Текст книги "Demons"
Автор книги: Федор Достоевский
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 56 страниц)
There was yet another young man who used to come to the evenings, a certain Virginsky, a local official, who bore some resemblance to Shatov, though he was also apparently his complete opposite in all respects; but he was a "family man" as well. A pathetic and extremely quiet young man, already about thirty, however, with considerable education, but mainly self-taught. He was poor, married, in the civil service, and supported his wife's sister and an aunt. His spouse and all the ladies were of the latest convictions, but with them it all came out somewhat crudely—here, precisely, was "an idea that ended up in the street," as Stepan Trofimovich put it once on a different occasion. They got everything out of books, and even at the first rumor from our progressive corners in the capital were prepared to throw anything whatsoever out the window, provided they were advised to throw it out. Madame Virginsky practiced the profession of midwife in our town; as a young girl, she had lived for a long time in Petersburg. Virginsky himself was a man of rare purity of heart, and rarely have I encountered a more honest flame of the soul. "Never, never shall I abandon these bright hopes," he used to say to me, his eyes shining.
Of these "bright hopes" he always spoke softly, with sweetness, in a half-whisper, as if secretly. He was quite tall but extremely skinny and narrow-shouldered, and had remarkably thin hair of a reddish hue. He bore meekly all of Stepan Trofimovich's scornful jibes at some of his opinions, and his objections to him were sometimes very serious and in many ways nonplussed him. Stepan Trofimovich treated him benignly, and generally took a fatherly attitude towards us all.
"You are all 'half-baked,’” he observed jokingly to Virginsky, "all your sort; though in you, Virginsky, I have not noticed that nar-row-mind-ed-ness that I met with in Petersburg chez ces séminaristes, [v] [22] but still you're 'half-baked.' Shatov would very much prefer to have been fully baked, but he, too, is half-baked."
"And me?" asked Liputin.
"And you are simply the golden mean that will get along anywhere ... in your own fashion."
Liputin was offended.
It was told of Virginsky, unfortunately on quite good grounds, that his wife, after less than a year of lawful wedlock, suddenly announced to him that he was being retired and that she preferred Lebyadkin. This Lebyadkin, who was some sort of transient, later turned out to be a rather suspicious character, and was even not a retired captain at all, as he styled himself. He only knew how to twirl his moustaches, drink, and spout the most uncouth nonsense imaginable. The man quite indelicately moved in with them at once, being glad of another man's bread, ate and slept with them, and finally began treating the master of the house with condescension. It was asserted that when his wife announced his retirement, Virginsky said to her: "My friend, up to now I have only loved you, but now I respect you," but it is hardly possible that such an ancient Roman utterance was actually spoken; on the contrary, they say he wept and sobbed. [23]Once, about two weeks after his retirement, all of them, the whole "family," went to a grove in the countryside to have tea with friends. Virginsky was somehow feverishly merry and took part in the dancing; but suddenly and without any preliminary quarrel he seized the giant Lebyadkin—who was dancing a cancan solo – by the hair with both hands, bent him down, and began dragging him around with shrieks, shouts, and tears. The giant was so frightened that he did not even defend himself and hardly broke silence all the while he was being dragged around; but after the dragging he became offended with all the fervor of a noble man. Virginsky spent the whole night on his knees begging his wife's forgiveness; but forgiveness was not granted, since he still would not consent to go and apologize to Lebyadkin; he was denounced, besides, for paucity of convictions and stupidity—the latter because he knelt while talking with a woman. The captain soon vanished and reappeared in our town only quite recently, with his sister and with new purposes; but more will be said of him later. No wonder the poor "family man" needed our company to ease his heart. Though he never spoke of his domestic affairs with us. Only one time, as we were returning together from Stepan Trofimovich's, did he begin speaking remotely about his situation, but at once, seizing me by the hand, he exclaimed ardently:
"It's nothing; it's just a particular case; in no way, in no way will it hinder the 'common cause'!"
Chance guests used to visit our circle; a little Jew named Lyamshin used to come. Captain Kartuzov used to come. For a while we had a certain inquisitive old man, but he died. Liputin started bringing an exiled Polish priest named Slonzevsky, and for a time we received him on principle, but later we even stopped receiving him.
IX
For a while there was talk of us around town, that our circle was a hotbed of freethinking, depravity, and godlessness; and this rumor has always persisted. Yet what we had was only the most innocent, nice, perfectly Russian, jolly liberal chatter. "Higher liberalism" and the "higher liberal"—that is, a liberal without any aim—are possible only in Russia. Stepan Trofimovich, like any witty man, needed a listener, and, besides, he needed an awareness that he was fulfilling the high duty of the propaganda of ideas. And, finally, one also needs someone to drink champagne with, over the wine exchanging jolly little thoughts of a certain sort about Russia and the "Russian spirit,” about God in general and the "Russian God" in particular; for the hundredth time repeating scandalous Russian anecdotes known to everyone and repeated by everyone. We were not above local gossip either, and here sometimes reached the point of stern and highly moral verdicts. We also fell into general human things, sternly discussed the future destiny of Europe and of mankind, prophesied doctrinarily that after Caesarism France would fall at once to the level of a secondary state, which we were quite sure could come about terribly quickly and easily. For the Pope we had long ago prophesied the role of mere metropolitan in a united Italy, and were quite convinced that this whole thousand-year-old question was, in our age of humaneness, industry, and railroads, but a trifling matter. Indeed, "higher Russian liberalism" has no other way of treating things. Stepan Trofimovich sometimes used to speak about art, and rather well, too, though somewhat abstractly. He sometimes recalled the friends of his youth—all noted persons in the history of our development—recalled them with tenderness and reverence, but somewhat enviously, as it were. If things got too boring, the little Jew Lyamshin (a petty postal clerk), a good hand at the piano, would sit down to play, and in the intermissions would do mimicries of a pig, a thunderstorm, a mother giving birth with the first cry of the baby, and so on and so forth; that was the sole reason for inviting him. If there was too much tippling—and it did happen, though not often—we would grow rapturous, and once even sang the "Marseillaise" [24]in chorus to Lyamshin's accompaniment, though I do not know that it came out very well. The great day of February nineteenth [25]we celebrated with raptures and even began emptying toasts in its honor way ahead of time. That was long, long ago when there was as yet no Shatov and no Virginsky, and Stepan Trofimovich still lived in the same house with Varvara Petrovna. Some time prior to the great day, Stepan Trofimovich took to muttering to himself the well-known though somewhat unnatural verses, written most likely by some former liberal landowner:
Peasants come, they're bringing axes, Something terrible will happen. [26]
I believe it went something like that, I do not remember it literally. Varvara Petrovna overheard it once, shouted "Nonsense! Nonsense!" at him, and angrily walked out. Liputin, who happened to be present, remarked caustically to Stepan Trofimovich:
"What a pity if the former serfs get so joyful as to really cause some unpleasantness for their gentleman landowners."
And he drew his index finger across his throat.
"Cher ami," Stepan Trofimovich remarked to him good-humoredly, "believe me, this"(he repeated the gesture across his throat) "will be of no use whatsoever either to our landowners or to the rest of us in general. Even without heads, we will not be able to arrange anything, though it's our heads that hinder our understanding most of all."
I should note that many among us thought something extraordinary, such as Liputin predicted, would take place on the day of the proclamation, and they were all so-called knowers of the people and the state. It seems Stepan Trofimovich also shared these thoughts, so much so that almost on the eve of the great day he suddenly began asking Varvara Petrovna to let him go abroad; in short, he began to worry. But the great day went by, and more time went by, and the scornful smile again appeared on Stepan Trofimovich's lips. In our presence he gave utterance to several remarkable thoughts on the character of the Russian man in general and of the Russian peasant in particular.
"We, being hasty people, were in too great a hurry with our dear little peasants," he concluded his series of remarkable thoughts. "We brought them into fashion, and for several years in a row the whole literary sector fussed over them as over some newly discovered treasure. We placed laurels upon lousy heads. In all its thousand years, the Russian village has given us only the 'komarinsky.' [27]A remarkable Russian poet, and one not wanting in wit, when he saw the great Rachel [28]on stage for the first time, exclaimed in rapture: 'I'd never trade Rachel for a peasant!' I am prepared to go further: I will trade all Russian peasants for one Rachel. It is time to take a more sober look and stop mixing our lumpish native tar with bouquet de l'impératrice." [29]
Liputin agreed at once, but observed that for the moment it was still necessary to play the hypocrite and praise peasants for the sake of the trend; that even high-society ladies flooded themselves with tears reading Anton the Wretch, [30] and some even wrote from Paris to their managers in Russia that henceforth they were to treat the peasants with all possible humaneness.
And, as if by design, just after the rumors about Anton Petrov, [31]it so happened that in our province, too, and only ten miles from Skvoreshniki, a certain misunderstanding occurred, so that in the heat of the moment troops had to be sent. This time Stepan Trofimovich became so excited that he even frightened us. He shouted in the club that more troops were needed, that they should be summoned by telegraph from another district; he ran to the governor and assured him that he had nothing to do with it, begged that he not be somehow mixed up in the affair by force of habit, and suggested that his statement be communicated at once to the proper quarters in Petersburg. It was good that it all passed quickly and ended in nothing; but at the time I simply marveled at Stepan Trofimovich.
About three years later, as everyone knows, there began to be talk of nationhood, and "public opinion" was born. Stepan Trofimovich had a good laugh.
"My friends," he would instruct us, "if our nationhood has indeed been 'born,' as they assure us nowadays in the newspapers, it is still sitting at school, in some German Peterschule, [32] over a German book, grinding out its eternal German lesson, and its German teacher makes it go on its knees when necessary. All praise to the German teacher; but most likely nothing has happened, and nothing of the sort has been born, and everything is still going on as before, that is, by the grace of God. In my opinion, that should be enough for Russia, pour notre sainte Russie. [vi] Besides, all these panslavisms and nationhoods—it's all too old to be new. Nationhood, if you like, has never appeared among us otherwise than as a gentlemen's clubroom fancy—a Moscow one at that! To be sure, I'm not talking about Igor's time. [33]And, finally, it all comes of idleness. With us everything comes of idleness, even what is fine and good. It all comes of our dear, cultivated, whimsical, gentlemanly idleness. I've been repeating it for thirty thousand years. We are unable to live by our own labor. And what is all this fuss nowadays about some public opinion being 'born'—did it just drop from the sky, suddenly, for no rhyme or reason? Don't they understand that in order to acquire an opinion what is needed first of all is labor, one's own labor, one's own initiative and experience! Nothing can ever be acquired gratis. If we labor, we shall have our own opinion. And since we shall never labor, those who have been working for us all along will have the opinion instead—that is, Europe again, the Germans again, our teachers from two hundred years back. Besides, Russia is too great a misunderstanding for us to resolve ourselves, without the Germans and without labor. For twenty years now I've been ringing the alarm and calling to labor! I've given my life to this call, and—madman—I believed! Now I no longer believe, but I still ring and shall go on ringing to the end, to my grave; I shall pull on the rope until the bells ring for my funeral!"
Alas, we simply yessed him! We applauded our teacher, and with what ardor! But after all, gentlemen, even now do we not at times hear all around us the same "dear," "intelligent," "liberal" old Russian nonsense?
Our teacher believed in God. "I do not understand why everyone here makes me out to be a godless man," he used to say occasionally. "I believe in God, mais distinguons, [vii] I believe as in a being who is conscious of himself in me. Why, I cannot go believing like my Nastasya" (the servingwoman) "or like some grand sir who believes 'just in case'—or like our dear Shatov—but, no, Shatov doesn't count, Shatov believes perforce, like a Moscow Slavophil. So far as Christianity is concerned, for all my sincere respect for it, I am not a Christian. I am rather an ancient pagan, like the great Goethe, [34]or like an ancient Greek. Take this one thing alone, that Christianity has never understood woman—as has been so splendidly developed by George Sand in one of her brilliant novels. [35]As for the bowings, the fasts, and the rest of it, I do not see why anyone should care about me. However our informers may bustle about here, I have no wish to become a Jesuit. In the year 'forty-seven Belinsky, while abroad, sent his famous letter in Gogol, in which he hotly reproached him with believing 'in some sort of God.' [36]Entre nous soit dit, [viii] I can imagine nothing more comical than the moment when Gogol (the Gogol of that time!) read this expression and... the whole letter! But, ridiculousness aside, since I still agree with the essence of the matter, I will point to them and proclaim: These were men! They knew how to love their people, they knew how to suffer for them, they knew how to sacrifice everything for them, and they knew at the same time how to disagree with them when necessary, not to indulge them in certain notions. Indeed, Belinsky could hardly seek salvation in Lenten oil or turnips and peas! ..."
But here Shatov would interrupt.
"These men of yours never loved the people, never suffered for them or sacrificed anything for them, no matter what they themselves imagined for their own good pleasure!" he growled gloomily, looking down and turning impatiently on his chair.
"Never loved the people, did they!" Stepan Trofimovich yelled. "Oh, how they loved Russia!"
"Neither Russia nor the people!" Shatov also yelled, flashing his eyes. "One cannot love what one does not know, and they understood nothing about the Russian people! All of them, and you along with them, turned a blind eye and overlooked the Russian people, and Belinsky especially; it's clear in that same letter to Gogol. Belinsky was just like Krylov's Inquisitive Man, [37]who didn't notice the elephant in the museum, but gave all his attention to French socialist bugs; and that's where he ended up. Yet he was maybe more intelligent than all of you! Not only have you overlooked the people—you have treated them with loathsome contempt, which is enough to say that by people you meant only the French people, and even then only the Parisians, and were ashamed that the Russian people are not like them. And this is the naked truth! And those who have no people, have no God! You may be sure that all those who cease to understand their people and lose their connection with them, at once, in the same measure, also lose the faith of their fathers, and become either atheists or indifferent. It's right, what I'm saying! The fact will be borne out. That is why all of you, and all of us now, are either vile atheists or indifferent, depraved trash, and nothing more! And you, too, Stepan Trofimovich, I do not exclude you in the least, I've even said it on your account, be it known to you!"
Usually, after delivering such a monologue (and this often happened with him), Shatov would seize his cap and rush to the door, completely certain that it was all over now and that he had broken his friendly relations with Stepan Trofimovich utterly and forever. But the latter always managed to stop him in time.
"Why not make peace, Shatov, after all these nice little words?" he would say, offering his hand good-naturedly from his chair.
Clumsy but bashful Shatov did not like tendernesses. On the surface he was a crude man, but inwardly, it seems, a most delicate one. Though he often lost his sense of measure, he was the first to suffer for it. Having growled something under his nose to Stepan Trofimovich's appeal, and shuffling in place like a bear, he would suddenly grin, lay his cap aside, and sit down in his former chair, stubbornly staring at the ground. Of course, wine would be brought out, and Stepan Trofimovich would pronounce some appropriate toast—say, for example, to the memory of one of the old activists.
2: Prince Harry – Matchmaking
I
There was one other person on earth to whom Varvara Petrovna was attached no less than to Stepan Trofimovich—her only son, Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin. It was for him that Stepan Trofimovich had been invited as a tutor. The boy was then about eight years old, and the frivolous General Stavrogin, his father, was at the time already living separately from his mama, so that the child grew up in her care alone. One must do Stepan Trofimovich justice: he knew how to win his pupil over. The whole secret lay in his being a child himself. I was not around then, and he was constantly in need of a true friend. He did not hesitate to make a friend of such a small being, once he had grown up a bit. It somehow came about naturally that there was not the least distance between them. More than once he awakened his tenor eleven-year-old friend at night only to pour out his injured feelings in tears before him, or to reveal some domestic secret to him, not noticing that this was altogether inadmissible. They used to throw themselves into each other's embrace and weep. The boy knew that his mother loved him very much, but he hardly had much love for her. She spoke little to him, rarely hindered him in anything, but he always somehow morbidly felt her eyes fixed upon him, watching him. However, in the whole business of education and moral development, his mother fully trusted Stepan Trofimovich. She still fully believed in him then. One may suppose that the pedagogue somewhat unsettled his pupil's nerves. When he was taken to the lycée in his sixteenth year, he was puny and pale, strangely quiet and pensive. (Later on he was distinguished by his extraordinary physical strength.) One may also suppose that when the friends wept, throwing themselves into their mutual embrace at night, it was not always over some little domestic anecdotes. Stepan Trofimovich managed to touch the deepest strings in his friend's heart and to call forth in him the first, still uncertain sensation of that age-old, sacred anguish which the chosen soul, having once tasted and known it, will never exchange for any cheap satisfaction. (There are lovers of this anguish who cherish it more than the most radical satisfaction, if that were even possible.) But in any event it was good that the youngling and the mentor, though none too soon, were parted in different directions.
For the first two years the young man came home from the lycée for vacations. While Varvara Petrovna and Stepan Trofimovich were in Petersburg, he was sometimes present at his mother's literary evenings, listening and observing. He spoke little, and was quiet and shy as before. He treated Stepan Trofimovich with the former tender attentiveness, but now somehow more reservedly: he obviously refrained from talking with him about lofty subjects or memories of the past. In accordance with his mama's wish, after completing his studies he entered military service and was soon enrolled in one of the most distinguished regiments of the Horse Guard. He did not come to show himself to his mama in his uniform and now rarely wrote from Petersburg. Varvara Petrovna sent him money without stint, in spite of the fact that the income from her estates fell so much after the reform that at first she did not get even half of her former income. However, through long economy she had saved up a certain not exactly small sum. She was very interested in her son's successes in Petersburg high society. The young officer, rich and with expectations, succeeded where she had not. He renewed acquaintances of which she could no longer even dream, and was received everywhere with great pleasure. But very soon rather strange rumors began to reach Varvara Petrovna: the young man, somehow madly and suddenly, started leading a wild life. Not that he gambled or drank too much; there was only talk of some savage unbridledness, of some people being run over by horses, of some beastly behavior towards a lady of good society with whom he had had a liaison and whom he afterwards publicly insulted. There was something even too frankly dirty about this affair. It was added, furthermore, that he was some sort of swashbuckler, that he picked on people and insulted them for the pleasure of it. Varvara Petrovna was worried and anguished. Stepan Trofimovich assured her that these were merely the first stormy impulses of an overabundant constitution, that the sea would grow calm, and that it all resembled Shakespeare's description of the youth of Prince Harry, carousing with Falstaff, Poins, and Mistress Quickly. [38]This time Varvara Petrovna did not shout "Nonsense, nonsense!" as it had lately become her habit to shout quite often at Stepan Trofimovich, but, on the contrary, paid great heed to him, asked him to explain in more detail, herself took Shakespeare and read the immortal chronicle with extreme attention. But the chronicle did not calm her down, nor did she find all that much resemblance. She waited feverishly for answers to certain of her letters. The answers were not slow in coming; soon the fatal news was received that Prince Harry had almost simultaneously fought two duels, was entirely to blame for both of them, had killed one of his opponents on the spot and crippled the other, and as a consequence of such deeds had been brought to trial. The affair ended with his being broken to the ranks, stripped of his rights, and exiled to service in one of the infantry regiments, and even that only by special favor.
In the year 'sixty-three he somehow managed to distinguish himself; he was awarded a little cross, promoted to noncommissioned officer, and then, somehow quite soon, to officer. Throughout this time Varvara Petrovna had sent perhaps as many as a hundred letters to the capital with requests and pleas. She allowed herself to be somewhat humiliated in so extraordinary a case. After his promotion, the young man suddenly retired, once again did not come to Skvoreshniki, and stopped writing to his mother altogether. It was learned in some roundabout way that he was back in Petersburg, but was not seen at all in the former society; he seemed to have hidden somewhere. It was discovered that he was living in some strange company, had become associated with some castoffs of the Petersburg populace, with some down-at-the-heel officials, retired military men who nobly begged for alms, drunkards, that he visited their dirty families, spent days and nights in dark slums and God knows what corners, that he had gone to seed, gone ragged, and that he apparently liked it. He did not ask money of his mother; he had his little estate—a former village of General Stavrogin's, which did bring at least some income and which, according to rumors, he had rented out to a German from Saxony. At last his mother begged a visit out of him, and Prince Harry appeared in our town. It was then that I first had a close look at him, for before then I had never seen him.
He was a very handsome young man, about twenty-five years old, and I confess I found him striking. I expected to see some dirty ragamuffin, wasted away from depravity and stinking of vodka. On the contrary, this was the most elegant gentleman of any I had ever happened to meet, extremely well dressed, of a behavior such as is to be found only in a gentleman accustomed to the most refined decorum. I was not alone in my surprise: the whole town was surprised, having already been informed, of course, of the whole of Mr. Stavrogin's biography, and even in such detail that it was impossible to imagine where it could have come from, and, what is most surprising, half of which turned out to be true. All our ladies lost their minds over the new visitor. They were sharply divided into two parties—one party adored him, the other hated him to the point of blood vengeance; but both lost their minds. Some were especially fascinated by the possibility of some fatal mystery in his soul; others positively liked his being a killer. It also turned out that he was quite well educated, and even rather knowledgeable. Of course, it did not take much knowledge to surprise us; but he could reason about vital and rather interesting issues as well, and, what was most precious, with remarkable reasonableness. I will mention as an oddity that everyone here, almost from the very first day, found him to be an extremely reasonable man. He was not very talkative, was elegant without exquisiteness, surprisingly modest, and at the same time bold and confident like no one else among us. Our dandies looked at him with envy and were totally eclipsed in his presence. I was also struck by his face: his hair was somehow too black, his light eyes were somehow too calm and clear, his complexion was somehow too delicate and white, his color somehow too bright and clean, his teeth like pearls, his lips like coral—the very image of beauty, it would seem, and at the same time repulsive, as it were. People said his face resembled a mask; however, they said much else as well, about his great physical strength, among other things. He was almost a tall man. Varvara Petrovna looked at him with pride, but also with constant uneasiness. He spent about half a year with us—listless, quiet, rather morose; he appeared in society and observed all our provincial etiquette with unswerving attention. He was related to our governor through his father, and was received in his house as a close relative. But several months passed, and the beast suddenly showed its claws.
By the way, I will note parenthetically that dear, mild Ivan Osipovich, our former governor, had something of the woman about him, but was from a good and well-connected family—which explains how he could sit with us for so many years constantly brushing all business aside. With his openhandedness and hospitality he should have been a marshal of nobility of the good old days, and not a governor in such a worrisome time as ours. There was eternal talk in town that it was not he but Varvara Petrovna who ruled the province. It was caustically put, of course, but nonetheless decidedly a lie. And much wit was wasted among us on account of it. On the contrary, in recent years Varvara Petrovna had specifically and consciously withdrawn from any higher destiny, despite the extreme respect accorded her by the whole of society, and voluntarily confined herself within the strict limits she set for herself. Instead of a higher destiny, she suddenly turned to the management of her estate, and in two or three years brought its income up almost to the former level. Instead of the former poetic impulses (visits to Petersburg, plans for publishing a magazine, and so on), she started scrimping and saving. She even removed Stepan Trofimovich from herself, allowing him to rent an apartment in another house (which he himself, under various pretexts, had been pestering her to do for a long time). Stepan Trofimovich gradually began referring to her as a prosaic woman, or, even more jocularly, as his "prosaic friend." To be sure, he allowed himself such jokes not otherwise than in the most highly respectful form and after a long selection of the appropriate moment.
All of us who were close to them understood—and Stepan Trofimovich more sensitively than any of us—that her son appeared to her then as if in the guise of a new hope and even in the guise of some new dream. Her passion for her son dated from the time of his successes in Petersburg society, and had increased especially from the moment she received the news that he had been broken to the ranks. And yet she was obviously afraid of him and seemed like a slave before him. One could see that she was afraid of something indefinite, mysterious, which she herself would have been unable to explain, and oftentimes she studied Nicolas unobtrusively and attentively, pondering and puzzling over something... and then—the beast suddenly put out its claws.
