'Well, I'll stay a bit longer,' says Michael Fyodorovich. 'Have I your permission, Miss Katya ?'
'You have,' Katya answers.
'Bene. Then have them bring on another little bottle.'
They both see me into the hall with candles.
'You've gro^n very thin of late, and you've aged,' says Michael Fyodorovich as I put on my fur coat. 'What's up ? Ill, arc you?'
'Yes, a bit.'
'And he won't see a doctor,' Katya puts in gloomily.
'But why ever not? This won't do! God helps those who help themselves, dear man. My regards to your family, and my excuses for not calling on them. I'll come round and say good-bye in a day or two before I go abroad—I'll make a point of it. I leave next week.'
As I come away from Katya's I'm irritable, alarmed by the talk about my illness and annoyed with myself. I wonder whether I really should consult a colleague about my health. Then I immediately picture him sounding my chest, after which he goes towards the window without speaking, thinks a little, and then turns to me, trying to prevent me from reading the truth in his face.
'I see nothing to worry about at the moment,' says he in a neutral voice. 'Still, I'd advise you to give up work, dear colleague.'
And that would rob me of my last hope.
What man lives without hope ? Now that I am diagnosing my own condition and treating myself, I have times when I hope that I'm deceived by my o^n ignorance, that I'm wrong about the albumen and sugar that I find—wrong about my heart, too, and about the oedemas which I've twice noticed in the mornings. Perusing textbooks of therapy with true hypochondriac fervour, and changing my nostrums every day, I still fancy I may stumble on some consolation. But this is all so trivial.
Whether the sky's cloudy or aglow with moon and stars, I always gaze at it on my way back, thinking how death will shortly overtake me. One might suppose that my thoughts must be as profound as that sky on these occasions, and as bright and vivid.
Far from it! I think about myself, my wife, Liza, Gnekker, students, people in general. My thoughts are wretched and trivial, I'm not honest with myself, and all the time my outlook is that expressed by the famous Arakcheyev in a private letter: 'Nothing good can exist without evil in this world, and there's always more evil than good.' All is vile, in other words, there's nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years of my life must be written off. Catching myself tanking like this, I cultivate the conviction that such ideas are accidental, temporary, superficial.
'But if that's so,' I immediately think, 'why am I drawnwn to see those two toads every evening ?'
I swear I'll never go to Katya's any more—yet I shall visit her again the very next evening, I know.
Tugging my door-bell and walking upstairs, I feel I've lost my family and don't want it back. These new, Arakcheyev-like ideas of mine obviously aren't accidental or temporary at all, they dominate my entire being. Sick in conscience, despondent, indolent, scarce moving my limbs, and feeling about fifty tons heavier, I go to bed and soon fall asleep.
Follows another sleepless night.
IV
Summer comes, life changes.
One fme morning Liza enters my room.
'Come, sir,' says she in jocular tone. 'All is ready.'
Sir is taken into the street, put in a cab and driven off. For want of anything better to do, I read the shop signs backwards as I pass. Traktir, thr: word for 'tavern', comes out as Ritkart, which would do as a baronial surname—the Baroness Ritkart. Then I drive through fields past a graveyard, which makes no impression on me at all, though I'll soon be lying there. Then I go through a wood, then through fields again. This is boring. After travelling for two hours, Sir is taken into the growid floor of a summer cottage and placed in a small, very jolly room with light blue wall-paper.
At night I sleep as little as before, but instead ofwaking and listening to my wife in the morning, I lie in bed—not asleep, but a prey to drowsiness, that semi-conscious state when you know you're not asleep, yet dream. I rise at noon and sit at my desk through force of habit, but instead of working I amuse myself with French books in yellow wrappers, which Katya sends me. To read Russian authors would be more patriotic, of course, but I'm not particularly disposed in their favour, I must confess. Two or three veterans apart, all modem literature seems to me less literature than a variety of cottage industry which exists solely to enjoy the patronage of persons reluctant to avail themselves ofits products. Even the best ofthese homely artefacts can't be called noteworthy, nor can one praise them sincerely without qualification. The same applies to all those literary novelties that I've read during the last ten or fifteen years and which include nothing noteworthy, nothing which can be praised without a 'but'. Such a product may be witty and uplifting—but lacks talent. Or else it's talented and uplifting, but lacks wit. Or, finally, it may be talented and witty, but lacks uplift.
I wouldn't call these French books talented, witty or uplifting. They don't satisfy me either. But they're less boring than the Russian, and it's not unusual to find in them that element vital to originality—a feeling of personal freedom such as Russian authors lack. I can't remember one new work where the author wasn't at pains to hobble himself with all sorts of conditions and contracts with his conscience from the first page onwards. One fears to speak of the naked body, another has tied himself hand and foot with psychological ^^ysis, a third requires a 'warm attitude to man', while a fourth deliberately pads the thing out with whole pages of nature description so as not to be suspected of tendentiousness.
One insists on his work showing him as a townsman of the lower orders, another must be a gentleman and so on. They have premeditation, caution, an eye to the main chance, but they lack the freedom and courage to write what they like, and hence they lack the creative.spirit.
All this relates to so-called belles-lettres.
As for learned Russian articles—on sociology, say, on art and all that —the reason I don't read them is sheer nervousness. As a boy and youth I was terrified of hall-porters and theatre ushers for some reason, and that terror is with me to this day. I still fear them. One fears only what one doesn't understand, it's said. And hard indeed it is to see quite why hall-porters and ushers should be so pompous, overweening and sublimely unmannerly. Reading learned articles fills me withjust the same vague dread. That fantastic pomposity, this air of magisterial banter, those familiar allusions to foreign authors, the ability to preserve one's dignity while on a wild-goose chase—it's all rather beyond me, it terrifies me, and it's most unlike the modesty, the calm, gentlemanly tone to which I've gro^n accustomed when reading our natural scientists and medical authors. Articles apart, I find it hard to read even translations made or edited by your serious Russian. The presumptuously condescending tone ofthe introductions, the profusion oftranslator's notes which stop me concentrating, the question marks and the word sic in brackets with which the liberal translator has bespattered the whole article—these things encroach on the author's personality and on my independence as a reader, or so I feel. I was once called in to give expert evidence in a county court. During the adjournment a fellow- expert pointed out how rude the prosecutor had been to the accused, who included two ladies of good social standing. I don't think I was exaggerating in the least when I told my colleague that the prosecutor's manner was no ruder than that obtaining between the authors of learned articles. So offensive is this manner, in fact, that one can't speak of it without distaste. They either handle each other, or the writers whom they criticize, with such egregious obsequiousness that it lowers their o^n dignity—or, conversely, treat them with far scanter ceremony than I have my future son-in-law Gnckker in these jottings and musings. Allegations of irresponsibility, of impure motives—of all kinds of criminal activity, even—arc the staple embellishment of learned articles. And that is, as young doctors like to say in their papers, the ultima ratio! Such attitudes are inevitably reflected in the morals of the younger generation of writers, which is why I'm not one bit surprised that the new items accruing to our literature in the last ten or fifteen years contain heroes who drink too much vodka and heroines whose chastity leaves something to be desired.