“You yourself are aware,” the doctor continues softly and measuredly, “that everything in this world is insignificant and uninteresting except the higher spiritual manifestations of human reason. Reason draws a sharp distinction between animal and man, hints at the divinity of the latter, and for him, to a certain degree, even takes the place of immortality, which does not exist. Hence, reason is the only possible source of pleasure. We, however, neither see nor hear any reason around us—which means we are deprived of pleasure. True, we have books, but that is not at all the same as live conversation and intercourse. If you will permit me a not entirely successful comparison, books are the scores, while conversation is the singing.”
“Quite right.”
Silence ensues. Daryushka comes from the kitchen and, with an expression of dumb grief, her face propped on her fist, stops in the doorway to listen.
“Ah!” sighs Mikhail Averyanych. “To ask reason of people nowadays!”
And he talks about how life used to be wholesome, gay, and interesting, what a smart intelligentsia there was in Russia and how highly it placed the notions of honor and friendship. Money was lent without receipt, and it was considered a disgrace not to offer a helping hand to a needy comrade. “And what campaigns, adventures, skirmishes there were, what comrades, what women! And the Caucasus—what an astonishing country! And the wife of one of the battalion commanders, a strange woman, used to dress up as an officer and ride off into the mountains in the evening alone, without an escort. They said she was having a romance with some princeling in a village there.”
“Saints alive …” Daryushka sighs.
“And how they drank! How they ate! What desperate liberals they were!”
Andrei Yefimych listens and hears nothing; he ponders something and sips his beer.
“I often dream about intelligent people and conversations with them,” he says unexpectedly, interrupting Mikhail Averyanych. “My father gave me an excellent education, but, influenced by the ideas of the sixties,6 he forced me to become a doctor. I think that if I hadn’t obeyed him, I would now be at the very center of the intellectual movement. I would probably be a member of some faculty. Of course, reason is not eternal and also passes, but you already know why I am well disposed towards it. Life is a vexing trap. When a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to adult consciousness, he involuntarily feels as if he is in a trap from which there is no escape. Indeed, against his will he is called by certain accidents from non-being into life … Why? He wants to learn the meaning and aim of his existence, and he is not told or else is told absurdities; he knocks—it is not opened; death comes to him—also against his will. And so, as people in prison, bound by a common misfortune, feel better when they come together, so also in life the trap can be disregarded when people inclined to analysis and generalization come together and spend time exchanging proud, free ideas. In this sense reason is an irreplaceable pleasure.”
“Quite right.”
Without looking his interlocutor in the eye, softly and with pauses, Andrei Yefimych goes on talking about intelligent people and his conversations with them, and Mikhail Averyanych listens to him attentively and agrees: “Quite right.”
“And you don’t believe in the immortality of the soul?” the postmaster suddenly asks.
“No, my esteemed Mikhail Averyanych, I do not believe in it and have no grounds for doing so.”
“I confess that I, too, have doubts. Though, incidentally, I have the feeling that I’ll never die. Hey, I think to myself, you old duffer, it’s time for you to die! And a little voice in my soul says: don’t believe it, you won’t die! …”
After nine, Mikhail Averyanych leaves. Putting his fur coat on in the front hall, he says with a sigh:
“But what a hole the fates have brought us to! The most vexing thing is that we’ll have to die here as well. Ah! …”
VII
After seeing his friend off, Andrei Yefimych sits down at the desk and again begins to read. The stillness of the evening and then the night is not broken by any sound, and time seems to stop, transfixed, with the doctor over the book, and it seems that nothing exists except for this book and the lamp with its green shade. The doctor’s coarse, peasant face gradually lights up with a smile of tenderness and delight at the movements of the human spirit. Oh, why is man not immortal? he thinks. Why brain centers and convolutions, why sight, speech, self-awareness, genius, if it is all doomed to sink into the ground and in the final end to cool down along with the earth’s crust and then whirl without sense or purpose, for millions of years, with the earth around the sun? For that cooling down and whirling around there was no need at all to bring man out of non-being, along with his lofty, almost divine reason, and then, as if in mockery, turn him into clay.
The life cycle! But what cowardice to comfort oneself with this surrogate of immortality! The unconcious processes that occur in nature are even lower than human stupidity, for in stupidity there is still consciousness and will, while in these processes there is nothing. Only a coward whose fear of death is greater than his dignity can comfort himself with the thought that in time his body will live in grass, a stone, a toad … To see one’s own immortality in the life cycle is as strange as to prophesy a brilliant future to the case after the costly violin has been broken and made useless.
When the clock strikes, Andrei Yefimych throws himself back in his armchair and closes his eyes in order to think a little. And inadvertently, under the influence of the good thoughts he has found in his book, he casts a glance over his past and present. The past is repulsive, better not to recall it. And the present is the same as the past. He knows that all the while his thoughts are whirling together with the cooled-down earth around the sun, in the big building next door to the doctor’s apartment people are languishing in disease and physical uncleanness; perhaps someone is lying awake and battling with insects, or someone is coming down with erysipelas or moaning because his bandage is too tight; perhaps the patients are playing cards with the nurses and drinking vodka. Twelve thousand people have been deceived during the fiscal year; the whole hospital business, just as twenty years ago, is built on theft, squabbles, gossip, chumminess, crude charlatanism, and, just as before, the hospital is an immoral institution, highly detrimental to the townspeople’s health. He knows that in Ward No. 6, behind the grilles, Nikita is beating the patients, and that Moiseika goes around town every day begging for alms.
On the other hand, he knows perfectly well that a fabulous change has come over medicine in the last twenty-five years. When he was studying at the university, it seemed to him that the same lot that had befallen alchemy and metaphysics would soon befall medicine, but now, when he reads at night, medicine touches him and arouses astonishment and even rapture in him. Indeed, what unexpected splendor, what a revolution! Owing to antiseptics, such operations are performed as the great Pirogov7 considered impossible even in spe.8 Ordinary zemstvo doctors dare to perform resections of the knee, only one out of a hundred Caesarean sections ends in death, and gallstones are considered such a trifle that no one even writes about them. Syphilis can be radically cured. And the theory of heredity, hypnotism, the discoveries of Pasteur and Koch,9 hygiene, and statistics, and our Russian zemstvo doctors? Psychiatry, with its present-day classification of illnesses, its methods of diagnosis and treatment, is a whole Mt. Elbrus10 compared to what it used to be. No one pours cold water over madmen’s heads now, or puts them in straitjackets: they are kept like human beings and, as the newspapers report, even have performances and balls organized for them. Andrei Yefimych knows that, given present-day views and tastes, such an abomination as Ward No. 6 is perhaps only possible two hundred miles from the railroad, in a town where the mayor and all the councilmen are semi-literate bourgeois, who see a doctor as a sort of priest who is to be believed without any criticism, even if he starts pouring molten tin down people’s throats; anywhere else the public and the newspapers would long ago have smashed this little Bastille to bits.