6
“A clear, frosty night. Extraordinary brightness and wholeness of the visible. Earth, air, moon, stars, fettered together, riveted by frost. In the park, the distinct shadows of trees lie across the alleys, seeming carved in relief. It seems all the time as if some dark figures are ceaselessly crossing the path in various places. Big stars like blue mica lamps hang in the forest among the branches. The whole sky is strewn with little stars like a summer meadow with chamomile.
“Our evening talks about Pushkin continue. We discussed his lycée poems in the first volume. How much depended on the choice of meter!
“In the poems with long lines, his youthful ambition did not go beyond the limits of Arzamas, the wish not to fall behind his elders, to blow smoke in his uncle’s eyes with mythologisms, pomposity, affected depravity and epicureanism, and premature, feigned sober-mindedness.
“But as soon as the young man, after his imitations of Ossian or Parny or the ‘Reminiscences in Tsarskoe Selo,’ hit upon the short lines of ‘The Little Town’ or ‘Epistle to My Sister,’ or ‘To My Inkstand’ from the later Kishinev period, or upon the rhythms of the ‘Letter to Yudin,’ the whole future Pushkin awakened in the adolescent.4
“Light and air, the noise of life, things, essences burst from outside into the poem as into a room through an open window. Objects from the external world, everyday objects, nouns, thronging and pressing, took over the lines, ousting the less definite parts of speech. Objects, objects, objects lined up in a rhymed column along the edge of the poem.
“As if this later celebrated Pushkinian tetrameter was a sort of metrical unit of Russian life, its yardstick, as if it was a measure taken from the whole of Russian existence, as when the form of a foot is outlined to make the pattern for a shoe, or when you give the size so as to find a glove to fit your hand.
“So later the rhythms of talking Russia, the chant of her colloquial speech, were expressed metrically in Nekrasov’s trimeters and dactylic rhymes.”5
7
“How I would like, along with having a job, working the earth, or practicing medicine, to nurture something lasting, fundamental, to write some scholarly work or something artistic.
“Everyone is born a Faust, to embrace everything, experience everything, express everything. The fact that Faust was a scientist was seen to by the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries. A step forward in science is made by the law of repulsion, with the refutation of reigning errors and false theories.
“That Faust was an artist was seen to by the infectious example of his teachers. A step forward in art is made by the law of attraction, with the imitation, following, and veneration of beloved predecessors.
“What then prevents me from working, treating, and writing? I think it is not privations and wanderings, not instability and frequent change, but the reigning spirit of bombastic phrases so widespread in our day—such as: the dawn of the future, the building of the new world, the lights of mankind. You hear that and at first you think—what breadth of imagination, what wealth! But in reality it is pompous precisely in its lack of talent.
“Only the ordinary is fantastic, once the hand of genius touches it. The best lesson in this respect is Pushkin. What a glorification of honest labor, duty, habitual everyday things! With us ‘bourgeois’ and ‘philistine’ have now come to sound reproachful. That reproof was forestalled by lines from ‘Genealogy’:
I am a bourgeois, a bourgeois.
“And from ‘Onegin’s Journey’:
My ideal now is a housewife,
My desire is for peace,
A pot of soup, and my fine self.6
“Of all things Russian I now love most the Russian childlikeness of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy unconcern with such resounding things as the ultimate goals of mankind and their own salvation. They, too, understood all these things, but such immodesties were far from them—not their business, not on their level! Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky prepared for death, were anxious, sought meaning, summed things up, but these two till the end were distracted by the current particulars of their artistic calling, and in their succession lived their lives inconspicuously, as one such particular, personal, of no concern to anyone, and now that particular has become common property and, like still unripe apples picked from the tree, is ripening in posterity, filling more and more with sweetness and meaning.”
8
“The first heralds of spring, a thaw. The air smells of pancakes and vodka, as during the week before Lent, when nature herself seems to rhyme with the calendar. Somnolent, the sun in the forest narrows its buttery eyes; somnolent, the forest squints through its needles like eyelashes; the puddles at noontime have a buttery gleam. Nature yawns, stretches herself, rolls over on the other side, and falls asleep again.
“In the seventh chapter of Evgeny Onegin—spring, the manor house empty after Onegin’s departure, Lensky’s grave down by the water, under the hill.
And there the nightingale, spring’s lover,
Sings all night long. The wild rose flowers.
“Why ‘lover’? Generally speaking, the epithet is natural, appropriate. Indeed he is a lover. Besides that, it’s needed for the rhyme. But in terms of sound, do we not also have here the epic Nightingale the Robber?7
“In the folk epic he is called Nightingale the Robber, son of Odikhmanty. How well it speaks of him!
From him and from his nightingale whistle,
From him and from his wild beast cry,
All the grassy masses shrink and shrivel,
All the sky-blue flowers wither and die,
The dark woods all bow down their heads,
And if there are people, they all lie dead.
“We arrived at Varykino in early spring. Soon everything began to turn green, especially in Shutma, as the ravine under Mikulitsyn’s house is called—bird cherry, alder, hazel. Several nights later the nightingales began to trill.
“And again, as if hearing them for the first time, I was amazed at how this song stands out from the calls of all other birds, what a leap, without gradual change, nature performs to the richness and singularity of this trilling. So much variety in changing figures and such force of distinct, far-reaching sound! In Turgenev somewhere8 there is a description of these whistlings, the wood demon’s piping, the larklike drumming. Two turns stood out particularly. The quick, greedy, and luxurious ‘tiokh, tiokh, tiokh,’ sometimes with three beats, sometimes countless, in response to which the thicket, all in dew, shook itself, preened itself, flinching as if it had been tickled. And another falling into two syllables, calling out, soul-felt, entreating, like a plea or an exhortation: ‘A-wake! A-wake! A-wake!’ ”
9
“Spring. We’re getting ready for farmwork. So no more diary. But it has been pleasant to take these notes. I’ll have to set them aside till winter.
“The other day, this time indeed during the week before Lent, the season of bad roads, a sick peasant drives his sled into the yard over water and mud. Naturally, I refuse to receive him. ‘Forgive me, my dear fellow, I’ve stopped doing that—I have neither a real choice of medicines, nor the necessary equipment.’ But there was no getting rid of him. ‘Help me. My skin’s going scant. Have mercy. A bodily ailment.’
“What to do? I don’t have a heart of stone. I decided to receive him. ‘Get undressed.’ I examined him. ‘You’ve got lupus.’ I busy myself with him, glancing sidelong towards the windowsill, at the bottle of carbolic acid. (Good God, don’t ask me where I got it, and another thing or two, the most necessary! It’s all from Samdevyatov.) I look—another sled drives into the yard, with a new patient, as it seems to me at first. And my brother Evgraf drops as if from the clouds. For a while he is at the disposal of the household, Tonya, Shurochka, Alexander Alexandrovich. Afterwards, when I’m free, I join the others. Questions begin—how, from where? As usual, he dodges, evades, not one direct answer, smiles, wonders, riddles.