Текст книги "Dead Souls"

Автор книги: Николай Гоголь

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Chapter Six

Once, long ago, in the days of my youth, in the days of my flashed-by never-to-return childhood, I used to rejoice when I approached an unknown place for the first time: no matter whether it was a little village, a wretched provincial town, a settlement, a hamlet—much that was curious in it revealed itself to a child's curious eyes. Every building, everything that bore on itself the stamp of some noticeable peculiarity—everything arrested and amazed me. A stone government building of familiar architecture with half its windows false, sticking up all by itself amid a trimmed log pile of common one-storied tradesmen's houses, or a regular round cupola, all clad in white sheet metal, soaring high above a snowy, whitewashed new church, or a marketplace, or a provincial fop who turned up in the middle of town—nothing escaped my fresh, keen attention, and, poking my nose out of my traveling cart, I gazed at the never-before-seen cut of some frock coat, and at the wooden boxes of nails, of sulphur yellowing from afar, of raisins and soap, flashing by in the doorway of a grocer's shop together with jars of stale Moscow candy, gazed also at an infantry officer walking off to one side, brought from God knows what district capital into provincial boredom, and at a merchant in a tight-waisted coat flashing by in a racing droshky, and mentally I would be carried off with them into their poor lives. Should a provincial official pass by, it was enough to set me thinking: where is he going, to spend the evening with some crony of his, or straight to his own home, to linger for half an hour or so on the porch, until dusk gathers fully, and then sit down to an early supper with his mama, his wife, his wife's sister, and the whole family, and what will be talked about among them, while a serf girl in a coin necklace or a lad in a thick jacket comes in after the soup bringing a tallow candle in a long-lived homemade candlestick. Approaching the estate of some landowner, I looked with curiosity at the tall, narrow wooden belfry or the broad, dark old wooden church. From far off through the green of the trees, the red roof and white chimneys of the landowner's house flashed enticingly to me, and I waited impatiently for the gardens screening it to part on both sides and show the whole of the house with its—then, alas!—by no means trite appearance; and from it I tried to guess what the landowner himself was, whether he was fat, and whether he had sons or as many as six daughters with ringing girlish laughter, games, and the youngest sister invariably a beauty, and whether they had dark eyes, and whether he himself was a jolly man, or sullen as the last days of September, looking at the calendar and boring the young folk with talk of rye and wheat.

Now it is with indifference that I approach any unknown estate, and with indifference that I gaze at its trite appearance; my chilled glance finds no refuge, I do not laugh, and that which in earlier days would have awakened a lively movement in my face, laughter and unceasing talk, now flits by, and my motionless lips preserve an impassive silence. Oh, my youth! Oh, my freshness!

While Chichikov thought and chuckled inwardly over the nickname the muzhiks had bestowed upon Plyushkin, he failed to notice that he had driven into the middle of a vast settlement with a multitude of cottages and lanes. Soon, however, it was brought to his notice by a quite decent jolt, produced by the log pavement, to which town cobblestones are nothing in comparison. These logs, like piano keys, kept rising up and down, and the unwary traveler would acquire a bump on his head, or a bruise on his brow, or might chance to give a painful bite with his own teeth to the tip of his own tongue. He noticed a sort of special dilapidation in all the village buildings: the logs of the cottages were dark and old; many of the roofs were riddled like sieves; some had just a ridge pole on top and rafters like ribs on the sides. It seemed as if the owners themselves had torn off the shingles and laths, considering—correctly, of course—that one does not roof cottages in the rain, and in fair weather there is no dripping anyway, so why sit around women's skirts inside, when there is free space enough in the pot-house and on the high road—in short, anywhere you like. The windows of the cottages had no glass, some were stopped up with a rag or a jacket; the little roofed balconies with railings, which for unknown reasons are built onto some Russian cottages, were lopsided and blackened, not even picturesquely. Behind the cottages in many places stretched rows of huge stacks of wheat, which had evidently been standing there for a long time; in color they resembled old, poorly baked brick, trash of all kinds was growing on top of them, and bushes even clung to their sides. The wheat evidently belonged to the master. From behind the wheat stacks and dilapidated roofs there soared and flashed in the clear air, now right, now left, according to the turns the britzka made, two village churches, one next to the other: an abandoned wooden one, and a stone one, its yellowed walls all stains and cracks. Parts of the master's house came into view and finally the whole of it appeared in a gap where the chain of cottages broke off and in their place was left a vacant lot, formerly a kitchen garden or cabbage patch, surrounded by a low, in places broken, fence. Long, immeasurably long, the strange castle looked like some decrepit invalid. In places it had one story, in places two; on the dark roof, which did not everywhere reliably shield its old age, two belvederes had been stuck, facing each other, both of them shaky now, deprived of the paint that had once covered them. The walls of the house showed bare lath in places and had evidently suffered much from all sorts of bad weather, rains, gales, and autumnal changes. Of the windows, only two were open, the rest being either shuttered or even boarded up. These two windows, for their part, were also weak-sighted; one of them had a dark triangle of blue sugar paper glued to it.

A vast, old garden stretching behind the house, extending beyond the village and then disappearing in the fields, overgrown and overrun, alone seemed to refresh this vast estate and alone was fully picturesque in its scenic devastation. In green clouds and irregular, leaf-fluttering cupolas against the sky's horizon lay the joined tops of the freely branching trees. The colossal white trunk of a birch, deprived of its crown, broken off in a tempest or thunderstorm, rose out of this green thickness and rounded in the air like a regular, gleaming marble column; the sharp, slanting break that topped it instead of a capital showed dark against its snowy whiteness, like a hat or a black bird. Wild hops, smothering the elder, mountain ash, and hazel bushes underneath and then running over the top of the whole thicket, finally raced upwards, twining around half the length of the broken birch. Having reached the middle, it hung down from there and began to catch at the tops of other trees or else dangled in air, tying its thin, grasping hooks into rings, swayed lightly by the air. In places the green thickets, lit by the sun, parted and revealed an unlit gap between them, yawning like a dark maw; it was all shrouded in shadow, and in its dark depths there barely flashed a running, narrow path, a collapsed railing, a rickety gazebo, the hollowed, decrepit trunk of a willow, a hoary hawthorn sticking out from behind the willow in a dense stubble of tangled and intertwined leaves and branches, withered in that terrible occlusion, and, finally, a young maple bough, stretching from the side its green pawlike leaves, one of them suddenly transformed by the sun, which got under it God knows how, into something transparent and fiery, shining wondrously in that dense darkness. To one side, at the very edge of the garden, several tall aspens, grown beyond the level of the rest, lifted up huge crows' nests on their fluttering tops. From some of them, broken but not quite sundered branches hung down with their withered leaves. In short, it was all just right, as neither nature nor art can contrive, but as only occurs when they join together, when, after the heaped-up, often senseless, labors of men, nature makes a finishing pass with her chisel, lightening the heavy masses, removing the crude-feeling regularity and indigent gaps through which the bare, undisguised plan peeps out, and imparts a wondrous warmth to all that was created in coldly measured cleanness and neatness.

Having made one or two turns, our hero finally found himself right in front of the house, which now seemed more mournful still. Green mold covered the already decayed wood of the fence and gate. A crowd of buildings—servants' quarters, barns, cellars, all visibly decaying—filled the courtyard; near them, to right and left, gates could be seen leading to other yards. Everything bespoke the vast scale on which estate life had once gone on here, and everything now looked dismal. Nothing to enliven the picture could be noticed: no doors opening, no people coming out from anywhere, no lively household hustle and bustle! Only the main gates were open, and that because a muzhik had driven in with a loaded cart covered with bast matting, appearing as if by design to enliven this desolate place; at other times the gates, too, were tightly locked, for a giant padlock was hanging in the iron staple. By one of the buildings Chichikov soon noticed some figure, who had begun squabbling with the muzhik on the cart. For a long time he could not make out the figure's sex, male or female. It was dressed in something completely indefinite, much like a woman's housecoat, with a cap on its head such as household serf wenches wear in the country, only the voice seemed to him rather too husky for a woman. "Ai, a female!" he thought to himself, and added at once: "Ah, no!" Finally he said, "A female, of course!"—having looked more intently. The figure for her part was also staring intently at him. It seemed that a visitor was a remarkable thing for her, because she scrutinized not only him, but also Selifan and the horses, from tail to muzzle. By the keys hanging from her belt, and by the fact that she was scolding the muzhik in rather abusive terms, Chichikov concluded that this must be the housekeeper.

"Listen, dearie," he said, getting out of the britzka, "about the master..."

"Not home," the housekeeper interrupted, without waiting for the end of the question, and then, after a minute, she added: "What do you want?" "It's business.

"Go in!" said the housekeeper, turning away and showing him her back, dusted with flour, with a big rip lower down.

He stepped into the dark, wide front hall, from which cold air blew as from a cellar. From the hall he got into a room, also dark, faintly illumined by light coming through a wide crack under a door. Opening this door, he at last found himself in the light and was struck by the disorder that confronted him. It looked as if they were washing the floors in the house, and all the furniture had for the time being been piled up here. On one table there even stood a broken chair, and next to it a clock with a stopped pendulum to which a spider had already attached its web. Near it, leaning its side against the wall, stood a cupboard with old silver, decanters, and Chinese porcelain. On the bureau, inlaid with mother-of-pearl mosaic, which in places had fallen out and left only yellow grooves filled with glue, lay a various multitude of things: a stack of papers written all over in a small hand, covered by a marble paperweight, gone green, with a little egg on top of it, some ancient book in a leather binding with red edges, a completely dried-up lemon no bigger than a hazelnut, the broken-off arm of an armchair, a glass with some sort of liquid and three flies in it, covered by a letter, a little piece of sealing wax, a little piece of rag picked up somewhere, two ink-stained pens, dried up as if with consumption, a toothpick, turned completely yellow, with which the master had probably picked his teeth even before the invasion of Moscow by the French. [26]26
  Napoleon, at the head of a 500,000-man army, invaded Russia in 1812. At the end of the same year, he managed to retreat with only a few thousand troops. Later in Dead Soulsthese events will be referred to simply as "the year 'twelve."


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On the walls, hung quite close together and haphazardly, were a number of pictures: a long, yellowed engraving of some battle, with enormous drums, shouting soldiers in three-cornered hats, and drowning horses, without glass, in a mahogany frame with thin bronze strips and bronze rounds at the corners. Next to it, half the wall was taken up by an enormous, blackened oil painting portraying flowers, fruit, a sliced watermelon, a boar's head, and a duck hanging upside down. From the middle of the ceiling hung a chandelier in a hempen sack, which the dust made to resemble a silk cocoon with a worm sitting inside it. On the floor in the corner of the room was heaped a pile of whatever was more crude and unworthy of lying on the tables. Precisely what was in this pile it was hard to tell, for there was such an abundance of dust on it that the hands of anyone who touched it resembled gloves; most conspicuously, there stuck out from it a broken-off piece of a wooden shovel and an old boot sole. One would never have known that the room was inhabited by a living being, were its presence not announced by an old, worn nightcap lying on the table. While he was examining all these strange adornments, a side door opened and in came the same housekeeper he had met in the yard. But here he perceived that the housekeeper was a man, rather than a woman; a woman, in any case, does not shave, while this one, on the contrary, did shave, though apparently not very often, because his whole chin along with the lower part of his cheeks resembled a currycomb made of iron wire, used in stables for grooming horses. Chichikov, giving his face an inquisitive expression, waited impatiently for what the housekeeper wanted to say to him. The housekeeper, for his part, also waited for what Chichikov wanted to say to him. Finally the latter, astonished at such strange perplexity, decided to ask:

"About the master? Is he in, or what?"

"The master's here," said the housekeeper.

"But where?" Chichikov reiterated.

"What, my dear, are you blind or something?" said the housekeeper. "Egad! But I am the master!"

Here our hero involuntarily stepped back and looked at him intently. He had chanced to meet many different kinds of people, even kinds such as the reader and I may never get to meet; but such a one he had never met before. His face presented nothing unusual; it was about the same as in many lean old men, only his chin protruded very far forward, so that he had to cover it with a handkerchief all the time to keep from spitting on it; his small eyes were not yet dim and darted from under his high arched eyebrows like mice when, poking their sharp little snouts from their dark holes, pricking up their ears and twitching their whiskers, they spy out whether there is a cat or a mischievous boy in hiding, and sniff the very air suspiciously. Far more remarkable was his outfit: no means or efforts would avail to discover what his robe was concocted of: the sleeves and front were so greasy and shiny that they looked like the tarred leather used for making boots; behind, instead of two skirts, four hung down, with tufts of cotton wool emerging from them. Around his neck, too, something unidentifiable was tied: a stocking, a garter, a bellyband, anything but a cravat. In short, if Chichikov had met him, attired thus, somewhere at a church door, he probably would have given him a copper. For to our hero's credit it must be said that he had a compassionate heart and could never refrain from giving a poor man a copper. But before him stood no beggar, before him stood a landowner. This landowner had more than a thousand souls, and it would have been hard to find another who had so much wheat in grain, flour, or simply in stacks, whose storerooms, barns, and granaries were crammed with so much linen, felt, sheepskin dressed and raw, dried fish, and all sorts of vegetables and foodstuff. Had anyone peeked into his workshop, where all kinds of wood and never-used wares were stored up in reserve—he would have thought he had landed somehow on woodworkers' row in Moscow, where spry beldames set out daily, with their scullery maids in tow, to make their household purchases, and where there gleam mountains of wooden articles—nailed, turned, joined, and plaited: barrels, halved barrels, tubs, tar buckets, flagons with and without spouts, stoups, baskets, hampers in which village women keep their skeins of flax and other junk, panniers of thin bent aspen, corbeils of plaited birchbark, and much else that is put to service in rich and poor Rus. [27]27
  Ruswas the old name for Russia, before Rossiyacame into use in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Rusbegan to be used again, especially in romantic apostrophes to the fatherland. It is in this sense, or in an ironic parody of it, that Gogol uses the word.


[Закрыть]What need, one might ask, did Plyushkin have for such a mass of these artifacts? Never in all his life could they have been used even on two such estates as his—but to him it still seemed too little. Not satisfied with it, he walked about the streets of his village every day, looked under the little bridges and stiles, and whatever he came across—an old shoe sole, a woman's rag, an iron nail, a potsherd—he carried off and added to the pile that Chichikov had noticed in the corner of the room. "The fisherman's off in pursuit again!" the muzhiks would say, when they saw him going for his booty. And, indeed, after him there was no need to sweep the streets: if a passing officer happened to lose a spur, the spur would immediately be dispatched to the famous pile; if a woman started mooning by the well and forgot her bucket, he would carry off the bucket. However, if a muzhik noticed and caught him in the act, he would not argue and would surrender the purloined thing; but if it did make it to the pile, it was all over: he would swear to God that he had bought the thing at such and such a time from such and such a person, or inherited it from his grandfather. In his room he picked up whatever he saw on the floor—a bit of sealing wax, a scrap of paper, a feather—and put it all on the bureau or the windowsill.

And yet once upon a time he had been simply a thrifty manager! was married and had a family, and a neighbor would come to dine with him, to listen and learn from him the ways of management and wise parsimony. Everything flowed briskly and was accomplished at a regular pace: the gristmills and fulling mills turned, the felting, wood-turning, and spinning machines worked; into everything everywhere the manager's keen glance penetrated, and, like an industrious spider, ran busily yet efficiently to all ends of his managerial spiderweb. His features reflected no very strong emotions, but one could see intelligence in his eyes; his speech was pervaded by experience and knowledge of the world, and it was pleasant for a guest to listen to him; the affable and talkative mistress of the house was famous for her hospitality; two comely daughters came to meet the guest, both blond and fresh as roses; the son ran out, a frolicsome lad, and kissed everyone, paying little heed to whether the guest was glad of it or not. All the windows were open in the house, the garret was occupied by the French tutor, who shaved splendidly and was a great shot: he always brought home grouse or duck for dinner, but on occasion only sparrow eggs, which he ordered served as an omelette for himself, since no one else in the house would eat them. In the garret there also lived a young lady compatriot of his, who taught the two girls. The master himself used to come to table in a frock coat, somewhat worn but neat, the elbows in good order: not a patch anywhere. But the good mistress died; part of the keys, and of the petty cares along with them, passed to him. Plyushkin grew more restless and, like all widowers, more suspicious and stingy. He could not rely altogether on his eldest daughter, Alexandra Stepanovna, and right he was, because Alexandra Stepanovna soon eloped with a staff captain of God knows what cavalry regiment and married him hastily somewhere in a village church, knowing that her father disliked officers, from the strange prejudice that the military are all supposed to be gamblers and spendthrifts. The father sent her a curse for the road, but did not bother pursuing her. The house became still emptier.

In the master of the house, stinginess displayed itself still more noticeably, furthered in its development by its faithful friend, the gray flickering in his coarse hair; the French tutor was dismissed, because the time came for the son to enter the civil service; madamewas chased out, because she was found not guiltless in Alexandra Stepanovna's elopement; the son, having been sent to the provincial capital to learn in a government office what, in his father's view, real service was, enlisted in a regiment instead and wrote to his father only after he enlisted, asking for money to equip himself; for which, quite naturally, he got what among common folk is known as a fig. Finally the last daughter, who had stayed at home with him, died, and the old man found himself the sole guardian, keeper, and master of his riches. Solitary life gave ample nourishment to his avarice, which, as is known, has a wolf's appetite and grows more insatiable the more it devours; human feelings, never very deep in him anyway, became shallower every moment, and each day something more was lost in this worn-out ruin. There came a moment, as if on purpose to confirm his opinion of the military, when his son happened to lose heavily at cards; he sent him a paternal curse from the bottom of his heart, and was never again interested in knowing whether his son existed in the world or not. Each year more windows in his house were closed up, until finally only two were left, one of which, as the reader already knows, had paper glued over it; each year more and more of the main parts of management were lost sight of, and his petty glance turned to the little scraps and feathers he collected in his room; he grew more unyielding with the buyers who came to take the products of his estate; the buyers bargained, bargained, and finally dropped him altogether, saying he was a devil, not a man; the hay and wheat rotted, the stooks and ricks turned to pure dung, good for planting cabbages in; the flour in the cellars became stone and had to be hacked up; the felt, linen, and homespun materials were even frightening to touch: they turned to dust. He himself had forgotten by then how much he had of what, and only remembered where in the cupboard he kept a little decanter with the remainder of some liqueur, on which he himself had made a mark, so that no one could steal a drink from it, or where a feather or a bit of sealing wax lay. But meanwhile the revenues of the estate were collected as before: the muzhik had to bring the same amount of quitrent, every woman was taxed the same amount of nuts, or as many lengths of linen if she was a weaver—all this was dumped in the storerooms, and it all turned to rot and gape, and he himself finally turned into a sort of gape in mankind. Alexandra Stepa-novna once came a couple of times with her little son, trying to see if she could get anything; apparently camp life with the staff captain was not as attractive as it had seemed before the wedding. Plyushkin forgave her, however, and even gave his little grandson a button that was lying on the table to play with, but money he gave none. The next time Alexandra Stepanovna came with two little ones and brought him a kulich [28]28
  A kulichis a rich, sweet yeast bread, generally cylindrical in form, baked especially for Easter.


[Закрыть]for tea and a new robe, because her papa's robe was such that it was not only embarrassing but even shameful to behold. Plyushkin was nice to both grandchildren and, placing one of them on his right knee and the other on his left, rocked them in exactly the same way as if they had been riding a horse; he accepted the kulichand the robe, but gave his daughter decidedly nothing; and with that Alexandra Stepanovna left.

And so, this was the sort of landowner who stood before Chichikov! It must be said that one rarely comes upon such a phenomenon in Russia, where everything prefers rather to expand than to shrink, and it is all the more striking when, right there in the neighborhood, there happens to be a landowner who carouses to the full breadth of Russian dash and largesse—who, as they say, burns up his whole life. A newcomer passing by will stop in amazement at the sight of his dwelling, wondering what sovereign prince has suddenly appeared among small, obscure landowners: there is the look of a palace about his white stone mansions with their numberless multitude of chimneys, belvederes, weather vanes, surrounded by a flock of cottages and all sorts of lodgings for long-term guests. Is there anything he lacks? Theatricals, balls; all night the garden shines, adorned with lights and lampions, resounding with the thunder of music. Half the province is decked out and gaily strolling under the trees, and in this forcible illumination no one sees it as wild and menacing when a branch leaps out theatrically from the thick of the trees, lit by the false light, robbed of its bright green; and, through all that, the night sky up above appears darker and sterner and twenty times more menacing; and the stern treetops, their leaves trembling in the far-off heights, sink deeper into the impenetrable darkness, indignant at this tinsel glitter illuminating their roots below.

For several minutes already Plyushkin had been standing there, not saying a word, yet Chichikov was still unable to begin talking, distracted as much by the look of the master himself as by all that was in his room. For a long time he was unable to think up any words to explain the reason for his visit. He was just about to express himself in some such spirit as, having heard of his virtue and the rare qualities of his soul, he felt it his duty personally to pay a tribute of respect, but he checked himself, feeling it was too much. Casting one more sidelong glance at all that was in the room, he felt that the words "virtue" and "rare qualities of soul" could successfully be replaced by the words "economy" and "order"; and therefore, transforming the speech in this manner, he said that, having heard of his economy and rare skill in running his estate, he felt it his duty to make his acquaintance and offer his respects personally. Of course, it would have been possible to produce another, better reason, but nothing else came into his head just then.

To this Plyushkin muttered something through his lips—for there were no teeth—precisely what is not known, but the meaning was probably this: "Ah, devil take you and your respects!" But since hospitality is so much the thing with us that even a niggard cannot transgress its laws, he added at once, somewhat more distinctly: "Pray be seated!"

"It's quite a while since I've seen visitors," he said, "and, I confess to say, I see little benefit in it. There's a most indecent custom of going and visiting each other, while the work of the estate is neglected . . . plus giving hay to their horses! I had my dinner long ago, and my kitchen is low, very shabby, and the chimney's all falling to pieces: heat it up and you'll start a fire."

"So that's how it is!" Chichikov thought to himself. "A good thing I snatched a cheesecake and a slice of lamb at Sobakevich's."

"And, such a nasty story, there's not a wisp of hay on the whole estate!" Plyushkin went on. "And how, indeed, can one save any?—wretched little piece of land, lazy muzhiks, don't like to work at all, dream only of the pot-house . . . I'm afraid I'll find myself a beggar in my old age."

"I was told, however," Chichikov observed modestly, "that you have more than a thousand souls."

"Who told you so? You ought, my dear, to have spit in the eye of the one who said it! He's a joker, obviously, and wanted to poke fun at you. A thousand souls, they say, but you just try counting them and there'll be nothing to count! In the last three years the cursed fever has killed off a healthy lot of muzhiks on me."

"You don't say! So a lot were killed off?" Chichikov exclaimed with sympathy.

"Yes, a lot got carted away."

"How many, if I may inquire?"

"About eighty."

"No!"

"I wouldn't lie, my dear."

"And, if I may ask: these souls have been counted up, I assume, since the day you submitted the last census report?"

"Would to God it were so," said Plyushkin, "but the pox of it is that since then it may have gone as high as a hundred and twenty."

"Really? A whole hundred and twenty?" Chichikov exclaimed and even opened his mouth slightly in amazement.

"I'm too old to lie, my dear: I'm in my sixties!" said Plyushkin. He seemed offended by such an almost joyful exclamation. Chichikov noticed that such indifference to another's misfortune was indeed improper, and therefore he straightaway sighed and offered his condolence.

"But condolence can't be put in the pocket," said Plyushkin. "There's this captain in the neighborhood, devil knows where he came from, says he's my relative—'Uncle! Uncle!' and kisses my hand—and once he starts his condoling, hold your ears, he sets up such a howl. He's all red in the face: keeps a deathly grip on the home brew, I expect. Must have blown all his cash serving as an officer, or else some theater actress lured it out of him, so now he's here condoling!"

Chichikov tried to explain that his condolence was not at all of the same sort as the captain's, and he was ready to prove it, not with empty words, but with deeds, and, not putting the matter off any longer, without beating around the bush, he straightaway expressed his readiness to take upon himself the duty of paying taxes on all the peasants who had died through such unfortunate occasions. The offer, it seemed, utterly astounded Plyushkin. He stared pop-eyed at him for a long time, and finally asked:

"You, my dear, were never in military service?"

"No," Chichikov replied rather slyly, "I was in the civil service."