Wings Mikhail Kuzmin Translated by Hugh Aplin ET REMOTISSIMA PROPE Modern Voices Modern Voices Published by Hesperu

• Citation preview
• Biographical note
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Wings
• Part One
• Part Two

Citation preview

Wings Mikhail Kuzmin

Translated by Hugh Aplin

ET REMOTISSIMA PROPE

Modern Voices

Modern Voices Published by Hesperus Press Limited 4 Rickett Street, London sw6 rRU www.hesperuspress.com First published in r 906 First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2007 Introduction and English language translation© Hugh Aplin, 2007 Foreword© Paul Bailey, 2007 Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio

ISBN: r-84391-431-X ISBNI3: 978-r-84391-4JI-0

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents Foreword by Paul Bailey Introduction

vii XI

Wings Part One Part Two Part Three Notes

IOI

Biographical note

Foreword

This wonderful short novel dispenses with most of the apparatus writers and readers of fiction depend upon -linear narrative, for instance, and psychological insights into the behaviour of the principal characters. Mikhail Kuzmin was widely read in several languages and must have been fully aware of what he was chucking out or, rather, deliberately ignoring. Wings is a work of self-discovery, and it suits Kuzmin's artistic purpose to write impressionistically. Scenes often follow each other with no discernible thread to link them, much as they do in life. It is the orphaned youth, Vanya Smurov, who is discovering both himself and the world about him, and it's he who is at the centre of the story. He looks and listens, and we look and listen with him, whether he's among his unexciting relatives in St Petersburg or in the company of sophisticated adults such as his kindly teacher of Greek, Daniil lvanovich, or the plump and hedonistic Monsignor Mori, or- especially- the enigmatic half-Russian, half-English Larion Dmitriyevich Stroop, who causes a young woman, Ida Golberg, to kill herself for love of him. It is salutary to reflect that Wings was first published in Russia in 1906, when Kuzmin was in his thirties. He had at last come to terms with his homosexuality, as Vanya Smurov is beginning to do in the closing paragraph of the book. That he was openly gay in the final years of Tsarist rule and the opening decade of Soviet Communism almost defies credibility, particularly when one thinks of the agonies of mind and body T chaikovsky was forced to endure. Kuzmin's attitude to his sexual desires bears comparison with that of another great poet and near-contemporary, Constantine Cavafy, whose poems celebrating the physical beauty of the various Alexandrian boys he went to bed with are entirely free of either sentimentality or guilt.

Wings, in its circuitous way, probably represents Kuzmin's own struggle to reconcile intellectual and aesthetic pleasures with the cruder needs of the flesh. There aren't many novels in which erudite people discuss the operas of Wagner, the twenty-eighth Canto from Purgatorio in Dante's Divine Comedy, the music of Rameau and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and refer casually to Greek mythology, the history of Ancient Rome and the paintings of Botticelli. In Kuzmin's novella, the reader is invited to learn what Vanya learns from his mentors. The book is unashamedly intelligent, yet there's no sense that the author is showing off. Some of the names he drops to a purpose are now forgotten or little known, like the once-fashionable poet and dramatist Gabriele D' Annunzio, who is now more interesting for his preposterous political views and his callous treatment of his lover, the actress Eleanora Duse, than for the larger part of his huge literary output. These fin de siecle figures give Wings a certain period flavour, placing it firmly in the burgeoning dawn of modernism. What makes Kuzmin's first foray into fiction such a rarity is the manner in which it reveals and displays a craving for culture that shows no immediate sign of being assuaged. High-minded though he is, Vanya Smurov is still capable of jealousy, the basest and most understandable of emotions. Kuzmin's aestheticism is not confined to an appreciation of great writers, composers and painters. Towards the end of Wings, Vanya and Stroop, the man whose love he will possibly enjoy, have this exchange after they have both witnessed a potentially gifted artist sacrificing his gift for the steely charms of a Florentine whore, Veronica Chibo: 'It's as if we've been at a funeral,' remarked Vanya. 'There are some people who continually seem to be at their own,' Stroop replied, without looking at Vanya.

'When an artist perishes, it can be very hard.' 'There are some people who are artists of life; their ruin is no less hard.' There follows a superb cameo, when Vanya, Stroop and the bibulous Monsignor Mori visit an old cobbler, Giuseppe, in his dark and cluttered shop in Florence. Giuseppe addresses them thus: 'What am I? I'm a poor hack, gentlemen, but there are artists, artists! Oh, it's not so easy to sew a boot in line with the laws of art; you need to know, to study in full the foot you're sewing for, you need to know where the bone is wider, where it's narrower, where there are corns, where the instep is higher than it ought to be. There's not a single foot belonging to a man, you know, that's just like another's, and you have to be an ignoramus to think a boot's a boot, and it fits all feet, when oh dear, what feet there are, Signori! And they all need to walk ... ' Kuzmin invests the artisan with the same compulsion to achieve perfection that possessed Mozart, or Beethoven, or any of those geniuses whose names aren't writ in water. The maker of a well-made shoe is not destined to be honoured by posterity, but his talent is his own, and precious, as Kuzmin has Giuseppe remind Vanya, and via him the reader. The descriptions of nature, the details of clothes, of food, of faces, of voices, are extraordinarily vivid. Yet they are only brush strokes, as it were, set down with clarity and economy. The cinema was in its very infancy when Mikhail Kuzmin wrote Wings, but he has a cinematic eye. He captures the Florence of the early 1900s in a fraction of a page, but it's the identical city I lived in in 1968, with its impoverished aristocrats and English exiles. 'If a story that should be told in fifty pages is written in thirty it will be better,' said Cavafy. Kuzmin would have agreed with him and, perhaps, with so much else that he had to say.

• Paul Bailey, 2007

Introduction

It is commonly the fate of Russian poets, whether or not they have also worked in prose, to be relatively little known outside their homeland, no matter how great their fame inside it. When Mikhail Alexeyevich Kuzmin died of pneumonia in Leningrad in the dreadful year of 1936, he was buried in the city's Volkov Cemetery in the company of such outstanding representatives of Russia's intellectual and artistic elite as the novelist Turgenev and the scientists Mendeleyev and Pavlov. This eminent final destination served as a just reflection of the circles in which he had moved in life. Yet the inscription marking his restingplace is equally suggestive of the ultimate relative obscurity of a man who had once been a leading figure of what was, arguably, Russia's most brilliant age in the early years of the twentieth century. For the one-word description of him as 'Poet', albeit honourable and honest, scarcely does justice to the variety of his talents. The year of birth shown on his grave - 1875 - notwithstanding, Kuzmin was actually born in the provincial town of Yaroslavl in 1872 (in later life he was himself liable to claim to be two or three years younger). His parents were a naval officer and the daughter of a small landowner, and the family were adherents of the Old Believer tradition which is depicted in some detail in Wings. In the child's second year they moved to another provincial town much further down the Volga, Saratov, but by 1884 had already moved again, this time to the most European of Russian cities, St Petersburg, where Kuzmin was to spend most of the remainder of his life. It was during his school years that Kuzmin began taking an active interest in Western European culture and its traditions, and this established a tension within him between the conservatively Russian outlook of his Old Believer upbringing and the contemporary cosmopolitan worldview of the artistic environment to which he was increasingly exposed. This duality of influence would be made visibly explicit after the turn of the century when, having spent some years in defiantly Old Believer guise, including cap, tight-fitting coat, boots and beard, he switched abruptly to the mannered dandyism of the Russian admirers of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. After leaving school, Kuzmin began studying in 1891 at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where his tutors included RimskyKorsakov, but he remained there for only three years. Nonetheless, music was to continue to play a very significant role in his creative life, and his early composition of vocal works in the tradition of the Russian romance was an indication of the way in which the word and music were to be closely intertwined in his oeuvre in the most varied genres: for example, operatic works, cabaret songs, or in his music for Alexander Blok's satirical play of 1906 The Puppet Show in the production by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Certainly it was as a musician that Kuzmin made his entry into the world of the artistic intelligentsia of St Petersburg from 1901 onwards, performing in the remarkable Evenings of Contemporary Music, which provided a Russian showcase for the likes of Ravel, Debussy, Schonberg, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. This in turn enabled him to form ties, through the Evenings' main organisers, Waiter Nouvel and Alexander Nurok, with such celebrated members of Sergei Diaghilev's World of Art group as the painters Leon Bakst and Konstantin Somov, who would produce an exquisite portrait of Kuzmin in 1909. Kuzmin's earliest surviving literary works are poems dating from 1897, though there can be no doubt that he was already writing before then. His actual debut as a published writer came only in 1904 with the appearance in an almanac of a cycle of sonnets. He was shortly, however, to achieve both literary fame and literary infamy, for 1906 saw the publication of his cycle of 'Alexandrian Songs' and his novella Wings. While the latter brought about a genuine furore in Russia's literary world, the success of the former enabled him to become closely involved with many of the most prominent figures of the then dominant Russian Symbolist movement, and led to his taking part in their regular gatherings as well as contributing to their publications. Wings was published as a separate edition in the following year of 1907, and Kuzmin's first book of poetry, Nets, came out in 1908. Over the next decade he was a much-published and sought-after writer who, in a time of great artistic as well as political turbulence, contrived to work with, yet remain largely aloof from the various rival literary groupings of the age. Unlike many of his peers, Kuzmin never saw fit to devote time and pages to propounding his own personal theory of art, and this doubtless helps explain how he could have been loosely associated at different times with various literary movements. Thus the journal The Scales, where Wings first appeared, was the organ of the Symbolists; when the Guild of Poets was formed in 1911 as an association of the young Acmeists such as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, Kuzmin was an occasional attendee at their meetings; and in 1914 and 1915 he contributed to the sensational first issues of the almanac The Archer along with not only Symbolists, but also cutting-edge representatives of Futurism such as the artist David Burliuk and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1910, in the first issue of the Acmeists' journal Apollo, where he occupied a significant position as a literary critic, he did publish his most explicit aesthetic credo, the article 'On Beautiful Clarity'; but if in some ways associated with Acmeism, this was primarily a declaration of artistic independence, and although he did indeed share much of the Acmeists' belief in elegance and purity of style, he was nonetheless never reticent with his criticism of their school. Rather he produced an -ism of his own, in Russian 'klarizm', from the Latin 'c/arus', signifying clarity or transparency, and the 'beautiful clarity' that was its essential feature was one of the abiding elements in all Kuzmin's writing during his most successful, pre-revolutionary years. Kuzmin's response to the revolutions of 1917 was, like that of so many other Russian intellectuals, broadly positive, and he never considered emigration. Despite the great impact that his journeys outside Russia, particularly to Egypt and Italy in the 1890s, had had on his artistic development, he knew that he could not live and work as a writer divorced from his native land. And the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution seemed to suggest that he could continue to flourish at home, as four collections of verse and a novel were published one after another. In the mid-1920s, however, only a mere handful of his poems appeared in print, and financial need increasingly obliged him to turn to translation and editing. His final significant publication, a cycle of poems depicting a homosexual love affair, The Trout Breaks the Ice (1929), fittingly continued the major thematic concern of his entire career as a writer. It was remarkable that it was published at all in the ever more aesthetically prescriptive climate of the Soviet Union, and perhaps not surprising that nothing more of his original writing was to appear in his few remaining years. That silence was very different to the furious noise that had accompanied the opening of Kuzmin's literary career. Russian literature in 1906 was quite unaccustomed to, and apparently unprepared for having the theme of a young man's struggle to come to terms with his unorthodox sexuality as the central concern of a work of fiction. Eroticism there had been aplenty in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts, and gender questions, particularly the role of women in society, had been under discussion for more than half a century; but serious mainstream works with sex, let alone homosexuality, as their primary subject were almost unknown- Leo Tolstoy's writings in favour of sexual abstinence being the obvious significant exceptions. But topics familiar from fin de siecle Western European culture were not passing Russia by: perhaps encouraged by a new sense of freedom in the aftermath of the revolution of 1905 - and a very real relaxation of censorship- Lidiya Zinovyeva-Annibal was at work on a tale of lesbian love, Thirty-three Monsters, that would regularly be referred to in the same breath as Wings; and also in 1906 Mikhail Artsybashev was beginning to write his infamous 'pornographic' novel Sanin. Thus Wings was in the forefront of a new wave of sexually revolutionary literature, and however restrained it might seem a century on, it was explosive material for the readership of its time, and can still be appreciated today for the originality of its construction and the sensitive, yet committed treatment of its theme. The youthful hero, Vanya Smurov, is shown in three novel, unorthodox and increasingly exotic settings. Newly orphaned, he is vulnerable and susceptible as a series of mentors introduce him to various possible approaches to life, and other characters, through differing experiences or parallel situations, suggest the fates that potentially await him, depending on the decisions he makes. Much of the work's interest lies in its examination of Smurov's response to the physicality of the sexual act: his conscious interest in the somewhat enigmatic older man, Stroop, is essentially based on aestheticism - his youth and innocence seem to exclude the possibility of anything carnal, and this explains his aversion, even fear, when he learns something of the reality of Stroop's life. Only gradually do the arguments of friends, the alternatives he encounters, and encouraging examples from the world of art and, particularly, the Classical world, come to convince him that his objections to the physical nature of homosexual love can be overcome. To the modern eye there is nothing at all explicit in the work - this could be a conventional Bildungsroman, but for the sexual orientation of its hero: yet that was, of course, the very feature that made it unique for its time in Russian literature and that stirred up a critical storm. Contemporary critics were almost unanimous in their negative response to Wings. It was considered stylistically careless'all over the place, awkward phrases written any old how,' commented Andrei Bely- and the mosaic-like structure, which may be a positive attraction to the modern reader accustomed to the frequent cutting of cinematic montage, was not deemed a success. Inevitably, however, it was the thematic nature of the work that drew most attention. One critic labelled it 'idealisation of the sodomitic sin'; another wrote of the 'sexual excesses' hidden behind 'flowery phrases about the beauty of the free man', and he berated the author for his lack of taste in juxtaposing the beautiful Antinous and the smell of sour cabbage soup. The eminent Symbolist Zinaida Hippius haughtily conceded that Kuzmin's 'barbarism', as she termed it, 'might pass for culture in Saratov', while Bely likened Wings to 'a whitepowdered woman with a dirty neck'. Yet within a year or two, positions had begun to change. Another of Russia's major Symbolist poets, Konstantin Balmont, wrote in 1909 in the journal The Golden Fleece of his own attitude to what he called 'the cult of male love'. In a discussion of Wait Whitman's poetry, while declaring his unwillingness to follow the American into that area, he nonetheless added: 'But if the cult of male love was comprehensible to such demigods as Leonardo or Michelangelo, and to such elementally fresh living spirits as Whitman, it is evident that with certain conditions of personality and historical circumstances this cult is a logical inner inevitability ... And if I am not attracted by something, I cannot for that reason alone have a negative attitude towards it.' Kuzmin's writing must certainly be considered to have played its part in literary Russia's nascent reappraisal of the theme of sexuality. It may be fitting here to give a final word on the author of Wings to another of Russia's great poets, Alexander Blok, whose remains lie today along with those of Kuzmin in St Petersburg's Volkov cemetery: while alluding in his assessment of Wings to Hippius' accusation of 'barbarism', he tempered his reservations with an appreciation not shown at the time by others, seeing in Kuzmin 'an artist to the marrow, the most refined lyricist, the most witty dialectician in art. The barbarism ... is completely drowned in the transparent and crystal-clear moisture of art.' - Hugh Aplin, 2007

Note on the text The Russian text of Wings used for this translation is that found in volume one of the excellent three-volume edition of Mikhail Kuzmin, Proza i esseistika [Prose and Essay-writing] (Moscow: Agraf, 1999), prepared by E. Domogatskaya and E. Pevak, whose detailed commentaries and notes are invaluable to both the reader and the translator. They based their text on Mikhail Kuzmin, Pervaya kniga rasskazov [First Book of Stories] (Moscow: Skorpion, 1910), but reinstated a number of fragments of text omitted therein from the first separate edition of the work, also published by Skorpion in Moscow in I 907.

Wings

Part One

It was getting lighter and lighter in the carriage, which had emptied somewhat towards morning; through the misted windows could be seen the green of the grass, almost toxically bright despite it being the end of August, sodden roads, milkmaids' carts at a closed level-crossing barrier, watchmen's huts, and ladies from dachas 1 out strolling under coloured umbrellas. At the frequent and monotonous stations new, local passengers with briefcases accumulated in the carriage, and it was evident that the carriage, the journey, was for them not an epoch, nor even an episode in life, but a normal part of the day's routine, and the bench where Nikolai Ivanovich Smurov sat with Vanya seemed the most solid and significant in the whole carriage. And the tightly strapped suitcases, the belted cushions, the old gentleman with long hair and an outdated shoulder-bag sitting opposite- all spoke of a more prolonged voyage, of an expedition that was less habitual and more epoch-making. Looking at a reddish ray of the sun, its uneven glow flickering through clouds of locomotive steam, at the face of Nikolai Ivanovich, silly now as he slept, Vanya remembered the rasping voice of this same cousin who had told him in the entrance hall, there, far away, 'at home', 'There's no money left for you from your mother; you know we aren't rich ourselves, but I'm prepared to help you as you're my cousin; you'll be studying for a long time yet, I can't take you in myself, but I'll lodge you with Alexei Vasilyevich and I'll visit; it's fun there, you can meet a lot of useful people. You make an effort; Natasha and I would be glad to take you ourselves, but it's absolutely impossible, and you yourself will find it more fun at the Kazanskys': there are young people there all the time. I shall pay for you; when we divide things up, I'll deduct it.' Vanya had listened, sitting on the window sill in the hall and looking at the sunshine lighting the corner of the trunk, Nikolai Ivanovich's grey and lilac striped trousers and the painted floor. He had not attempted to grasp the sense of the words, thinking how his mother had died, how the whole house had suddenly filled with old women of some sort who had previously been strangers and who now became extraordinarily close, recalling the fuss, the offices for the dead, the funeral and, after all of that, the sudden emptiness and desolation, and, without looking at Nikolai lvanovich, he had only said mechanically, 'Yes, Uncle Kolya,'- although Nikolai lvanovich was not Vanya's uncle at all, but only his cousin. And now it seemed strange to him to be travelling together with this man who was, after all, a complete stranger to him, to be near him for such a long time, to be talking about their affairs, making plans. And he was somewhat disappointed, although he had known it before, that they were entering St Petersburg not directly into the central area of palaces and big buildings, with lots of people, sunshine and martial music, through a big arch, but with long kitchen gardens, visible through grey fences, cemeteries, seeming like romantic groves when left behind, dank six-storey blocks of housing for workers amidst tumbledown wooden shacks, all stretching through smoke and soot. 'So here it is- St Petersburg,' thought Vanya in disappointment and curiosity, looking at the unwelcoming faces of the porters. 'Have you finished reading, Kostya? May I?' said Anna Nikolayevna, getting up from the table and taking a packet of Russian newspapers from Konstantin Vasilyevich with long fingers bedecked in cheap rings despite it still being the morning. 'Yes, there's nothing of interest.' 'What ever can there be of interest in our Russian newspapers? Abroad- I can understand! There one can write everything, answering for everything if necessary before a court. Whereas here it's something terrible- you don't know what to believe. Dispatches and reports from the government are untrue and worthless, there's no home life apart from waste, only rumours from special correspondents.' 'But there are only sensationalist rumours abroad as well, you know, and they're not answerable before the law for lying either.' Koka and Boba were idly stirring the spoons in their glasses and eating black bread and poor quality butter. 'Where are you going today, Nata? Got a lot to do?' asked Anna Nikolayevna in a somewhat artificial tone. Nata, covered in freckles, gingery and with a vulgarly pouting mouth, made some reply through a mouth stuffed with white bread. Uncle Kostya, who as the cashier of some shady club had been caught embezzling and, after coming out of prison, had been living at his brother's with no job and nothing to do, was expressing indignation about a trial for theft. 'Now, when everything is stirring, new forces are coming into being, everything is awakening,' Alexei Vasilyevich was saying, impassioned. 'I'm not at all in favour of every sort of awakening; for example, I prefer Sonya's aunt asleep.' Students of some sort and simply young men in jackets came and went, exchanging impressions gleaned from the newspapers of the race meeting that had just been held; Uncle Kostya demanded some vodka; Anna Nikolayevna, already with her hat on and pulling on her gloves, was talking about an exhibition, looking askance at Uncle Kostya, who had filled some glasses with slightly trembling hands and, with his kind, reddish eyes shifting about, was saying, 'A strike, my friends, you know, it's, you know, it's .. .' 'Larion Dmitriyevich!' announced the servant, moving quickly through the kitchen and collecting a tray of glasses and the stained, crumpled tablecloth on the way.

Vanya turned from the window where he was standing and saw a very familiar lanky figure in baggy clothing coming through the door- Larion Dmitriyevich Stroop. Vanya had begun combing his hair and, for a certain time now, taking trouble over his toilet. Examining his reflection in the small mirror on the wall, he looked dispassionately at a somewhat insignificant, round face with a high colour, big grey eyes, a handsome, but still childishly pouting mouth and fair hair, which, not being cut short, was slightly curling. He neither liked, nor disliked this tall and slender boy in a black smock with his fine eyebrows. Outside the window could be seen the courtyard with wet flagstones, the windows of the wing opposite, pedlars with matches. It was a holiday, and everyone was still asleep. Rising early out of habit, Vanya had sat down at the window to wait for some tea, listening to the bell-ringing from the nearest church and the rustling of the servant tidying up the room next door. He remembered the mornings of holidays there, 'at home', in the little old provincial town, their clean little rooms with muslin curtains and icon-lamps, mass, a pie for lunch, everything simple, light and nice, and he began to feel miserable about the rainy weather, the barrel-organs in the courtyards, the newspapers with the morning tea, the chaotic and comfortless life, the dark rooms. Konstantin Vasilyevich, who sometimes dropped in on Vanya, glanced in through the door. 'Are you by yourself, Vanya?' 'Yes, Uncle Kostya. Hello! What is it?' 'Nothing. Waiting for some tea?' 'Yes. Is Auntie not up yet?' 'She's up, but not coming out. She's cross, there's probably no money. It's the first sign: when she sits in the bedroom for two hours, that means there's no money. And why? She'll have to come out all the same.' 'Does Uncle Alexei Vasilyevich earn a lot? Do you know?' 'It varies. And what does "a lot" mean? There never is a lot of money for a man.' Konstantin Vasilyevich sighed and was silent for a while; Vanya too was silent, looking out of the window. 'What I want to ask you, Ivanushka,' Konstantin Vasilyevich began again, 'is do you have any spare money until Wednesday, I'll pay you back straight away on Wednesday?' 'Where on earth will I have money from? Of course I haven't.' 'How should I know? Someone might give you some .. .' 'Come on, Uncle! Who's going to give money to me?' 'So you haven't, then?' 'No.' 'That's bad!' 'And how much would you like to have?' 'Five roubles or so, not a lot, not a lot at all,' Konstantin Vasilyevich became animated once more. 'Perhaps you might find it, eh? Just until Wednesday?!' 'I haven't got five roubles.' Konstantin Vasilyevich gave Vanya a disappointed and sly look. Vanya became even more depressed. 'What's to be done, then? It's still raining ... You know what, Ivanushka, ask Larion Dmitriyevich for some money for me.' 'Stroop?' 'Yes, my dear, ask him!' 'Why don't you ask him yourself?' 'He won't give it to me.' 'How is it he won't give it to you, but will give it to me?' 'He will give it, believe me; please, my dear, only don't say it's for me; as though you yourself need twenty roubles.' 'But it's only five, isn't it?!' 'Does it really matter how much you ask for? Please, Vanya!' 'Well, all right. And if he asks me what I want it for?' 'He won't ask, he's an intelligent man.' 'Only see you pay it back yourself.' 'Without fail, without fail.' 'But Uncle, why do you think Stroop will give money to me?' 'I just think he will!' And, smiling, Konstantin Vasilyevich went out of the room on tiptoe, embarrassed and contented. Vanya stood for a long time by the window, not turning around and not seeing the wet courtyard, and, when he was called to have some tea, before going into the dining room he looked in the mirror once again at his flushed face with its grey eyes and fine eyebrows. In Greek, Nikolayev and Shpilevsky kept Vanya amused all the time, turning around and giggling at the front desk. Immediately before the holidays classes went on any old how, and the little, ageing teacher, sitting on one leg, talked about Greek life without testing them on their homework; the windows were open, and the tops of the trees could be seen coming into leaf, and also the red body of some building. More and more Vanya wanted to get out of St Petersburg into fresh air, somewhere far away. The brass handles of the doors and windows, the spittoons, all brightly polished, the maps on the walls, the board, the yellow box for papers, the backs of his comrades' heads, some cropped, some curly, seemed unbearable to him. 'Sycophants are informers, spies, literally - those who show figs; when the export of that produce from Attica was still prohibited under pain of a fine, these people, blackmailers in our language, would show a suspect a fig from under their cloak as a form of threat that, in the event of his not paying them off... ' And without stepping down from the rostrum, Daniil 10

lvanovich demonstrated in gestures and mime both the informers and the maligned, both the cloak and the fig, then, darting off, walked about the class, repeating in a preoccupied way one and the same thing, such as, 'Sycophants ... yes, sycophants ... yes, gentlemen, sycophants,' imparting various, but for the given word utterly unexpected nuances. 'I'll try and ask Stroop for some money today,' thought Vanya, looking out of the window. Quite red, Shpilevsky rose from his desk, 'What's Nikolayev doing molesting me?!' 'Nikolayev, why are you molesting Shpilevsky?' 'I'm not.' 'What are you doing, then?' 'I'm tickling him.' 'Sit down. And you, Mr Shpilevsky, I advise to be more precise in your use of words. Taking into consideration the fact that you are not a woman, Mr Nikolayev cannot molest you, he being a youth already of age and of rather limited ideas.' 'I see the question like this: if you want to work- work, if you don't- don't,' said Anna Nikolayevna, looking as if the interest of the whole world were focused on how she saw the question. In the sitting room, filled in every direction with period furniture in the form of hip baths, Bath chairs and boxes for papers, the voices of four women- Anna Nikolayevna, Nata and the Shpeier sisters, artists -made it noisy. 'I really like this cabinet, but the bench doesn't attract me. I'd always prefer the cabinet.' 'Even if furniture for seating were needed?' 'People are indignant about the piles of work that servants have: they have more leisure than we do! Sometimes I don't leave the house for days, but how many times does our Annushka have to go to the shop for one thing or another, for II

bread, for boots. And what's more, the contact with other people is immense. I find the complaints of all the commiserators exaggerated.' 'Imagine, he poses with such an air that female pupils are scared to sit near him. And he's the most interesting character too: a Russian gipsy from Munich; he was at a grammar school, in the ballet, an artist's model; he reports ever such entertaining details about Stuck.' 2 'This will be too bright on pink foulard. I'd prefer pale green.' 'You need to ask Stroop about that.' 'But you know he went away yesterday, Stroop, you wretches!' cried the elder Shpeier. 'What, Stroop's gone away? Where to? Why?' 'Now that I can't tell you: it's a secret, as usual.' 'Who did you hear it from?' 'It was from him himself I heard it; for about three weeks, he says.' 'Well, that's not so terrible!' 'And just today Vanya Smurov was asking when Stroop would be coming to see us.' 'So why does he need to know?' 'I don't know, some sort of business.' 'Vanya has business with Stroop? That's original!' 'Well, Nata, it's time we went,' Anna Nikolayevna tried to chirp, and the two ladies withdrew, rustling their skirts, certain that they were very like the society ladies in the novels by Prevost3 and Ohnet4 which they read in translation. In April the question of a dacha was raised. Alexei Vasilyevich had to be in town frequently, almost daily; Koka and Boba too, and Anna Nikolayevna and Nata's plans regarding the Volga were hanging in the air. There was wavering between Terioki and Sestroretsk, but irrespective of the site of the dacha, everyone was concerned with their summer clothes. Dust flew through the wide open windows and the noise of driving and the ringing of horse-drawn trams could be heard. To do his homework or to read, Vanya sometimes went off to the Summer Garden. Sitting on the path closest to the Field of Mars, and with his open yellowy-pink book of Teibner's5 editions set down binding uppermost, already grown up a little and pale from the spring sun, he looked at the passers-by in the Garden and on the other side of the Swan Canal. From the other end of the Garden came the laughter of children playing in the open space around Krylov, 6 and Vanya did not hear the crunching of the sand beneath the feet of the approaching Stroop. 'Are you working?' said the latter, lowering himself onto the bench alongside Vanya, who had thought to limit himself to a bow. 'I am; but you know, I'm so fed up with it all, it's simply awful!. . .' 'What's that, Homer?' 'Yes, Homer. This Greek especially!' 'You don't like Greek?' 'Who does like it?' smiled Vanya. 'That's a great pity!' 'What is?' 'That you don't like languages.' 'Modern ones are all right, I like them, you can read things, but who on earth's going to read them in Greek, such antediluvian stuff?' 'What a boy you are, Vanya. A whole world, worlds are closed for you; what's more, a world of beauty, not only to know which, but to love which, is the basis of any degree of education.' 'You can read in translations, but so much time learning grammar?!' Stroop looked at Vanya with infinite regret. 'Instead of a man of flesh and blood, laughing or sullen, who can be loved, kissed, hated, in whom one can see the blood flowing in the veins and the natural grace of the naked body- to have a soulless puppet, often made with the hands of a hackthere you have translations. And very little time is needed for preparatory work on grammar. You must simply read, read and read. Read, looking up every word in the dictionary, as though forcing your way through a forest thicket, and you'd enjoy untried delights. And it seems to me, Vanya, you have within you the resources to become a genuine new man.' Vanya was discontentedly silent. 'You're in bad surroundings; but that may be for the best, as you're divested of the prejudices of any kind of traditional life, and you could become a perfectly modern man if you wanted,' Stroop added after a pause. 'I don't know, I'd like to get away from all this somewhere: from the grammar school, and from Homer, and from Anna Nikolayevna- and that's all.' 'Into the lap of nature?' 'Precisely.' 'But, my dear friend, if to live in the lap of nature means to eat more, to drink milk, to bathe and do nothing, then, of course, that is very simple; but taking pleasure in nature is perhaps more difficult than Greek grammar and, like any sort of pleasure, it's tiring. And I can't believe in the man who, seeing the best part of nature - the sky and water -with indifference in town, travels to Mont Blanc to seek nature; I can't believe that he loves nature.' Uncle Kostya offered to give Vanya a lift in a cab. In the hot morning the proximity of the summer could already be sensed, and the streets were half blocked off with chevaux de frise.

Uncle Kostya, occupying three-quarters of the cab, sat firmly with his legs set apart. 'Uncle Kostya, can you wait a little, I'll just find out if the priest has come, and if he hasn't, I'll go on with you for the ride to wherever you need to go, and come back from there on foot for the walk, rather than sitting in school. All right?' 'And why should your priest not have come?' 'He's already been ill for a week.' 'Ah, all right then, ask.' A minute later Vanya came out and, walking around the cab, got in on the other side next to Konstantin Vasilyevich. 'It's as if that Larion Dmitriyevich had a presentiment, brother, of the plans we were making for him- gone away, and doesn't come back.' 'Perhaps he has come back.' 'Then he would have come to see Anna Nikolayevna.' 'Who is he, Uncle Kostya?' 'Who- who do you mean?' 'Larion Dmitriyevich.' 'Stroop- and nothing more. Half-English, a rich man, doesn't work anywhere, lives well, splendidly even, a highly educated and well-read man, so I don't even understand what he's doing, visiting the Kazanskys.' 'He's not married, is he, Uncle?' 'Quite the opposite even, and if Nata thinks that he'll fall for her, she's sorely mistaken; and in general, I really can't understand what there is for him to do at the Kazanskys'? Yesterday, it was hilarious: Anna Nikolayevna was giving pitched battle to Alexei!' They were crossing a bridge over the Fontanka. Peasant men on barrels were pulling fish out through traps, little steamboats were smoking away, and there was a crowd standing idly by the stone parapet. An ice-cream vendor was making a clatter, moving his blue crate about.

'Maybe you've heard from somebody that Stroop's back, or you've seen the man himself?' said Uncle Kostya in farewell. 'No, and how could I have, since you say he's not come back,' said Vanya, blushing. 'There you were, saying it isn't hot, but how red in the face you've gone yourself,' and Konstantin Vasilyevich's corpulent figure disappeared in the entranceway. 'Why did I conceal the meeting with Stroop?' thought Vanya, rejoicing that he had a sort of secret developing. The staff-room was very smoky, and glasses of watery tea gave off a slight amber hue in the semi-darkness of the ground-floor room. To those going in it seemed as if figures were moving in an aquarium. The torrential rain falling outside the frostedglass windows intensified that impression. The noise of voices and the tinkling of teaspoons mixed with the muffled din of the lunch break that carried from the hall and, at times, from just nearby, from the corridor. 'Class six are driving Orlov mad again; he really doesn't know how to assert himself.' 'Well, all right, so let's say you give him a two, but he'll still be here- do you think to correct him like that?' 'I'm not pursuing correctional objectives at all, just aiming for a fair evaluation of knowledge.' 'Our grammar school pupils would be horrified if they saw the curricula of French colleges, not to mention seminaries.' 'I van Petrovich is unlikely to be pleased with that.' 'Superb, I tell you, superb, yesterday he was in excellent voice.' 'You're a fine one too, going for a little slam in clubs when you yourself have the king, jack and two minor cards.' 'Shpilevsky is a dissolute young wretch, and I don't understand why it is you stand up for him so.'

All the voices were drowned by the harsh tenor of the inspector, a Czech in a pince-nez and with a small, grey, wedgeshaped beard, 'Then I'll ask you, gentlemen, to be responsible for transom windows: never higher fourteen degree, draught and ventilation.' They gradually dispersed, and in the emptying staff-room there rang out only the quiet, low bass of the Russian language teacher conversing with the Greek teacher. 'You come across some amazing fellows there. Some reading was suggested for the summer before joining up, quite a lot, and, for example, The Demon 8 gets related like this ex abrupto,9 "The Devil was flying over the earth and saw a girl." -"And what was the girl's name?"- "Liza."- "Let's suppose it was Tamara."- "Yes sir, Tamara."- "Well, and what then?""He wanted to marry her, but her fiance interfered; then the fiance was killed by the Tatars."- "And so then the Demon married Tamara?"- "No sir, an angel interfered, stole a march; and that way the Devil remained a bachelor and started hating everything."' 'I think that's magnificent ... ' 'Or a judgement on Rudin, 10 "He was an awful man, always talking, but did nothing; then he got mixed up with some worthless people and got killed."- "And why," I ask, "do you consider the workers and all the participants generally in the popular movement, during which Rudin perished, worthless people?"- "Yes sir," he rejoins, "he suffered for the truth."' 'You were wrong to try and get that young man's personal opinion of what he'd read. Military service, like a monastery, like almost any evolved dogma, has an immense attraction in the availability of ready and defined attitudes to all kinds of phenomena and concepts. That's a great support for weak people, and life becomes extraordinarily easy, divested of ethical invention.'

In the corridor Vanya was waiting for Daniil lvanovich. 'What can I do for you, Smurov?' 'I'd like to have a word with you in private, Daniil lvanovich.' 'Regarding what?' 'Regarding Greek.' 'Is everything not going well for you, then?' 'No, I got a three plus.' 'So what is it you want?' 'No, I wanted to have a word with you generally about Greek, and please, Dannil lvanovich, do allow me to come to your apartment.' 'Yes, please do, please do. You know my address. Although this is more than remarkable: someone for whom everything is going well, and wanting to talk in private about Greek. Please do, I live alone, from seven to eleven I'm always at your service.' Daniil lvanovich had already started going up the matting on the staircase, but, stopping, he called to Vanya, 'Don't you get any ideas, Smurov: after eleven I'm at home as well, but I go to bed and am then capable of only the most private explanations, of which you probably have no need.' Vanya met Stroop in the Summer Garden on more than one occasion and, without noticing it himself, would be waiting for him, always sitting in one and the same avenue, and, when leaving without having seen him, his step light in spite of his intentional slowness, he would peer with sharp eyes at the figures of men resembling Stroop. One day, when, without having seen him, he set out to walk around a part of the Garden where he never went, he came across Koka walking in an unbuttoned overcoat over the top of a double-breasted jacket. 'So is this where you are, Ivan? What, taking a stroll?' 'Yes, I'm here quite often, what of it?'

'How is it I never see you? You sit somewhere on the other side, do you?' 'It varies.' 'Now I come across Stroop every time, and I even suspect it may be for one and the same reason that we come here.' 'Is Stroop back, then?' 'For some time. Nata and everyone knows it, and no matter how foolish Nata might be, it's nonetheless swinish not to come and see us, as though we're some sort of trash.' 'What's Nata got to do with it?' 'She's trying to catch Stroop, and it's completely pointless her doing it: he's not going to get married generally, least of all to Nata; I think he only has aesthetic conversations with Ida Golberg too, and I'm wrong to be worried.' 'Are you worried, then?' 'Naturally, since I'm in love!' and, quite forgetting he was talking with Vanya, who did not know of his affairs, Koka grew animated: 'A wonderful girl, educated, a musician, a beauty, and how rich she is! Only she walks with a limp. And so I come here every day to see her, she takes a walk here from three until four o'clock, and I'm afraid Stroop perhaps comes for the same reason.' 'Is Stroop in love with her too, then?' 'Stroop? Well, just hang on now, that's not at all the way the land lies! He only makes conversation, whereas she, she all but idolises him. And Stroop's loves - that's quite another, quite another sphere.' 'You're simply in a temper, Koka! .. .' 'Ridiculous! ... ' They had just turned past a bed of red geraniums when Koka proclaimed, 'And there they are!' Vanya saw a tall girl with a pale, quite round face, very fair hair, big grey eyes of Aphrodisian shape, which had now turned blue in agitation, with a mouth like the ones in Botticelli'sii paintings, wearing a dark dress; she walked with a limp and leaning on the arm of an elderly lady, while Stroop on her other side was saying, 'And people saw that every sort of beauty, every sort of love was from the gods, and they became free and bold, and they grew wings.' In the end Koka and Boba got a box for Samson and Delilah. But the first performance was substituted with Carmen, and Nata, on whose insistence it was that this venture had been undertaken in the hope of meeting Stroop on neutral ground, ranted and raved, knowing he would not go without special reason to such a well-known opera. She gave up her place in the box to Vanya on the condition that, if she should come to the theatre in the middle of the show, he would go home. Anna Nikolayevna, the Shpeier sisters and Alexei Vasilyevich set off in cabs, while the youngsters went on ahead on foot. Carmen and her friends were already dancing at Lilas Pastia's when Nata, who had discovered as if by inspiration that Stroop was in the theatre, appeared all in pale blue, powdered and agitated. 'Well, Ivan, you'll have to be interrupted.' 'I'll stay till the end of the act.' 'Is Stroop here?' asked Nata in a whisper, settling down beside Anna Nikolayevna. The latter directed her eyes in silence towards the box where Ida Golberg was sitting with the elderly lady, a very young officer and Stroop. 'It's simply a premonition, simply a premonition!' said Nata, opening and closing her fan. 'Poor thing!' sighed Anna Nikolayevna. In the interval Vanya was about to leave when Nata stopped him and invited him to stretch his legs in the foyer. 'Nata, Nata!' Anna Nikolayevna's voice rang out from the depths of the box, 'will this be proper?'

Nata rushed impetuously downstairs, drawing Vanya along after her. Before the entrance into the foyer she stopped by a mirror to adjust her hair and then slowly went into the hall, not as yet filled with people. They came across Stroop: he was walking in conversation with that same young officer who had been in the box, and, without noticing Smurov and Nata, he even went straight out into the intercommunicating room next door, where there was a bored salesgirl with waved hair at a table of photographs. 'Let's go out, it's dreadfully stuffy!' said Nata, dragging Vanya after Stroop. 'We're nearer our seat from the other exit.' 'What does it matter!' the girl shouted, hurrying, and all but pushing people aside. Stroop caught sight of them and bent over the photographs. Drawing level with him, Vanya called out loudly, 'Larion Dmitriyevich!' 'Ah, Vanya?' said the latter, turning. 'Natalya Alexeyevna, forgive me, I didn't notice you straight away.' 'I didn't expect you to be here,' Nata began. 'But why not? I'm very fond of Carmen, and I shall never grow tired of it: it has in it the profound and genuine throb of life and everything is flooded in sunlight; I can understand how Nietzsche could have been carried away by that music.' Nata listened in silence, her ginger eyes looking with malicious pleasure at the man talking, then pronounced, 'It's not having met you at Carmen that surprises me, but having seen you in St Petersburg, yet not at our home.' 'Yes, I arrived a couple of weeks ago.' 'Very nice.' They started to walk around the empty corridor past drowsing footmen, and Vanya, standing by the staircase, looked with interest at Nata's face becoming increasingly covered with red blotches and at the angry physiognomy of her cavalier. The interval came to an end, and Vanya had started going quietly upstairs to the circle to put on his coat and go home, when suddenly he was overtaken by Nata, almost running and with her handkerchief at her mouth. 'It's disgraceful, do you hear, lvan, disgraceful, the way that man talks to me,' she whispered to Vanya, and ran past up the stairs. Vanya wanted to say goodbye to Stroop and, after standing for some time on the staircase, he went down to the lower corridor; there, by the doors to a box, stood Stroop and the officer. 'Goodbye, Larion Dmitriyevich,' said Vanya, pretending he was going upstairs to his place. 'Are you leaving, then?' 'I didn't have my own seat, you know: Nata arrived, and so I was one person too many.' 'What silliness, come into our box, we have empty seats. The final act is one of the best.' 'And is it all right for me to go into the box: after all, I'm not acquainted?' 'Of course it's all right: the Golbergs are very straightforward people, and you are still a boy, Vanya.' Passing into the box, Stroop bent down to Vanya, who listened to him without turning his head, 'And then, Vanya, I may not be at the Kazanskys' in the future; so, if you're not averse, I shall always be very glad to see you at my home. You can say you're studying English with me; but nobody will even ask where you go and why. Please, Vanya, do come.' 'Very well. So have you fallen out with Nata, then? You're not going to marry her?' asked Vanya, without turning his head. 'No,' said Stroop seriously. 'Do you know, it's a very good thing you're not going to marry her, because she's dreadfully unpleasant, a complete toad!' Vanya suddenly burst out laughing, turning his whole face towards Stroop, and for some reason grasped his hand. 'It's amusing how much we see what we wish to see and understand just what we are seeking. How in the Greek tragedians the Romans and the Romanic peoples of the seventeenth century perceived only the three unities. The eighteenth century - booming tirades and ideas of liberation, the Romantics feats of lofty heroism, and our own age- the sharp tang of the primitive and Klinger's irradiance of the distant ... ' Vanya listened while examining the room, still flooded in evening sunlight: around the walls- shelves of unbound books up to the ceiling, books on tables and chairs, a cage with a thrush, a paralytic kitten on a leather sofa, and in the corner a small head of Antinous, standing alone as the penates of this abode. Daniil Ivanovich, in felt slippers, was bustling about over tea, pulling cheese and butter in paper wrappers out of the iron stove, and the kitten, without turning its head, followed the movements of its owner with its green eyes. 'And what gave us the idea he was old, when he's perfectly young,' thought Vanya, scrutinising the bald head of the little Greek teacher in surprise. 'In the fifteenth century the Italians had an already firmly established view of the friendships of Achilles and Patroclus and Orestes and Pylades 18 as sodomitic love, and yet in Homer there are no direct indications of it.' 'So the Italians thought it up themselves?' 'No, they were right, but the point is that only a cynical attitude to any sort of love makes it depravity. Am I acting morally or immorally when I sneeze, dust the table, stroke the kitten? And yet these same actions can be criminal, if, for example, let's say, by sneezing I give notice to a murderer of a convenient time for a murder, and so on. The man committing a murder cold-bloodedly, without spite, divests the act of any ethical colouring other then the mystical intercourse of murderer and victim, of lovers, of mother and child.' It had grown quite dark, and barely visible through the window were the roofs of buildings and, in the distance, St Isaac's against a rather dirty pink sky, obscured by smoke. Vanya started getting ready to go home; the kitten set off, hobbling on its crippled forelegs, roused from Vanya's cap on which it had been sleeping. 'You must be a kind man, Daniil Ivanovich: taking in various cripples.' 'I like him, and it's nice for me having him here. If to do what gives pleasure means to be kind, then that's what I am.' 'Tell me, please, Smurov,' said Daniil Ivanovich, shaking Vanya's hand in farewell, 'did you come up with the idea of visiting me for Greek conversations yourself?' 'Yes, that is, the idea was perhaps given me by someone else too.' 'Who, if it's not a secret?' 'No, why should it be? Only you don't know him.' 'But maybe I do?' 'A certain Stroop.' 'Larion Dmitriyevich?' 'Do you know him, then?' 'Very well, even,' replied the Greek teacher, lighting the stairs for Vanya with a lamp. There was nobody in the enclosed cabin of the Finland steamboat, but that was precisely where Nata, who was afraid of draughts and gumboils, had led the whole party. 'There are no dachas at all, none at all!' said weary Anna Nikolayevna. 'Such unpleasant places everywhere: holes, draughts!'

'Dachas are always draughty - what did you expect? You weren't born yesterday!' 'Want one?' Koka offered his open silver cigarette-case with a naked lady to Boba. 'A dacha's a really unpleasant place not because it's unpleasant there, but because you feel yourself to be camping out, a temporary resident, and life isn't organised, whereas in town you always know what you need to do at what time.' 'And if you always lived at the dacha, winter and summer?' 'Then it wouldn't be unpleasant; I'd organise a routine.' 'It's true,' Anna Nikolayevna joined in, 'you don't even want to get settled just for a time. The summer before last, for instance, we put up new wallpaper- and had to give it all nice and clean like that as a present to the owner; we weren't going to strip it off!' 'What, do you regret not making it dirty?' Nata looked through the glass with a grimace at the windows of the palaces burning in the sunset and the goldenpink waves spreading smooth and wide. 'And then there are the masses of people, they know everything about one another, what they cook, how much they pay their servants.' 'Generally, disgusting! ... ' 'So why are you going?' 'What do you mean, why? What else can you do? Stay in town, or something?' 'Well, and why not? At least when it's sunny you can walk on the shady side.' 'Uncle Kostya will always think of something.' 'Mama,' Nata turned round suddenly, 'let's go to the Volga, dear: there are little towns there, Plyos, Vasilsursk, where you can get fixed up really cheaply. Varvara Nikolayevna Shpeier said so ... A whole party of them stayed in Plyos, you know,

Levitan was still living there; and they stayed in Uglich too.' 'Yes, and it was Uglich they were apparently chucked out of,' responded Koka. 'So they were chucked out, so what of it? But we won't be chucked out! Of course the landlords said to them, "There's a whole party of you, young ladies, cavaliers; ours is a quiet town, no one comes here, we're afraid: do forgive us, but clear out of the apartment."' They were approaching the Alexandrovsky Garden; through the lower windows of the jetty could be seen a brightly lit kitchen, a kitchen-boy all in white preparing fish, a blazing cooker in the depths. 'Aunt, I'll walk to Larion Dmitriyevich's from here,' said Vanya. 'Well, go on then; found a nice companion there too!' grumbled Anna Nikolayevna. 'Is he a bad man, then?' 'I'm not talking about his being bad, but about his not being a companion.' 'I study English with him.' 'That's all nonsense, you'd be better off doing your homework ... ' 'No, all the same, Aunt, I will go, you know.' 'Well, go, who's stopping you?' 'Have a cuddle with your Stroop,' added Nata. 'Yes, I will, yes, I will, and it's of no concern to anyone.' 'Hm, well,' Boba was about to begin, but Vanya cut him short by falling upon Nata: 'You wouldn't mind having a cuddle with him either, but he doesn't want to, because you're a ginger toad, because you're a fool! Yes!' 'Ivan, stop it!' Alexei Vasilyevich's voice rang out.

'Why is it they've pitched into me? Why won't they let me go? Am I a little boy, then? I'll be writing to Uncle Kolya tomorrow! ... ' 'lvan, stop it,' declared Alexei Vasilyevich a tone higher. 'A young wretch, a little pig like him dares to behave like this!' said Anna Nikolayevna in agitation. 'And Stroop will never marry you, never ever!' Vanya blurted out, beside himself. Nata immediately fell quiet and, almost calm, said quietly, 'And is he going to marry Ida Golberg?' 'I don't know,' replied Vanya, also quietly and simply, 'I think it's unlikely,' he added almost tenderly. 'Now just listen to the conversations they've started!' cried Anna Nikolayevna. 'What, you believe this young wretch, do you?' 'Maybe I do,' muttered Nata, turning towards the window. 'I van, just don't think they're such fools as they want to seem,' Boba tried to persuade Vanya, 'they're ever so pleased that through you they can still have dealings with Stroop and information about Golberg; only if you really are well disposed towards Larion Dmitriyevich, you be careful, don't betray yourself.' 'How am I betraying myself?' asked Vanya in surprise. 'Has my advice come in useful so soon?!' Boba laughed, and strode onto the jetty. As Vanya was entering Stroop's apartment he heard singing and the fortepiano. Without entering the drawing room, he went quietly into the study to the left of the hall and started to listen. A male voice he did not know sang, The evening twilight above a warm sea, The lights of beacons against a darkened sky, The scent of verbena at the end of a feast, The fresh morning after lengthy vigils, A stroll in the avenues of a vernal garden, The cries and laughter of women bathing, Sacred peacocks by the temple of]uno, Vendors of violets, pomegranates, lemons, The doves are cooing, the sun is shiningWhen I see you, my native towns And the fortepiano cloaked the harrowing phrases of the voice in deep chords, like a dense fog. The overlapping conversation of male voices began, and Vanya went out into the reception room. How he loved this spacious, greenish room, filled with the sounds of Rameau 22 and Debussy,23 and these friends of Stroop's, so unlike the people to be met at the Kazanskys'; these arguments; these late suppers for men with wine and light conversation; this study with books right up to the ceiling, where they read Marlowe 2 4 and Swinburne; this bedroom with the wash-set, where across a bright-green ground there danced a garland of dark-red fauns; this dining room, all in red copper; these tales of Italy, Egypt, India; these raptures over any acute beauty of any country and any time; these walks to the islands; these disturbing, but alluring discussions; this smile on an unattractive face; this scent of peau d'Espagne with the breath of decay; these thin, strong fingers wearing rings, shoes with an unusually thick sole - how he loved it all, not understanding, but obscurely captivated. 'We are Hellenes: the intolerant monotheism of the Judaeans is alien to us, their turning away from the fine arts, their simultaneous attachment to the flesh, to posterity, to the seed. In all the Bible there are no indications for having faith in bliss beyond the grave, and the sole reward mentioned in the Commandments (and specifically for showing respect for the givers of life) is that you will be long-lived on the earth. A fruitless marriage is a

stigma and a curse that deprives one even of the right to participate in divine worship, as though it has been forgotten that it is according to Jewish legend that childbearing and toil are a punishment for sin, and not the aim of life. And the further people are from sin, the further will they go from procreation and physical toil. Among Christians it is vaguely understandable, when a woman cleanses herself with prayer after childbirth, but not after marriage, and a man is not subjected to anything of the kind. Love has no other objective beyond itself; nature is also devoid of any shadow of the idea of finality. The laws of nature are of a completely different category to the laws of God, socalled, and men. The law of nature is not that a given tree must produce its fruit, but that in certain conditions it will produce a fruit, and in others it will not, and will even die itself, just as fairly and simply as it would have borne fruit. That on the introduction of a knife into a heart, it may stop beating; there is no finality here, no good and evil. And the law of nature can be broken only by the man who can kiss his eyes without their having been torn from their sockets, and see the back of his head without a mirror. And when you're told, "it's unnatural", you just look at the blind man who said it and pass by, without becoming like the sparrows that scatter away from a kitchengarden scarecrow. People walk around like blind men, like dead men, when they could create the most ardent life, where all enjoyment would be so heightened, it would be as if you had only just been born and would die at any·moment.lt is with precisely such greed that everything must be appreciated. There are wonders all around us at every step: there are muscles, ligaments in the human body that cannot be seen without a tremor! And men who link the concept of beauty with the beauty of a woman display only vulgar lust, and are further, furthest of all from the true idea of beauty. We are Hellenes, lovers of the beautiful, bacchanals of the future life. Like the visions of Tannhauser in the grotto of Venus, like the clairvoyance of Klinger and Thoma, there is the land of our forefathers, flooded in sunlight and freedom, with beautiful, bold people, and across the seas, through mist and murk, we are going there, Argonauts! And in the most unheard-of novelty we recognise our most ancient roots, and in the most unprecedented radiance we sense our fatherland!' 'Vanya, have a look in the dining room, please, what's the time?' said Ida Golberg, lowering some sort of embroidery onto her knees. The main room in the new house, which resembled a bright cabin on the deck of a ship, was meagrely and simply furnished, a yellow curtain the size of the entire wall covered all three windows at once, and on the leather trunks, the suitcases studded with little brass nails and still waiting to be packed, and a box of late hyacinths there lay an alarming yellow hue. Vanya put down the Dante he had been reading aloud and went out into the next room. 'Half past five,' he said when he returned. 'Larion Dmitriyevich has been gone a long time,' he said, as though answering the girl's thoughts. 'Are we not going to do any more work?' 'It's not worth starting a new canto, Vanya. And so, ... e vidi che con riso Udito havenan ['ultimo construtto; Poi a la bella donna tornai il viso, and saw they had been listening to the last conclusion with a smile, then turned to the beautifullady.'3° 'The beautiful lady - is that the contemplation of an active life?' 'You can't trust in commentators entirely, Vanya, except for historical information; understand simply and beautifully that's all, or else, truly, instead of Dante you end up with a kind of mathematics.' She put her work down conclusively and sat as though waiting for something, tapping occasionally with a paper knife on the light arm of the chair. 'Larion Dmitriyevich will probably be here soon,' declared Vanya almost protectively, again catching the girl's thought. 'Did you see him yesterday?' 'No, I didn't see him yesterday or the day before. Yesterday he went to Tsarskoye in the afternoon and was at his club in the evening, and the day before he went somewhere on the Vyborg Side - I don't know where,' Vanya reported deferentially and proudly. 'To see whom?' 'I don't know, somewhere on business.' 'You don't know?' 'No.' 'Listen, Vanya,' the girl began, examining the knife. 'I want you - not for me alone, but for you, for Larion Dmitriyevich, for all of us - to find out what this address is. It's very important, very important for all three,' and she reached a scrap of paper out to Vanya, where in Stroop's generously spaced and pointed handwriting was written, 'Vyborg Side, Simbirskaya St., apt. 103, Fyodor Vasilyevich Solovyov.' It did not particularly surprise anyone that Stroop, among other enthusiasms, began to get involved in Russian antiquities too; that he began to be visited by dealers, sometimes garrulous ones in German dress, sometimes old ones 'from God' in longskirted half-length caftans, but all equally roguish, with manuscripts, icons, old cloth, fake castings; that he began taking an interest in ancient singing, reading Smolensky, Razumovsky and Metallov, sometimes going to Nikolayevskaya to listen to the singing, and, finally, under the direction of some pock-marked chorister, learning neumes himself. 'This obscure corner of the world spirit was completely unknown to me,' Stroop would repeat, trying to infect Vanya with this enthusiasm too. Surprisingly, the latter was also leaning in precisely the same direction. One day Stroop announced over tea, 'Now this, Vanya, you must see without fail: an authentic schismatic of the old school from the Volga, just imagine: eighteen years old and goes around in a poddyovka, doesn't drink tea; his sisters live in a hermitage; a house on the Volga with a high fence and guard dogs where they go to bed at nine o'clock- something like Pechersky, only less treacly. You must see it without fail. Let's go and call on Zasadin tomorrow, he has an interesting "Ascension"; this character of ours will be there and I'll introduce you. Yes, incidentally, make a note of the address just in case; I may go straight from the exhibition, and you'll have to try and find it by yourself.' And without looking in his notebook, Stroop dictated, like something he knew very well, Simbirskaya, apt. 103, furnished roomsask there.' On the other side of the wall could be heard the muffled sound of two voices; a clock with weights was quietly ticking; on tables, chairs and window sills were piles and rows of dark icons and books in leather-covered boards; it was dusty and musty, and from the corridor, through the transom window above the door, there carried the rotten smell of sour cabbage soup. Zasadin, standing in front of Vanya and putting on ·a caftan, was saying, 'Larion Dmitriyevich will be here in no sooner than about forty minutes' time, or maybe even an hour; I ought to go and fetch a little icon from just nearby, only I don't know what to do. Wait here, will you, or will you take a walk somewhere?'

'I'll stay here.' 'Right, right, and I'll be back straight away. Now why don't you take a look in some books for the time being,' and Zasadin, handing Vanya a dust-covered Limonar, hurriedly disappeared through the door, from where the rotten smell of sour cabbage soup became stronger. And Vanya, standing by the window, opened the tale that told how a certain elderly hermit, after a chance visit from a woman who lived alone in the same wilderness, kept on returning in his lecherous thoughts to that same female and, unable to endure it, took his staff and set off in the most scorching heat, staggering like a blind man in his lust, for the place where he thought to find this woman; and how in a frenzy he saw that the earth had yawned open, and there in it were three decomposed corpses: a woman, a man and a child; and there was a voice, 'Here is a woman, here is a man, here is a child - who can distinguish between them now? Go and slake your lust.' All are equal, all are equal before death, love and beauty, all beautiful bodies are equal, and only lust makes a man chase after a woman and a woman thirst for a man. On the other side of the wall a young, rather husky voice continued, 'Well, I'll be going, Uncle Yermolai, what do you keep on scolding for?' 'How on earth can I not scold you, you layabout? Taking it into your head to play around!' 'Maybe Vaska's told you a pack of lies, why do you listen to him?' 'Why should Vaska lie? Well, tell me yourself, deny it yourself: aren't you playing around, then?' 'Well, what of it? So I'm playing around! Doesn't Vaska play around? Very likely we all play around, except perhaps Dmitry Pavlovich,' and the speaker could be heard to burst out laughing. After a pause he began again in a more intimate tone, in a low voice, 'It was Vaska himself that taught me; a young gentleman came once and says to Dmitry Pavlovich, "I want to be washed by the one who let me in," and it was me that let him in; and as Dmitry Pavlovich knew this gentleman was one for playing around, and Vasily had always dealt with him before, he says, "It's quite impossible, your worship, for him to come by himself, he's not a regular, and he doesn't understand any of that." - "Well, to hell with you, give me two, with Vasily as one of them!" As soon as he's gone in, Vaska says, "And how much will you give us?" -"Besides beer, ten roubles." But we have a regulation: whoever drew the curtain across at the doors, it's them that'll be playing around, and you can't bring out less than five roubles to the head man; so Vasily says, "No, your honour, that's not worth our while." He promised another tenner. Vasya went to get the water ready, and I started getting undressed, but the gentleman says, "What's that you've got on your cheek, Fyodor: a birthmark, or is it some sort of dirt?" He laughs and stretches out his hand. And I stand there like an idiot, not knowing myself whether I've got some birthmark on my cheek or not. At this point, though, Vasily arrived, really cross, and says to the gentleman, "This way, sir," and off we all went.' 'Matvei, is he staying with you?' 'No, he's got a position.' 'Who with? The colonel?' 'Yes, he offered him thirty roubles with all found.' 'He's got married, apparently, Matvei?' 'He has, gave him some money for the wedding himself, had a coat made for eighty roubles, but what of the wife? She lives in the country, he won't be allowed to live with a woman in a position like that, will he? I've decided to take a position too,' said the narrator after a pause. 'Just the same as Matvei?'

'A good gentleman, on his own, thirty roubles too, like Matvei.' 'Look out, Fedya, you'll come to a bad end!' 'And maybe I won't.' 'And who is this gentleman, someone you know, is he?' 'He lives here on Furshtadtskaya, where Dmitry works as an under-footman too, on the first floor. And he's sometimes here at Stepan Stepanovich's as well.' 'An Old Believer,35 is he?' 'No, nothing of the kind! He's not even Russian, I don't think. English, or something.' 'Well spoken of?' 'Yes, they say he's a good, kind gentleman.' 'Well then, good luck.' 'Goodbye, Uncle Yermolai, thanks for the hospitality.' 'Drop by when you can, Fedya.' 'I will,' and with a light step, his heels tapping, Fyodor slammed the door and set off down the corridor. Vanya went out quickly, not entirely aware of why he was doing so, and called after the young man passing by in a Russian shirt with a jacket on top, from beneath which hung the tassels of a laced belt, wearing short, patent-leather boots and with a peaked cap tilted to one side, 'Listen, do you know if Stepan Stepanovich Zasadin will be long?' He turned around, and in the light penetrating from the door of the room Vanya saw quick and furtive grey eyes in the sort of pale face that people who live locked up or in perpetual steam have, dark hair cut in a fringe, and a beautifully drawn mouth. Despite a certain coarseness in the features, there was a pampered air to the face, and although Vanya looked with prejudice at those furtive, gentle eyes and the impudent grin of the mouth, there was something both in the face and the tall figure as a whole, the shapeliness of which was striking 35

even beneath a jacket, that captivated you and made you feel embarrassed. 'And are you being so good as to wait for him?' 'Yes, and it's nearly seven o'clock.' 'Half past six,' Fyodor corrected him, taking out a pocketwatch, 'and we thought there was no one in his room ... He'll probably be here soon,' he added, just so as to say something. 'Yes. Thank you, forgive me for troubling you,' said Vanya without moving. 'That's quite all right, sir,' he replied with a grimace. There was a loud ring, and in came Stroop, Zasadin and a tall young man in a poddyovka. Stroop glanced quickly at Fyodor and Vanya, who were still standing opposite one another. 'I'm sorry for making you wait,' he said to Vanya, while Fyodor rushed to remove his coat. Vanya saw all this as in a dream, feeling he was falling away into some sort of abyss and that everything was being obscured in mist. When Vanya entered the dining room, Anna Nikolayevna finished saying, 'And it's a pity, you know, that such a man is compromising himself like this.' Konstantin Vasilyevich turned his eyes silently towards Vanya, who had picked up a book and sat down by the window, and he began to speak, '"Recherche, unnatural, excessive," they say, but if you stick to the use of our bodies that's considered natural, then with your hands you'll have only to tear raw meat apart and put it in your mouth and fight with your enemies, and with your feet chase hares or run away from wolves, et cetera. It reminds me of the tale from The Thousand and One Nights where a girl tormented by the idea of finality kept on asking what this or that had been created for. And when she asked about a certain part of the body, her mother flogged her, repeating as she did so, "Now you see what it was created for." Of course, that nice mama gave a graphic demonstration of the truth of her explanation, but the potential of the given spot would scarcely have been exhausted by it. And all moral explanations of the naturalness of actions boil down to the nose being made to be painted with green paint. Man should develop every capacity of his spirit and body to the utmost and seek out the application of his capabilities, if he doesn't want to remain a Caliban.'3 6 'Well, gymnasts, now, walk upside down ... ' "'Well now, that is in any event a plus, and it may be very pleasant," Larion Dmitriyevich would say,' and Uncle Kostya threw a challenging look at Vanya, who had not stopped reading. 'What's Larion Dmitriyevich got to do with it?' remarked even Anna Nikolayevna. 'Surely you don't think I was stating my own views?' 'I'm going to see Nata,' declared Anna Nikolayevna, getting up. 'What, is she well? I don't see her at all,' Vanya remembered for some reason. 'What do you expect, you disappear for days on end.' 'And where is it I disappear to?' 'Now it's you that needs to be asked about that,' said his aunt as she left the room. Uncle Kostya was finishing his coffee, which had gone cold, and there was a strong smell of mothballs in the room. 'Were you talking about Stroop, Uncle Kostya, when I arrived?' Vanya made up his mind to ask. 'About Stroop? I really don't remember, but Aneta was saying something to me.' 'Well I thought it was about him.' 'No, why would she and I be talking about Stroop?' 'But do you really suppose Stroop has convictions such as those you were expressing?'

'His arguments are those; his actions I don't know, and another man's convictions are an obscure and subtle thing.' 'Do you think, then, that his actions are at variance with his words?' 'I don't know; I don't know his affairs, and then it's not always possible to act in accordance with desire. For example, we were intending to be at a dacha already long ago, yet meanwhile ... ' 'You know, Uncle, this Old Believer, Sorokin, is inviting me to visit them on the Volga. "Pay us a visit," he says, "Daddy's all right, he won't scold; you can take a look at how our people exist, if it's of interest." Just suddenly took a liking to me, I don't even know why.' 'Well, all right, off you go then.' 'Aunt won't give me any money, and in any event it's not worthwhile.' 'Why's it not worthwhile?' 'It's all so vile, it's all so vile!' 'And why on earth is it everything's suddenly become vile?' 'I really don't know,' Vanya said, and covered his face with his hands. Konstantin Vasilyevich looked at Vanya's bowed head and quietly went out of the room. There was no doorman, the doors onto the staircase were open, and into the hall from the closed study there carried an irate voice, alternating with quiet, when there was the vague sound of someone's soft, apparently female voice. Without taking off his coat and cap, Vanya stopped in the hall; the door-handle into the study turned, and in the half-opened door the arm of someone holding that handle appeared as far as the shoulder in the red sleeve of a Russian shirt. Stroop's words carried distinctly, 'I will not allow anyone to touch upon it! Particularly a woman. I forbid you, do you hear, I forbid you to speak of it!' The door closed again, and the voices again became more muffled; in anguish Vanya examined the hall he knew so well: the electric light in front of the mirror and above the table, the clothing on the racks; a lady's gloves had been dropped on the table, but no hat or outdoor clothing was to be seen. The doors again flew open with a crash, and Stroop, without noticing Vanya, and with an irate, pale face, went through into the corridor; a second later he was followed almost at a run by Fyodor in a red silk shirt with no belt and with a carafe in his hand. 'What can I do for you?' he said, addressing Vanya and evidently not recognising him. Fyodor's face was red with excitement, like that of someone who has been drinking or using rouge, his shirt was unbelted, his hair carefully combed and seemingly slightly curled, and he gave off a strong smell of Stroop's scent. 'What can I do for you?' he repeated to Vanya, who was looking at him with wide open eyes. 'Larion Dmitriyevich?' 'He's not here, sir.' 'Then how is it I just saw him?' 'I'm sorry, he's very busy, sir, he can't possibly see you.' 'You go and announce me.' 'No, really, better drop in again another time: it's absolutely impossible for him to see you now. He's not alone,' Fyodor lowered his voice. 'Fyodor!' called Stroop from the depths of the corridor, and the former rushed off with noiseless steps. After waiting a few minutes, Vanya went out onto the stairs, leaving the door ajar, behind which there again rang out muffled, but loud and irate voices. In the doorman's room, with her face to the mirror, adjusting her veil, stood a short lady in a grey-green dress and a black jacket. Passing behind her back, Vanya made out distinctly in the mirror that it was Nata. When she had finished adjusting her veil, she began unhurriedly climbing the stairs and rang at Stroop's apartment, as the doorman, arriving just in time, was letting Vanya out into the street. 'What's this?' Alexei Vasilyevich paused in his reading of the morning newspaper. "'Puzzling suicide. Yesterday, 2rst May, on Furshtadtskaya Street, house No., in the apartment of English subject L.D. Stroop, a young girl, full of hopes and energy, Ida Golberg, closed her account with life. The youthful suicide asks in her farewell note that no one be blamed for this death, but the situation in which this sad event took place leads one to assume there was a romance behind it. According to the owner of the apartment, the deceased, during a heated discussion, after writing something on a scrap of paper, quickly seized the revolver that had been prepared for his, Stroop's, journey, and before those present had had time to undertake anything, she had emptied an entire charge into her right temple. The solution to this puzzle is complicated by the fact that Mr Stroop's servant, Fyodor Vasilyevich Solovyov, a peasant of Oryol Province, disappeared without trace on the same day, and there remain unclarified not only the identity of a lady who came to Stroop's apartment half an hour before the fateful event, but also the degree of her influence on the tragic denouement. An investigation is under way."' All were silent at the tea table, and in the room, impregnated with the smell of mothballs, only the ticking of the clock could be heard. 'What on earth was it? Nata? Nata? You know it, don't you?' Vanya finally said in a voice that was not his own, but Nata continued to draw on her empty plate with a fork, answering not one word.

Part Two

'Just think, Vanya, how odd it is, that here you have another person, another person entirely, and his legs are different, and his skin, and his eyes - and he's completely yours, completely, completely, you can look at, kiss and touch all of him; every little mark on his body, wherever it might be, the little golden hairs that grow on his arms, every little furrow and hollow of the skin that is loved much too much. And you know everything, the way he walks, eats, sleeps, the way the wrinkles spread across his face when he smiles, the way he thinks, the way his body smells. And then it's as if you cease to be yourself, and it's as though you and he are one and the same: your flesh, your skin cleaves to him, and in love, Vanya, there's no greater happiness on earth, whereas without love it's unbearable, unbearable! And what I would say, Vanya, is that it's easier not to have while loving, than to have without loving. Marriage, marriage: the secret isn't about the priest giving his blessing and children coming - look at a cat, it's carrying as many as four times a year - but about a soul getting a burning desire to give itself to another and to take him completely, if only for a week, if only for a day, and if both of their souls are burning, then that means God has united them. It's a sin to make love with a cold heart or for gain, but anyone who's touched by the fiery finger, whatever he does, he remains pure before the Lord. Anyone who's touched by the flaming spirit of love, whatever he's done, it's all forgiven him, because he's no longer his own, in the spirit, in the rapture .. .' And getting up in agitation, Maria Dmitriyevna walked from one apple tree to another, then once more lowered herself onto the bench beside Vanya, from where one could see half the Volga, interminable forests on the other shore and, far away to the right, the white church of a village beyond the Volga. 'But it's frightening, Vanya, when love touches you; joyous, but frightening; as if you're flying and always falling, or you're 43

dying, like sometimes in dreams; and all the time then there's only one thing you can see everywhere, whatever it was that pierced you in the person you love: be it the eyes, the hair, the walk. And it truly is odd: I mean, a face, what is there to it? A nose in the middle, a mouth, two eyes. What on earth is there about it that so excites and captivates you? And after all, you see a lot of faces, beautiful ones too, and you admire them, like a flower or some brocade, whereas another may not be beautiful, but it turns your entire soul upside down, and not everyone's, but yours alone, and that face alone does it: why is that? And another thing,' the speaker added after a hesitation, 'is that men love women, and women men; it does sometimes happen too, they say, that a woman loves a woman, and a man a man; it does happen, they say, and I've read about it myself as well in the Lives of the Saints: St Eugenia, Nifont, Pafnuty Borovsky;37 and again about Tsar lvan Vasilyevich.3 8 And it's not hard to believe it, is it not possible for God to put that thorn too into the human heart, then? And it's hard, Vanya, to go against what's been put in, and perhaps it's sinful too.' The sun had almost set behind a distant jagged wood, and the three winding stretches of the Volga that could be seen began turning a pinky golden yellow. Maria Dmitriyevna looked in silence at the dark forests on the other shore and the ever paling crimson of the evening sky; silent too was Vanya, who, with his mouth half open, seemed to continue listening to his companion with his whole being, then suddenly remarked, perhaps with sorrow, perhaps with censure, 'And it does sometimes happen that people sin anyway: out of curiosity or pride, out of avarice.' 'It does happen, anything can happen; it's their sin,' confessed Maria Dmitriyevna, humbled somehow, and without altering her pose or turning around to Vanya, 'but for those the thing's been put into it's hard, oh how hard it is, Vanyechka! I'm not 44

saying it in complaint -life is easy for the rest, but it's worthless; like cabbage soup without salt: filling, but not nice to eat.' After a room, a balcony, the entrance hall and the yard under the apple trees, dinners were moved to the cellar. The cellar was dark, it smelt of malt, cabbage and somewhat of mice, but it was thought that it was not so hot there and there were no flies; the table was stood opposite the doors for greater light, but when Malanya, who had practically run across the yard with the food, paused in the opening to come down the steps in the darkness, it became even darker, and the cook inevitably grumbled, 'What darkness, now, Lord save us! What have you dreamt up, tell me, where have you gone and put yourselves!' Sometimes, without waiting for Malanya, curly-haired Sergei, a young lad from the shop who had dinner at home along with Ivan Osipovich, would run to fetch the food; and when later on he was rushing across the yard, holding a dish up high with both hands, the cook would be tearing along behind him too with a spoon or a fork, shouting, 'What's all this, as though I wouldn't have served it myself? Why make Sergei run errands? I'd have soon ... ' 'You'd have soon, but we've already,' countered Sergei, making a raffish clatter with the dishes in front of Arina Dmitriyevna and settling down with a little smile in his place between Ivan Osipovich and Sasha. 'And why was it God invented such heat?' Sergei tried to elicit. 'Nobody wants it: the water dries up, the trees burn everyone finds it hard ... ' 'For the crops, it would seem.' 'It's of no great profit for the crops either, at the wrong time and in the wrong measure. And after all, at both the right time and the wrong time, it's still God that sends it.' 'If it's at the wrong time, then that means it's a trial in return for sin.' 45

'But you know,' lvan Osipovich intervened, 'we had an old man killed by the heat; he wasn't hurting anyone and he was on a pilgrimage, but the heat went and killed him. How should that be understood?' Sergei was silently triumphant. 'For the sins of others he suffered, it would seem, not for his own,' Prokhor Nikitich decided in a not entirely confident tone. 'How's that, then? Other folks'll go boozing and out on the spree, and the Lord'll kill innocent old men instead of them?' 'Or else, forgive me, you wouldn't pay your debts, for example, and I'd get put in a pit instead of you; would that be right?' remarked Sergei. 'Better eat your cabbage soup than talk nonsense; why this, why that; why you yourself? You're thinking about the heat, that there's no point to it, and perhaps it's thinking of you, Sergei, that there's no point to you.' When they had eaten their fill, they spent a long time laboriously drinking tea, some with apples, some with jam. Sergei began reasoning once again, 'It's very often troublesome to understand how things ought to be understood; let's take this: a soldier's killed a man, and I've killed one; he gets the Order of St George, I get hard labour why's that?' 'How are you to understand? I'll say this: a husband lives with his wife, and a bachelor gets mixed up with a woman; someone might say that it's all the same, but there's a big difference. What is it, one asks?' 'I wouldn't know,' responded Sergei, all eyes. 'Imagination. The first thing,' said Prokhor Nikitich, as though searching not only for words, but for ideas too, 'the first thing is: the married man has dealings with one woman- that's one thing: the next thing is- they live quietly, peacefully, they're used to one another, and the husband loves his wife in just the

same way as he eats his porridge or curses the bailiffs, but the others have nonsense on their minds all the time, it's all fun and games, there's no constancy, no steadiness; and that's why the one thing is lawful, and the other- fornication. The sin isn't in the act but in the application, how the thing's applied to what.' 'Forgive me, but it does sometimes happen, after all, that a husband adores his wife with a trembling heart as well, and the other is so used to his mistress too that it's all the same to him whether he's kissing her or squashing a mosquito: how ever can you make out then what's lawful, and what's fornication?' 'Doing such things without love is just filthy,' Maria Dmitriyevna suddenly responded. 'Now, you say "filthy", but it's not enough to know words, you have to understand their force. What is written, "filth" is meat offered to idols39- so eating rabbits, for example- that's filth, but otherwise it's fornication.' 'Why do you keep on about "fornication", "fornication"! Just think what talk you've started in front of the boys!' Arina Dmitriyevna raised her voice. 'Well, what's the matter, they can understand for themselves. Isn't that so, Ivan Petrovich?' old Sorokin turned to Vanya. 'What's that?' the latter started up. 'What do you reckon regarding all this?' 'You know, it's very hard to judge about other people's affairs.' 'You've said a true word there, Vanyechka,' rejoiced Arina Dmitriyevna, 'and never do judge; that's what's written, "Judge not, that ye be not judged" .'4° 'Well, some people don't judge, but they do get judged,' said Sorokin, rising from the table. On the jetty and the planked footway there remained only the women selling white loaves, dried roach, raspberries and pickled cucumbers; the boatmen in their coloured shirts stood 47

leaning on the handrail and spitting into the water, and Arina Dmitriyevna, having seen old Sorokin onto the steamboat, was settling down into the wide wagonette alongside Maria Dmitriyevna. 'How did you come to forget the flat cakes, Mashenka? Prokhor Nikitich is so fond of having them with his tea.' 'I went and put them out in full view, didn't I, but in the end there was no point.' 'You at least might have reminded us, Parfen! .. .' 'What's it got to do with me? If you'd forgotten them somewhere out in the open, I'd have called out, of course, but then I didn't go inside the house,' the old workman tried to vindicate himself. 'lvan Petrovich, Sasha! Where on earth are you going?!' Arina Dmitriyevna called to the young men, who had already started up the hill. 'We'll go on foot, Mummy, we'll even arrive before you by taking the pathway.' 'Well, go on, go on, you've got young legs. Or else you could take a ride, Ivan Petrovich?' she tried to persuade Vanya. 'No, it's all right, we'll go on foot, thank you,' he cried from halfway up the hill. 'Look over there- they've arrived from Lyubimovo,' remarked Sasha, taking off his cap and turning his slightly sweaty, flushed face to the wind. 'Will Prokhor Nikitich be gone for long?' 'No, he won't stay on the Unzha any later than St Peter's Day,4 1 there's not a lot to do there, it's just taking a look.' 'And don't you ever go travelling around with your father, then?' 'I do always go with him, it's just that you're staying with us, so I didn't go.' 'But why didn't you go? Why feel restricted because of me?'

Sasha pulled the cap back onto his black hair, which had gone flying in all directions, and remarked with a smile, 'There's no feeling of restriction about it, Vanyechka, and I'm very glad to stay with you like this. Of course, if it were with my Mama and Auntie alone, I'd get bored, but like this I'm very glad.' He continued after a pause, as though deep in thought, 'I mean, you spend time on the Unzha, on the Vetluga, on the Moscow River, and nothing do you see apart from your own business, you might as well be blind! Everywhere it's only timber, and about timber, and concerning timber; how much does it cost, how much is transportation, and how many planks and logs will it be- and that's it! That's the way Daddy's made, and he's shaping me in just the same way. And wherever we come to, it's going round the foresters straight away and around the inns, and everywhere it's always one and the same thing, one conversation. I mean, it's boring, you know. It's like, say, there'd be a builder, and he'd build only churches, and not entire churches, but only the cornices on churches; and he'd travel around the whole world and everywhere he'd look only at church cornices, seeing neither the different people nor how they live, how they think, pray and love, neither the trees nor the flowers of those places- he wouldn't see anything, except for his cornices. A man ought to be like a river or a mirror - what's reflected in it, that's what's taken in; then, like in the Volga, there'll be sunshine in him, and clouds, and forests, and high mountains, and towns with churches - equal for everything's how it should be, then you'll combine everything inside you too. But anyone who gets hooked on some one thing will get eaten up by it, and worst of all is avarice, or else godly things, too.' 'That is, how do you mean, godly?' 'Well, church things, if you like! People who are always thinking and reading about them find it hard to understand anything else.' 49

'How is it, then, that there are senior churchmen who don't shun worldly things, even among your Old Believers, His Grace Innokenty4 2 for example.' 'Of course there are, and you know, in my opinion, they're very wrong to do that: it's impossible to be a good churchman, a good officer, a good merchant, if you have an equal understanding of everything; and that's the reason, Vanya, I envy you with all my heart, because you're not being prepared to be just one person, and you know everything and understand everything, not like me, for example, and yet we're the same age.' 'Come on, I don't know everything at all, they don't teach us anything at the grammar school!' 'All the same, it's better that you can understand everything, while knowing nothing, than know only one thing.' Indistinctly down below, the wheels of a droshky43 began to rattle, and somewhere far away on the water could be heard loud cursing and the splashing of oars. 'Our lot are taking a long time!' 'They must have dropped in on Loginov,' remarked Sasha, sitting down next to Smurov on the grass. 'Are you and I the same age, then?' asked the latter, gazing at the Volga, where the shadows of clouds were racing across the water-meadows. 'But of course, we were born almost in the same month, I asked Larion Dmitriyevich.' 'Do you know Larion Dmitriyevich well, Sasha?' 'Not so you'd say very; I mean, it was only recently we met; and he wouldn't be the sort of person you'd get to know right from the first.' 'Have you heard about the thing that happened to him?' 'I have, I was still in Petersburg then; only I think it's all untrue.' 'What's untrue?'

'That that young lady didn't kill herself. I saw her, Larion Dmitriyevich showed her to me one time in the Garden: a bit of an odd one. Right then I said to Larion Dmitriyevich, "You mark my words, that young lady'll come to a bad end." A bit of a simple one, somehow.' 'Yes, but after all, you can be the cause of a suicide even without firing the shot.' 'No, Vanyechka, if people get upset about something that doesn't concern them and kill themselves, no one is the cause.' 'And do you blame Stroop for the thing Ida Pavlovna shot herself over?' 'And what did she shoot herself over?' 'I think you know for yourself.' 'Over Fyodor?' 'I think so,' replied Vanya, embarrassed. Sorokin did not reply for a long time, and when Vanya raised his eyes he saw that the former was looking quite indifferently, even somewhat angrily at the road from where Parfen and the droshky were climbing. 'Why don't you reply, Sasha?' He made to look at Vanya, and said angrily and simply, 'Fyodor's a simple lad, a peasant, why shoot yourself over him? But then perhaps Larion Dmitriyevich shouldn't have taken on either a coachman for the horses or a doorman for the doors, or gone to the doctor when he had toothache. For there to have been no Fyodor, what's needed was .. .' 'So are you waiting for us?' cried Arina Dmitriyevna, climbing down from the droshky, while Parfen and Maria Dmitriyevna took away the paper packages and little bags, and a black watchdog circled around barking. On St Peter's Day they were intending to travel to an isolated monastery about forty kilometres beyond the Volga to stand

through mass with the priest on what was a big holy day, and to see Anna Nikanorovna, a distant relative of the Sorokins who lived at the monastery's apiary; they had put off going to Cheremshany, where Prokhor Nikitich's daughters lived, until St Ilya's Day44 so as to stay there until the end of the fair, to which Vanya intended going too. In September they meant to gather together- the women from Cheremshany, the men from Nizhny Novgorod- while Vanya, without stopping by there, was to go directly to St Petersburg at the end of August. Some four days before their departure, when they were almost packed for the journey, everyone was sitting drinking their evening tea, discussing for the tenth time who was going where and how long they were going for, when Vanya, who had not received a single letter ever since his arrival, was brought two with the evening post. One was from Anna Nikolayevna, asking them to look out for a small dacha in Vasil for about sixty roubles, as Nata had got so miserable in the end that she could not stay at the dacha outside St Petersburg. Koka had gone to divert his grief in Notental, near Gange, while Alexei Vasilyevich, Uncle Kostya and Boba would quite simply stay in town. The other was from Koka himself, where, between phrases about how he was mourning 'the death of that perfect young girl, destroyed by that good-for-nothing', he reported that the kursaal45 was just nearby, there were masses of young ladies, he was going out on a bicycle for days on end etc., etc. 'Why is he writing all this to me?' thought Vanya after reading the letter. 'Does he really have no one to address himself to but me?' 'It's my aunt and her sister asking us to look for a dacha, they want to come out here.' 'Well now, I don't think Germanikha's is taken, some people from Astrakhan wanted to come, but they aren't here for some reason; and it wouldn't be far for you.'

'Will you ask, please, Arina Dmitriyevna, if she'll let them have it for sixty roubles, and how things stand there in general.' 'She'll let them have it for fifty even, don't you worry, I'll arrange everything.' On retiring to his room, Vanya sat for a long time at the window without lighting the candles, and St Petersburg, the Kazanskys, Stroop and his apartment, and for some reason Fyodor in particular, as he had seen him last, in the red silk shirt without a belt, with a smile on the flushed face unaccustomed to the high colour, with a carafe in his hand, all came to mind; lighting a candle, he took out a volume of Shakespeare with Romeo and ]uliet in it, and he tried to read; there was no dictionary, and without Stroop he understood only in snatches, but suddenly a sort of torrent of beauty and life engulfed him as never before, as if something kindred, long unseen, half forgotten, had resurrected and embraced him with hot arms. Someone knocked quietly at the door. 'Who is it?' 'Me! Can I come in?' 'Please do.' 'Forgive me, I'm bothering you,' said Maria Dmitriyevna, coming in, 'I've brought you this leather rosary, you pack it away in your bag.' 'Ah,good!' 'What's that you were reading?' Maria Dmitriyevna was slow to leave. 'I thought perhaps it was the church calendar you'd taken to read.' 'No, it's nothing, a play, an English one.' 'Right, and I thought perhaps it was the calendar, the words weren't audible, just that you were reading rhythmically.' 'Was I reading out loud, then?' 'But of course ... So I'll put the rosary on the shelves ... Goodnight.' 53

'Goodnight.' And after adjusting the icon-lamp, Maria Dmitriyevna withdrew noiselessly, shutting the doors quietly, yet tight. Vanya looked in surprise, like someone awakened, at the icons in the icon-case, the icon-lamp, the hammered chest in the corner, the made bed, the solid table by the window with its white curtain, beyond which could be seen the garden and the starry sky and, closing the book, he blew out the candle. 'My, what a lot of forget-me-nots on the marsh!' Maria Dmitriyevna exclaimed at every minute as they rode beside a marsh meadow completely smothered in blue flowers and tall aquatic grass, on which sat dragonflies, their brilliant wings and their entire little greenish bodies almost imperceptibly quivering. Having, with Vanya, fallen behind the first britzka4 6 where Arina Dmitriyevna and Sasha were riding, she would first get down from the chaise and walk along the path beside the marsh and the forest, then get on again, then be gathering flowers, then be humming something, and all the time she would be talking to Vanya as though to herself, as if intoxicated with the forest and the sun, the blue sky and the blue flowers. And it was almost with condescending sympathy that Vanya looked at the shining face of this thirty-year-old woman, rejuvenated like an adolescent's. 'In Moscow we used to have a wonderful garden, we lived in Zamoskvorechye: apple trees, lilac grew, and in a corner there was a spring and a blackcurrant bush; we didn't go anywhere in the summer, so I was sometimes in the garden all day; I made jam in the garden too ... You know, Vanyechka, I love going barefooted over hot earth or bathing in the river; through the water you can see your body, golden flecks of sunlight reflecting off the water run over it, and when you go under and you open your eyes there, then everything's green, green, and you can 54

see the little fish darting by, and afterwards you lie on the hot sand to dry, and there's a breeze, it's lovely! And it's better when you lie there alone and there are none of your girlfriends about. And it's not true what the old women say, making out the body is sinful, flowers, beauty are sinful, washing yourself is sinful. Wasn't it the Lord that created it all: the water, and the trees, and the body? It's sinful to resist the Lord's will: when, for example, someone is marked out for something, strains for it, and it's not allowed- that's sinful! And how you have to hurry, Vanya, there just aren't the words for it! As a good housewife stores up both cabbage and cucumbers at the right time, knowing you can't get hold of them later on, so we, Vanya, have to look our fill and love our fill and breathe our fill all in good time! Does our life last long? And our youth is even shorter, and a minute that passes will never return, and that should always be remembered; then everything would be twice as sweet, like for an infant that's only just opened its eyes, or for a dying man.' In the distance could be heard the voices of Arina Dmitriyevna and Sasha; behind, Parfen's wagon was clattering down the brushwood road, flies were buzzing, there was the smell of grass, marsh and flowers; it was hot, and Maria Dmitriyevna, in her evening dress and with a white shawl off her shoulders, pale from tiredness and the heat, with her dark eyes shining, sat in the chaise beside Vanya slightly hunched, sorting out the flowers she had picked. 'It's all one to me, what I think to myself or what I say to you, Vanyechka, because you have the soul of an infant.' At a turn an extensive clearing was revealed, and on it a heap of houses with their entrances facing inwards; many resembled sheds without windows or with windows only on the upper floor, and they were without an evident street, in a heap, grey from time. There were no people to be seen, and only the 55

barking of dogs from the monastery rushed to meet the dustraising britzka carrying Arina Dmitriyevna and Sasha. After mass, the Sorokins and Vanya set off to see the starets47 Leonty who lived at the apiary half a kilometre from the monastery. Passing hurriedly through a shady copse into a small glade where, amidst the tall grass and flowers, the current of an invisible stream in a wooden chute could be heard, Arina Dmitriyevna informed Vanya about the starets Leonty. 'You know, he switched from the Great Russian Church to the true one a long time ago now, it'll be about thirty years, and even then he was no longer young. But he's a tough old man, an enthusiast; he's been on trial four times, did two years in Suzdal; he's terribly fond of fasting, and my, how furiously he prays - like a wound-up wheel! And he can foresee everything ... Don't you say straight out, Vanyechka, that you're Orthodox, he might not like it.' 'But he might set about instructing me even better?' 'No, you'd better not say ... ' 'Oh all right, all right,' said Vanya absent-mindedly, looking with curiosity at the little low hut, the pink hollyhocks around it, and on the zavalinka, 48 in a white shirt, blue trousers and with a little skull-cap on his head, a grey-haired old man with a long, narrow beard and lively, merry eyes. 'As soon as he came up to my room, this priest, he went straight to the table and started going through the Gospels. "You're lucky," he says, "it's an authorised edition, or else I'd have taken it away, but the pictures and some of the manuscripts I'll definitely be taking." I had portraits of Semyon Denisov,49 Pyotr Filippov5° and some others hanging on the wall. But I wasn't yet old then, I was in good health, and I says, "We'll have to see, Father, if I'll be letting you take them away." The deacon was completely drunk, kept on groaning,

and he says, "Stop it, Father." The priest toppled me over onto the bed and tries to pour tea from a saucer over me- to baptise me, that is, but I fought hard and he climbed off. "Goodbye," he says, "I'll be talking with you again." And when I went to see them off, he goes and shoves me down the hill.' And in a well-rehearsed tone the old man related how he had been with the Nekrasov sectF in Turkey, how people had wanted to kill him, how he had been on trial, how he had done time in Suzdal, how he had been saved everywhere by his cross with relics, and out of the hut, bending low in the doorway, he brought a hollow cross, where on the bronze mount was engraved, 'Relics of St Peter, Moscow Metropolitan and miracleworker, 52 the Righteous Princess St Fevroniya of Murom, St Jonah the Prophet, the Righteous Tsarevich St Dmitry, our Venerable Mother Maria the Egyptian'.B Indoors, visible through the windows, there were icons on the shelves, the reddish light of icon-lamps and candles, books on the window sills and on the table, a bare bench with a log at its head. And in a sing-song voice, with his merry eyes looking for no good reason at Vanya, the starers Leonty said, 'Stand firm, my son, in the true faith, for what is higher than the true faith? It obscures all sin and installs you in the houses of eternal light. And the eternal light of Our Lord Jesus must be loved more than anything. What is eternal, what is imperishable, but radiant Paradise, the salvation of the soul? If a flower captivates you- tomorrow it fades, if you come to love a mantomorrow he dies: clear eyes will sink and rot away, rosy cheeks will turn yellow, you will lose your hair and teeth, and you are in general the spoils of worms. Walking corpses - there you have men in this world.' 'It'll be easier now, they'll allow churches to be built, services to be held openly,' Vanya tried to distract the old man. 57

'Do not pursue what is easy, but strive for what is hard! Peoples perish because of ease, freedom and wealth, while in grave suffering they save their faith. The enemy of man is cunning, clandestine are his intrigues- any favour must be put to the test to find out where it comes from.' 'Where does such bitterness come from?' said Vanya, leaving the apiary. 'And another thing: is it people's fault, then, that they die?' said Maria Dmitriyevna in agreement. 'I'd go and fall even deeper in love with something that's condemned to die tomorrow.' 'You can love everything, but don't give your heart to any one thing, so as not to be eaten up,' remarked Sasha, who had been silent all the time. 'Here's another philosofa turned up,' his aunt remarked disdainfully. 'What, am I brainless, then?' 'And how is it he didn't recognise you belong to the Church? Or perhaps, my dear, he foresaw that you'd be coming to the true faith?' Arina Dmitriyevna reasoned, looking at Vanya touchingly. In the room lit by one small icon-lamp it was almost completely dark; through the window could be seen the deep red and, higher up, yellowing sky of the sunset, and against it the black wood beyond the glade, and Sasha Sorokin, darkening by the reddened evening window, continued talking, 'It's hard to combine it. As one of our people said, "After the theatre, how are you going to read the canon to Jesus? It's easier after killing someone." And that's right: you can kill, steal, commit adultery with any faith, but understanding Faust54 and praying with conviction with a leather rosary is unthinkable, or at least it's God knows what, teasing the Devil.

And you know, if someone commits no sin and obeys the rules, but doesn't believe in their necessity and power to save, then that's worse than not obeying them, yet believing. But how can you believe, when things can't be believed? How can you not know what you know, not remember what you remember? And you can't make judgements here: that's wise, that I'll obey, while that's nothing, that's not obligatory: who put you here to make such judgements? Until they're abolished by the church, all the rules have to be obeyed, and we have to shun the secular arts, not have treatment from doctors of other faiths, observe every fast. Only old men in the woods can hold on to the old Orthodoxy, and why should I be called what I'm not and what I don't consider it necessary to be? And how can I think that only our little handful will be saved, while the whole world wallows in sin? And without thinking that, how can I be considered an Old Believer? In the same way, it's harsh to accept any faith or life that disparages all those that are different, and if you understand them all at the same time, you can't be a true believer in any of them.' Sasha's voice fell quiet, then rang out again, since Vanya, lying on his bed, made no reply out of the darkness. 'Perhaps for you, looking on from the side, our life, faith, rituals are more understandable and more evident than they are for us ourselves, and our people can be understood by you, but you by them - no; or only one part of you, and not the most important one, can be understood by Daddy or our old men, and you've always been a stranger, an outsider. There's nothing you can do about it! No matter how much I love and respect you yourself, Vanyechka, still I can sense that there's something in you that oppresses and troubles me. Our fathers, and our grandfathers too, lived, thought and knew things differently, and we ourselves can't yet match you- the difference is bound to show somewhere, and desire alone can do nothing about it.' 59

Sasha's voice fell silent again, and for a long time only the very distant singing from the open doors of the house of prayer could be heard. 'And what about Maria Dmitriyevna?' 'What about Maria Dmitriyevna?' 'What does she think, how does she get along?' 'Who knows; she's devout, and she misses her husband.' 'Has her husband been dead long?' 'Yes, about eight years now, I was still just a little boy.' 'She's very nice.' 'She's all right, but she doesn't have very many big ideas either,' said Sasha, closing the window. Another chaise carrying guests drove up to the gates; Arina Dmitriyevna, who had scarcely sat down at the table, ran to meet them, and cries of greeting and kisses were heard from the porch. The reception hall, where about ten men were having lunch, was noisy and hot; barefooted Froska, who had been brought in to help Malanya, was continually running to the cellar with a large glass jug and carrying it back again filled with cold, frothing kvas. 55 In the room where the women were having lunch Maria Dmitriyevna was standing in for the hostess, who was herself running from table to table plying people with food, to the kitchen and to meet the new guests who kept on arriving; Anna Nikolayevna and Nata and five or so guests were there, wiping the sweat from their faces with handkerchiefs that were already wet through, while dishes were served, more and more of them, Madeira and fruit liqueur were drunk, and flies got into the dirty glasses, while heaps of them sat on the whitewashed walls and the crumb-covered tablecloth. The men had all taken off their jackets, and, wearing waistcoats over the top of their coloured shirts, red and dazed, they laughed loudly, talking and hiccoughing. The sunlight coming through the open 6o

door shone through a glass stand onto brightly burning iconlamps and further on, in the room next door, onto painted cages with canaries which sang frenziedly, excited by the general noise. Dogs getting in from the yard were continually being chased away, and the door on a pulley, held for a moment by Froska's bare foot, slammed and squeaked; there was a smell of raspberries, pies, wine and sweat. 'Well, judge for yourselves, I instruct him to reply by telegram to Samara, and not a word from him.' 'After pouring spirit over it, first take it down into the cellar, and then only on the next day boil it up with oak bark- it turns out very tasty.' 'Father Vasily from Gromovo made a splendid speech on Ascension Day: "Blessed are the peacemakers- so you make peace as well over the Chubykinsky almshouse, remit the warden his debts and don't ask for an account!"- it's like a joke! .. .' 'I say thirty-five roubles, and he gives me fifteen ... ' 'Blue, and just so blue, with a pink pattern,' carried from the women's room. 'Your health, Arina Dmitriyevna, your health!' shouted the men to the hostess, who was hurrying to the kitchen. Somehow the chairs scraped all at once, and everyone started silently crossing themselves in the direction of the icons in the corner; Froska was already lugging in the samovar, and Arina Dmitriyevna was exhorting the guests not to wander off too far before having tea. 'Do you really like this life?' Nata asked Vanya, who had gone to see them across the yard in safety from the Sorokins' dogs. 'No, but it could be worse.' 'Scarcely,' remarked Anna Nikolayevna, reopening the gate a little to free the trapped hem of her grey silk dress.

6r

'Let's sit down here, Nata, I'd like to have a talk with you.' 'If you like, let's sit down. And what do you want to talk about?' said the girl, sitting down beside Vanya on a bench under the shade of some big birch trees. There was decorating going on in the church that stood away to one side, and from the open doors could be heard the devotional singing of the decorators whom the priest had forbidden to sing secular songs inside. The church-porch, which had dense spiraea shrubs planted all around it, could not be seen, but every word was clearly audible in the evening air; in the far distance a herd going home was lowing. 'And what did you want to talk with me about?' 'I don't know; maybe it'll be difficult or unpleasant for you to recall it.' 'You probably want to talk about that unfortunate business?' said Nata after a pause. 'Yes, if you can explain it to me even a bit, then do.' 'You're mistaken if you think I know more than others do; I only know that Ida Golberg shot herself, and even the reason for her action is unknown to me.' 'But you were there at the time?' 'I was, though not half an hour before, but about ten minutes, of which I stood for about seven in the empty entrance hall.' 'Did she shoot herself in front of you?' 'No; it was actually the shot that made me go into the study .. .' 'And she was already dead?' Nata silently gave an affirmative nod of the head. The decorators in the church struck up with 'Let my prayer be set forth'.5 6 'Let me go, you devil! What do you think you're doing there?! Oh, damn you! Ah!' the feigned cries of a woman's voice

rang out from the church-porch, while her invisible partner preferred to continue his frolicking in silence. 'Ah!' the exclamation rang out higher still, like the cry of people drowning, and in one spot the spiraea shrubs began to shake violently without there being any wind. 'The evening sacrifice!'57 the singing inside was ended appeasingly. 'On the table stood a carafe or a siphon, something made of glass, and a bottle of brandy; a man in a red shirt was sitting on the leather couch and doing something by that same table, Stroop himself was standing to the right, and Ida was sitting with her head thrown back against the back of the armchair, by the desk ... ' 'Was she no longer alive?' 'No, she already seemed to be dead. I'd scarcely walked in when he said to me, "Why are you here? For your happiness, for your tranquillity, leave! Leave now, I beg of you." The man sitting on the couch stood up, and I noticed he was beltless and very handsome; he had a red, glowing face, and his hair was wavy; he seemed drunk to me. And Stroop said, "Fyodor, see the young lady out."' 'Thy will be done,' 58 they were already singing something else in the church; the voices on the church-porch, already reconciled, were murmuring softly without any cries; the woman seemed to be quietly weeping. 'Still, it's dreadful!' said Vanya. 'Dreadful,' Nata repeated like an echo, 'and all the more so for me: I loved that man so,' and she started to cry. Vanya cast an unfriendly look at the somehow suddenly aged and rather flaccid girl with the pouting mouth, with the freckles which had now merged into unbroken brown blotches, with the tousled ginger hair, and said, 'You loved Larion Dmitriyevich then, did you?'

She nodded her head in silence and, after a pause, began in an unusually affectionate tone, 'You're not corresponding with him now, are you, Vanya?' 'No, I don't even know his address, I mean, he's abandoned his apartment in St Petersburg.' 'You can always find it.' 'And what if I were corresponding?' 'No, just asking, it's nothing.' A young man in a jacket and a peaked cap emerged quietly from the shrubs, and when, on drawing level, he bowed to Vanya, the latter recognised him as Sergei. 'Who is he?' asked Nata. 'The Sorokins' shop assistant.' 'And he's presumably the hero of the story that was taking place just now,' added Nata with a vulgar sort of smile. 'What story?' 'On the church-porch, didn't you hear anything, then?' 'I heard women shouting, but then that's nothing to me.' Vanya almost stumbled over a prostrate man in a white suit with a summer uniform cap slipping off the face on which it had been placed, and with his arms thrown back behind his head, asleep on the shady descent down to the river. And he was very surprised to recognise by the bald spot, the snub nose, the sparse, ginger beard and the entire small figure, his Greek language teacher. 'Are you here, then, Daniil lvanovich?' said Vanya, even forgetting to say hello in his astonishment. 'As you see! But what ever is it that surprises you so, since you yourself are here, while also being from St Petersburg?' 'But how is it I've not met you before?' 'That's perfectly understandable, since I arrived only yesterday. And are you here with your family?' asked the Greek teacher, sitting up properly and wiping his bald spot with a handkerchief

edged in red. 'Sit yourself down, there's shade here and a breeze.' 'Yes, my aunt and cousin are here as well, but I'm staying on my own with the Sorokins, perhaps you've heard of them?' 'I've not yet had the good fortune. But it's not bad here, not bad at all: the Volga, the gardens and all that.' 'But where ever are your kitten and thrush, are they with you?' 'No, I'm going to be travelling for a long time, you know ... ' And he began enthusiastically recounting how he had quite unexpectedly received a small inheritance, had taken leave, and wanted to realise his dream of long standing: to travel to Athens, Alexandria, Rome, but while awaiting the autumn, when it would be less hot for southern wanderings, he had set off down the Volga, stopping wherever he liked, with a small suitcase and three or four favourite books. 'In Rome, Pompeii, Asia there are the most interesting excavations now, and new literary works of the ancients have been found there.' And, getting carried away and with his eyes gleaming, the Greek teacher again threw off his cap and talked for a long time about his dreams, enthusiasms, plans, and Vanya looked sadly at the little bald Greek teacher's unattractive face, shining with the play of vitality. 'Yes, it's interesting, all that, very interesting,' he said dreamily, when the other, having finished his narrative, lit up a cigarette. 'And will you be here until the autumn?' Daniil lvanovich suddenly thought to ask. 'Probably. I'll go to the fair in Nizhny and home from there,' confessed Vanya, as though ashamed of the insignificance of his plans. 'Well, and are you content? These Sorokins, are they interesting people?'

'They're very simple, but good and kind,' Vanya replied again, with inhospitable thoughts about the people who had suddenly become so alien to him. 'I'm very bored, very! You know, not only is there no one able to infect me with enthusiasm, there's no one simply able to understand and share the least movement of my soul,' it suddenly burst out ofVanya, 'not here, nor, perhaps, in St Petersburg.' The Greek teacher gave him a penetrating look. 'Smurov,' he began, somewhat solemnly, 'you do have a friend capable of appreciating the loftiest impulses of the soul and in whom you can always meet with sympathy and love.' 'I'm grateful to you, Daniil lvanovich,' said Vanya, reaching his hand out to the Greek teacher. 'It's nothing,' the latter replied, 'all the more since I wasn't actually talking about myself.' 'About whom, then?' 'Larion Dmitriyevich.' 'Stroop?' 'Yes... Hang on, don't interrupt me. I know Larion Dmitriyevich very well, I saw him after that unfortunate occurrence and I can testify that he is as much to blame for it as you would be to blame if I, for example, were to drown myself because you have blond hair. Of course, Larion Dmitriyevich is in the highest degree indifferent to what is said about him, but he did express regret that some of the people who are dear to him could change towards him, and, among others, he named you. Bear that in mind, like the fact that he is now in Munich, at the hotel "The Four Seasons".' 'I don't judge him, but I don't need his address, and if you've come here to inform me of it, then you've gone to the trouble for nothing.' 'My friend, beware of conceit. Am I, an old man, going to drop in at Vasilsurskaya on the way from St Petersburg to Rome 66

to inform Vanya Smurov of Stroop's address? I didn't even know you were here. You're agitated, you're unwell, and I, like a kind doctor, like a mentor, am pointing out what you're missing - the life which for you is embodied by Stroop - and that's all.' 'How well-formed you are, Vanyechka!' said Sasha, getting undressed and looking at the naked figure of Vanya, who was still standing entirely on the dry sand and had bent to scoop up some water to wet his crown and armpits before going into the water. The latter looked at the reflection, made to undulate by the spreading circles in the water, of his tall, supple body with its narrow hips and long, shapely legs, tanned by bathing and the sun, at his untrimmed fair curls above the slender neck, at the big eyes in the round, leaner face - and, with a silent smile, he entered the cold water. Short-legged despite his height, white and chubby, Sasha plopped into a deep spot with a splash. All along the bank there was a herd of little children bathing, running along the bank and through the water and squealing, here and there were little knots of red and white shirts, and in the distance, a little higher up, under white willows on brightgreen mown grass, there were also glimpses of children and adolescents, the delicate pink of their bodies reminiscent of pictures of paradise in the manner of Thoma. With almost passionate gaiety Vanya felt his body cutting through the cold, deep water and with rapid turns, like a fish, frothing up the warmer surface. When he grew tired, he swam on his back, seeing only the sky gleaming in the sun, not moving his arms, not knowing where he was swimming to. He was roused by some increased shouting on the shore, shouting which was moving ever further away in the direction of the herd and a dredging machine. People were running, putting their shirts on

as they went, and the shouting hurried to meet them, 'They've caught him, they've caught him, they've pulled him out!' 'What is it?' 'A drowned man, he went under back in the spring; they've only just found him now, he'd got caught up on a log and couldn't float out,' the people running and the children overtaking them were saying. Down the slope, crying loudly, ran a woman in a red dress and a white headscarf; reaching the spot where the body lay on a bast mat, she fell face down on the sand and, keening, began sobbing even louder. 'Arina ... the mother!. . .' they whispered all around. 'Remember, I told you his life story,' Sergei, appearing from somewhere, reminded Vanya, as he looked in horror at the swollen, slime-covered corpse with its face already formless, naked, wearing only boots, repulsive and frightful in the bright sunlight amidst the noisy and curious children whose delicate pink bodies could be seen through their unbuttoned shirts. 'He was an only son, always wanting to become a monk, ran away three times, but was turned back; he was even beaten, but nothing was of any use; children buy gingerbread, but he spent everything on candles; then this bit of skirt, a slut, turned up, he didn't understand a thing, and when he did understand, he went to bathe with the lads and drowned, he was only sixteen ... ' Sergei's account reached him as if through water. 'Vanya! Vanya!' the woman exclaimed shrilly, rising and then again falling onto the sand at the sight of the swollen, slime-covered corpse. Vanya in horror set off running up the slope, stumbling, scratching himself on bushes and nettles, without looking back, as if there were people chasing at his heels, and with his heart thumping and a roaring in his temples he stopped only in the Sorokins' garden, where the apples showed red on the sparsely planted apple trees, the forests stood dark beyond the calm 68

Volga, grasshoppers chirred in the grass and there was the smell of honey and costmary. Stroop's words, 'there are ligaments, muscles in the human body that cannot be seen without a tremor,' came to Vanya's mind when with horror, by the light of a candle, he was examining in the mirror his thin, now terribly pale face with its fine eyebrows and grey eyes, his bright-red mouth and his wavy hair above the slender neck. He was not even surprised that Maria Dmitriyevna suddenly came in at such a late hour without a sound, quietly shutting the door tight behind her. 'What ever will happen? What ever will happen?' he rushed to her. 'The cheeks will sink and turn pale, the body will swell and become slimy, worms will eat out the eyes, all the joints will fall apart in a dear body! But there are ligaments, muscles in the human body that cannot be seen without a tremor! Everything will pass away, perish! And I don't know anything, I've not seen anything, and I want to, I want to ... I'm not unfeeling, not just some stone, and now I know my own beauty! I'm frightened! Frightened! Who will save me?' Maria Dmitriyevna looked at Vanya joyfully, without surprise. 'Vanyechka, my dear, I'm sorry for you, so sorry! I was afraid of this moment, but evidently the time for the Lord's will has come,' and, unhurriedly blowing out the candle, she embraced Vanya and started to kiss him on the mouth, eyes and cheeks, pressing him ever more firmly to her breast. Vanya, who immediately became sober, began to feel hot, uncomfortable and cramped, and, trying to free himself from the embrace, he repeated quietly in what was now a completely different voice, 'Maria Dmitriyevna, what's the matter with you? Let me go, don't!'

But she pressed him still tighter to her breast, quickly and soundlessly kissing him on the cheeks, mouth and eyes, and whispered, 'Vanyechka, my dear, my joy!' 'Now just you let me go, you disgusting woman!' Vanya finally cried, and, pushing the woman embracing him away with all his strength, he ran out, slamming the door. 'So what am I to do now?' Vanya asked at Daniil lvanovich's, where he ran straight from the house in the night. 'I think you need to go,' said his host, wearing a dressinggown over his underwear and bedroom slippers. 'And where will I go? Not to St Petersburg, surely? They'll ask why I've come back, and there's the boredom too.' 'Yes, it's awkward, but it's impossible for you to remain here, you're quite unwell.' 'So what am I to do?' Vanya repeated, gazing helplessly at the Greek teacher drumming on the table. 'I don't know your circumstances and means, do I, how far away you can go; but you can't travel by yourself anyway.' 'So what am I to do?' 'If you believed in my favourable disposition towards you and didn't invent God knows what nonsense, I should invite you, Smurov, to come with me.' 'Where?' 'Abroad.' 'I've got no money.' 'We'd have enough; then, with time, we'd settle up; we'd go as far as Rome, and then we'd see who you were to return with and where I'd travel on to. That would be the best thing.' 'Are you really being serious, Daniil lvanovich?' 'As serious as can be.' 'Is it really possible: me in Rome!'

'Very much so!' smiled the Greek teacher. 'I can't believe it! ... ' said Vanya in excitement. The Greek teacher smoked a cigarette in silence and, smiling, looked at Vanya. 'How nice you are, how kind you are!' the latter let out his feelings. 'It's very pleasant for me myself not to make the journey alone; of course, we'll economise along the way, not staying in hotels that are too smart, but in local inns.' 'Oh, that'll be even more fun!' rejoiced Vanya. 'So tomorrow morning I'll have a talk with your auntie.' And they talked until morning about the trip, selected stops, towns, villages, made plans for excursions - and, emerging in bright sunlight into a street overgrown with grass, Vanya was surprised that he was still in Vasil, and that the Volga and the dark forests beyond it were still to be seen.

71

Part Three

The three of them were sitting in a cafe on the Corso after Tannhiiuser, and in the noisy, not entirely familiar Italian speech, in the tinkling of plates and glasses of ice-cream, in the distant sounds of a string orchestra that carried through the tobacco smoke, they felt themselves almost intimate, their imminent separation putting them in a particularly amicable mood. An officer with an entire cockerel's wing on his hat and two ladies in black, yet strident dresses sitting at a table next to them paid them no attention, and through the tulle at the open window the streetlights, passing carriages, and people walking down the pavements and the roadway could be seen, and the nearest fountain on the square could be heard. In non-uniform dress, which for some reason seemed dandified, despite its utter ordinariness, Vanya looked a mere boy, very pale, tall and slim; Daniil lvanovich, who accompanied his friend everywhere in the capacity of, as he laughed, 'the mentor of the travelling prince', was now chatting graciously and patronisingly with him and with Ugo Orsini. 'Always, when I hear that first scene in the second redaction, already the redaction of the Wagner of Tristan,59 I feel an unprecedented rapture, a prophetic trembling, as I do before the paintings of Klinger and the poetry of D' Annunzio. 60 Those fauns and nymphs dancing, the appearances by Leda and Europa on the shining, radiant, imaginary, yet deeply, even painfully familiar classical landscapes that suddenly open up; the cupids firing from trees, like in Botticelli's 'Spring', at dancing fauns made to freeze by their arrows in exhausting poses- and all that in front of Venus, watching with unearthly love and tenderness over the sleeping Tannhiiuser - it's all like the breath of a new spring, of a new passion, bubbling up from the darkest depths, for life and sunshine!' And with his handkerchief Orsini wiped his pale, clean-shaven face, which was already beginning to get fat, with its black, lustreless eyes and thin, sinuous mouth. 75

'It's the only time, you know, that Wagner touches upon the ancient world,' remarked Daniil Ivanovich, 'and I've heard the opera more than once, yet without the reworked scene with Venus, and I've always thought that in conception it and Parsifa/ 61 were homogeneous, and Wagner's greatest projects; but I don't understand and don't want their conclusions: why this renunciation, asceticism? Not the character of Wagner's genius, not anything could attract me to such endings!' 'Musically that scene isn't particularly in keeping with what had been written previously, and Venus is something of an imitation of Isolde.' 'Asceticism is, in essence, the most unnatural phenomenon, and the chastity of certain animals is the purest fantasy.' They were served hard ice-cream and water in large glasses on tall stems. The cafe was emptying somewhat, and the musicians were already playing their pieces a second time. 'Are you leaving tomorrow?' Ugo asked, adjusting the red carnation in his buttonhole. 'No, I'd like to say goodbye to Rome and not part with Daniil Ivanovich for a little longer,' said Vanya. 'You're going to Naples and Sicily? What about you?' 'I'm going to Florence with the Canon.' 'Mori?' 'Precisely.' 'How do you know him?' 'We met at Gaetano Bossi's- you know, the archaeologist?' 'That lives on via Nazionale?' 'Yes. He's very nice, you know, that Canon.' 'Yes, I can truly say: now lettest thou depart; 62 I pass you from my own hands into the hands of the Monsignor.' Vanya smiled affectionately. 'Are you really so fed up with me?' 'Terribly!' joked Daniil Ivanovich.

'We'll probably meet in Florence; I'll be there in a week: my quartet's being played there.' 'I'm very glad of that. You know, you'll always find the Monsignor at the cathedral, and he'll know my address.' 'Well I'll be putting up with the Marquise Moratti, Borgo Santi Apostoli. Please, don't stand on ceremony- the Marquise lives alone and is pleased to see everyone. She's my aunt, and I'm her heir.' Orsini smiled sweetly with his thin mouth in his white face that was getting fat and with his black, lustreless eyes, and rings gleamed on his fingers with their ligaments developed by music and their short, trimmed nails. 'That Ugo looks like a poisoner, doesn't he?' Vanya asked his companion, going home up the Corso. 'What sort of fancy is that? He's a very nice man, nothing more.' Despite the light rain, which was flowing downhill in little streams beside the pavement, the cool of the museum was pleasant and desirable. Having visited the Coliseum, the forums, the Palatine Hill, they stood almost alone, right before departure, in a small hall before 'a youth running'. 'Only the so-called "Ilian" torso can compare with this in the life and beauty of the youthful body, where the crimson blood can be seen gushing beneath the white skin, where all the muscles are intoxicatingly captivating and where we modems aren't put off by the absence of arms and a head. The body itself, matter, will perish, and works of art, Phidias, 6 3 Mozart, Shakespeare, let's say, will perish, but the idea, the type of beauty enshrined in them cannot perish, and that is, perhaps, the only valuable thing in the changing and transient diversity of life. And no matter how crude the realisations of those ideas might be, they are divine and pure; in religious practices, were the most 77

exalted ideas of asceticism not robed in symbolic rites, wild, fanatical, yet illuminated by the hidden symbol within them and divine?' Giving his final directions before their parting, Daniil lvanovich said, 'You listen to me, Smurov: if spiritual comfort should be needed and a way of getting settled somewhere inexpensively, then turn to the Monsignor, but if your money runs out completely or you need wise and fine advice - then turn to Larion Dmitriyevich. I'll give you his address. All right? Do you promise me?' 'Is there really no one else? I wouldn't want that at all.' 'I've got no one more reliable; so look for someone yourself then.' 'What about Ugo? Won't he help?' 'It's unlikely, he's almost always short of money himself. And I don't know what it is you have against Larion Dmitriyevich, to the point of not even turning to him in writing? What has happened that's sufficient to explain this change?' For a long time Vanya looked at a bust of Marcus Aurelius 6 4 as a youth without replying, then finally began slowly and in a monotone, 'I'm not accusing him of anything, I don't consider myself to have the right to be angry at all, but I'm unbearably sorry that, against my will, after finding out certain things, I cannot feel the same way towards Stroop as before; it prevents me from seeing in him the guide and friend I wish for.' 'What Romanticism, if only it didn't sound learnt by heart! You're like the former "unearthly" young ladies who imagined cavaliers ought to think that maidens don't eat, don't drink, don't sleep, don't snore, don't blow their noses. Every man has his functions, and they don't degrade him in the least, no matter how unpleasant they might be for another's gaze. And being

jealous of Fyodor means acknowledging oneself as being on his level and having an identical significance and purpose. But, lacking in wit though that might be, it's still better than Romantic squeamishness.' 'Let's drop all this; if there's no other way, I'll write to Stroop.' 'And you'll be doing the right thing, my little Cato.' 6 5 'But you yourself taught me to despise Cato.' 'Evidently with no particular success.' They were walking along a straight path across a lawn between beds of flowers, indistinct in the gloom, towards a terrace; a whitish, gentle mist was spreading, hurrying, as it seemed, and catching them up; owlets were calling somewhere; in the east a star was burning unevenly and raggedly in a mist that had begun to turn pink; and the criss-crossed windows of the ancient house directly opposite them, all lit up, burned unusually and strangely behind panes that were already reflecting the morning sky. Ugo had finished whistling his quartet and was smoking a cigarette in silence. As they were passing close by the terrace, their heads not reaching the bottom of the railing, Vanya, clearly hearing Russian voices, came to a halt. 'And so, will you be staying in Italy for a long time yet?' 'I don't know, you can see how weak Mama is; after Naples we'll be spending some time in Lugano, but I don't know how long.' 'I'll be deprived of the opportunity of seeing you, of hearing your voice for so long ... ' the male voice made to begin. 'About four months,' the female voice interrupted him hurriedly. 'About four months!' the first voice repeated like an echo. 'I don't think you'll get bored .. .' Hearing the footsteps of Vanya and Orsini coming up, they fell quiet, and in the morning gloom only vaguely visible were 79

the figure of a seated woman and a not very tall gentleman standing alongside. Entering the reception hall, where they were gripped by the somewhat stuffy warmth of a crowded room, Vanya asked Ugo, 'Who were those Russians?' 'Blonskaya, Anna, and one of your Russian artists - I don't remember his name.' 'He seems to be in love with her?' 'Oh, everyone knows about that, and about his dissolute life too.' 'Is she a beauty?' Vanya asked, still somewhat naively. 'There, take a look.' Vanya turned around and saw coming in a slim, pale girl, with smooth, dark hair combed back low over the ears, delicate features, a rather large mouth and blue eyes. Some five minutes after her a man of about twenty-six came in quickly, stooping, with a sharp little blond beard, curly hair, very protuberant light eyes beneath thick brows the colour of old gold, and with sharp ears like a faun's. 'He loves her and leads a dissolute life, and everyone knows about both the one thing and the other?' asked Vanya. 'Yes, he loves her too much to treat her as a woman. Russian fancies!' the Italian added. People were dispersing, and a fat ecclesiastic, rolling his eyes, was repeating, 'His Holiness gets so tired, so tired ... ' A ray of sunlight flashed harshly through the windows, and the muffled noise of carriages being brought up could be heard. 'And so, goodbye until Florence,' said Orsini, shaking Vanya's hand. 'Yes, I leave tomorrow.'

So

They were all lying on window sills covered with coloured, quilted straw mattresses, Signore Poldina and Philumena in one window and Signora Scholastica with Santina the cook in the other, when the Monsignor brought Vanya up the narrow, dark and cool street towards the old house with the iron ring instead of a bell by the door. When the first upsurge of noise, cries and exclamations had subsided, Signora Poldina alone continued to orate, 'Ulysses says, "I'm bringing a Russian signor, he'll be living with us."- "Ulysses, you're joking, nobody has ever lived here with us; he's a prince, a Russian gentleman, how will we look after him?" But whatever my brother gets into his head, he does. We thought a Russian signor was big, stout, tall, of the sort we saw in Mr Buturlin, but here we have such a little boy, so slender, such a dear, such a little cherub,' and Signora Poldina's old woman's voice softened tenderly in sweet cadences. The Monsignor took Vanya to view the library, and the sisters withdrew into the kitchen and their room. Hitching up his soutane, 66 the Monsignor climbed up and down the ladder, and his fat calves, wrapped tight in black, homespun stockings, could be seen, and the thickest of shoes; with a spiritual accent he read loudly the names of the books that might, in his opinion, interest Vanya, and passed over the remainder in silence - thickset and red-cheeked, despite his sixty-five years, cheerful, obstinate and narrow-mindedly instructive. On the shelves there stood and lay Italian, Latin, French, Spanish, English and Greek books. Thomas Aquinas 6 7 alongside Don Quixote, 68 Shakespeare alongside various odd Lives of the Saints, Seneca 6 9 alongside Anacreon.7° 'A confiscated book,' the Canon explained, noticing Vanya's surprised look and moving the little illustrated volume of Anacreon well away. 'There are many books here confiscated from my spiritual children. They cannot do me any harm.' 81

'Here's your room!' Mori announced, leading Vanya into a large, square, bluish room with white drapes and a bed-curtain by the bed in the centre; rather bare walls with engravings of saints and the Madonna 'of Good Counsel', a simple table, a shelf of books of edifying content, under a bell-glass on the chest of drawers a painted wax doll of St Luigi Gonzaga,7 1 dressed in the costume, sewn out of material, of an enfant de choeur,7 2 an aspergill with holy water by the door - all imparted the character of a cell to the room, and only a piano by the balcony door and a dressing-table by the window prevented the resemblance being complete. 'A cat, ah, a cat, shoo, shoo!' Poldina rushed at a fat, white tomcat that for complete triumph had turned up in the reception hall. 'Why are you chasing it off? I'm very fond of cats,' remarked Vanya. 'The Signor likes cats! Oh, the little lad! Oh, what a dear! Philumena, bring Miscina and the kittens to show the Signor ... Oh, what a dear!' They had been walking around Florence since early morning, and in a loud, melodious voice the Monsignor had been imparting information, events and anecdotes of both the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries, communicating with equal passion and sympathy both the scandalous chronicle of the present, and episodes from Vasari.73 He had stopped in the middle of crowded lanes to develop his eloquent, for the most part denunciatory periods, starting conversations with passersby, with horses and dogs, he had laughed loudly and sung, and the whole atmosphere around him, with his politeness, somewhat redolent of the common man, and his rather vulgar delicacy, uncomplicated in its instructiveness, as well as in its cheerfulness, was reminiscent of the atmosphere of the tales

of Sacchetti.74 Sometimes, when his reserve of stories was insufficient for his need to speak, to speak figuratively, with intonation, with gestures, to make of conversation a primitive work of art - he had returned to the most ancient subjects of the writers of tales, and communicated them once more with naive eloquence and conviction. He knew everyone and everything, and each corner, each stone of his Tuscany and dear Florence had its legends and anecdotal historicity. He took Vanya with him everywhere, exploiting Vanya's position as a person passing through. Here were marquises going broke and counts living in neglected palaces, playing cards and squabbling over them with their own footmen; here were engineers and doctors, merchants living simply in the ways of old- thriftily and in isolation; musicians starting out, aspiring to the fame of Puccini75 and imitating him with their beardless, plump faces and ties; the Persian consul, fat, pompous and gracious, living near San Miniato with his six nieces; apothecaries; young men of some sort running errands; Englishwomen converted to Catholicism, and, finally, Mme Monier, an aesthete and artist living in Fiesole with a whole company of guests in a villa, decorated with paintings of delicate spring allegories, and with a view of Florence and the Arno valley, eternally cheerful, short, twittering, ginger-haired and ugly. They remained on the terrace in front of the table, where, on the pinkish tablecloth, in the already approaching dusk, the plates, dark-red all over, like pools of blood, showed densely dark, and the smell of cigars, wild strawberries and the wine left in the glasses mingled with the smell of flowers from the garden. From inside the house a woman's voice could be heard singing old songs, interrupted at times by a short silence, at times by prolonged talking and laughter; and when the light was lit inside, the view from the semi-darkness of the terrace was reminiscent

of a production of Maeterlinck's L'Interieur.7 6 And Ugo Orsini, with a red carnation in his buttonhole, pale and beardless, continued to talk, 'You can't imagine the woman he's losing himself with! If a man is not an ascetic, there is no greater crime than pure love. While he has love for Blonskaya, just look who he's sunk to: the only good things about Chibo are the depraved mermaid's eyes in her pale face. Her mouth- oh dear, her mouth! -just listen to the way she speaks; there's no banality she wouldn't repeat, and her every word is a vulgarity! Like the girl in the fairytale, with every word she has a mouse or a toad leaping out of her mouth. Absolutely! ... And she won't let him go, he'll forget Blonskaya, and his talent, and everything on earth for that woman. He is perishing as a man and, especially, as an artist.' 'And do you think that if Blonskaya ... if he loved her differently, he could break with Chibo?' 'I do.' After a pause Vanya began again shyly, 'And do you really consider pure love unattainable for him?' 'You see the way it's turning out? You only have to look at his face to understand it. I don't affirm anything, as nothing can be guaranteed, but I can see that he's perishing, and I can see why, and it infuriates me because I like and value him very much, and for that reason I hate in equal measure both Chibo and Blonskaya.' Orsini finished his cigarette and went into the house, and Vanya, remaining alone, kept on thinking about the rather round-shouldered young artist with the light, curly hair and sharp little beard, and the light, grey, very protuberant eyes, mocking and sad, beneath thick brows the colour of old gold. And for some reason Stroop came to mind. The voice of Mme Monier, birdlike and affected, carried from the reception hall,

'Remember Segantini's genius with the huge wings above the lovers by the spring on the heights?77Jt's lovers themselves who ought to have wings, all those who are bold, free, loving.' 'A letter from Ivan Strannik;7 8 the dear woman! She sends us Anatole France's79 greetings and blessing. I kiss your name, great teacher.' 'Yours? To words by D' Annunzio? Of course, it stands to reason, why ever didn't you say anything?' And the noise could be heard of chairs being moved aside, the sound of the fortepiano in loud and proud chords, and the voice of Orsini beginning, in a rather coarsely passionate way, a broad, somewhat banal melody. 'Oh, how glad I am! Uncle, wouldn't you say? Splendid!' Mme Monier twittered, running out onto the terrace, all in pink, ginger-haired, ugly and charming. 'You're here?' she came upon Vanya. 'News! Your compatriot has arrived. Though he's not a Russian, albeit from St Petersburg; he's English. Ah? What?' she tossed out, without waiting for a reply, and disappeared to meet the new arrivals down the wide thoroughfare in the garden, already lit up by the moon. 'For God's sake, let's leave, I'm afraid, I don't want this, let's leave without saying goodbye, now, this minute,' Vanya hurried the Canon, who was sitting eating ice-cream and staring wideeyed at Vanya. 'Well yes, well yes, my child, but I don't understand what you're so worried about; let's go, I'll just find my hat.' 'Quickly, quickly, cher pere!' 80 Vanya was flagging in causeless terror. 'This way, this way, they're coming along there!' He turned aside from the main road where the clatter of hooves and carriage wheels could be heard, and at a turn on a narrow path, into the moonlight, unexpectedly, very close to them, Mme Monier emerged with several guests, going round by

Bs

the quickest way, and unmistakably, clearly illuminated, undoubted, in the moonlight- Stroop. 'Let's stay,' whispered Vanya, squeezing the arm of the Canon, who could clearly see how a deep flush, noticeable even by moonlight, had covered the smiling, excited face of his charge. They had driven out in four donkey-drawn gigs from under the gateway of a house built as early as the thirteenth century with a well in the first-floor dining room in case of siege, with a hearth into which a shepherd's hut could have fitted, with a library, portraits and a chapel. In case it was cold on the way up, servants had brought out capes and travelling rugs in addition to those sent on ahead with provisions. Those who had come from Florence via the station of Borgo san Lorenzo, then by horse, passing Scarperia with its castle and steel wares, and Sant-Agata, were in a hurry to finish lunch in order to return from the mountains while it was still light, and all that was audible without any conversation was the clatter of forks and knives and simultaneously of spoons already in coffee. Having driven past vineyards and farms amid chestnut trees, they had climbed ever higher up a winding road, so that the first carriage had sometimes found itself directly above the last one, they had abandoned more southerly plants for birches, pines, mosses and violets, where clouds could already be seen down below. Without having yet reached the summit of Giuogo, from where, it was said, one could see both the Mediterranean and the Adriatic Seas, they had suddenly caught sight at a turn of Firenzuola, seeming like a little pile of reddish-grey stones, of the winding highway running through it towards Faenza, and of an old-fashioned stagecoach which had been moving along it. The stagecoach had stopped to give one of the female passengers time to get out for a call of nature, and the driver on his high coach-box had been having a peaceful smoke while waiting until he could move off again. 86

'How reminiscent that is of Goldoni 81 of blessed memory! What delightful simplicity!' Mme Monier had gone into raptures, cracking a whip with a red handle. They had been offered fried eggs, cheese, Chianti and salami in a smoke-blackened taverna resembling a brigands' den, and the hostess, a one-eyed and suntanned woman, listened with her cheek pressed against the back of a wooden chair to a man without a jacket, in a felt hat that had turned green, black-browed and big-eyed, telling the gentlemen about her: 'It had been known for a long time that Beppo was sometimes here at night ... The carabinieri say to her, "Auntie Pasqua, don't turn your nose up at our money, Beppo'll be caught anyway." She thought about it, couldn't make up her mind ... She's an honest woman, take a look ... But fate will always be fate; one day he arrived drunk after the wedding of a man from his parts, and off he went to bed ... Pasqua had warned the carabinieri earlier on, and she gave them a whistle, and earlier on she'd taken Beppo's knives and gun off him. What could he do? He's a man, Signori .. .' 'How he cursed! Tied up, he threw this very bench here over with his feet, fell down and started rolling around!' said Pasqua in a rather hoarse voice, with her teeth and her one eye flashing, and smiling as though she were recounting the most pleasant things. 'Yes, yes, she's a fine girl, Pasqua, even if she is one-eyed! Another glass?' suggested the bearded man, at the same time slapping the hostess on the shoulder. 'Smurov, Orsini, go back up quickly, I've forgotten my umbrella, you're the last, we'll wait for you! Ah? What? My umbrella, my umbrella!' Mme Monier called from the first chaise, reining in the donkeys and turning back her ugly, pink and smiling face in flying ginger locks. The taverna was empty, the uncleared table, the displaced benches and chairs recalled the guests who had just been there,

and behind a curtain where a bed was concealed, sighs and indistinct whispering could be heard. 'Who's there?' Orsini called from the threshold. 'The signora has forgotten her umbrella here; have you seen it?' A whispering began behind the curtain; then Pasqua, dishevelled, without shawl or bodice, adjusting her dirty skirt as she walked, tanned, thin and, despite her youth, terribly old, pointed in silence at the umbrella standing in the corner, white, lacy, with an indeterminate yellow design at the top and a white handle. From behind the curtain a man's voice called, 'Pasqua, hey Pasqua? Will you be long? Have they gone?' 'Just a moment,' the woman replied hoarsely, and, going up to a broken piece of mirror on the wall, she stuck the red carnation forgotten by Orsini into her dishevelled hair. They were almost the only ones in the theatre to be following Isolde's outpourings to Brangane with full attention and almost failing to notice the King entering the box opposite the stage with the Queens and, after bowing awkwardly to the public, who had met him with cries of greeting, lowering himself onto a seat right by the barrier with a bored and businesslike air small, moustachioed and large-headed, with a sentimental and cruel face. Despite the action, the auditorium was fully lit: the ladies in the boxes, decolletees and wearing necklaces, sat with their backs all but turned towards the stage, exchanging remarks and smiling; and cavaliers with buttonholes, dull and proper, paid calls from one box to another. Ice-cream was being served, and elderly gentlemen sitting in the depths of the boxes, read newspapers, holding them fully opened out. Sitting between Stroop and Orsini, Vanya did not hear the whispering and noise all around, completely absorbed in thoughts of Isolde, who imagined the sound of hunting horns in the rustling of leaves. 8 2 88

'There you have the apotheosis of love! Without the night and death it would be the greatest song of passion, and how ritualistic are the very outlines of the melody and the scene as a whole, how like hymns!' said Ugo to Vanya, who had gone quite pale. Stroop, without turning round, was looking through operaglasses at the box opposite them, where, sitting tightly up against one another, were the fair-haired artist and a small woman with strikingly black, wavy hair, with still, whitish, huge eyes in a pale, unrouged face, with a large, deep-red mouth, wearing a bright-yellow dress, embroidered in gold, conspicuous, pretentious and with a vulgar and madly decisive chin. And Vanya listened mechanically to tales about the affairs of this Veronica Chibo, where the various names of men and women who had perished through her were intertwined. 'She's the most complete good-for-nothing,' came the voice of Ugo, 'a character from the sixteenth century.' 'Oh, that's too smart for her! She's simply a vile female,' and the rudest names were heard from the lips of the proper cavaliers, gazing with desire at that yellow dress and the depraved mermaid's eyes in the pale face. When Vanya was obliged to turn to Stroop with the simplest of questions, he would blush, smiling, and the impression was of someone talking, having only just made up after a stormy quarrel, or talking with somebody recovering after a long illness. 'I keep on thinking about Tristan and Isolde,' said Vanya, walking down a corridor with Orsini. 'I mean, there you have the most ideal depiction of love, the apotheosis of passion, but I mean, if you look at the external side and the end of the story, isn't it, in essence, the same thing that we came upon in the taverna on Giuogo?' 'I don't entirely understand what you mean. Are you troubled by the very presence of carnal union?'

'No, but there's something that's ridiculous and degrading in any real act; well, I mean, Isolde and Tristan did have to undo and take off their clothes, and after all, weren't capes and trousers even then just as unpoetic as jackets are for us?' 'Oh, what ideas! That is amusing!' laughed Orsini, gazing at Vanya in surprise. 'That's the way it always is; I don't understand what you want?' 'If the bare essence is one and the same, does it really make any difference how you reach it - with the growth of a great love, or with an animal impulse?' 'What's the matter with you? I don't recognise the friend of Canon Mori! It stands to reason that the fact and the bare essence are not important, important is one's attitude to themand the most disgraceful fact, the most improbable situation may be vindicated and cleansed by one's attitude to it,' Orsini said seriously, almost sermonising. 'That may, indeed, be true, in spite of its being edifying,' Vanya remarked with a smile, and, sitting down next to Stroop, he gave him an attentive look from the side. They had arrived somewhat early at the station to see off Mme Monier, who was leaving for Brittany to spend a couple of weeks there before Paris. Against a pale yellow sky the globes of the electric streetlights showed white, cries of 'pronti, partenza' 8 3 rang out, passengers bustled onto earlier trains, and requests and the tinkling of teaspoons carried continually from the refreshment room. They were drinking coffee while waiting for the train; a bouquet of gloire de Dijon 84 roses lay on an unfolded Figaro 8 5 beside Mme Monier's gloves; she was sitting in a maize-coloured dress with pale yellow ribbons, and the cavaliers were cracking jokes about the political news that someone had just read out, when at the next table there

appeared Veronica Chibo in travelling clothes with her green veil lowered, the artist with a holdall, and behind them a porter with their things. 'Look, they're leaving! He'll perish completely!' said Ugo, having said hello to the artist and moving away to his own party. 'Where are they going? Doesn't he see anything? That base, base woman!' Pale and challenging, Chibo raised her veil, silently showed the porter where to put the things, and placed her hand on her travelling-companion's sleeve, as though taking him into her possession. 'Look - Blonskaya! How did she find out? I don't envy her and Chibo,' whispered Mme Monier, while the other woman, all in grey, walked quickly towards the artist, who was sitting with his back to her and could not see her, and his travellingcompanion with her fixedly staring mermaid's eyes. Going up to them, she began speaking quietly in Russian, 'Seryozha, where are you going, and why? And why is it a secret from me, from all of us? Aren't you a friend for all of us? Nonetheless, I know, and I know it's your ruin! Perhaps I myself am to blame and can put something right?' 'What ever is to be put right?' Chibo stared motionless, straight at Blonskaya, as though not seeing her, blind. 'Perhaps it will keep you here if I marry you? That I love you, you know.' 'No, no, I don't want anything!' he replied, abruptly and rudely, as though afraid of yielding. 'Is there really nothing that can help? Is it really irrevocable?' 'Perhaps. Many things happen too late.' 'Seryozha, come to your senses! Let's go back, you'll perish, you know, not only as an artist, but generally too!'

'What is there to say? It's too late to put right, and anyway, I want it like this!' the artist suddenly almost shouted. Chibo transferred her eyes to him. 'No, you don't want it like this,' said Blonskaya. 'What then, so I don't know myself what I want?' 'You don't. And what a boy you are, Seryozha!' Chibo rose in the wake of the porter who had taken her suitcase, and she addressed her travelling-companion inaudibly; he got up, putting on his overcoat and without replying to Blonskaya. 'And so, Seryozha, Seryozha, you're leaving anyway?' Mme Monier, twittering noisily, was saying goodbye to her friends and already nodding her ginger head from behind the bouquet of gloire de Dijon roses in her compartment. Returning, they saw Blonskaya going quickly on foot, all in grey, leaning on an umbrella. 'It's as if we've been at a funeral,' remarked Vanya. 'There are some people who continually seem to be at their own,' Stroop replied, without looking at Vanya. 'When an artist perishes, it can be very hard.' 'There are some people who are artists of life; their ruin is no less hard.' 'And there are some things it's sometimes too late to do,' added Vanya. 'Yes, there are some things it's sometimes too late to do,' repeated Stroop. They went into a low box room, lit only by the open door, where an old cobbler with round glasses like those in paintings by Dawe 86 sat bent over a boot. It was cool after the sunshine in the street, it smelt of leather and jasmine, several twigs of which stood right under the ceiling in a bottle on the top shelf of a cupboard full of boots; an apprentice was looking at the Canon, 92

who was sitting with his legs set apart and wiping away the sweat with a red silk handkerchief, and old Giuseppe was talking in a melodious, good-natured voice, 'What am I? I'm a poor hack, gentlemen, but there are artists, artists! Oh, it's not so easy to sew a boot in line with the laws of art; you need to know, to study in full the foot you're sewing for, you need to know where the bone is wider, where it's narrower, where there are corns, where the instep is higher than it ought to be. There's not a single foot belonging to a man, you know, that's just like another's, and you have to be an ignoramus to think a boot's a boot, and it fits all feet, when oh dear, what feet there are, Signori! And they all need to walk. The Lord God only made it compulsory for a foot to have five toes and a heel, while everything else is equally right, you understand? And even if someone has six or four toes, then it was the Lord God that endowed him with such feet, and he needs to walk like others do too, and it's the master cobbler that has to know it and make it possible.' The Canon was noisily gulping Chianti from a large glass and using his wide-brimmed black hat to drive off the flies that kept settling on his forehead, which was covered in beads of sweat; the apprentice continued to look at him, and the even and melodious sound of Giuseppe's speech was soporific. As they were passing through the cathedral square to go to the Giotto restaurant, frequented by the clergy, they met old Count Guidetti, rouged and wearing a wig, walking along and almost leaning upon two young girls of modest, almost staid appearance. Vanya remembered stories about this old man who had half gone to pieces, about his so-called 'nieces', about the stimulation demanded by the dulled senses of this old debauchee with the deathly, painted face and the lively eyes, shining with intelligence and wit; he remembered his conversations, when out from the mumbling mouth flew the paradoxes, witticisms 93

and stories which are being lost more and more in our time, and he could hear the voice of Giuseppe saying, 'And even if someone has six or four toes, then it was the Lord God that endowed him with such feet, and he needs to walk like others do too.' 'The stones, the walls blushed, when the Count's trial was being conducted,' said Mori, passing to the left into a room filled with the black figures of ecclesiastics and a few customers from among the laymen who wished to eat no meat on Fridays. An elderly Englishwoman with a beardless youth was speaking French with a strong accent: 'We converts, we love it more, we understand more consciously all the beauty and charm of Catholicism, its rituals, its doctrines, its discipline.' 'The poor woman,' the Canon explained, putting his hat down next to him on the wooden couch, 'from a wealthy, good family - and here she is going out giving lessons, in need, because she found out the true faith and everyone broke off with her.' 'Risotto! Three portions!' 'There were more than three hundred of us when we were walking from Pontasieve, there are always enough pilgrims by the time you reach Annunziata.'87 'St George! With him and the Archangel Michael, and the Holy Virgin, with patrons like that there's no need to be afraid of anything in life!' The Englishwoman's accent was getting lost in the general noise. 'By birth he was from Bithynia; Bithynia is the Switzerland of Asia Minor, with mountains that turn green, mountain streams and pastures, and he was a shepherd before Hadrian 88 took him in; he accompanied his Emperor on his journeys, during one of which he died in Egypt. Dark rumours circulated that he'd 94

drowned himself in the Nile as a sacrifice to the gods for the life of his patron, others claimed he'd drowned in saving Hadrian while he was bathing. At the hour of his death astronomers discovered a new star in the sky; his death, surrounded by an aureole of mystery, and his extraordinary beauty, which had revived the art that had then been stagnant, had an effect not only on the court environment - and the inconsolable Emperor, wishing to honour his favourite, deified him, instituting games, erecting palaestras and temples in his honour and oracles where, to begin with, he himself wrote replies in ancient verse. But it would be a mistake to think that the new cult was propagated by force, only in the circle of courtiers, that it was official, and fell together with its founder. Much later, several centuries almost, we encounter communities honouring Diana and Antinous, where the aim was the burial of their members at the expense of the community, meals with pooled resources and modest services of worship. The members of these communities -prototypes of the first Christian ones -were people from the poorest class, and the complete rule of one such institution has come down to us. Thus, in the course of time, the divine nature of the imperial favourite acquires the character of a nocturnal divine being from beyond the grave, popular among the poor, and which didn't receive propagation like the cult of Mithra, 8 9 but as one of the most powerful movements of deified man.' The Canon closed the notebook and, looking over the top of his glasses at Vanya, remarked, 'The morality of pagan emperors doesn't concern us, my child, but I cannot hide it from you that Hadrian's relationship with Antinous was, of course, far from being one of fatherly love.' 'Why did you take it into your head to write about Antinous?' asked Vanya indifferently, thinking about something else entirely and not looking at the Canon. 95

'I read to you what was written this morning, but in general I'm writing about the Roman Caesars.' Vanya found it funny that the Canon was writing about the life ofTiberius9° on Capri, and, unable to resist, he asked, 'Have you been writing about Tiberius too, cher pere?' 'Certainly.' 'And about his life on Capri, you remember, the way it's described in Suetonius?'9 1 Stung, Mori began speaking heatedly, 'Terrible, you're right, my friend! It's terrible, and only Christianity, the holy teaching, could lead the human race out from that degradation, from that cesspit!' 'Are you more restrained in your attitude to the Emperor Hadrian?' 'It's a big difference, my friend, here there is something exalted, although, of course, it is a dreadful delusion of the senses, with which even people enlightened by baptism haven't always been able to struggle.' 'But in essence, at any given moment, isn't it one and the same thing?' 'You're dreadfully deluded, my son. Important in every act is the attitude to it, its aim, and also the reasons that engendered it; the acts themselves are the mechanical movements of our bodies, incapable of offending anyone, still less the Lord God.' And he again opened the notebook at the place marked by his fat thumb. They were walking down the far right-hand road of the Cascine, where through the trees could be seen meadows and farms and, beyond them, low mountains; passing a restaurant, deserted at this time of day, they moved through an area which was increasingly taking on a rural appearance. Occasionally there were keepers with light buttons sitting on benches, and in the dis-

tance boys were running around in little cassocks under the supervision of a fat abbot. 'I'm so grateful to you for agreeing to come here,' said Stroop, sitting down on a bench. 'If we're going to talk, then better while walking, I understand quicker that way,' remarked Vanya. 'Excellent.' And they began to walk, now stopping, now moving on once more between the trees. 'Why on earth did you deprive me of your friendship, your good disposition? Did you suspect me of being to blame for the death of Ida Golberg?' 'No.' 'Why, then? Answer frankly.' 'I will answer frankly: because of your business with Fyodor.' 'Do you think so?' 'I know what is, and you're not going to deny it.' 'Of course not.' 'Now, perhaps, I'd have responded quite differently, but then there was a lot I didn't know, I didn't think about anything, and it was very hard for me because, I confess, it seemed to me that I was losing you irrevocably and, along with you, any sort of way towards the beauty of life.' Having made a circuit around a glade, they were again walking along that same path, and the children in the distance, playing with a ball, were laughing loudly, but far away. 'Tomorrow I ought to leave, in that case, for Bari, but I can stay; that now depends on you: if it's "no", write "go", if "yes" -"stay".' 'What "no", what "yes"?' asked Vanya. 'Do you want me to spell it out to you?' 'No, no, there's no need, I understand; only why all this?' 'It's become so essential now. I'll wait until one o'clock.' 97

'I'll reply in any event.' 'One more effort, and you'll grow wings, I can already see them.' 'Perhaps, only it's very hard when they're growing,' said Vanya, grinning. They sat up late on the balcony, and Vanya noticed in surprise that he was listening to Ugo attentively and carefree, as though it were not the next day that he needed to give a reply to Stroop. There was a sort of pleasantness in this uncertainty of situation, feelings, relations, a sort of lightness and hopelessness. Ugo continued with fervour, 'It has no title yet. The first scene: a grey sea, cliffs, a goldcoloured sky that calls you into the distance, the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece - everything frightening in its novelty and unprecedentedness and where you suddenly recognise the most ancient love and your fatherland. The second actPrometheus, chained and punished, "No one can have insight into the secrets of nature and go unpunished, not without violating its laws, and only an incestuous patricide can guess the riddle of the Sphinx!" Pasiphae9 2 appears, blind with passion for a bull, terrible and oracular, "I see neither the diversity of a disorderly life, nor the orderliness of prophetic dreams." All are horrified. Then the third act: on the blessed glades there are scenes from Metamorphoses,93 where the gods assumed all kinds of forms for love, Icarus falls, Phaeton falls, Ganymede says, "Poor brothers, of those who flew up into the sky only I have remained there, because you were drawn towards the sun by pride and childish toys, whereas I was taken by raging love, incomprehensible to mortals. "94 Flowers, prophetically huge, fiery, burst into bloom, birds and animals walk in pairs, and in a flickering pink mist can be seen forty-eight models of human conjunction from Indian "manuels erotiques" .95 And

everything starts to rotate in a double rotation, each thing in its own sphere, and in an ever bigger circle, ever quicker and quicker, until all outlines merge, and the whole moving mass takes form and sets into a huge radiant figure of ZeusDionysus-Helios, standing above the glittering sea and treeless, yellow cliffs under an unbearable sun!' He got up after a sleepless night, worn out and with an aching head, and, after dressing and washing deliberately slowly, without opening the blinds, by the table, where there stood a glass of flowers, he wrote, unhurriedly, 'Leave'; after a little thought, with the same not yet fully awake face, he added, 'I'm coming with you' - and he opened the window into the street, which was bathed in bright sunlight.

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Notes I. Small country houses or villas. 2. Franz von Stuck (I863-I928), German painter and sculptor. 3. Eugene Prevost (I 862-I94 I), French novelist, dramatist and theatre critic. 4· Georges Ohnet (I848-I9I8), French novelist and dramatist. 5. B. G. Teibner, Leipzig publisher specialising in editions of classical literature. 6. The monument to the fabulist Ivan Krylov (1769-I 844) by Baron P.K. Klodt, unveiled in I 8 55. 7· A number of metal spikes set in timber to repel cavalry, or set along the top of a fence, wall, etc., to repel intruders. 8. Narrative poem on which Mikhail Lermontov (I8I4-4I) worked throughout the I 8 30s. 9· Off the cuff (Latin). 10. Eponymous hero ofthe novel of 1856 by Ivan Turgenev (1818-83) who dies on the Paris barricades in I848. 1 r. Sandro Botticelli ( I445-15 IO), Italian painter. I2. Opera of 1877 by French composer Camille Saint-Saens (1835-I92I). I3. Opera of I875 by French composer Georges Bizet (I838-75). 14. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-I900), German philosopher. I5. Max Klinger (1857-I92o), German artist. I6. Favourite of the Roman Emperor Hadrian (see note 88), who, born around II I, drowned in the Nile in I30 AD. 17. Greek heroes who both died in the Trojan War in Homer's epic The Iliad. I 8. Pyla des supported his cousin Orestes during and after the latter's murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, to avenge her killing of his father Agamemnon, a hero of the Trojan War. I9. St Petersburg's most important cathedral, completed in 1858 to the design of Auguste de Montferrand. 20. Isaac Levitan (r860-1900), Russian painter. 21. Part of the Introduction to Kuzmin's own cycle of poems, 'Alexandrian Songs' (1905-8). 22. Jean Philippe Rameau (168 3-1764 ), French composer. 23. Claude Debussy (I862-1918), French composer. 24. Christopher Marlowe (I564-93), English dramatist. 25. Algernon Charles Swinburne (I837-1909), English poet and critic. 26. Spanish leather (French). 27. A scene from the opera Tannhiiuser (I 84 5) by Richard Wagner (I 8 I 3-8 3 ). 28. Hans Thoma (I 839-I924), German painter. 29. Dante Alighieri (1265-I321), Italian poet.

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30. The passage is from Canto XXVIII of Purgatorio, part of Dante's Divine Comedy. 31. Stepan Smolensky (I848-I909), music historian and choir conductor; Dmitry Razumovsky (I 8 I 8-89 ), music historian and teacher; Vasily Metallov ( I862-I926), historian of church singing, composer and teacher. 32. A man's light, tight-fitting coat of a style favoured by schismatics. 3 3. Andrei Pechersky, pen-name of Pavel Melnikov (I 8 I 8-8 3 ), whose novels In the Forests (I875) and On the Hills (I88I) dealt with the contemporary life of schismatics on the Volga. 34· One of the oldest Russian books of Lives of the Fathers, thought to date from the seventh century. 3 5. The schism in the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century had led to the formation of various heretical sects whose members were referred to generally as Old Believers. Persecution had not prevented them from flourishing into the twentieth century. 36. An uncouth man, after the character of that name in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. 37. St Eugenia, according to legend, the daughter of the Roman Governor of Alexandria during the reign of the Emperor Commodus, martyred c.258; Nifont, Bishop ofNovgorod from 1130 until his death in 1156; Pafnuty Borovsky, founder of a monastery at Borovsk, died in I477 or I478. 38. lvan IV, the Terrible (I530-84), Grand Prince of Moscow and All Russia, who became the first Russian tsar in I 54 7. 39· TheActsoftheApostles I5:28-9. 40. Matthew 7:1. 41. Celebrated on 29th June (12th July in the New Style calendar). 42. The reference could be to the theologian lvan Borisov (I8oo-s?), the missionary Ivan Popov-Venyaminov (I797-I879 ), both of whom took the name Innokenty, or the religious writer and teacher Innokenty Smirnov (I784-I8I9). 43· A low, open horse-drawn carriage. 44· Celebrated on 2oth July (2nd August in the New Style calendar). 4 5. A public building at a health resort, provided for the use and entertainment of visitors. 46. An open carriage with calash top and space for reclining. 4 7. A spiritual leader or counsellor. 48. A mound of earth around the walls of a peasant's hut serving as protection from the elements and as an informal seat. 49· A representative of the anti-priestly movement in the Old Believers' tradition (I6B2-I74I). 50. Kuzmin may mean lvan Filippov (I65 5-I744), who joined Semyon Denisov's community in the remote Olonetsk region.

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5 r. A group of anti-priestly Old Believers, mostly Don Cossacks by origin and led by the hetman !gnat Nekrasov (d. c.I737), who fled to the Kuban to avoid persecution in I708 and thence, in about I740, to Turkey, where they settled. 52·· Died I32.6. 53. St Fevroniya of Murom, wife of Prince David of Murom- they died on the same day in June I2.2.8; Jonah the Prophet, perhaps the Moscow Metropolitan St Jonah (d. 146I); St Dmitry, a son of Ivan the Terrible, popularly believed to have been an innocent victim of murder in I 59 I; Maria the Egyptian, traditionally believed to be a converted sinner who lived in the sixth century. 54· The verse drama by J.W. von Goethe (I749-I832.). 55. A fermented beverage, low in alcohol, made from rye flour or bread with malt. 56. 'Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.' Psalms I4I:2.. 57· See note 56. 58. From the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6ao, Luke n:2.. 59· The initial failure of Tannhiiuser led to its revision during the time of Wagner's work on Tristan and Isolde at the end of the I 8 50s. 6o. Gabriele D'Annunzio (I863-I938), Italian writer and political activist. 6r. Wagner's last opera (I882.). 62.. A reference to the Song of Simeon, Luke 2.:2.9. 63. Greek sculptor of the fifth century BC. 64. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (I 2. 1-So ), Emperor of Rome from 161 onwards. 65. Marcus Porcius Cato the Elder (2.34-149 BC), also known as 'the Censor', the post he held in Rome from I84, famed for his ultra-conservative opposition to innovation. 66. A cassock. 67. St Thomas Aquinas (12.2.5-74), Italian scholastic theologian. 68. Eponymous hero of the novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-16I6). 69. Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (c.5 BC-6 5 AD), Roman philosopher and statesman. 70. Greek lyric poet of the sixth century BC whose interest in the convivial and the erotic, including the homoerotic, has given rise to the adjective 'Anacreontic'. 71. An Italian Jesuit, also known as St Aloysius (1568-91). 72.. Choirboy (French). 73· Giorgio Vasari (I511-74), Italian painter, architect, art historian and biographer. 74· Franco Sacchetti (c.1330-140o), Italian author of stories in the manner of Giovanni Boccaccio.

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75· Giacomo Puccini (1S5S-1924), Italian composer, primarily of operas. 76. This play by the Belgian dramatist and poet Maurice Maeterlinck (1S62-1949) was a part of the cycle Three Little Dramas for Marionettes (1S94). 77· 'Love at the Fountain of Life' (1S96), a painting by the Italian artist Giovanni Segantini (1S5S-99). 7S. Pen-name of the Russian writer and journalist Anna Anichkova (1S6S-1935), who lived for many years in Paris. 79· Pen-name of Anatole Fran.,:ois Thibault (1S44-1924), French novelist and critic. So. Dear Father (French). Sr. Carlo Goldoni (1707-93), prolific Italian author of comedies. S2. The beginning of the second act ofWagner's Tristan and lsolde (first performed 1S65). S3. Ready, departure (Italian). S4. Glory of Dijon (French). S5. The French daily newspaper Le Figaro. S6. George Dawe (17S1-1S29), English painter who spent his final years in St Petersburg working on portraits of Russia's military leaders during the Napoleonic Wars for the 1S 12 Gallery ofthe Winter Palace. S7. The Church of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence's Piazza della Santissima Annunziata. SS. Publius Aelius Hadrianus (76-13S), Roman emperor. See note 16. S9. A god in Iranian mythology associated with light, power and wisdom. 90. Tiberius Claudius Nero (42 BC- 37 AD), emperor of Rome from 14 AD. 91. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (75-160), Roman historian, biographer of the first twelve Caesars, who described Tiberius' life on Capri after his retreat there in 27 AD as one of unbridled sensuality. 92. In Greek mythology the wife of the Cretan king Minos, whose passion for a bull, inspired by a vengeful divinity, led to the birth of the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull. 93· The title of fifteen books of verse by the Roman poet Ovid, Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC- 17 AD), dealing with the mythical transformations of Greek gods and heroes. 94· In Greek mythology Icarus perished after flying too close to the sun on artificial wings; Phaeton was struck down by Zeus after failing to control the fiery chariot of his father Helios; the handsome Ganymede was the favourite of Zeus who was abducted and brought to Olympus by an eagle. 9 5. Erotic manuals (French).

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Biographical note Poet, novelist, playwright, composer and critic Mikhail Kuzmin was born in I872 in the provincial town of Yaroslavl in Russia. While at school, he developed an interest in Western culture and went on to spend three years in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's composition class at the St Petersburg Conservatory. In I904 Kuzmin was introduced to The World of Art, an artistic circle that attracted him because of its preoccupations with Art Nouveau aesthetics and Symbolism, and that he also found congenial as a high proportion of its members were homosexual. After the Bolshevik government came to power in I9I7, Kuzmin sat on the Praesidium of the Association of Artists in Petrograd, alongside other writers including Alexander Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and worked as an official translator under Maxim Gorky. He also helped found the daily The Life of Art in I 9 I 8 and worked as one of its editors. Kuzmin's first published work appeared in the anthology Green Miscellany in I 904. A prolific writer, he was a prominent contributor to the Silver Age of Russian poetry, producing the first substantial body of free verse in Russian literature. He was also the first Russian author to tackle homosexuality in works such as Wings ( I906) and the autobiographical poem cycle The Trout Breaks the Ice (I929), which has inevitably led to comparisons with the likes of Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide. He died of pneumonia in Leningrad in I 9 3 6 and is buried in the city's Volkov Cemetery. Hugh Aplin studied Russian at the University of East Anglia and Voronezh State University, and worked at the Universities of Leeds and St Andrews before taking up his current post as Head of Russian at Westminster School, London. His previous

translations include Anton Chekhov's The Story of a Nobody and Three Years, Nikolai Gogol's The Squabble, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Poor People, The Gambler and Notes from the Underground, Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murat and The Forged Coupon, lvan Turgenev's Faust and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Fatal Eggs.

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