The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (53 page)

Meanwhile the carriages drove up to the porch.

The general stepped out and shook himself, followed by the colonel, straightening the plumes on his hat.
Then the fat major jumped down from the droshky, holding his saber under his arm.
Then the slim lieutenants who had been holding the sub-lieutenant on their laps leaped down from the
bonvoyage
, and finally the horse-prancing officers dismounted.

“The master’s not at home,” said a lackey, coming out to the porch.

“How, not at home?
But, in any case, he’ll be home by dinnertime?”

“No, sir, he’s gone for the whole day.
He may be back around this time tomorrow.”

“Well, look at that!” said the general.
“How can it be?…”

“Some stunt, I must say!” the colonel said, laughing.

“Ah, no, it isn’t done,” the general went on with displeasure.
“Pah … the devil … If you can’t receive, why go inviting?”

“I don’t understand how anyone could do it, Your Excellency,” said one young officer.

“What?” said the general, who was in the habit of always uttering this interrogative word when speaking with his officers.

“I said, Your Excellency, how can anyone act in such a way?”

“Naturally … Well, if something’s happened, let people know, at least, or don’t invite them.”

“So, Your Excellency, there’s no help for it, let’s go back!” said the colonel.

“Certainly, nothing else to be done.
However, we can have a look at the carriage even without him.
He surely hasn’t taken it with him.
Hey, you there, come here, brother!”

“What’s your pleasure?”

“You’re a stable boy?”

“I am, Your Excellency.”

“Show us the new carriage your master acquired recently.”

“It’s here in the shed, sir.”

The general went into the shed together with the officers.

“If you wish, I’ll move it out a little, it’s a bit dark in here.”

“Enough, enough, that’s good!”

The general and the officers walked around the carriage, thoroughly examining the wheels and springs.

“Well, nothing special,” said the general, “a most ordinary carriage.”

“Most ungainly,” said the colonel, “absolutely nothing good about it.”

“It seems to me, Your Excellency, that it’s hardly worth four thousand,” said one of the young officers.

“What?”

“I said, Your Excellency, that it seems to me it’s not worth four thousand.”

“Four thousand, hah!
It’s not even worth two.
There’s simply nothing to it.
Unless there’s something special inside … Be so kind, my good fellow, as to undo the cover …”

And before the officers’ eyes Chertokutsky appeared, sitting in his dressing gown and crouched in an extraordinary fashion.

“Ah, you’re here!…” said the amazed general.

Having said which, the general at once slammed the doors, covered Chertokutsky with the apron again, and drove off with the other gentlemen officers.

THE PORTRAIT

PART I

N
OWHERE DID SO
many people stop as in front of the art shop in the Shchukin market.
This shop, indeed, presented the most heterogeneous collection of marvels: the pictures were for the most part painted in oils and covered with a dark green varnish, in gaudy, dark-yellow frames.
Winter with white trees, a completely red evening like the glow of a fire, a Flemish peasant with a pipe and a dislocated arm, looking more like a turkey with cuffs than a human being—these were their usual subjects.
To them should be added a few engraved prints: the portrait of Khozrev-Mirza
¹
in a lambskin hat, the portraits of some generals in three-cornered hats, with crooked noses.
Moreover, the doors of such a shop are usually hung with sheaves of popular prints on large sheets, which witness to the innate giftedness of the Russian man.
On one was the tsarevna Miliktrisa Kirbitievna,
²
on another the city of Jerusalem, whose houses and churches were unceremoniously rolled over with red paint, which invaded part of the ground and two praying Russian peasants in mittens.
These works usually have few purchasers, but a heap of viewers.
Some bibulous lackey is sure to be there gaping at them, holding covered dishes from the restaurant for his master, who without doubt will sup a none-too-hot soup.
In front of them there is sure to be standing a soldier in an overcoat, that cavalier of
the flea market, with a couple of penknives to sell, and an Okhta
³
market woman with a box full of shoes.
Each admires in his own way: the peasants usually poke their fingers; gentlemen study seriously; lackey boys and boy artisans laugh and tease each other with caricatures; old lackeys in frieze overcoats look on only so as to stand somewhere and gape; and young Russian market women hasten there by instinct, to hear what people are gabbing about and look at what they are looking at.

Just then the young artist Chartkov, passing by, stopped involuntarily in front of the shop.
His old overcoat and unstylish clothes showed him to be a man who was selflessly devoted to his work and had no time to concern himself with his attire, which always has some mysterious attraction for the young.
He stopped in front of the shop and at first laughed to himself at these ugly pictures.
In the end, an involuntary pondering came over him: he began thinking about who might have need of these works.
That the Russian populace should stare at
Yeruslan Lazarevich
, at the
big eaters
and
big drinkers
, at
Foma and Yerema
,
⁴
did not seem surprising to him: the subjects portrayed were easily accessible and understandable for the people; but where were the purchasers for these motley, dirty daubings in oil?
Who needed these Flemish peasants, these red and blue landscapes, which displayed some pretense to a slightly higher step of art, while showing all the depths of its humiliation?
They seemed not altogether the works of a self-taught child.
Otherwise, for all the insensitive caricature of the whole, some sharp impulse would have burst through in them.
But here one could only see dull-witted, impotent, decrepit giftlessness arbitrarily placing itself among the arts, when it belonged among the lowest crafts—a giftlessness which was faithful to its calling, however, and introduced its craft into art itself.
The same colors, the same manner, the same practiced, habituated hand, belonging rather to a crudely made automaton than to a man!… He stood for a long time before these grimy paintings, finally not thinking about them at all, and meanwhile the owner of the shop, a gray little man in a frieze overcoat, with a chin unshaved since Sunday, had long been talking to him, bargaining and setting a price, before even finding out what he liked and wanted.

“For these peasants here and this little landscape, I’m asking twenty-five roubles.
What painterliness!
It simply hits you in the eye.
We just got them from the exchange; the varnish is still wet.
Or there’s this winter, take this winter!
Fifteen roubles!
The frame is worth a lot by itself.
Look, what a winter!” Here the shop owner gave the canvas a light flick, probably to show how good a winter it was.
“Shall I have them tied up together and taken along with you?
Where do you live?
Hey, lad, fetch me the string!”

“Wait, brother, not so fast,” the artist said, coming to his senses and seeing that the nimble shop owner had seriously started tying them up together.
He felt a bit ashamed not to take anything after standing in the shop for so long, and he said:

“Wait, now, I’ll see if there’s anything here for me,” and, bending down, he started going through some shabby, dusty old daubings piled on the floor and evidently not held in any respect.
There were old family portraits, whose descendants were perhaps not even to be found in this world, pictures of total strangers on torn canvases, frames that had lost their gilding—in short, all sorts of decrepit trash.
But the artist began to examine them, thinking secretly, “Maybe something will turn up.” More than once he had heard stories of great master paintings occasionally being found among the trash sold by cheap print dealers.

The owner, seeing where he was getting to, abandoned his bustling and, assuming his usual position and proper dignity, placed himself by the door again, calling to passers-by and pointing with one hand to the shop: “Here, my friends, see what pictures!
Come in, come in!
Fresh from the exchange!” He had already shouted his fill, for the most part fruitlessly, and talked to his heart’s content with the rag seller who stood across the street by the door of his own shop, and, remembering at last that he had a customer in his shop, he turned his back to the people and went inside.
“Well, my friend, have you chosen something?” But the artist had already been standing motionless for some time before a portrait in a big, once magnificent frame, on which traces of gilding now barely gleamed.

It was an old man with a face the color of bronze, gaunt, high-cheekboned; the features seemed to have been caught at a moment
of convulsive movement and bespoke an un-northern force.
Fiery-noon was stamped on them.
He was draped in a loose Asiatic costume.
Damaged and dusty though the portrait was, when he managed to clean the dust off the face, he could see the marks of a lofty artist’s work.
The portrait, it seemed, was unfinished; but the force of the brush was striking.
Most extraordinary of all were the eyes: in them the artist seemed to have employed all the force of his brush and all his painstaking effort.
They simply stared, stared even out of the portrait itself, as if destroying its harmony by their strange aliveness.
When he brought the portrait to the door, the eyes stared still more strongly.
They produced almost the same impression among the people.
A woman who stopped behind him exclaimed, “It’s staring, it’s staring!” and backed away.
He felt some unpleasant feeling, unaccountable to himself, and put the portrait down.

“So, take the portrait!” said the owner.

“How much?” said the artist.

“Why make it expensive?
Give me seventy-five kopecks!”

“No.”

“Well, then, what will you give me?”

“Twenty kopecks,” said the artist, preparing to leave.

“Eh, what kind of price is that?
Twenty kopecks won’t even pay for the frame.
I see, you think you’ll buy it tomorrow?
Mister, mister, come back!
Tack on ten kopecks at least.
Take it, then, take it, give me the twenty kopecks.
Really, it’s just for openers, since you’re my first customer.”

At which he made a gesture as if to say, “So be it, and perish the picture!”

Thus Chartkov quite unexpectedly bought the old portrait and at the same time thought: “Why did I buy it?
What do I need it for?” But there was nothing to be done.
He took a twenty-kopeck piece from his pocket, gave it to the owner, took the portrait under his arm, and dragged it home.
On the way, he recalled that the twenty kopecks he had paid out were his last.
His thoughts suddenly darkened; vexation and an indifferent emptiness came over him in the same moment.
“Devil take it!
it’s vile in this world!” he said, with the feeling of a Russian for whom things are
going badly.
And he walked on almost mechanically, with hurried steps, insensible to everything.
The red light of the evening sun still lingered over half the sky; the houses turned toward it still glowed faintly with its warm light; and meanwhile the cold, bluish radiance of the moon grew stronger.
Light, half-transparent shadows fell tail-like on the ground, cast by houses and the legs of passers-by.
The artist was beginning gradually to admire the sky, aglow with some transparent, thin, uncertain light, and almost simultaneously the words “What a light tone!” and “It’s irksome, devil take it!” flew out of his mouth.
And, straightening the portrait, which kept slipping from under his arm, he quickened his pace.

Weary and all in a sweat, he dragged himself to the Fifteenth Line on Vasilievsky Island.
⁵
Straining and panting, he climbed the stairs, slopped with swill and adorned with the traces of cats and dogs.
His knocking at the door brought no response: his man was not at home.
He leaned against the window and set himself to waiting patiently, until he finally heard behind him the steps of the lad in the blue shirt, his companion, his model, his paint grinder and floor sweeper, who dirtied it straight away with his boots.
The lad was called Nikita, and he spent all his time outside the gates when his master was not at home.
Nikita was a long time trying to get the key into the keyhole, which was completely invisible on account of the darkness.
At last the door opened.
Chartkov went into his front room, which was insufferably cold, as is always the case with artists, something they, however, do not notice.
Not handing Nikita his overcoat, he went in it to his studio, a square room, large but low, with frost-covered windows, set about with all sorts of artistic litter: pieces of plaster arms, stretched canvases, sketches begun and abandoned, lengths of fabric draped over chairs.
He was very weary, threw off his overcoat, absentmindedly stood the portrait he had bought between two small canvases, and threw himself down on a narrow couch, of which one could not say that it was covered in leather, because the row of brass tacks formerly attaching it had long since existed on its own, and the leather over it also existed on its own, so that Nikita could shove black stockings, shirts, and all the dirty linen under it.
Sitting there,
sprawling as much as one could on this narrow couch, he finally asked for a candle.