Forty Stories (35 page)

When we came home, Belokurov sat down on my sofa, brooding and frowning, while I began pacing up and down the carpet, aware of a sweet emotion stirring in me, exactly like the stirring of love. I felt a desire to talk about the Volchaninovs.

“Leda could only fall in love with a zemstvo worker, someone
who is just as fascinated by hospitals and schools as she is,” I said. “For the sake of a young woman like that a man should be prepared to become a zemstvo worker, and even wear out a pair of iron boots, as in the fairy story. And then there’s Missy! What an adorable person she is!”

Then Belokurov began to talk at great length, with his drawling “er-er-er,” about the disease of the age—pessimism. He spoke with confidence, and by his tone it might be thought I was having an argument with him. Hundreds of miles of empty, monotonous, burned-out steppe were no drearier than this man who sat and talked and gave no sign of ever going away.

“It’s not a question of pessimism or optimism,” I said irritably. “It’s just that ninety-nine out of a hundred people don’t have any brains.”

Belukurov took this as a personal remark, and he walked out, deeply insulted.

“The prince is staying at Malozyomovo and sends you his greetings,” Leda said, coming in and taking off her gloves. “He had a lot of interesting things to say. He promised to raise the question of a medical center at Malozyomovo at the provincial assembly, but he says there’s not much hope.” And then, turning to me, she said: “Please excuse me, I was forgetting that this cannot be of the slightest interest to you.”

I was irritated by her remark.

“Why shouldn’t it be interesting to me?” I asked with a shrug. “You don’t care to know my opinion, but I assure you the question interests me greatly.”

“Yes?”

“It does indeed. In my opinion a medical center at Malozyomovo is quite unnecessary.”

My irritation was communicated to her. She looked at me, half closed her eyes, and said: “Then what is necessary? Paintings of landscapes?”

“No, landscapes aren’t necessary. You don’t need anything there!”

She finished taking off her gloves and opened a newspaper, which had just come in the mail. A moment later she said quietly, evidently restraining her deep feelings: “Last week Anna died in childbirth. If there had been a medical center near by, she would still be alive. Even landscape painters, I should think, might have convictions on this subject.”

“I have very definite convictions, I assure you,” I answered, while she took refuge behind her newspaper as though unwilling to listen to me. “In my opinion, medical centers, schools, libraries, dispensaries—all these under present conditions only serve to keep the people enslaved. They are being held down with heavy chains, and you are not breaking the chains, you are only adding new links to them. That’s what I think!”

She raised her eyes to me and smiled scornfully, but I went on, trying to catch the thread of my ideas: “What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all those Annas, Mouras, Pelageyas, bend their backs from early morning to late at night, fall ill from working beyond their strength, spend their whole lives worrying about their sick and starving children, always dreading death and disease, always having to doctor themselves, fading early and aging quickly and dying in foul-smelling filth! Their children grow up, and then it is the same story all over again, and hundreds of years pass by, and millions of people are still living worse than the beasts—in perpetual fear, for the sake of a crust of bread. The whole horror of their position lies in their never having time to think about their souls, never having time to remember they are made in the image and likeness of God. Cold, hunger, animal fear, the heavy burden of toil—these are like the drifts of snow, cutting them off from the pathways leading them to spiritual activity, to everything that distinguishes a man from a beast, to the only thing that makes life worth living. You come to their aid with your hospitals and schools, but you are not delivering them from
their shackles. On the contrary, you are forcing them deeper and deeper into slavery, for by introducing new prejudices into their lives you increase the number of their wants, not to mention the fact that they have to pay the zemstvo for the drugs and the books, and so they have to work harder than ever!”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Leda said, putting down her newspaper. “I’ve heard all that before. I will say only one thing—it is no good sitting with folded arms. True, we are not saving mankind, and perhaps we are making a great many mistakes, but we do what we can, and—we are right! The great and holy task of a civilized man is to serve his neighbors, and we are trying to serve them as best we can. You may not like it, but it is impossible to please everyone.”

“True, Leda, true,” said her mother.

Her mother’s courage always failed her in Leda’s presence, and while she was talking she would look timidly at her daughter, afraid of saying anything superfluous or inappropriate, and she never contradicted her, but would always agree with her: “True, Leda, true!”

“Teaching the peasants to read and write, giving them books full of wretched moralizings and quaint adages, and building medical centers can no more diminish their ignorance or decrease the death rate than the lamp in your window can light up the whole of your vast garden,” I said. “You are not giving them anything by interfering in their lives. You only create new wants, and make them have to work more.”

“Good heavens, something has to be done!” Leda said angrily, and I could tell from her voice that she thought my arguments completely worthless, and despised them.

“You must free people from hard physical labor,” I said. “Their yoke must be lifted from them, they must be given a breathing space so that they don’t have to spend their whole lives at the stove and the washtub and in the fields. They should have time to think about their souls and about God, and time to develop their spiritual faculties. The salvation of every human being
lies in spiritual activity—in the continual search for truth and the meaning of life. Make it unnecessary for them to work at rough physical labor, let them feel themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery all these books and dispensaries really are! Once a man is aware of his true vocation, he can only be satisfied with religion, science, and art—not with those other trifles!”

“Free them from work?” Leda gave a smile. “Is that possible?”

“Yes, if we take upon ourselves a share of the work. If all of us, townspeople and country people alike, all without exception, agreed to share the work which is expended to satisfy the physical needs of mankind, then perhaps none of us would have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us, rich and poor, worked only three hours a day, then the rest of our time would be free. And then, in order to be still less dependent upon our bodies and upon physical labor, imagine that we invent machines which will take the place of labor, and imagine that we make an effort to reduce our requirements to the minimum. We should harden ourselves and our children, so that they would no longer fear hunger and cold, and then we wouldn’t be perpetually worrying about health, as the Annas, Mouras, and Pelageyas of the world worry! If we didn’t take medicines and maintain dispensaries, tobacco factories, and distilleries—what a lot of free time we would have after all! We would all—all of us together—devote our leisure to science and art. Just as the peasants sometimes work communally to repair and mend the roads, so all of us together, the whole community, would search together for truth and the meaning of life, and—I am sure of it—the truth would be very soon discovered, and man would be delivered from his continual, agonizing, oppressive fear of death, and even death itself might be conquered.”

“But you are contradicting yourself,” Leda said. “You keep talking about science while denying the need for literacy.”

“What is the good of literacy when men have nothing to read
but the signs on public houses and occasional books which they don’t understand? We have had that kind of literacy since the days of Rurik.
²
Gogol’s Petrushka has been reading for a long time now, but the villages haven’t changed since the time of Rurik. What is needed is not literacy, but freedom for the full development of men’s spiritual faculties. What we need is not schools, but universities.”

“So you are opposed to medicine too?”

“Yes, medicine should be required only for the study of diseases as natural phenomena, not for their cure. It is no use treating diseases, unless we treat the causes. Remove the chief cause, physical labor, and there will be no diseases. I don’t admit the existence of a science that cures diseases!” I went on excitedly. “True science and true art are not directed toward temporary or partial ends, but they are directed toward the eternal and the universal—they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek after God and the soul, and when they are harnessed to our everyday evils and necessities—when they are harnessed to dispensaries and libraries—then they only complicate and burden life! We have plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, and we have plenty of literate people, but we have no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, and poets. All our intelligence, all our spiritual energy is wasted on temporary passing needs.… Scientists, writers, and painters are hard at work, and thanks to them the comforts of life are increasing daily. The demands of the body multiply, but the truth is still far away, and man continues to be an entirely rapacious and filthy animal, and everything is tending toward the degeneration of the greater part of mankind and the decay of human vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist becomes meaningless, and the more talented he is, the stranger and more incomprehensible becomes the role he plays in society, for he would appear to be working only for the amusement of rapacious and filthy animals while he supports
the established order. I have no desire to work, and I won’t work!… Nothing is any use! Let the world go reeling to hell!”

“Missy, leave the room,” Leda said to her sister, apparently thinking my words would have a bad effect on a young girl.

Zhenia looked sadly at her mother and sister, and went out.

“People usually say these charming things when they want to justify their own callousness,” Leda said. “Denying the usefulness of hospitals and schools is easier than curing diseases and teaching.”

“True, Leda, true,” her mother agreed.

“You were threatening to give up working,” Leda went on. “Apparently you place a high value on your works of art. Let us give up arguing, for we shall never agree on anything, and I regard the most imperfect library or dispensary as of infinitely greater value than all the landscapes in the world.” Suddenly she turned to her mother and began speaking in an entirely different tone of voice. “The prince is very thin, and he has changed a lot since he was last here. The doctors are sending him to Vichy.”

She went on talking to her mother about the prince to avoid talking to me. Her face was burning, and to conceal her agitation she bent low over the table as though she were nearsighted, and made a show of reading the newspaper. My presence was distasteful to her. I took my leave and went home.

It was very quiet outside. The village on the further side of the pond was already asleep, and there was not a light anywhere to be seen. Only on the pond lay the pale reflection of the glimmering stars. At the gate with the lions Zhenia was waiting to accompany me on my walk.

“They’ve all gone to sleep in the village,” I said, trying to make out her face in the darkness. I could see her dark mournful
eyes gazing at me fixedly. “The innkeeper and the horse thieves are fast asleep, at peace, while we, who should know better, quarrel and antagonize one another.”

It was a melancholy August night—melancholy because there was already a breath of autumn in the air. The moon was rising behind a purple cloud, shedding scarcely any light along the road and the dark fields of winter wheat stretching away on both sides. At times a shooting star would fall. Zhenia walked beside me, and she avoided looking up at the sky so as not to see the falling stars, which for some reason frightened her.

“I think you are right,” she said, trembling in the damp night air. “If all the people were to devote themselves to spiritual activities, they would soon come to know everything.”

“Of course. We are higher beings, and if we really realized the full power of human genius and lived only for higher things, then we would ultimately become like gods. But it will never happen. Mankind will degenerate and no traces of that genius will ever be found.”

When we could no longer see the gates, Zhenia paused and hurriedly pressed my hand.

“Good night,” she said, trembling. She had nothing but the thin blouse over her shoulders, and she was shivering with cold. “Come tomorrow.”

I felt wretched at the thought of being left alone in a mood of irritation and annoyance with myself and others, and I too tried not to look at the falling stars.

“Please stay with me a little longer,” I said. “Please.”

I was in love with Zhenia. I must have loved her because she met me when I came and always walked with me a little way when I went home, and because she looked at me with tender, admiring glances. Her pale face, her slender neck, her thin hands, her delicacy and her laziness and her books—all these held a wistful appeal for me. And her intelligence? I surmised she had a remarkable intelligence and I was fascinated with the breadth of her views, perhaps because she thought differently
from the austere and beautiful Leda, who had no love for me. Zhenia liked me because I was a painter. I had conquered her heart with my talent, and I longed passionately to paint only for her, and I dreamed of her as my little queen who would one day inherit with me all these trees, fields, mists, and dawns, all those miraculous and enchanting scenes from nature where until now I had felt so hopelessly lonely and unwanted.

“Please stay a little longer,” I begged her. “Only a little longer.”

I took off my overcoat and covered her shivering shoulders; and becase she was afraid of looking funny and ugly in a man’s coat she laughed and threw it off, and then I put my arms round her and began to cover her face, her shoulders, her hands, with kisses.