The Gift (32 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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