Sketches from a Hunter's Album (27 page)

Love of art and artists gives such people an inexplicably cloying affectedness. To know them and talk to them is torture because they're real blockheads smeared with honey. For example, they never refer to Rafael as Rafael or Correggio as Correggio, it's always, as they say: ‘Oh, the divine Sanzio, oh, the inimitable de Allegris,' always emphasizing the ‘oh'. Any homegrown, ambitious, overrated and mediocre talent they proclaim a genius or – more correctly – a ‘henius'. They never stop babbling about the blue sky of Italy, southern lemons, the fragrant airs of Brenta's banks. ‘Oh, Vanya, Vanya,' or ‘Oh, Sasha, Sasha,' they say to each other with feeling, ‘we must be off to the south, the south… We're Greeks in spirit, you and I, ancient Greeks!' They can be observed at exhibitions standing in front of the works of Russian painters. (It has to be noted that for the most part all these gentlemen are frightful patriots.) They will take a couple of steps back and throw back their heads, then
once more advance towards the picture, their little eyes fattily misting over. ‘My God, there you are!' they tend to say at last in voices hoarse with emotion. ‘The soulfulness of it, the soulfulness! Oh, the feeling in it, the feeling! Oh, he's shown such soulfulness, a mass of soulfulness! Oh, the way it's done! Masterfully!' And yet what paintings they have in their own drawing-rooms! What artists they have visiting them in the evenings, drinking tea with them and listening to their talk! And what perspective views of their own rooms they bring them, with a broom on the right-hand side, a pile of rubbish on a polished floor, a yellow samovar on a table next the window and the master of the house himself in a dressing-gown and skull-cap with a bright splodge of highlight on his cheek! What longhaired devotees of the Muses visit them with their feverishly condescending smiles! What pale-green young ladies screech their way through songs at their pianos! Because with us in Russia it's now ordained that one cannot be devoted only to one branch of art: it's all or nothing now. And therefore it's not at all surprising that these gentlemen amateurs are also showing strong protective feeling towards Russian literature, particularly the drama… The
Giacobo Sannazaros
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of this world are written for them: the struggle of unrecognized talent against people, against the whole world, something told a thousand times before, shakes their souls to their very depths…

The day after Mr Benevolensky's arrival, Tatyana Borisovna over tea ordered her nephew to show their guest his drawings.

‘So he draws, does he?' uttered Mr Benevolensky, not without surprise, and turned with interest towards Andryusha.

‘Certainly he does,' said Tatyana Borisovna. ‘He's very fond of it! And he does it by himself without a teacher.'

‘Oh, show me, show me,' chimed in Mr Benevolensky.

Andryusha, reddening and smiling, brought their guest his drawing-book.

Mr Benevolensky began to look through it with the air of an expert.

‘Good, young man,' he said finally. ‘Good, very good.' And he stroked Andryusha on the head. Andryusha gave his hand a flying kiss. ‘Well, well, what a talent! I congratulate you, Tatyana Borisovna, I congratulate you.'

‘But you see, Pyotr Mikhaylych, I simply cannot find a teacher anywhere here. It's expensive having one from the town. Our neighbours, the Artamonovs, have a painter and they say he's very good, but the young lady there forbids him to teach anyone else for fear he may spoil his taste, as she puts it.'

‘Hmm,' said Mr Benevolensky, reflected a while and looked at Andryusha from under his brows. ‘Well, we'll give it some thought,' he added and rubbed his hands.

That very day he asked Tatyana Borisovna permission to speak to her alone. They locked themselves away. After half an hour they summoned Andryusha. He entered. Mr Benevolensky was standing by the window with a slightly pink face and shining eyes. Tatyana Borisovna was sitting in a corner and wiping away tears.

‘Well, Andryusha,' she began at last, ‘you must be grateful to Pyotr Mikhaylych, he is taking you into his keeping and is carrying you off to St Petersburg.'

Andryusha literally froze where he stood.

‘You must tell me sincerely,' began Mr Benevolensky in a voice filled with dignity and deference, ‘do you wish to be an artist, young man, do you feel a sacred calling towards art?'

‘I want to be an artist, Pyotr Mikhaylych,' Andryusha confirmed haltingly.

‘In that case I'm very glad. It will be hard for you, of course,' Mr Benevolensky went on, ‘to say goodbye to your honoured auntie. You must feel towards her the liveliest gratitude.'

‘I adore my auntie,' interrupted Andryusha and blinked his eyes.

‘Of course, of course, that is very understandable and does you much credit. But on the other hand, just imagine what joy you'll have in due course… your successes…'

‘Embrace me, Andryusha,' murmured the kind lady of the house. Andryusha flung himself on her neck. ‘Well, now thank your benefactor…'

Andryusha embraced Mr Benevolensky's stomach, stood on tiptoe and reached out for his hand, which the benefactor, true, was ready to deliver to him, but in no great hurry, as if to say: one's got to play along with a child's wishes and satisfy them but one can have a bit of fun oneself, too. A couple of days later Mr Benevolensky left and carried off his new protégé.

In the course of the first three years of separation Andryusha wrote fairly often and sometimes attached drawings to his letters. Occasionally Mr Benevolensky also added a few words of his own, for the most part words of approval. Later the letters became less and less frequent and finally stopped altogether. For a whole year her nephew was silent and Tatyana Borisovna began to grow worried, when suddenly she received a note with the following content:

‘I'm su-uffering, I'm su-uffering,' howled her nephew in the next room.

‘That's enough, Andryusha.'

‘My spirit droops now that you're go-one,' went on the indefatigable singer.

Tatyana Borisovna shook her head. ‘My, oh my, these artistic types!'

A year has passed since then. Belovzorov is still living with his auntie and still planning to go to St Petersburg. He's grown broader than he's tall since being in the country. His aunt – who'd have thought it? – can't do enough for him and young ladies of the region are falling in love with him…

Many of her former friends have stopped visiting Tatyana Borisovna.

‘Let's be off, then.'

He ordered a horse to be saddled and dressed himself in a short green jacket with bronze buttons bearing the image of a boar's head, pulled on a worsted game-bag and silver flask, and having thrown a new French sports-gun over his shoulder, disported himself before the mirror, not without some approbation, and shouted for his dog, Esperance, a gift from a cousin, an elderly maiden lady with a warm heart but without a hair on her head.

We set off. My neighbour took with him the local guardian of the peace, Arkhip, a stout and thick-set peasant with a square-shaped face and cheekbones of positively antediluvian dimensions, and a young man of about nineteen, lean, fair-haired and shortsighted, with sloping shoulders and a long neck, Mr Gottlieb von der Kock, recently engaged as a manager from the Baltic provinces. My neighbour had not long before inherited his estate. It had come to him as an inheritance from his aunt, Kardon-Katayeva, the widow of a state's counsellor, a woman of unusual obesity who, even when lying in bed, had a habit of emitting protracted and piteous groans. We reached his small property and Ardalion Mikhaylich (my neighbour) said, addressing his companions: ‘Wait for me out here in the clearing.'

The German bowed, slid from his horse, extracted a small book from his pocket – a novel, it appeared, by Johanna Schopenhauer
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and seated himself in the shade of a bush, while Arkhip remained out in the sun for a solid hour without budging an inch. Ardalion Mikhaylich and I made a round of the undergrowth, but were unable to find a single bird. My friend announced that he was determined to set off for his wood. I was also far from convinced that our hunting would be successful on such a day and trailed along behind him. We returned to the clearing. The German made a note of his page, stood up, placed his book in his pocket and, not without some difficulty, mounted his short-tailed reject of a mare which neighed and kicked at the slightest touch. Arkhip sprang to life, gave a sharp tug at both reins, clapped his legs against the animal's flanks and eventually managed to set off on his cowed and shaken little steed. Off we went.

Ardalion Mikhaylich's wood had been known to me since my childhood. I had often gone to Chaplygino in the company of my French tutor, Monsieur Désiré Fleury, an excellent chap (who, however, only just avoided ruining my health irretrievably by forcing me to take the medicines of Leroy every evening). The entire wood consisted of some two or three hundred enormous oaks and ash trees. Their stately, powerful trunks used to stand out in magnificent dark relief against the golden transparency of the green-leaved rowans and nut trees; rising on high they composed their fine proportions against the lucid blue sky and there spread out the domes of their far-reaching, angular branches; hawks, merlins, kestrels, all whistled and hovered above their motionless crests and colourful woodpeckers tapped away loudly at their thick bark; the resonant song of the blackbird suddenly rang out amid the thick foliage in the wake of the lilting call of the oriole; below, in the undergrowth, robins, siskins and chiffchaffs chirruped and sang; finches darted to and fro across the paths; white hares ran along the edge of the wood in cautious stops and starts, and nut-brown squirrels leapt friskily from tree to tree, suddenly stopping with tails raised above their heads. In the grass, around tall ant-hills and in the mild shadiness offered by the beautiful fretwork of ferns, violets used to flower, and lilies of the valley, and reddish mushrooms grew, russula, emetic agaric, milk agaric, fairy clubs and red fly agaric; and in the meadows, among the widespread bushes, wild strawberries would grow crimson… And what deep shade there was in the wood! At noon, when the heat was
greatest, it would be dark as night: peaceful, fragrant, moist… Time would pass for me so gaily at Chaplygino that it was, I admit, not without a feeling of sadness that I now rode into this all-too-familiar wood. The bitter, snowless winter of 1840 had not spared my old friends, the oaks and ash trees. Desiccated and naked, covered here and there with diseased leaf, they rose sadly above the young trees which ‘had supplanted them but not replaced them'…
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Some, well covered with foliage on their lower boughs, raised on high, as if in reproach and desperation, their lifeless, broken upper branches; from other trees amidst foliage which was still quite thick, although not as abundant or overflowing as it was formerly, there stuck out fat, dry limbs of dead wood; from others, the bark had already fallen away; and there were some that had fallen down completely and lay rotting on the ground like corpses. Who could have foreseen that there would have been shadows in Chaplygino, where once there wasn't a single shadow to be found! As I looked at the dying trees, I thought: surely you must know shame and bitterness? And I recalled the lines from Koltsov:
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