Текст книги "The Collected tales of Nikolai Gogol"

Автор книги: Николай Гоголь

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Fortunately for the world and for the arts, such a strained and violent life could not long continue: the scope of its passions was too exaggerated and colossal for its feeble forces. Attacks of rage and madness began to come more often, and finally it all turned into a most terrible illness. A cruel fever combined with galloping consumption came over him with such fierceness that in three days nothing but a shadow of him remained. This was combined with all the signs of hopeless insanity. Sometimes several men could not hold him back. He would begin to imagine the long forgotten, living eyes of the extraordinary portrait, and then his rage was terrible. All the people around his bed seemed to him like terrible portraits. It doubled, quadrupled in his eyes; all the walls seemed hung with portraits, their motionless, living eyes fixed on him. Frightful portraits stared from the ceiling, from the floor; the room expanded and went on endlessly to make space for more of these motionless eyes. The doctor who had assumed the charge of caring for him, having heard something of his strange story, tried his best to find the mysterious relation between the phantoms he imagined and the circumstances of his life, but never succeeded. The sick man neither understood nor felt anything except his own torments, and uttered only terrible screams and incoherent talk. Finally his life broke off in the last, already voiceless strain of suffering. His corpse was frightful. Nothing could be found of his enormous wealth, either; but seeing the slashed remains of lofty works of art whose worth went beyond millions, its terrible use became clear.

PART II

A great many carriages, droshkies, and barouches stood outside the entrance of a house in which an auction was under way of the belongings of one of those wealthy lovers of art who spend their whole life drowsing sweetly, immersed in their zephyrs and cupids, who innocently pass for Maecenases 16 and simple-heartedly spend on it the millions accumulated by their substantial fathers, and often even by their own former labors. Such Maecenases, as we know, exist no longer, and our nineteenth century has long since acquired the dull physiognomy of a banker who delights in his millions only as numbers on paper. The long room was filled with a most motley crowd of visitors, who had come flying like birds of prey to an unburied body. There was a whole fleet of Russian merchants from the Merchants' Arcade, 17 and even from the flea market, in dark blue German frock coats. Their appearance and the expression of their faces was somehow more firm here, more free, and not marked by that cloying subservience so conspicuous in the Russian merchant when he is in his shop with a customer before him. Here they dropped all decorum, even though there were in this same hall a great many of those counts before whom, in some other place, they would be ready with their bowing to sweep away the dust brought in on their own boots. Here they were completely casual, unceremoniously fingered the books and paintings, wishing to see if the wares were good, and boldly upped the bids offered by aristocratic experts. Here there were many of those inevitable auction-goers whose custom it was to attend one every day in place of lunch; aristocratic experts who considered it their duty not to miss a chance of adding to their collections and who found nothing else to do between twelve and one; and, lastly, those noble gentlemen whose clothes and pockets were quite threadbare, who came daily with no mercenary purpose but solely to see how it would end, who would offer more, who less, who would bid up whom, and who would be left with what. A great many paintings were thrown around without any sense at all; they were mixed in with furniture and books bearing the monogram of their former owner, who probably never had the laudable curiosity to look into them. Chinese vases, marble table tops, new and old pieces of furniture with curved lines, gryphons, sphinxes, and lions' paws, gilded and ungilded, chandeliers, Quinquet lamps 18 – it was all lying in heaps, and by no means in the orderly fashion of shops. It all presented some sort of chaos of the arts. Generally, we experience a dreadful feeling at the sight of an auction: it all smacks of something like a funeral procession. The rooms in which they are held are always somehow gloomy; the windows, blocked by furniture and paintings, emit a scant light, silence spreads over the faces, and the funereal voice of the auctioneer, as he taps with his hammer, intones a panikhida 19 over the poor arts so oddly come together there. All this seems to strengthen still more the strange unpleasantness of the impression.

The auction seemed to be at its peak. A whole crowd of decent people, clustered together, vied excitedly with each other over something. The words "Rouble, rouble, rouble," coming from all sides, gave the auctioneer no time to repeat the rising price, which had already grown four times over the initial one. The surrounding crowd was excited over a portrait that could not have failed to stop anyone with at least some understanding of painting. The lofty brush of an artist was clearly manifest in it. The portrait had evidently already been renewed and restored several times, and it represented the swarthy features of some Asian in loose attire, with an extraordinary, strange expression on his face; but most of all, the people around it were struck by the extraordinary aliveness of the eyes. The more they looked at them, the more the eyes seemed to penetrate into each of them. This strangeness, this extraordinary trick of the artist, occupied almost everyone's attention. Many of the competitors had already given up, because the bids rose incredibly. There remained only two well-known aristocrats, lovers of painting, who simply refused to give up such an acquisition. They were excited and would probably have raised the bid impossibly, if one of the onlookers there had not suddenly said:

"Allow me to interrupt your dispute for a time. I have perhaps more right to this portrait than anyone else."

These words instantly drew everyone's attention to him. He was a trim man of about thirty-five with long black hair. His pleasant face, filled with some carefree brightness, spoke for a soul foreign to all wearisome worldly shocks; in his clothing there was no pretense to fashion: everything in him spoke of the artist. This was, in fact, the painter B., known personally to many of those present.

"Strange as my words may seem to you," he went on, seeing the general attention directed at him, "if you are resolved to listen to a brief story, you will perhaps see that I had the right to speak them. Everything assures me that this portrait is the very one I am looking for."

A quite natural curiosity lit up on the faces of almost all of them, and the auctioneer himself stopped, openmouthed, with the upraised hammer in his hand, preparing to listen. At the beginning of the story, many kept involuntarily turning their eyes to the portrait, but soon they all fixed their eyes on the narrator alone, as his story became ever more engrossing.

"You know that part of the city which is called Kolomna." So he began. "There everything is unlike the other parts of Petersburg; there it is neither capital nor province; you seem to feel, as you enter the streets of Kolomna, that all youthful desires and impulses are abandoning you. The future does not visit there, everything there is silence and retirement; everything has settled out of the movement of the capital. Retired clerks move there to live, and widows, and people of small income who, after some acquaintance with the Senate, 20 condemned themselves to this place for almost their whole lives; pensioned-off cooks who spend all day jostling in the marketplaces, babbling nonsense with some peasant in a small-goods shop, and every day take five kopecks' worth of coffee and four of sugar; and, finally, that whole class of people who may be called by one word: ashen-people whose clothing, faces, hair, eyes have a sort of dull, ashen appearance, like a day on which there is neither storm nor sun in the sky, but simply nothing in particular: a drizzling mist robs all objects of their sharpness. Retired theater ushers, retired titular councillors, retired disciples of Mars with a blind eye and a swollen lip, can be included here. These people are utterly passionless: they walk about without looking at anything, they are silent without thinking about anything. They have few chattels in their rooms, sometimes simply a bottle of pure Russian vodka, which they sip monotonously all day, without any strong rush to the head aroused by a heavy intake such as a young German artisan likes to treat himself to on Sundays-that daredevil of Meshchanskaya Street, who takes sole possession of the pavements once it's past midnight.

"Life in Kolomna is terribly solitary: there is rarely a carriage, except maybe the kind actors go around in, which with its rumbling, jingling, and clanking is all that disturbs the universal silence. There everybody goes on foot; a cabby with no passengers quite often plods along, bringing hay to his bearded little nag. You can find lodgings for five roubles a month, even with morning coffee. Widows living on pensions are the aristocrats of the place-they behave themselves well, sweep their room frequently, discuss the high price of beef and cabbage with their lady friends; there's often a young daughter with them, a silent, speechless, sometimes comely being, a vile little dog, and a wall clock with a sadly ticking pendulum. Then come actors, whose earnings do not allow them to move out of Kolomna-free folk who, like all artists, live for pleasure. Sitting in their dressing gowns, they repair a pistol, glue up various useful household objects from cardboard, play checkers or cards with a visiting friend, spend the morning that way, and do almost the same thing in the evening, with the addition of an occasional glass of punch. After these aces and the aristocracy of Kolomna come the extraordinarily puny and piddling. It's as difficult to name them as it is to count the multitude of insects that generate in stale vinegar. There are old women who pray, old women who drink, old women who both pray and drink, old women who get along by incomprehensible means, like ants– they drag old rags and linens from the Kalinkin Bridge to the flea market and sell them there for fifteen kopecks; in short, often the most wretched sediment of mankind, whose condition no philanthropic political economist could find the means to improve.

"I mention them in order to show you how often these people have the need to seek one-time, sudden, temporary assistance, to resort to borrowing; and then there settle among them a special sort of moneylenders, who provide them with small sums on a pledge and at high interest. These small moneylenders are oftentimes more unfeeling than any of the big ones, because they emerge in the midst of poverty and the most manifest beggarly rags, something not seen by the wealthy moneylender, who deals only with those who come to him in carriages. And therefore human feeling dies all too early in their souls. Among these moneylenders there was one… but it will do no harm to inform you that the event I've begun to tell you about took place in the last century-namely, during the reign of the late empress Catherine II. You can understand yourselves that the very appearance and inner life of Kolomna must have changed significantly And so, among the moneylenders there was one-an extraordinary being in all respects-who had long since settled in that part of the city. He went about in loose Asian attire; the dark color of his face pointed to his southern origin, but precisely what his nationality was-Indian, Greek, Persian-no one could say for certain. Tall, almost extraordinary stature, a swarthy, lean, burnt face, its color somehow inconceivably terrible, large eyes of an extraordinary fire, and thick, beetling brows, distinguished him greatly and sharply from all the ashen inhabitants of the capital. His dwelling itself was unlike all the other little wooden houses. It was a stone building, like those once built in great numbers by Genoese merchants-with irregular, unequal-sized windows, iron shutters, and iron bars. This moneylender differed from other moneylenders in that he was able to supply any sum to anyone, from a destitute old woman to an extravagant courtier. The most brilliant carriages often turned up in front of his house, in the windows of which the heads of magnificent society ladies often appeared. The rumor spread, as usual, that his iron coffers were filled with an inestimable fortune in money, jewelry, diamonds, and various pledges, but that nonetheless he was not mercenary in the same way other moneylenders were. He gave money out willingly, fixing seemingly advantageous terms of payment; but through certain strange mathematical calculations, he somehow made the interest increase enormously. So, at least, rumor said. But strangest of all, and what could not fail to strike many, was the strange fate that befell all those who took money from him: they all ended their lives in some unfortunate way. Whether this was simply people's opinion, absurd superstitious talk, or a deliberately spread rumor, remained unknown. But within a short period of time several vivid and spectacular examples occurred before everyone's eyes.

"Among the aristocracy of the time, a young man from one of the best families soon drew everyone's eyes, who distinguished himself in the government service while still young-an ardent admirer of everything genuine and lofty, a zealot of everything produced by human art and intellect, a promising Maecenas. He soon deserved to be distinguished by the empress herself, who entrusted him with an important post that agreed perfectly with his own expectations, a post in which he could do much for learning and for the good in general. The young courtier surrounded himself with painters, poets, scholars. He wanted to give work to all, to encourage all. He undertook at his own expense a great many useful publications, commissioned a great many things, announced encouraging awards, spent heaps of money on it, and in the end was ruined. Yet, full of magnanimous impulse, he did not want to abandon his cause, sought to borrow everywhere, and turned at last to the famous moneylender. Having taken a considerable loan from him, in a short period of time the man changed completely: he became an enemy, a persecutor of developing minds and talents. In all writings he began to see the bad side, he twisted the meaning of every phrase. As luck would have it, the French Revolution occurred just then. This suddenly served him as a tool for every possible nastiness. He began to see some sort of revolutionary trend in everything, he imagined allusions everywhere. He became suspicious to such a degree that he finally began to suspect his own self, started writing terrible, unjust denunciations, made innumerable people miserable. It goes without saying that such behavior could not fail in the end to reach the throne. The magnanimous empress was horrified and, filled with that nobility of soul which is the adornment of crowned heads, spoke words which, though they could not have been conveyed to us exactly, yet imprinted their deep meaning in the hearts of many. The empress observed that it is not under monarchy that the lofty, noble impulses of the soul are suppressed, it is not there that works of intellect, poetry, and art are scorned and persecuted; that, on the contrary, only monarchs patronize them; that the Shakespeares and Molieres flourished under their magnanimous rule, while Dante could not find himself a corner in his republican fatherland; that true geniuses emerge in times of the splendor and power of sovereigns and states, and not at times of outrageous political phenomena and republican terrors, which up to now have never presented the world with a single poet; that poets and artists ought to be held in distinction, for they bring only peace and a beautiful quiet to the soul, not agitation and murmuring; that scholars, poets, and all those who produce art are pearls and diamonds in the imperial crown: by them the epoch of a great sovereign is adorned and acquires still greater splendor. In short, the empress, at the moment of speaking these words, was divinely beautiful. I remember that old people couldn't speak of it without tears. Everyone became concerned with the affair. To the credit of our national pride, it must be noted that there always dwells in the Russian heart a beautiful impulse to take the side of the oppressed. The courtier who had betrayed his trust was duly punished and dismissed from his post. But in the faces of his compatriots he read a much greater punishment. This was a decided and universal scorn. It is impossible to describe how the vain soul suffered; pride, disap– pointed ambition, ruined hopes all joined together, and in fits of terrible madness and rage his life broke off.

"Another spectacular example also occurred before everyone's eyes. Among the beauties of whom there was no lack in our northern capital, one decidedly held primacy over the rest. She was some miraculous blend of our northern beauty with Mediterranean beauty, a diamond that rarely occurs in the world. My father used to confess that he had never in his life seen anything like her. It seemed that everything came together in her: wealth, intelligence, and inner charm. She had a crowd of wooers, and the most remarkable of them was Prince R., the noblest, the best of all young men, beautiful both in looks and in his chivalrous, magnanimous impulses-the lofty ideal of novels and women, a Gran-dison 21 in all respects. Prince R. was passionately and madly in love with her; and he was reciprocated with the same burning love. But her family thought the match unequal. The prince's hereditary estates had long ceased to belong to him, his family was in disgrace, and the poor state of his affairs was known to everyone. Suddenly the prince leaves the capital for a time, supposedly in order to straighten out his affairs, and a short while later he reappears surrounded with unbelievable magnificence and splendor. Brilliant balls and banquets make him known at court. The beauty's father turns favorable, and in town a most interesting wedding takes place. Whence came such a change and the bridegroom's unheard-of wealth-that certainly no one could explain; but people murmured on the side that he had entered into certain conditions with the incomprehensible moneylender and taken a loan from him. Be that as it may, the wedding occupied the whole town. Both bride and groom were objects of general envy. Everybody knew of their ardent, constant love, the long languishing suffered on both sides, the high merits of both. Fiery women described beforehand the paradisal bliss that the young spouses were going to enjoy. But it all turned out otherwise. Within a year, a terrible change took place in the husband. His character, hitherto noble and beautiful, was poisoned by the venom of suspicious jealousy, intolerance, and inexhaustible caprices. He became a tyrant and tormentor of his wife and-something no one could have foreseen-resorted to the most inhuman acts, even to beating. Within a year, no one could recognize the woman who so recently had shone and attracted crowds of obedient admirers. At last, unable to endure her hard lot any longer, she made the first mention of divorce. Her husband flew into a fury at the very thought of it. On a first violent impulse, he burst into her room with a knife in his hand and undoubtedly would have stabbed her then and there had he not been seized and held back. In a fit of frenzy and despair, he turned the knife against himself-and in the most terrible sufferings ended his life.

"Besides these two examples, which happened before the eyes of the whole of society, a great many were told of which had occurred in the lower classes, almost all of them having a terrible end. Here an honest, sober man became a drunkard; there a merchant's salesclerk stole from his employer; there a cabby, after several years of honest work, put a knife into a client over a penny. It was impossible that these occurrences, sometimes told with additions, should fail to bring some sort of involuntary terror to the humble inhabitants of Kolomna. No one doubted the presence of unclean powers in this man. It was said that he offered hair-raising terms, such as no unfortunate man ever dared repeat to anyone afterwards; that his money had a burning quality, that it became red-hot by itself and bore some strange signs… in short, there was a great deal of every sort of absurd talk. And the remarkable thing was that this whole Kolomna populace, this whole world of poor old women, minor officials, minor artists, and, in short, all the small fry we've just named, agreed to suffer and endure the last extremity rather than turn to the dreadful moneylender; old women were even found dead of starvation, preferring the death of their bodies to the destruction of their souls. Those who met him in the street felt an involuntary fear. A passer-by would cautiously back away and glance behind him for a long time afterwards, watching his immensely tall figure disappear in the distance. His appearance alone held so much of the extraordinary that it would have made anyone ascribe a supernatural existence to him. The strong features, more deeply chiseled than ever happens in a man; the hot, bronze complexion; the immense thickness of the eyebrows, the unbearably frightening eyes, even the loose folds of his Asian clothing-all seemed to say that the passions of others all paled before the passion that moved in his body. My father, each time he met him, would stand motionless, and each time could not help saying: 'The devil, the very devil!' But I must hasten to acquaint you with my father, who, incidentally, is the real subject of this story

"My father was a man remarkable in many respects. He was an artist such as few are, one of those wonders that Russia alone brings forth from her inexhaustible womb, a self-taught artist who found rules and laws in his own soul, without teachers or school, driven only by his thirst for perfection, and following, for reasons perhaps unknown to himself, no path but that which his own soul indicated-one of those natural-born wonders whom contemporaries often abuse with the offensive word 'ignoramus' and whom the castigations of others and their own failures do not cool down but only lend new zeal and strength, so that in their souls they go far beyond the works that earned them the title of 'ignoramus.' With lofty inner instinct, he sensed the presence of a thought in every object; he grasped the true meaning of the term 'historical painting' on his own; grasped why a simple head, a simple portrait by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Correggio, could be called a historical painting, and why a huge picture on a historical subject remained a tableau de genre, despite all the artist's claim to historical painting. Both inner sense and personal conviction turned his brush to Christian subjects, the highest and last step of the sublime. He had none of the ambition or irritability so inseparable from the character of many artists. He was of firm character, an honest, direct, even crude man, covered on the outside with a somewhat tough bark, not without a certain pride in his soul, who spoke of people at once sharply and condescendingly. 'Why look at them?' he used to say. 'I don't work for them. I won't take my works to their drawing rooms, they'll be put in a church. Whoever understands me will be grateful-if not, they'll pray to God anyway. There's no point in blaming a man of society for not understanding painting: he understands cards instead, he can appreciate good wine, horses-why should a gentleman know more than that? Otherwise he'll take up one thing or another, turn smart, and then there'll be no getting rid of him! To each his own; let everybody tend to his affairs. As I see it, he's a better man who says outright that he doesn't understand than one who plays the hypocrite, saying he knows something when he doesn't and simply mucking everything up.' He worked for little money-that is, just for what he needed to support his family and give him the chance to work. Besides that, he never refused to help others or give a helping hand to a poor artist. He had the simple, pious faith of his ancestors, and that may be why the lofty expression which brilliant talents were never able to achieve appeared of itself on the faces he portrayed. In the end, through the constancy of his labors and his steadfastness on the path he had marked out for himself, he began to gain respect even on the part of those who had abused him as an ignoramus and a homemade talent. He was constantly given commissions by the Church and was never without work. One of his works occupied him greatly. I no longer remember what the subject was, I know only that he had to include the spirit of darkness in the picture. He thought for a long time about what image to give him; he wanted to realize in his face all that burdens and oppresses man. As he reflected thus, the image of the mysterious moneylender sometimes passed through his head, and he would think involuntarily, 'There's the one I should paint the devil after.' Consider his astonishment, then, when one day, as he was working in his studio, he heard a knock at the door and immediately afterwards the terrible moneylender came in. He could not help feeling some inner tremor, which passed involuntarily through his whole body.

" 'You are an artist?' he said to my father, without any ceremony.

" 'An artist,' my father said in perplexity, waiting for what would follow.

" 'Very well. Paint my portrait. I may die soon. I have no children, but I do not want to die altogether, I want to live on. Can you paint my portrait as if it were perfectly alive?'

"My father thought, 'What could be better? He's inviting himself to be the devil in my painting.' He gave his word. They arranged the time and the price, and the next day my father seized his palette and brushes and went to him. The high courtyard, the dogs, the iron doors and bars, the arched windows, the coffers covered with strange carpets, and, finally, the extraordinary host himself, who sat motionless before him-all this made a strange impression on him. The windows, as if by design, were blocked up and encumbered below, so that light came only from above. 'Devil take it, how well his face is lighted now!' he said to himself, and he began to paint greedily, as if fearing that the fortunate lighting might somehow disappear. 'What force!' he repeated to himself. 'If I depict him even half the way he is now, he'll kill all my saints and angels; they'll pale beside him. What diabolical force! He'll simply leap out of my canvas if I'm the least bit faithful to nature. What extraordinary features!' he constantly repeated, his zeal increasing, and he could already see certain features beginning to come over on canvas. But the closer he came to them, the more he felt some heavy, anxious feeling, incomprehensible to himself. However, despite that, he resolved to pursue every inconspicuous trait and expression with literal precision. First of all he set to work on the eyes. There was so much power in those eyes that it seemed impossible even to think of conveying them exactly as they were in nature. However, he determined at all costs to search out the least detail and nuance in them, to grasp their mystery… But as soon as he began to penetrate and delve into them with his brush, there arose such a strange revulsion in his soul, such inexplicable distress, that he had to lay his brush aside for a time and then begin again. In the end he could no longer endure it, he felt that these eyes had pierced his soul and produced an inconceivable anxiety in it. The next day, and the third, it became still stronger. He felt frightened. He threw down his brush and declared flatly that he was no longer able to paint him. You should have seen the change these words produced in the strange moneylender. He fell at his feet and beseeched him to finish the portrait, saying that his fate and his existence in the world depended on it, that he had already touched his living features with his brush, and that if he conveyed them faithfully, his life by some supernatural force would be retained in the portrait, that through it he would not die entirely, and that he had to be present in the world. My father felt horrified by these words: they seemed so strange and frightening to him that he threw down both brushes and palette and rushed headlong from the room.

"The thought of it troubled him all day and all night, and in the morning he received the portrait from the moneylender, brought by some woman, the only being in his service, who announced straight away that her master did not want the portrait, would pay nothing for it, and was sending it back. In the evening of the same day, he learned that the moneylender had died and was to be buried by the rites of his own religion. All this seemed inexplicably strange to him. And after that a perceptible change occurred in his character: he felt himself in an uneasy state of anxiety, the cause of which he could not understand, and soon he did something no one would have expected of him. For some time, the works of one of his pupils had begun to attract the attention of a small circle of experts and amateurs. My father had always seen talent in him and was particularly well-disposed toward him for that. Suddenly he became jealous of him. General concern and talk about the young man became unbearable to him. Finally, to crown his vexation, he found out that his pupil had been invited to do the pictures for a rich, newly constructed church. This made him explode. 'No, I won't let that greenhorn triumph!' he said. 'It's too early, brother, for you to be shoving old men into the ditch! I'm still strong, thank God. We'll see who shoves whom.' And this straightforward, honorable man turned to intrigue and scheming, something he had previously always scorned; he succeeded, finally, in having a competition for the pictures announced, and other painters could also enter their works in it. After that he shut himself in his room and ardently took up his brush. It seemed he wanted to put his whole strength, his whole self into it. And, indeed, it turned out to be one of his best works. No one doubted that he would take first place. The paintings were exhibited, and beside it all the others were as night to day. Then suddenly one of the members present, a clergyman if I'm not mistaken, made an observation that struck everyone. 'There is, indeed, much talent in the artist's picture,' he said, 'but there is no holiness in the faces; there is, on the contrary, something demonic in the eyes, as if the painter's hand was guided by an unclean feeling.' Everyone looked and could not but be convinced of the truth of these words. My father rushed up to his picture, as if to verify this offensive observation, and saw with horror that he had given almost all the figures the moneylender's eyes. Their gaze was so demonically destructive that he involuntarily shuddered. The picture was rejected, and he had to hear, to his indescribable vexation, the first place awarded to his pupil. It is impossible to describe the rage in which he returned home. He almost gave my mother a beating, chased the children away, broke all his brushes and his easel, snatched the portrait of the moneylender from the wall, asked for a knife, and ordered a fire made in the fireplace, intending to cut it to pieces and burn it. At that point he was found by a friend who came into the room, himself also a painter, a happy fellow, always pleased with himself, not carried away by any far-reaching desires, who worked happily at whatever came along and was even happier to get down to dining and carousing.