A LETTER TO A LEARNED NEIGHBOR
The Village of Eaten-Pancakes
DEAREST NEIGHBOR,
Maxim . . . (can’t recall your patronymic . . . forgive me kindly!) Forgive and pardon me, an old fogy and ridiculous human soul, that I dare pester you with my pathetic epistolary blathering. A whole year has gone by since it pleased you to settle in our corner of the world, neighboring me, an insignificant nobody, and I still am not acquainted with you, and still you aren’t acquainted with me, pathetic flittering insect that I am. Allow me then, precious neighbor, if only by means of these senile hieroglyphicated scribblings, to introduce myself to you, mentally to shake your learned hand, and to congratulate you on your arrival from St. Petersburg to our unworthy land, inhabited by muzhiks and peasant folk, that is to say, the plebeian element. I have long sought an occasion to make your acquaintance, I yearned for it, because science is, in a manner of speaking, the mother of us all, just the same as civileezation, and also because I have a heartfelt respect for those people whose famed names and titles have been crowned with the gloriosity of public renown, laurels, cymbals, medals, decoration ribbons, and endorsements, and resound like thunder and lightning in all the corners of this inhabited world both visible and invisible, that is to say, sublunary. I passionately admire astronomers, poets, metaphysicians, privatdozents, chemists, and other votaries of the sciences, among which you are to be numbered due to your employment of clever facts and your familiarity with the various branches of the sciences, that is to say, with their outcomes and fruitions. I have heard that you have published many books during the time of your mental sedentarizing amid glass tubing, thermometers, and stacks of foreign books with titillating pictures. Recently, my neighbor Gerasimov visited me in my humble abode, amid my ruins and wreckage, and with characteristic fanaticism berated and castigated your thoughts and ideas concerning human origin and other phenomena of the visible world, and mutinied and railed against your mental sphere and your cerebral horizon bedecked with loominaries and aerolites. I disagree with Gerasimov concerning your learned ideas, because I live for and am nurtured by science alone, which providence has given to the human race so that it could plumb the depths of the world seen and unseen for precious metals, metalloids, and diamonds, but still, my dear, you will have to forgive me, an insect barely visible, if I have the audacity to contradict, in my doddering way, some of your ideas concerning the essence of nature. Gerasimov informed me that you have composed a treatize in which it pleased you to express some rather unsubstantiated ideas about mankind’s primal condition and antediluvian existence. It pleased you to pen that man has descended from the apish tribes of monkeys, orangutans, and so forth. Forgive me, an old man, but I disagree with you on this important point and can even provide you with some pause for thought here. For if man, the ruler of the world, the smartest of all breathing creatures, descended from the stupid and ignorant ape, then he would have a tail and a beastly voice. If we had descended from apes, then in present times the Gypsies would be taking us around to various towns and we would be paying money to be exhibited to each other, dancing at the command of the Gypsy or sitting in a cage at the zoo. Are we covered with fur all over? Are we not wearing clothing, which the apes lack? Could we feel any love for woman rather than contempt, if she smelled even a bit like the monkey that we see every Tuesday at the house of the Marshal of Nobility? If our progenitors have descended from apes they wouldn’t have been buried at Christian cemeteries; for instance, my great-great-grandfather Ambrosius who lived in days of yore in the Kingdom of Poland was interred not as an ape but beside the Catholic abbot Joakim Shostak, whose writings regarding temperate climate and the intemperate use of alcoholic drinks are preserved to this day by my brother Ivan (the major). An abbot means a Catholic priest. Forgive me, a know-nothing, that I interfere in your learned business, interpret it in my own senile way, and thrust upon you my half-baked and garish ideas that are more likely to be found in the stomachs of learned and civilized people than in their heads. But I cannot stomach it in silence when scientists reason incorrectly, and so cannot but contradict you. Gerasimov informed me that you reason incorrectly about the night’s loominary, that is, the moon, which replaces the sun for us during the hours of darkness, when people sleep, while you are conducting electricity from place to place and fantasizing. Do not laugh at an old man for writing so foolishly. You write that the moon, that is to say, the crescent, is inhabited and settled by peoples and tribes. That could never be, because if people were living on the moon, they would have blocked from us its magical and enchanting light by their houses and ample pastures. People cannot live without rain, and rain falls downward toward the earth and not upward toward the moon. Filth and garbage would pour down upon our land from such an inhabited moon. Could people live on the moon if it exists only during the night and disappears during the day? Also, governments could never allow people to live on the moon because, due to reasons of great distance and inaccessibility, it would be very easy to hide there in order to evade compulsory military service. You are a little mistaken about all this. Gerasimov told me that you have composed and published a learned treatize, where you write that on the greatest of all loominaries, the sun, there are little black spots. Such a thing cannot be, because it could never be. How could you see these spots on the sun, if you cannot look at the sun with the plain human eye, and what are these spots for, if you can make do without them? From which wet substance are these spots made if they do not burn up? Maybe fish also live on the sun, according to you? Forgive me, the noxious weed that I am, this stupid witticism! I am terribly loyal to science! The ruble, that sail of the nineteenth century, has no hold upon me; in my eyes, science has outraced it upon its vaster wings. Every discovery torments me like a sharp nail hammered into my back. I may be an ignoramus and an old-fashioned landowner, but despite that, the old rascal that I am, I still busy myself with science and discoveries, which I effect with my own two hands as I fill my senseless noggin, my uncultivated scull, with thoughts and an array of the greatest scientific knowledge. Mother Nature is a book that must be read and observed. I have enacted many discoveries with my own brain, such discoveries that not a single reformer has yet managed to invent. I can say without boasting that I am not the last in line when it comes to learnedness obtained by sweat and tears and not by the wealth of parents, that is to say, mothers and fathers or guardians, who often bring their children to ruin by means of wealth, luxury, and six-story mansions filled with slaves and electric bells. Here is what my worthless brain discovered. I discovered that our great fiery loominous chlamys, the sun, shimmers entertainingly and picturesquely with multicolored hues once a year, early in the morning, in such a way as to produce a playful impression by its splendid glimmering. Here is another discovery of mine: Why is it that in the winter the day is short and the night is long, and in the summer the reverse? In the winter the day is short because, akin to other objects visible and invisible, it shrinks from the cold as the sun sets early, while the night expands from the illumination of lighting fixtures and streetlamps because it warms up thereby. Then I also discovered that dogs eat grass in the spring, like sheep, and that coffee is unwholesome for sanguine people because it brings on light-headedness, bleary eyes, and other suchlike things. I have made many discoveries besides these, even though I have neither award certificates nor diplomas to show for it. Really, dearest neighbor, why don’t you just come and visit? We’ll discover something together, get busy with some literature, and you can teach rotten little me some calculations or other.