a look of intense pain appears on her face.

‘For God’s sake, Nikolay,’ she begs, in between sobs. ‘For God’s sake, take this burden away! I’m going through hell!’

I find it painful to look at her.

‘Very well, Varya,’ I say tenderly. ‘All right, I’ll go to Kharkov if you want me to and I’ll do everything you want.’

She presses her handkerchief to her eyes and goes to her room to cry. I am left on my own.

A little later a lamp is brought in. The armchair and lampshade cast those familiar shadows of which I have long grown tired on the walls and floor, and when I look at them I feel night has already come and with it my damned insomnia. I lie on my bed, then I get up again, walk up and down – and then I lie down again. Usually after dinner, as evening approaches, my nervous excitement reaches fever pitch. For no reason I start crying and bury my head under the pillow. At these moments I’m afraid that someone might come in, or that I might suddenly die. I’m ashamed of my tears and altogether I feel something insufferable is going on inside me. I feel that I can’t bear to look at my lamp, my books, the shadows on the floor any more, I can’t bear to hear those voices in the drawing-room. Some invisible, incomprehensible force is roughly driving me out of the house. I leap up, hurriedly dress and, taking every precaution not to be seen by anyone in the house, I slip out into the street. Where can I go?

The answer to this question has long been in my mind – to Katya.

III

As usual she is lying on the ottoman or on a couch reading. When she sees me she idly raises her head, sits up and stretches out her hand to me.

‘You’re always lying down,’ I say after a short pause and a rest. ‘It’s not good for you. You should find something to do!’

‘What?’

‘I said you should find something to do.’

‘What? A woman can only be a menial worker or an actress.’

‘All right, if you don’t want to do menial work then go on the stage.’

She says nothing.

‘You ought to get married,’ I say, half-joking.

‘There’s no one I want to marry. Besides, there’s no point.’

‘But you can’t go on like this.’

‘Without a husband? What does it matter! I could have as many men as I liked if I wanted to.’

‘That’s not nice, Katya!’

‘What’s not nice?’

‘Well, what you just said.’

Noting that I am upset and eager to erase the bad impression Katya says, ‘Let’s go. This way – there!’

She leads me into a small, very cosy room and points at a writing desk.

‘There… I’ve arranged it all for you,’ she tells me. ‘You can work here. You can come every day and bring your work with you. They only interrupt you at home. Will you do this? Yes?’

Not wishing to upset her with a refusal I reply that I will come and work at her place, that I like the room very much. Then we both sit down in the cosy little room and start talking.

Instead of giving me pleasure as they did before, warmth, comfort and agreeable company only arouse a strong desire to complain and grumble. Somehow I feel better after a little grousing and complaining.

‘Things are bad, my dear!’ I begin with a sigh. ‘Very bad.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’ll explain, my dear. The finest, most sacred right of kings is the right to pardon and I’ve always felt like a king, since I’ve made unlimited use of this right. I’ve never judged, I’ve made allowances, I’ve readily forgiven everyone right and left. Where others have protested or waxed indignant, I’ve merely advised and persuaded. All my life I’ve been concerned solely with making my company tolerable for my family, my students, my colleagues and my servants. And I know that this attitude to people has had a civilizing influence on all those around me. But no longer am I a king. Something is happening to me that is fit only for a slave. Day and night evil thoughts haunt me and feelings I had never known before – of hatred, contempt, indignation, exasperation and dread – have come to dwell in my heart. I’ve become excessively strict, demanding, irritable, rude, suspicious. What was once a pretext for an extra joke or hearty laughter utterly depresses me now. And my sense of logic has also altered. Once I despised only money, but now I feel malicious – not towards money, but towards the rich, as if they were to blame. Where I used to hate violence and tyranny I now hate the perpetrators of violence, as if they alone were to blame and not all of us who are incapable of educating each other. What does it all mean? If these new thoughts and feelings are the result of a change in my convictions how did the change come about? Has the world become worse? Have I become better? Or was I blind before and indifferent? But if this change originated from a general decline in physical and intellectual powers – after all, I’m a sick person and I’m losing weight every day – then my position is indeed pathetic: it can only mean that my new thoughts are morbid, abnormal, that I should be ashamed of them and make light of them…’

‘Illness has nothing to do with it,’ interrupts Katya. ‘It’s simply that your eyes have been opened, that’s all. You’ve seen what for some reason you closed your eyes to before. In my opinion the most important thing is to make a clean break with your family and get away from them.’

‘You’re talking nonsense.’

‘But you don’t love them any more, so why act against your conscience. Call that a family! They’re nobodies! If they were to drop dead today no one would miss them tomorrow.’

Katya despises my wife and daughter as much as they loathe her. These days it’s practically impossible to speak of people’s rights to despise each other. But if one were to accept Katya’s point of view and admit this right exists, then obviously she’s just as entitled to despise my wife and Liza as they are to detest her.

‘Nobodies!’ she repeats. ‘Have you had any lunch today? How come they didn’t forget to invite you to the table? How is it that they are still aware you exist?’

‘Katya,’ I say sternly, ‘please be quiet, I beg you.’

‘Do you honestly think I enjoy talking about them? I wish I’d never set eyes on them. Now, listen to me, my dear: give everything up and go away. Go abroad. And the sooner the better.’

‘Rubbish! What about the university?’

‘And leave the university too. What do you need it for? It just doesn’t make sense. You’ve been lecturing for thirty years now and where are your pupils? Are there many famous scientists among them? Count them, go on! To breed doctors who exploit ignorance and earn their hundreds of thousands of roubles – you don’t need to be a talented or good man for that! You’re redundant!’

‘Good God, how harsh you are!’ I exclaim, horrified. ‘How harsh! Now be quiet, or I’ll go! I’ve no answer to these sharp words of yours!’

The maid enters to announce that tea is ready. Over the samovar we both change the subject, thank God. After my good old grumble I want to indulge another weakness of old age – reminiscing. I tell Katya about my past and to my own great surprise I go into details I never suspected I would remember so well. And she shows emotion and pride as she listens with bated breath. I’m particularly fond of telling her about my student days at a theological college when I dreamed of going on to university.

‘I often used to stroll in the college gardens,’ I tell her. ‘From some distant tavern a song and an accordion’s grating would be borne to me on the breeze, or a troika with bells ringing would tear past the college fence – all this would suffice to fill not only my heart, but my stomach, legs and arms with a sudden feeling of happiness. As I listened to the accordion or those bells dying away I would imagine myself a doctor and I’d paint pictures in my mind, each better than the last. And as you can see, now my dreams have come true. I’ve received more than I ever dared dream of. For thirty years I’ve been a much-loved professor, I’ve had excellent colleagues, enjoyed fame and distinction. I’ve loved – I married for passionate love – I’ve had children. In brief, as I look back on it, my whole life seems a beautiful, skilfully fashioned composition. All that remains is not to spoil the finale and for that I must die like a man. If death really is a threat, then I must meet it in a manner worthy of a teacher, scholar and citizen of a Christian country: courageously and with equanimity. I’m spoiling the finale, though. It’s as if I’m drowning and I’m running to you begging for help, but all you say is: “Then go and drown – that’s exactly what you should do.” ’

But then a bell rings in the hall. Katya and I recognize the sound. ‘That must be Mikhail Fyodorovich,’ we say.

And in fact a minute later my colleague, the literary historian Mikhail Fyodorovich, enters, a tall, well-built, clean-shaven man of fifty, with thick grey hair and black eyebrows. He is a good fellow and first-class colleague. He hails from a fairly fortunate, ancient, talented and noble family which has played a prominent part in the history of our country’s literature and enlightenment. As for him, he’s intelligent, gifted, highly educated, but not without certain oddities. To some extent we are all strange and a little weird, but in his idiosyncrasies there is something truly exceptional and fraught with danger for his friends. I know quite a few of the latter for whom his numerous virtues are completely obscured by these quirks of his.

On entering he slowly removes his gloves.

‘Good evening!’ he says in his velvety bass. ‘Having tea? That’s most welcome. It’s hellishly cold.’

Then he sits down at the table, takes himself a glass and immediately starts talking. What is most distinctive about the way he talks is that constantly jocular tone, a kind of mixture of philosophizing and buffoonery – as with Shakespeare’s gravediggers. He’s always talking about serious matters, but he never talks seriously. His judgements are always sharp and provocative, but thanks to his soft, even, jocular tone, the sharp words don’t jar on the ear and you soon get used to them. Every evening he brings with him half a dozen stories of university life and he usually begins with them when he sits down at the table.

‘Oh Lord!’ he sighs, twitching his black eyebrows mockingly. ‘There’s such clowns in this world!’

‘What do you mean?’ asks Katya.

‘Well, when I came out of the lecture-room this morning whom should I meet on the stairs but that silly old fool NN—. There he comes with that horsey chin sticking out as usual and looking for someone to hear him complain about his migraine, his wife and the students who don’t want to go to his lectures. Oh, I think to myself, he’s spotted me, I’m finished, all is lost…’

And more in the same vein. Or he fires off like this: ‘Yesterday I was at our dear So-and-So’s public lecture. Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but I’m amazed that our alma mater has the nerve to put such imbeciles and certified nitwits as him on public display. Why, he’s an international fool! You won’t find a fool to equal him in the whole of Europe in a month of Sundays! Just imagine – when he lectures he lisps, just as if he’s sucking boiled sweets… He gets in such a flap that he can hardly decipher his own handwriting, his piffling little thoughts hobble along with the speed of an abbot on a bicycle. But worst of all, you can’t make head or tail of what he wants to say. The boredom’s deathly – even the flies drop dead! The only other kind of boredom you can compare with it is what we get at the annual ceremony in the assembly hall, on degree day, when the traditional oration is read – damn and blast it!’

Immediately there is an abrupt transition.

‘About ten years ago, as Nikolay Stepanovich will recall, it was my turn to deliver the oration. It was hot and stuffy, my uniform was pinching me under the arms – it was sheer hell! I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half, two hours… “Well, I think, praise the Lord there’s only ten pages left!” And there were four pages at the end that could easily be skipped and I was counting on leaving them out. “So,” I think, “only six pages to go!” But then – just imagine! – I glance in front of me and lo and behold there’s some beribboned general sitting with a bishop in the front row. The poor devils were bored out of their minds and kept goggling their eyes to stay awake. But for all that they were still trying to look as if they were listening, pretending that they understood and liked my oration. “Well,” I think, “if you like it so much you can damned well have it! That’ll teach you!” So I soldier on and read all four pages.’

As you usually find with sarcastic people, only his eyes and eyebrows smile when he speaks. At such moments there is neither hatred nor malice in them, but a great deal of wit and that peculiar foxy cunning which you only find with very observant people. To continue with his eyes, I noticed another peculiarity about them. Whenever he takes a glass from Katya or listens to what she says, or glances after her when she leaves the room for a short while to fetch something, I notice something gentle, beseeching, pure in their expression…

The maid takes the samovar away and puts on the table a large piece of cheese, some fruit and a bottle of Crimean champagne – a rather poor wine to which Katya had become partial when she lived in the Crimea. Mikhail Fyodorovich takes two packs of cards from the shelf and starts playing patience. But despite his claim that some varieties of patience call for nimbleness of thought and concentration, he still doesn’t stop distracting himself with his talk as he plays. Katya closely follows the cards, helping him more by gesture than by words. She drinks no more than two glasses the whole evening. I drink a quarter of a glass and the rest of the bottle falls to the lot of Mikhail Fyodorovich who can knock back any amount without ever getting drunk.

Over patience we settle all kinds of questions, mainly on the highest level and our dearest love – science – catches it more than anything else.

‘Science, thank God, has had its day,’ solemnly proclaims Mikhail Fyodorovich. ‘Its goose is cooked! Oh yes, sir! Mankind is already feeling the need to replace it with something else. Science arose out of superstition, was nourished by superstition and now constitutes the very essence of superstition, like those obsolete grandmamas – alchemy, metaphysics and philosophy. And in actual fact, what has science given mankind? After all, the difference between learned Europeans and Chinamen who have no science is trivial, purely superficial. Chinamen have never had any science – and what have they lost as a result?’

‘Flies don’t have science either,’ I say, ‘but what does that prove?’

‘There’s no need to get cross, Nikolay. I’m only saying this here, between ourselves. I’m more tactful than you think and I’d never talk like this in public. God forbid! The superstition that the arts and sciences are superior to agriculture, commerce and handicrafts is alive and kicking among the masses. Our part of society thrives on superstition and God forbid that you or I should destroy it!’

During patience the younger generation catches it as well.

‘Nowadays our students have degenerated,’ sighs Mikhail Fyodorovich. ‘I don’t mean ideals and all that stuff, but if only they would work and think intelligently! Oh yes it’s all a question of “How sadly I behold our generation”.’¹⁶

‘Yes, they’ve degenerated terribly,’ Katya agrees. ‘Tell me, have you had a single outstanding student over the past five or ten years?’

‘I can’t speak for the other professors, but I don’t remember having had any.’

‘I’ve seen many students in my lifetime and those young scholars of yours, many actors… and what do you think? Not once have I had the honour of meeting a single interesting person, let alone geniuses and high flyers. They’re all so dull, mediocre, so puffed up with pretension…’

All this talk of degeneracy invariably affects me as if I’d accidentally overheard an unpleasant conversation about my daughter. I find it offensive that these accusations are unfounded and based on such hackneyed clichés, such bugbears as degeneracy, lack of ideals, or harking back to the good old days. Every accusation, even if it is made in the company of ladies, should be formulated with the greatest possible precision, otherwise it is not an accusation at all, but vain backbiting, unworthy of decent men.

I’m an old man, I’ve been working at the university for thirty years, but I don’t see any degeneracy or lack of ideals and I don’t think things are any worse now than before. My porter Nikolay, whose experience in these matters is not to be underestimated, maintains that the students of today are neither worse nor better than before.

If I were asked what I dislike about my present students I wouldn’t reply immediately or in much detail, but my answer would be precise enough. I’m aware of their shortcomings, so I don’t need to resort to platitudes. I don’t like their smoking, drinking strong alcohol, marrying late in life, being so devil-may-care and often so heartless that they allow some of their number to starve by not paying their subscription to the students’ aid society. They don’t know modern languages and can’t express themselves correctly in Russian. Only yesterday a hygienist colleague of mine complained that he has had to double the number of lectures, as his students’ physics is so poor and because they are utterly ignorant of meteorology. They gladly succumb to the influence of the most modern writers – and not even the best ones at that – but they are completely indifferent to such classics as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus or Pascal,¹⁷ for example. Their lack of experience in worldly matters shows most of all in this inability to distinguish the great from the small. All difficult problems of a more or less social character (for instance, land settlement in unpopulated areas) they decide by organizing public subscriptions, not by scientific research and investigation, although the latter is fully at their disposal and is more in line with their vocation. Eagerly they become house surgeons, registrars, laboratory assistants, house physicians and are ready to carry on doing these jobs until they are forty, although an independent spirit, a feeling of freedom and personal initiative are needed in science for example, as much as in art or commerce. I have my students and my audience – but no assistants or successors. Therefore I like them and am touched by them, but I’m not proud of them. And so on…

However numerous these shortcomings may be they can generate pessimistic or quarrelsome moods only in the faint-hearted or weak. All of them are accidental and transient and depend entirely on living conditions. A few decades will suffice for them to vanish or give way to other, fresh defects that can’t be avoided and which in turn will frighten the faint-hearted. Students’ transgressions often annoy me, but the annoyance is nothing in comparison with the joy I’ve been having now for thirty years when I talk with my students, lecture to them, note their attitudes and compare them with people from different social circles.

Mikhail Fyodorovich continues with his muckraking, while Katya listens. Neither notices the deep abyss into which they are gradually being sucked by the apparently innocent diversion of condemning their neighbour. They don’t realize how ordinary conversations can gradually turn into mockery and sneering, and how both of them are beginning to resort to the techniques of outright slander.

‘You really do come across some killingly funny types,’ says Mikhail Fyodorovich. ‘Yesterday I dropped in on our dear Yegor Petrovich and whom do I find there but one of your medics – third-year, I think. His face was in Dobrolyubov style,¹⁸ with that same stamp of profound thought on his brow. We get talking. “The things you hear about, young man,” I say. “I’ve been reading about a certain German – I forget his name – who’s extracted a new alkaloid from the human brain – idiotin.” And what do you think? He believed it and even assumed a respectful expression. “You have to hand it to us scientists!” he says. And the other day I went to the theatre. I take my seat. Right in front of me, in the very next row, one of our students is sitting – evidently a lawyer – and the other a shaggy medic. The medic’s soused to the gills, not paying a blind bit of attention to what was happening on stage, just dozing away, his head nodding. But the moment an actor embarks on a loud soliloquy or simply raises his voice my medic gives a start, pokes his neighbour in the ribs and asks, “What’s he on about? Are they noble sentiments?”. “Yes, noble sentiments,” replies the lawyer. “Bra-avo!” roars the medic. “Noble sentiments! Bra-avo!” You see, that drunken moron hadn’t gone to the theatre for art’s sake, but for noble sentiments! He wants to be uplifted!’

Katya listens and laughs. She has the most peculiar sort of guffaw, breathing in and out in a rapid, regular rhythm, just as if she were playing a concertina, so that the only part of her face that seems to be laughing is her nostrils. But I lose heart and don’t know what to say. Then I flare up, lose my temper, leap from my chair.

‘Will you please shut up!’ I shout. ‘Why are you sitting there like two toads, poisoning the air with your breath? It’s enough!’

And without waiting for them to stop their spiteful gossip I prepare to go home. It’s high time anyway – past ten o’clock.

‘I think I’ll stay a bit longer,’ says Mikhail Fyodorovich. ‘Do I have your permission, Yekaterina Vladimirovna?’

‘You do,’ replies Katya.

‘Bene. In that case please ask for another bottle.’

Both of them see me into the hall with candles and while I’m putting on my fur coat Mikhail Fyodorovich says, ‘You’ve grown terribly thin lately and you’ve aged, Nikolay Stepanovich. What’s wrong? Are you ill?’

‘Yes, a little.’

‘And he won’t go and see a doctor,’ gloomily interposes Katya.

‘Why ever not? You can’t go on like this. God helps those who help themselves, my dear fellow. Remember me to your wife and daughter and my apologies for not calling on them. In a few days I’m going abroad. Before I go I’ll come and say goodbye. I’m leaving next week.’

I leave Katya’s place feeling irritated and alarmed by all that talk about my illness and dissatisfied with myself. I ask myself whether I shouldn’t after all consult one of my colleagues. And immediately I picture my colleague silently going over to the window after examining me, reflecting for a while and then turning towards me, trying to stop me reading the truth on his face – and then casually saying, ‘Although I can’t see anything much at the moment I would still advise you, my dear colleague, to give up work…’ And that will put paid to my last hope.

And who among us doesn’t cherish hopes? Now when I make my own diagnosis and treat myself I sometimes hope that I’m the victim of my own ignorance, that I’m mistaken about the albumen and sugar in my urine, about my heart and those oedemas that I’ve already noticed twice in the mornings. When I read through the therapeutic textbooks with a hypochondriac’s zeal and change the medicine every day, I always feel that I will stumble upon something that will be of comfort. It’s all so petty!

Whether the sky is overcast or if it is filled with the light of the moon and the stars, every time I come home I look at it and reflect that death will soon come to take me. You might think that at these moments my thoughts would be as deep as the sky, bright and striking… But no! I think about myself, about my wife, Liza, Gnekker, the students, about people in general. My thoughts are ineffectual, trifling, I deceive myself– and then my outlook on life might be expressed in words used by the famous Arakcheyev¹⁹ in one of his intimate letters: ‘Everything that is good in this world cannot be free of evil – and there is always more bad than good.’ In other words, everything is vile, there’s no point in living and I must consider the sixty-two years of my life as wasted. I catch myself thinking these things and try and convince myself that they are accidental, ephemeral and aren’t deeply ingrained in me. But then I immediately think: ‘If this is so, then why do I have the urge to go and visit those toads every evening?’

And I solemnly promise myself not to go to Katya’s any more, although I know very well that I’ll go again tomorrow.

As I ring my front door bell and go upstairs I feel that I have no family any more and I have no desire to get it back. Clearly, those new, Arakcheyevan thoughts within me are neither accidental nor passing, but possess my whole being. With a sick conscience, feeling dejected and sluggish and barely able to move my limbs – as if a thousand pounds had been added to my weight – I get into bed and soon fall asleep.

And then – insomnia…

IV

Summer comes and life changes.

One fine morning Liza comes to see me and says jokingly, ‘Let’s go, Your Excellency! It’s all ready.’

‘My Excellency’ is led into the street, put into a cab and driven away. To occupy my mind I read the shop signs backwards: traktir (tavern) becomes Ritkart. That would do very well for a baronial surname – Baroness Ritkart! Further on I drive through open country, past a cemetery which makes no impression on me at all, although I shall soon be lying there. Then I drive through a wood and through open country again. There’s nothing of interest. After a two-hour drive ‘His Excellency’ is taken to the ground floor of a dacha and accommodated in a small, very cheerful little room with blue wallpaper.

I have insomnia at night again, but instead of waking up in the morning and listening to my wife I am lying in bed – not asleep, but in that drowsy, half-conscious state when you know you’re not asleep, yet still have dreams of a sort. At midday I get up and from habit I sit down at the desk; I don’t do any work, though, and I amuse myself with the yellow French paperbacks that Katya sends me. Of course, it would be more patriotic of me to read Russian authors, but I must confess that I don’t really have much enthusiasm for them. Apart from two or three old-timers, the whole of contemporary literature seems less literature than a special kind of cottage industry which exists only to be patronized by those who are reluctant to avail themselves of its produce. The best of these home-produced artefacts cannot be called remarkable and cannot be praised without strong reservations. The same must be said of all those literary novelties which I’ve read over the past ten to fifteen years, none of which can be called remarkable or praised without a ‘but’. The product may be intelligent, uplifting, but lacking in talent. It may be talented and uplifting, but it’s unintelligent. Or – finally – it may be talented and intelligent, but it’s not uplifting.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that French books are talented, intelligent and uplifting. Nor do they satisfy me. But they aren’t so boring as Russian books and it’s not uncommon to find in them what is essential for artistic creativity – a feeling of personal freedom which you don’t find in Russian authors. I can’t remember one new book where the author doesn’t try from the first page to shackle himself with all kinds of conventions and contracts with his conscience. One is afraid to speak of the naked body, another has bound himself hand and foot with psychological analysis, another stands in need of a ‘warm attitude to man’, a fourth deliberately pads out whole pages with nature description so as not to be suspected of tendentiousness… One wants to appear lower class in his writings, whilst another simply has to be one of the gentry, and so on. They have a sense of purpose, are careful, shrewd, but they have neither the freedom nor the courage to write what they like and therefore there is no creativity.

All this applies to so-called belles-lettres.

As for serious Russian articles – on sociology, say, or art and so forth – I don’t read them simply because I’m scared of them. In my childhood and youth I was terrified of porters and theatre ushers for some reason and this fear is with me to this day. I fear them even now. It’s said that we fear only what we don’t understand. And indeed it’s very difficult to understand why porters and ushers should be so self-important, overbearing and imperiously ill-mannered. Reading serious articles I experience exactly the same vague fear. Their incredible pomposity, their bantering, magisterial style, the familiarity with which they treat foreign authors, their ability to retain their dignity whilst labouring in vain – all this I find incomprehensible, frightening and utterly unlike the humility and the calm, gentlemanly tone to which I’ve become accustomed when reading our medical and scientific authors. Not only articles, but even translations made or edited by serious-minded Russians I find difficult to read. The arrogant, condescending tone of the prefaces, the mass of translator’s footnotes that ruin my concentration, the question marks and parenthetical ‘sics’ with which the generous translator has peppered the entire article or book are an invasion of the author’s personality – and of my independence as a reader.

Once I was called to give expert evidence at a Court of Assizes. In the adjournment one of my fellow experts drew my attention to the prosecutor’s rude treatment of the defendants, who numbered two cultured women. I don’t believe I was exaggerating in the least when I replied to my friend that the prosecutor’s treatment was no worse than that which prevails among authors of serious articles. In fact, their manners are so rude that it doesn’t bear talking about. Either they treat each other and those writers they criticize with excessive obsequiousness, at the expense of their own dignity, or they go to the other extreme and deal with them far more ruthlessly than I have done in these memoirs and in my thoughts about my future son-in-law Gnekker. Charges of irresponsibility, impure motives and all kinds of criminal activity even, are the standard embellishment of these serious articles. But, as young doctors are fond of putting it in their articles, this is the ultima ratio! Such attitudes are bound to be reflected in the morals of the young generation of writers and therefore it doesn’t surprise me in the least that, in the new books added to our stock of belles-lettres over the past ten to fifteen years, the heroes drink too much vodka, while the heroines are hardly what you’d call chaste.

I read French books and glance out of the open window. I can see the spikes of my garden fence, two or three spindly little trees and beyond the fence the road, the fields, then a broad strip of pine forest. I often enjoy looking at a boy and girl, both fair-haired and ragged, climbing the fence and laughing at my bald pate. In their sparkling little eyes I can read the words: ‘Go up, thou bald head!’²⁰ They must be almost the only ones who don’t care a rap about my fame or rank.

Now I don’t have people coming to see me every day. I shall mention only the visits of Nikolay and Pyotr Ignatyevich. Nikolay usually comes on a Sunday or saint’s day, ostensibly on business, but really just to see me. He turns up very tipsy, which he never is during the winter.

‘How are things?’ I ask as I go out into the hall to meet him.

‘Professor!’ he says, pressing hand to heart and looking at me with a lover’s ardour. ‘Your excellency! May God punish me! May lightning strike me dead on this very spot. Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus!’²¹

And he eagerly kisses me on my shoulders, sleeves, buttons.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Professor! As God is my witness…!’

He never stops gratuitously invoking the deity and I soon get bored with him, so I dispatch him to the kitchen where they give him a meal. Pyotr Ignatyevich also comes on holidays, especially to see me and to share his thoughts. He usually sits next to me at table. Unassuming, spruce and sensible, he doesn’t dare cross his legs or lean his elbows on the table and in his soft, even, smooth pedantic little voice relates what he considers very interesting and spicy novelties that he has gleaned from journals and books. All these items are identical and follow the same pattern: a Frenchman has made a discovery. Someone else, a German, has exposed him by proving the discovery was made as long ago as 1870 by some American. And a third (also a German) has outsmarted both of them by demonstrating that the two of them had committed a gaffe by mistaking air bubbles under a microscope for dark pigment. Even when he wants to amuse me Pyotr Ignatyevich talks at great length and diffusely, like someone defending his dissertation with an infinitely detailed itemization of bibliographical sources, endeavouring not to make one slip-up in the dates, issues of the journals, or in the names. He never calls anyone plain and simply Petit, but always Jean-Jacques Petit.²² Sometimes he stays for dinner and throughout the meal tells the same spicy stories, which depress the whole company. If Gnekker and Liza mention fugues or counterpoint in his presence, Brahms or Bach, he humbly drops his eyes and shows embarrassment. He is ashamed that such trivial matters can be discussed in the presence of such serious-minded people as himself or me.

In my present mood five minutes are enough for him to bore me as if I’d been seeing and listening to him from time immemorial. I loathe the poor devil. His quiet, even voice and pedantic language make me droop, his stories stupefy me. He nourishes the kindest feelings towards me and only talks to give me pleasure. But I pay him back by staring straight at him, as if I want to hypnotize him. ‘Go away, go away!’ I think to myself. ‘Go!’ But he cannot read my mind and stays on and on and on…

When he’s with me I just can’t shake off the thought that when I die he’ll very likely be appointed to succeed me and my poor lecture-room seems like an oasis where the spring has run dry. I’m rude to Pyotr Ignatyevich, taciturn and sullen – as if he were to blame for such thoughts, not I. When he starts rapturously praising German scholars I no longer good-humouredly chaff him as I used to.

‘Your Germans are asses…’ I mutter gloomily.

That reminds me of the late Professor Nikita Krylov,²³ when he was once bathing with Pirogov at Revel. He became furious with the freezing cold water and cursed those ‘German scoundrels’. I behave badly towards Pyotr Ignatyevich and only when he’s leaving and I look through the window and glimpse his grey hat beyond the fence do I feel like calling out to him: ‘Please forgive me, my dear fellow!’

Lunch is even more boring than during the winter. That same Gnekker, whom I now hate and despise, dines with me almost every day. Once I tolerated his presence in silence, but now I make caustic remarks at his expense, which make my wife and Liza blush. Carried away by malicious feelings I often come out with complete inanities. For example, once after I’d given Gnekker a long, contemptuous look I suddenly blurted out, for no apparent reason:

Eagles lower than hens can fly

But hens will ne’er soar into the sky.²⁴

What’s most annoying is that ‘hen-Gnekker’ turns out to be far cleverer than ‘eagle-professor’. Knowing that my wife and daughter are on his side he adopts the tactic of answering my caustic sallies with a condescending silence. ‘The old boy’s off his rocker,’ he must be thinking, ‘so why talk to him?’ Or he good-humouredly pulls my leg. It’s quite amazing how low a man can sink. I’m capable of spending the entire meal dreaming that one day Gnekker will turn out a confidence trickster, that Liza and my wife will see the error of their ways and that I’ll tease them – and similar ridiculous fantasies when I already have one foot in the grave!

And now there are misunderstandings of which I previously became aware only by hearsay. However ashamed it makes me feel, I shall describe one of them that happened the other day after dinner.

I am sitting in my room smoking my pipe. In comes my wife. She sits down and starts talking about how nice it would be if I went to Kharkov – now that the weather’s warm and I have the time to spare – to find out what kind of man this Gnekker is.

‘All right, I’ll go,’ I agree.

Pleased with me, my wife gets up and goes to the door, but immediately she turns back.

‘By the way, I have one more request. I know you’ll be angry, but it’s my duty to warn you… I’m sorry I have to say this, Nikolay, but all your friends and neighbours have started talking about your being at Katya’s so much. She’s clever and educated – that I don’t dispute – and it must be pleasant spending time with her, but at your age and for someone in your social position it’s a bit odd that you should find pleasure in her company… Besides, she has such a reputation that…’

The blood suddenly drains from my head, my eyes flash. I leap up, clutch my head and stamp my feet.

‘Leave me alone!’ I shout in a voice that isn’t mine. ‘Leave me alone! Leave me!’

I probably look terrible and my voice must sound strange in the extreme, since my wife suddenly goes pale and shrieks – also in a frantic voice which isn’t hers. Hearing our cries in rushes Liza, then Gnekker, followed by Yegor…

‘Leave me alone!’ I shout. ‘Get out! Leave me!’

There’s no feeling in my legs, as if they aren’t there at all, and I feel that I am falling into someone’s arms. Then, briefly, I can hear someone weeping and I sink into a faint which lasts two or three hours.

And now about Katya. She arrives every day in the late afternoon and this of course cannot fail to go unnoticed by neighbours or friends. She comes in for a few minutes and then takes me for a drive. She keeps her own horses and a new chaise which she bought this summer. On the whole she lives quite lavishly: she has rented an expensive detached villa with a large garden in the country and moved all her furniture there from town. She keeps two maids and a coachman. I often ask her, ‘Katya, what will you live on once you’ve squandered all your father’s money?’

‘We’ll see…,’ she replies.

‘That money deserves to be treated more seriously, my dear. It was earned by a good man, by honest labour.’

‘I know – you’ve already told me.’

At first we drive through open country, then through the pine wood which is visible from my window. Nature looks as beautiful as ever, although the devil whispers that when I’m dead in three or four months those pines and firs, those birds and white clouds in the sky won’t notice I’ve gone. Katya likes driving and finds it pleasant to have me sitting next to her – and in such fine weather. She’s in a good mood and doesn’t say any of those nasty things.

‘You’re a very good man, Nikolay Stepanovich,’ she says. ‘You are a rare specimen and no actor could portray you. As for myself or Mikhail Fyodorovich – even a bad actor could manage us, but no one could manage you. And I envy you – I envy you terribly! After all, what am I, all said and done? What?’

She reflects for a moment and then she asks, ‘Nikolay Stepanovich, I’m a negative phenomenon, aren’t I? Yes?’

‘Yes,’ I reply.

‘Hm… what am I to do then?’

What can I tell her? It’s easy enough to say, ‘Work!’, ‘Give all you have to the poor’, ‘Know thyself’ – and because it’s so easy to say I’m lost for a reply.

When my colleagues from the therapy department are teaching the art of healing they advise their students to ‘individualize each separate case’. You only need to follow this advice to see that the techniques recommended in textbooks as the very best and most applicable to routine cases turn out completely unsuitable in individual cases. It’s the same with moral ailments.

But I have to give some reply.

‘My dear, you have too much time on your hands,’ I tell her. ‘You must find something to do. In fact, why don’t you go on the stage again, if that’s your real vocation?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Your tone and manner seem to imply you’re a victim. I don’t like that, my dear. It’s your own fault. Remember how at first you got angry with people and the way things were, but you did nothing to improve one or the other. You didn’t combat evil, but simply crumpled up and so you’re a victim of your own feebleness – not of the struggle. Of course, you were young then and inexperienced, but now everything can be different. Yes, go ahead! You will toil, you will serve sacred art…’

‘Don’t try and pull the wool over my eyes, Nikolay Stepanovich,’ Katya interrupts. ‘Let’s agree once and for all – we’ll talk about actors, actresses and writers, but let’s leave art in peace. You’re a fine, rare person, but I don’t think you understand enough about art to call it sacred, in all honesty. You have no instinct for art, no ear. All your life you’ve been too busy, so you never had time to acquire that feeling. In general I don’t like all this talk about art,’ she continues nervously. ‘I don’t like it! It’s been vulgarized enough already, thank you very much!’

‘Who’s vulgarized it?’

‘Some people by drunkenness, newspapers by their condescending attitude, clever people by their philosophy.’

‘Philosophy’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘Yes it has. When someone philosophizes it shows he doesn’t understand.’

To avoid a possible flare-up I hasten to change the subject and then say nothing for a long time. Only when we are driving out of the wood and approaching Katya’s village do I return to the earlier topic.

‘You still haven’t answered my question: why don’t you want to go back to the stage?’

‘Really, Nikolay Stepanovich, that’s cruel of you!’ she cries and suddenly blushes furiously. ‘Do you want me to spell the truth out loud? Very well, if that’s what you want! I’ve no talent! No talent and a great deal of vanity. So there you are!’

Having made this confession she turns her face away and tugs violently on the reins to hide the trembling in her hands.

As we drive up to the villa we can see from the distance Mikhail Fyodorovich strolling by the gates and impatiently awaiting us.

‘It’s that Mikhail Fyodorovich again!’ says Katya in exasperation. ‘Take him away from me – please! I’m sick and tired of him… he’s all washed up. Blow him!’

Mikhail Fyodorovich ought to have gone abroad long ago, but every week he keeps postponing his departure. A few changes have come over him lately: now he has a somewhat pinched look, wine goes to his head, which it never used to before, his black eyebrows are turning grey. When our chaise draws up at the gates he can’t hide his delight and impatience. Fussily he helps Katya and myself down, fires questions at us, laughs and rubs his hands. The gentle, imploring expression I’d noticed only in his eyes before now suffuses his whole face. He is happy, yet he’s ashamed of his joy, ashamed of his habit of visiting Katya every evening and he feels he must justify his appearance with some patent absurdity such as: ‘I happened to be driving past on some business, so I thought I’d drop in for a moment.’

The three of us go inside. First we have tea, then those long-familiar two packs of cards, the large piece of cheese, the fruit, the bottle of Crimean champagne, make their appearance on the table. Our topics of conversation aren’t new – they’re exactly the same as during the winter. University students, literature and the theatre all come in for abuse. The air grows thicker, stuffier from all that spiteful gossip and no longer two toads as in winter but a trio of them poison it with their exhalations. Besides the velvety baritone laughter and loud guffaws that put me in mind of an accordion the maid who is serving us can also hear an unpleasant grating laugh, like a general’s chuckle in a cheap stage farce.

V

There are terrifying nights, with thunder, lightning, rain and wind – they are called ‘sparrow nights’ by country folk. One such sparrow night took place in my personal life…

I wake up after midnight and suddenly jump out of bed. For some reason I feel I’m suddenly going to die. Why do I feel this? In my body there is not one sensation that would seem to indicate an early demise, but my heart is assailed with such horror it’s as though I’d suddenly seen the sinister glow of some vast conflagration.

I quickly strike a light and drink some water straight from the carafe. Then I rush to the open window. The night is magnificent, with a scent of hay and some other delightful smell. I can see the spikes of my garden fence, the gaunt sleepy trees by the window, the road, the dark strip of the wood. There’s a tranquil, very bright moon in the sky and not one cloud. All is quiet, not a leaf stirs. I feel that everything is looking at me and trying to hear how I’m going to die.

I’m terrified. I close the window and run back to bed. After feeling for my pulse and not finding it in my wrist, I start looking for it in my temples, my chin, then again in my wrist. Everything I touch is cold and clammy with sweat. I breathe faster and faster, my body trembles, all my inside is in turmoil and it feels as if my face and bald patch are covered with a cobweb.

What shall I do? Call my family? No, there’s no point in that – I don’t know what my wife and Liza would do if they came in.

I hide my head under the pillow, close my eyes and wait… and wait. My back is cold and it seems as if it’s being drawn into me, and I have the feeling that death is bound to creep up on me from behind…

‘Kee-vee, kee-vee!’ something shrieks in the silence of the night and there’s no telling where it’s coming from – my chest or the street?

‘Kee-vee, kee-vee!’

God, how frightening! I would have drunk some more water but I’m too scared to open my eyes and afraid to raise my head. This fear of mine is unaccountable, animal-like – why I’m feeling so frightened is quite beyond me. Is it because I want to live or because some new, as yet unknown pain is in store for me?

In the room above someone groans or laughs. I listen hard. Soon afterwards I can hear footsteps on the stairs. Someone hurries down and then up again. A minute later I can again hear footsteps downstairs: someone stops outside my door and listens.

‘Who’s there?’ I shout.

The door opens and I boldly open my eyes and see my wife. Her face is pale and her eyes tear-stained.

‘Can’t you sleep, Nikolay?’ she asks.

‘What do you want?’

‘For God’s sake go and see Liza. There’s something the matter with her.’

‘All right… with pleasure,’ I mutter, delighted that I’m no longer alone. ‘All right… straight away.’

I follow my wife and listen to her, but I’m too agitated to take in anything. The patches of light from her candle dance on the stairs, our long shadows quiver, my feet become entangled in the skirts of my dressing-gown. I gasp for breath and I sense that something is chasing me and wants to grab my back. ‘I’m going to die now, right here, on these stairs,’ I think. ‘Now…’ But we’ve gone up the stairs, along the dark corridor with the Italian window and we enter Liza’s room. She’s sitting on the bed in her nightdress, her bare feet dangling; she’s groaning.

‘Oh God!’ she mutters, screwing up her eyes at our candle. ‘I can’t bear it any more!’

‘Liza, my child,’ I say. “What’s wrong?’

Seeing me, she shrieks and flings her arms around my neck.

‘My kind Papa,’ she sobs. ‘Good kind Papa… my darling sweet pet… I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I feel awful!’

She hugs and kisses me and babbles those fond words that I used to hear from her when she was a little child.

‘Calm yourself, my child – please!’ I say. ‘You mustn’t cry. I feel awful too.’

I try to tuck her in, my wife gives her some water and the two of us jostle each other around the bed in confusion. I jog my wife’s shoulder with mine and this reminds me of how once we used to bathe our children together.

‘Help her, won’t you!’ begs my wife. ‘Do something!’

But what can I do? Nothing. That girl is depressed about something but I understand nothing, know nothing and can only mutter, ‘It’s all right… it will pass… Now, go to sleep… sleep.’

To make matters worse a dog suddenly starts barking in the yard, quietly and hesitantly at first, then followed by a noisy duet. I’ve never attached much significance to omens such as dogs howling or owls hooting, but now my heart sinks and I hurry to find an explanation for that howling.

‘It’s all nonsense,’ I think. ‘It’s just how one organism influences another. My extreme nervous tension has infected my wife, Liza, the dog – that’s all… This transmission explains presentiments, forebodings.’

After returning to my room a little later to write Liza a prescription I no longer think about imminent death, but I feel so wretched and miserable that I actually regret not having died suddenly. For a long while I stand motionless in the middle of the room, wondering what to prescribe for Liza. But the groans above the ceiling die away and I decide not to prescribe anything. But still I stand there…

There’s a deathly silence that rings even in the ears, as some writer put it. Time passes slowly, the streaks of moonlight on the windowsill stay quite still and seem frozen. Dawn is a long time away.

But then the garden gate creaks, someone creeps in, breaks a twig off one of the spindly trees and cautiously taps on the window.

‘Nikolay Stepanovich!’ I hear someone whisper. ‘Nikolay Stepanovich!’

I open the window and fancy I’m dreaming. Beneath the window, huddled close to the wall, stands a woman in a black dress, brightly lit by the moon and looking at me with big eyes. Her face is pale, stern, weird in the moonlight, just like marble; her chin is trembling.

‘It’s me!’ she says. ‘It’s me – Katya!’

In the moonlight all women’s eyes look large and black, people seem taller and paler – this was probably why I didn’t recognize her right away.

‘What do you want?’

‘Forgive me,’ she says, ‘but for some reason I suddenly felt so incredibly miserable that I could bear it no longer. So I came here. There was a light in your window… and… I decided to knock… Forgive me… Oh, if only you knew how depressed I was feeling! What are you doing now?’

‘Nothing… can’t sleep.’

‘I had a kind of premonition. Still, that’s all nonsense.’

She raises her eyebrows, tears shine in her eyes and her whole face is illumined with that familiar, trusting look I hadn’t seen for so long.

‘Nikolay Stepanovich!’ she pleads, holding out both arms to me. ‘My dear friend, I beg you… I implore you… If you don’t despise my friendship and respect for you, please grant my request!’

‘What is it?’

‘Take my money!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! What do I want with your money?’

‘You could go away somewhere for your health. You need treatment. You will take it, won’t you, dear? Yes?’

She eagerly looks into my face.

‘You will take it? Yes?’ she repeats.

‘No, my dear, I won’t…’ I say. ‘But thank you…’

She turns her back to me and lowers her head. Probably the tone of my refusal made any further discussion of financial matters impossible.

‘Go home and sleep,’ I say. ‘We’ll see each other tomorrow.’

‘Does this mean you don’t consider me your friend?’ she asks dejectedly.

‘I’m not saying that. But your money is useless to me now.’

‘I’m sorry…’ she says, lowering her voice a whole octave.

‘I understand you… To be indebted to a person like me… a retired actress… Oh well, goodbye…’

And she leaves so quickly that I don’t even manage to say goodbye.

VI

I’m in Kharkov.

Since it would be fruitless and beyond my powers to struggle against my present mood, I’ve decided that the last days of my life will be irreproachable – at least in a formal sense. If I’m being unfair to my family, as I fully realize, I’ll try my very best to do what they want. If I really have to go to Kharkov – then to Kharkov I shall go. Besides, I’ve become so indifferent to everything lately that it’s really all the same to me where I go – Kharkov, Paris or Berdichev.²⁵

I arrived in Kharkov at about noon and put up at a hotel not far from the cathedral. The jolting of the train made me feel sick, the draughts went right through me and now here I am sitting on my bed, clutching my head and waiting for the nervous tic to start. Today I really ought to go and see some professor friends, but I’ve neither the inclination nor the strength.

The old hotel waiter comes in and asks if I have bed linen. I keep him for about five minutes and question him about Gnekker – the object of my journey. The waiter turns out to be a native of Kharkov, who knows the city like the back of his hand, but he doesn’t know of any house owned by a Gnekker. I ask him about estates in the country – I get the same reply.

In the corridor the clock strikes one, two, three… The final months of my life, whilst I’m waiting for death, seem far longer than the whole of my life up to now. Never before could I resign myself to the slow passage of time as I can now. Before, when I waited for a train at a station, or invigilated at an examination, a quarter of an hour seemed a eternity. But now I can sit all night on my bed without moving, reflecting with complete indifference that tomorrow night will be just as long and dreary – and the night after that…

The corridor clock strikes five, six, seven. It’s growing dark.

There’s a dull pain in my cheek – the tic is starting. To occupy my mind I revert to my earlier outlook, when I wasn’t so apathetic. Why, I ask myself, should a famous man, at the top of his profession, be sitting in this small hotel room on a bed with a strange grey quilt? Why am I looking at a cheap tin washstand and listening to the jarring sound of that wretched clock in the corridor? Is all this in keeping with my fame and elevated position in society? And I answer these questions with a sarcastic smile. I’m amused by the naivety with which I once – when I was young – used to exaggerate the importance of fame and the exclusive status celebrities appear to enjoy. I am well-known, my name is uttered in awe, my portrait has been in The Cornfield²⁶ and World Illustrated.²⁷ I’ve even read my biography in a German journal – and what does it all add up to? Here I am sitting all alone, in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my hand. Family squabbles, ruthless creditors, the rudeness of railway guards, the bothersome passport system,²⁸ the expensive and unhealthy food at buffets, people’s general boorishness and bad manners – all this and much more which would take too long to enumerate, affects me no less than any lowly tradesman, known only in his little back alley. What is so special about my position? Let’s suppose I’m a celebrity a thousand times over, that I’m a hero, the pride of Russia. Bulletins about my illness appear in every paper, now I receive in the post letters of sympathy from my colleagues, students and the public, yet none of this will save me from dying miserably in a strange bed and in utter loneliness. No one’s to blame for this of course but (sinner that I am) I don’t like having such a popular name. It strikes me that it’s cheated me.

Around ten o’clock I fall asleep and I sleep soundly, despite the tic. I would have slept for a long time had someone not woken me up. Soon after one o’clock there’s a sudden knock at the door.

‘Who’s there?’

‘A telegram for you.’

‘You might have waited till the morning,’ I say angrily as I take the telegram from the hotel boy. ‘Now I shan’t get to sleep again.’

‘Sorry sir. I saw a light in your room, so I thought you were awake.’

I open the telegram and first I glance at the signature: it’s my wife’s. What does she want?

YESTERDAY GNEKKER SECRETLY MARRIED LIZA COME BACK

As I read the telegram my fear is short-lived. It’s not Liza’s or Gnekker’s behaviour that alarms me, but my own indifference to the news of their marriage. Philosophers and true sages are said to be dispassionate, but that’s false: indifference is spiritual paralysis, premature death.

I go back to bed again and wonder how to occupy my mind. What can I think about? I feel I’ve thought over everything already and that there’s nothing left capable of stimulating my mind now.

When daylight comes I’m sitting on my bed, knees clasped, and for want of anything else to do I try to know myself. ‘Know thyself’ is fine, practical advice, only it’s a pity the ancients didn’t get round to showing us how to make use of their advice.

Before, whenever I had the urge to understand someone else or myself, it wasn’t their actions – where everything follows convention – that I used to take into account, but their desires: tell me what you want and I’ll tell you who you are.

And now I examine myself and ask: what do I want?

I want our wives, children, friends, students to love us not for our prestige, not for the way we’re branded and labelled, but as ordinary human beings. What else? I would have liked to have had helpers and successors. What else? I’d like to wake up a hundred years from now and at least have a quick look at what’s going on in science. I’d like to live another ten years… And then?

Nothing more. I keep thinking for a long, long time but can’t hit upon anything. And however much I rack my brains and whenever I let my thoughts roam, obviously something of fundamental importance, something that is absolutely crucial is lacking in my desires. In my passion for science, in my urge to live, in my sitting here on this strange bed, in all the thoughts and feelings and conceptions I form about everything and in my endeavour to know myself, there is no common link which might bind them into one whole. Every feeling, every idea I entertain lives a separate life. Not even the most skilful analyst could discover any ‘general idea’ or the God of living man in any of my judgements about science, the stage, literature, students, in any of the pictures painted by my imagination.

And if that’s not there, then nothing is there.

My present plight is so wretched that serious illness, fear of death, the impact of circumstances and people have sufficed to capsize and to completely shatter what once I considered my entire outlook, everything which once brought meaning and joy to my life. Therefore it’s no wonder that I’ve darkened the last months of my life with thoughts and feelings worthy of a slave and barbarian, that I’m so apathetic now and don’t even notice when dawn comes. When a man lacks something which is stronger and superior to all outside influences, then a cold will suffice for him to become unbalanced and to see an owl in every bird and to hear the howling of dogs in every noise. And all his pessimism or optimism, together with his thoughts – great or small – are in that case meaningful solely as symptoms, nothing else.

I am defeated. If that’s so, there’s no point in carrying on thinking or talking. I shall just sit and wait in silence for whatever comes.

In the morning the boy brings me tea and a local paper. Mechanically I read the advertisements on the front page, the editorial, extracts from papers and journals, the Chronicle of Events. Among other things I find the following announcement: ‘Yesterday that famous scholar the distinguished Professor Nikolay Stepanovich Such-and-Such arrived by express in Kharkov and is staying at Such-and-Such hotel.’

Resounding reputations are apparently created to live their own separate lives, apart from those who bear them. Now my name is wandering serenely around Kharkov; in three months’ time it will be engraved in gold letters gleaming bright as the sun on my tombstone – that’s when I myself will be under the grass…

There’s a light tap on the door. Someone wants me.

‘Who’s there? Come in!’

The door opens and I am so startled I step backwards, hurriedly wrapping the folds of my dressing-gown around me. Before me stands Katya.

‘Hullo,’ she says, out of breath after walking up the stairs. ‘You weren’t expecting me, were you? Well… I’ve come here too.’

She sits down and goes on talking, falteringly and without looking at me.

‘Why don’t you say hullo? I’m here too, I arrived this morning. I found out that you were staying in this hotel, so I came to see you.’

‘But I’m amazed… just like a bolt from the blue! Why have you come here?’

‘Me? Oh well… I had a sudden urge, so I came…’

Silence. Suddenly she impetuously gets up and comes over to me.

‘Nikolay Stepanovich!’ she says, turning pale and pressing her hands to her bosom. ‘Nikolay Stepanovich! I can’t go on living like this! I can’t! For God’s sake tell me quickly, right now – what am I to do? Tell me what to do.’

‘What can I say?’ I ask in bewilderment. ‘There’s nothing to say.’

‘But please tell me, I beg you!’ she continues, gasping and shaking all over. ‘I swear it, I can’t live like this any more. I’m at the end of my tether!’

She sinks onto a chair and starts sobbing. With her head tossed back she wrings her hands, stamps her feet. Her hat falls off and dangles on a piece of elastic, her hair is dishevelled.

‘Help me, help me!’ she pleads. ‘I can’t go on like this any more!’

She takes a handkerchief from her travelling bag and pulls out with it several letters which fall from her lap onto the floor. I pick them up and in one of them I recognize Mikhail Fyodorovich’s handwriting and happen to read part of a word – ‘passionat. .’

‘There’s nothing I can tell you, Katya,’ I say.

‘Help me!’ she sobs, seizing my hand and kissing it. ‘You’re my father, my only friend! You’re clever, educated, you’ve lived a long life! You were a teacher once! Tell me what to do!’

‘In all honesty, Katya, I don’t know.’

I am bewildered, embarrassed, moved by her sobbing and I can hardly stand.

‘Let’s have some lunch, Katya,’ I say, forcing a smile. ‘Now stop crying!’

And I immediately add in a sinking voice, ‘Soon I shall be dead, Katya…’

‘Just one word, one word!’ she weeps, stretching out her arms. ‘What can I do?’

‘Really, you’re so strange,’ I mutter. ‘I don’t understand. Such a clever girl – then suddenly all these tears! Really!’

Silence follows. Katya tidies her hair, puts on her hat, crumples the letters together and stuffs them in the bag – all this without hurrying or speaking. Her face, her bosom, her gloves are wet with tears, but her expression is cold and stern now… I look at her and feel ashamed that I’m happier than her. Only on the brink of death, in my twilight days, have I discovered that I lack what my philosopher colleagues call a general idea, but that poor girl’s spirit never knew and will never know sanctuary all its life. All its life!

‘Come on Katya, let’s have lunch,’ I say.

‘No thank you,’ she replies coldly.

Another minute passes in silence.

‘I don’t like Kharkov,’ I say. ‘It’s very grey – a grey kind of town!’

‘Yes, perhaps it is… Yes, it’s ugly… I’m not staying long… just passing through. I’m leaving today.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the Crimea… I mean, the Caucasus.’

‘Oh. For long?’

‘I don’t know.’

Katya gets up and without looking at me she stretches out her hand with a cold smile.

I feel like asking: ‘So, you won’t be at my funeral?’ But she doesn’t look at me, her hand is as cold as a stranger’s. Without saying a word I escort her to the door… And now she’s left me and she’s walking down the long corridor without looking back. She knows I’m watching her and she’ll probably look back at the corner.

But no, she doesn’t look back. I glimpse her black dress for the last time, her footsteps die away… Farewell, my treasure!