The owner, seeing where he was getting to, abandoned his bustling and, assuming his usual position and proper dignity, placed himself by the door again, calling to passers-by and pointing with one hand to the shop: "Here, my friends, see what pictures! Come in, come in! Fresh from the exchange!" He had already shouted his fill, for the most part fruitlessly, and talked to his heart's content with the rag seller who stood across the street by the door of his own shop, and, remembering at last that he had a customer in his shop, he turned his back to the people and went inside. "Well, my friend, have you chosen something?" But the artist had already been standing motionless for some time before a portrait in a big, once magnificent frame, on which traces of gilding now barely gleamed.
It was an old man with a face the color of bronze, gaunt, high-cheekboned; the features seemed to have been caught at a moment of convulsive movement and bespoke an un-northern force. Fiery noon was stamped on them. He was draped in a loose Asiatic costume. Damaged and dusty though the portrait was, when he managed to clean the dust off the face, he could see the marks of a lofty artist's work. The portrait, it seemed, was unfinished; but the force of the brush was striking. Most extraordinary of all were the eyes: in them the artist seemed to have employed all the force of his brush and all his painstaking effort. They simply stared, stared even out of the portrait itself, as if destroying its harmony by their strange aliveness. When he brought the portrait to the door, the eyes stared still more strongly. They produced almost the same impression among the people. A woman who stopped behind him exclaimed, "It's staring, it's staring!" and backed away. He felt some unpleasant feeling, unaccountable to himself, and put the portrait down.
"So, take the portrait!" said the owner.
"How much?" said the artist.
"Why make it expensive? Give me seventy-five kopecks!" "No."
"Well, then, what will you give me?"
"Twenty kopecks," said the artist, preparing to leave.
"Eh, what kind of price is that? Twenty kopecks won't even pay for the frame. I see, you think you'll buy it tomorrow? Mister, mister, come back! Tack on ten kopecks at least. Take it, then, take it, give me the twenty kopecks. Really, it's just for openers, since you're my first customer."
At which he made a gesture as if to say, "So be it, and perish the picture!"
Thus Chartkov quite unexpectedly bought the old portrait and at the same time thought: "Why did I buy it? What do I need it for?" But there was nothing to be done. He took a twenty-kopeck piece from his pocket, gave it to the owner, took the portrait under his arm, and dragged it home. On the way, he recalled that the twenty kopecks he had paid out were his last. His thoughts suddenly darkened; vexation and an indifferent emptiness came over him in the same moment. "Devil take it! it's vile in this world!" he said, with the feeling of a Russian for whom things are going badly. And he walked on almost mechanically, with hurried steps, insensible to everything. The red light of the evening sun still lingered over half the sky; the houses turned toward it still glowed faintly with its warm light; and meanwhile the cold, bluish radiance of the moon grew stronger. Light, half-transparent shadows fell tail-like on the ground, cast by houses and the legs of passers-by. The artist was beginning gradually to admire the sky, aglow with some transparent, thin, uncertain light, and almost simultaneously the words "What a light tone!" and "It's irksome, devil take it!" flew out of his mouth. And, straightening the portrait, which kept slipping from under his arm, he quickened his pace.
Weary and all in a sweat, he dragged himself to the Fifteenth Line on Vasilievsky Island. 5 Straining and panting, he climbed the stairs, slopped with swill and adorned with the traces of cats and dogs. His knocking at the door brought no response: his man was not at home. He leaned against the window and set himself to waiting patiently, until he finally heard behind him the steps of the lad in the blue shirt, his companion, his model, his paint grinder and floor sweeper, who dirtied it straight away with his boots. The lad was called Nikita, and he spent all his time outside the gates when his master was not at home. Nikita was a long time trying to get the key into the keyhole, which was completely invisible on account of the darkness. At last the door opened. Chartkov went into his front room, which was insufferably cold, as is always the case with artists, something they, however, do not notice. Not handing Nikita his overcoat, he went in it to his studio, a square room, large but low, with frost-covered windows, set about with all sorts of artistic litter: pieces of plaster arms, stretched canvases, sketches begun and abandoned, lengths of fabric draped over chairs. He was very weary, threw off his overcoat, absentmindedly stood the portrait he had bought between two small canvases, and threw himself down on a narrow couch, of which one could not say that it was covered in leather, because the row of brass tacks formerly attaching it had long since existed on its own, and the leather over it also existed on its own, so that Nikita could shove black stockings, shirts, and all the dirty linen under it. Sitting there, sprawling as much as one could on this narrow couch, he finally asked for a candle.
"We have no candles," said Nikita.
"No?"
"And we had none yesterday either," said Nikita.
The artist remembered that in fact they had not had any candles yesterday, so he calmed down and fell silent. He allowed himself to be undressed and put on his well- and much-worn dressing gown.
"And the landlord also came," said Nikita.
"Well, so he came for money? I know," the artist said, waving his hand.
"He didn't come alone," said Nikita.
"With whom, then?"
"I don't know… some policeman."
"Why a policeman?"
"I don't know why. He says the rent isn't paid."
"Well, so what will come of it?"
"I don't know. He said, 'If he doesn't want to pay, he can move out.' They're both coming back tomorrow."
"Let them," Chartkov said with sad indifference. And a dreary state of mind came over him completely.
Young Chartkov was an artist with a talent that promised much: in flashes and moments his brush bespoke power of observation, understanding, a strong impulse to get closer to nature. "Watch out, brother," his professor had told him more than once, "you have talent; it would be a sin to ruin it. But you're impatient. Some one thing entices you, some one thing takes your fancy-and you occupy yourself with it, and the rest can rot, you don't care about it, you don't even want to look at it. Watch out you don't turn into a fashionable painter. Even now your colors are beginning to cry a bit too loudly. Your drawing is imprecise, and sometimes quite weak, the line doesn't show; you go for fashionable lighting, which strikes the eye at once. Watch out or you'll fall right into the English type. Beware. You already feel drawn to the world: every so often I see a showy scarf on your neck, a glossy hat… It's enticing, you can start painting fashionable pictures, little portraits for money. But that doesn't develop talent, it ruins it. Be patient.
Ponder over every work, drop showiness-let the others make money. You won't come out the loser."
The professor was partly right. Sometimes, indeed, our artist liked to carouse or play the dandy-in short, to show off his youth here and there. Yet, for all that, he was able to keep himself under control. At times he was able to forget everything and take up his brush, and had to tear himself away again as if from a beautiful, interrupted dream. His taste was developing noticeably. He still did not understand all the depth of Raphael, but was already carried away by the quick, broad stroke of Guido, paused before Titian's portraits, admired the Flemish school. 6 The dark surface obscuring the old paintings had not yet been entirely removed for him; yet he already perceived something in them, though inwardly he did not agree with his professor that the old masters surpassed us beyond reach; it even seemed to him that the nineteenth century was significantly ahead of them in certain things, that the imitation of nature as it was done now had become somehow brighter, livelier, closer; in short, he thought in this case as a young man thinks who already understands something and feels it in his proud inner consciousness. At times he became vexed when he saw how some foreign painter, a Frenchman or a German, sometimes not even a painter by vocation, with nothing but an accustomed hand, a quick brush, and bright colors, would produce a general stir and instandy amass a fortune. This would come to his mind not when, all immersed in his work, he forgot drinking and eating and the whole world, but when he would finally come hard up against necessity, when he had no money to buy brushes and paints, when the importunate landlord came ten times a day to demand the rent. Then his hungry imagination enviously pictured the lot of the rich painter; then a thought glimmered that often passes through a Russian head: to drop everything and go on a spree out of grief and to spite it all. And now he was almost in such a situation.