This name of mine is popular. In Russia it is known to every literate person, and abroad it is mentioned from podiums with the addition of well-known and esteemed. It is one of those few fortunate names which it is considered bad tone to abuse or take in vain, in public or in print. And so it should be. For my name is closely connected with the notion of a man who is famous, richly endowed, and unquestionably useful. I’m as staunch and hardworking as a camel, which is important, and I’m talented, which is still more important. Besides that, be it said in passing, I’m a well-bred, modest, and honorable fellow. Never have I poked my nose into literature and politics, or sought popularity in polemics with ignoramuses, or given speeches either at dinners or over the graves of my colleagues … Generally, there is not a single blot on my learned name, and it has nothing to complain of. It is happy.
The bearer of this name, that is, myself, has the look of a sixty-two-year-old man with a bald head, false teeth, and an incurable tic. As my name is brilliant and beautiful, so I myself am dull and ugly. My head and hands shake from weakness; my neck, as with one of Turgenev’s heroines,3 resembles the fingerboard of a double bass, my chest is sunken, my shoulders narrow. When I speak or read, my mouth twists to one side; when I smile, my whole face is covered with an old man’s deathly wrinkles. There is nothing imposing in my pathetic figure; except perhaps that when I have my tic, I acquire some peculiar expression, which evokes in anyone looking at me the stern and imposing thought: “This man will evidently die soon.”
I still lecture fairly well; I can hold the attention of my listeners for two hours at a stretch, as I used to. My passion, the literary quality of my exposition, and my humor make almost unnoticeable the defects of my voice, which is dry, shrill, and sing-song, like a hypocrite’s. But I write badly. The part of my brain in charge of writing ability refuses to work. My memory has weakened, my thoughts lack consistency, and each time I set them down on paper it seems to me that I’ve lost the intuition of their organic connection, the constructions are monotonous, the phrasing impoverished and timid. I often write something other than what I mean; when I get to the end, I no longer remember the beginning. I often forget ordinary words, and always have to waste much energy avoiding superfluous phrases and unnecessary parenthetical clauses in my writing—both clearly witnessing to a decline of mental activity. And, remarkably, the simpler the writing, the more excruciating is the strain. With a learned article I feel myself far more free and intelligent than with a letter of congratulations or a report. Another thing: it’s easier for me to write in German or English than in Russian.
As for my present way of life, first of all I must make note of the insomnia from which I’ve been suffering lately. If I were to be asked: What now constitutes the main and fundamental feature of your existence? I would answer: Insomnia. As before, out of habit, I get undressed and go to bed exactly at midnight. I fall asleep quickly, but I wake up again before two o’clock, and with a feeling as if I haven’t slept at all. I have to get up and light the lamp. For an hour or two I pace the room from corner to corner and gaze at the long-familiar paintings and photographs. When I get tired of pacing, I sit down at my desk. I sit motionless, not thinking about anything and not feeling any desires; if there’s a book lying in front of me, I mechanically draw it towards me and read without any interest. Thus, recently, in a single night I mechanically read an entire novel with the strange title What the Swallow Sang.4 Or else, to occupy my attention, I make myself count to a thousand or picture the face of one of my colleagues and begin recalling: in what year and under what circumstances did he take up his post? I like listening to sounds. Two doors away my daughter Liza says something rapidly in her sleep, or my wife crosses the living room with a candle and unfailingly drops the box of matches, or a cupboard creaks from dryness, or the lamp flame suddenly starts to hum—and for some reason all these sounds trouble me.
Not to sleep during the night means to be aware every moment of your abnormality, and therefore I wait impatiently for morning and daylight, when I have the right not to sleep. A long, wearisome time goes by before the cock crows in the yard. He is my first bearer of good tidings. Once he crows, I know that in an hour the hall porter will wake up below and, coughing gruffly, come upstairs for something. And then little by little the air outside the windows will turn pale, voices will be heard in the street …
My day begins with the coming of my wife. She enters my room in a petticoat, her hair not yet done, but already washed, smelling of flower cologne, and with the air of having come in by chance, and each time she says one and the same thing:
“Excuse me, I’ll only stay a moment … You didn’t sleep again?”
Then she puts out the lamp, sits down by the desk and begins to talk. I’m no prophet, but I know beforehand what the talk will be about. It is the same every morning. Usually, after anxious inquiries about my health, she suddenly remembers our son, an officer serving in Warsaw. After the twentieth of each month we send him fifty roubles—that mainly serves as the theme of our conversation.
“Of course, it’s difficult for us,” my wife sighs, “but until he finally gets on his feet, it’s our duty to help him. The boy is in a foreign land, his pay is small … However, if you like, next month we’ll send him not fifty but forty What do you think?”
Everyday experience might have convinced my wife that expenses are not diminished by our frequent talking about them, but my wife does not recognize experience and tells me regularly each morning about our officer, and that the price of bread has gone down, thank God, but sugar has gone up two kopecks—and all this in such a tone as if she were telling me some news.
I listen, mechanically saying yes, and strange, useless thoughts come over me, probably because I haven’t slept all night. I look at my wife and am astonished, like a child. In perplexity, I ask myself: Can it be that this old, very stout, ungainly woman with a dull expression of petty care and fear over a crust of bread, with eyes clouded by constant thoughts of debt and poverty, only capable of talking about expenses and only smiling at bargains—can it be that this woman was once that same slender Varya whom I passionately loved for her good, clear mind, her pure soul, her beauty, and, as Othello loved Desdemona, “that she did pity” my science? Can this be that same wife Varya who once bore me a son?
I peer intently into the flabby, ungainly old woman’s face, searching for my Varya in her, but nothing has survived from the past except her fear for my health and her way of calling my salary our salary and my hat our hat. It pains me to look at her, and to comfort her at least a little I let her say whatever she likes, and even say nothing when she judges people unfairly or chides me for not having a practice or publishing textbooks.
Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife suddenly remembers that I have not had my tea yet and becomes alarmed.
“What am I doing sitting here?” she says, getting up. “The samovar has long been on the table, and I sit here chattering. Lord, I’ve become so forgetful!”