‘Who’s there?’ shouted Guskov at me in a perfectly tipsy voice. The cold air evidently had an effect on him. ‘What devil is prowling about there with a horse?’
I did not reply, and silently found my way out on to the road.
1 Gorodki is a game in which short, thick sticks are arranged in certain figures within squares. Each side has its own square, and each player in turn throws a stick to try to clear out the enemy’s square. The side wins which first accomplishes this with the six figures in which the sticks are successively arranged.
2 Run of ill luck.
3 ‘The luck has turned.’
4 ‘Yes, my dear fellow, the days follow, but do not resemble one another.’
5 Kabardá is a district in the Térek Territory of the Caucasus, and Kabardá horses are famous for their powers of endurance.
6 A position in the world.
7 ‘My father allowed me 10,000 rubles a year.’
8 ‘I was received in the best society of Petersburg; I could aspire …’
9 ‘But in particular I spoke the society jargon.’
10 ‘Was that liaison with Mme D—.’
11 ‘My father; you will have heard him spoken of.’
12 ‘He disinherited me.’
13 ‘He has been consistent.’
14 Camp life.
15 ‘I should be seen under fire.’
16 ‘You know, with the prestige that misfortune gives.’
17 ‘(But) what a disenchantment!’
18 ‘I hope that is saying a good deal.’
19 ‘You can have no idea of what I had to suffer.’
20 ‘With the small means I had, I lacked everything.’
21 ‘With my pride, I wrote to my father.’
22 ‘Have you a cigarette?’
23 ‘Who is the son of my father’s steward.’
24 ‘I have been seen under fire.’
25 War, camp-life.
26 ‘It is dreadful, it is killing.’
27 ‘Quite frankly.’
28 ‘You are above that [i.e. above despising me for my misfortunes], my dear fellow, I have not a halfpenny.’
29 ‘Can you lend me ten rubles?’
30 ‘Do not trouble yourself.’
31 Reversing.
32 From light-heartedness.
33 Women of good breeding.
34 ‘And I have not a strong head.’
35 Morskaya – one of the best streets in Petersburg.
36 On the ground floor.
37 ‘In the morning I went out.’
38 ‘It must be admitted that she was a ravishing woman.’
39 ‘Always gay, always loving.’
40 ‘And I have much to reproach myself with.’
41 ‘I made her suffer, often.’
42 ‘I am broken.’
43 Dignity in misfortune.
44 ‘Has stained me.’
45 ‘I cannot.’
46 ‘I have shown it.’
LUCERNE
FROM PRINCE NEKHLYÚDOV’S MEMOIRS
LUCERNE
8th July, 1857.
LAST night I arrived at Lucerne, and put up at the Schweizerhof, the best hotel.
Lucerne, an ancient town and the capital of the canton, situated on the shore of the Lake of Lucerne, says Murray, is one of the most romantic places in Switzerland: here three important high roads meet, and it is only one hour by steamboat to Mount Rigi, from which one of the most magnificent views in the world can be seen.
Whether this be right or not, other guide-books say the same, and so tourists of all nationalities, especially the English, flock there.
The magnificent five-storeyed Schweizerhof Hotel has been recently erected on the quay, close to the lake at the very place where of old there was a roofed and crooked bridge1 with chapels at its corners and carvings on its beams. Now, thanks to the enormous influx of English people, their needs, their tastes, and their money, the old bridge has been torn down and a granite quay, as straight as a stick, erected, on which straight, rectangular, five-storeyed houses have been built, in front of which two rows of little lindens with stakes to them have been planted, between which the usual small green benches have been placed. This is a promenade, and here Englishwomen wearing Swiss straw hats, and Englishmen in stout and comfortable clothes, walk about enjoying the work they have inspired. Perhaps such quays and houses and lime trees and Englishmen are all very well in some places, but not here amid this strangely majestic and yet inexpressibly genial and harmonious Nature.
When I went up to my room and opened the window facing the lake I was at first literally blinded and shaken by the beauty of that water, those mountains, and the sky. I felt an inward restlessness and a need to find expression for the emotion that filled my soul to overflowing. At that moment I felt a wish to embrace someone, to hug him closely, to tickle and pinch him – in a word to do something extraordinary to myself and to him.
It was past six and had rained all day, but was now beginning to clear up. The lake, light-blue like burning sulphur, and dotted with little boats which left vanishing tracks behind them, spread out before my windows motionless, smooth, and apparently convex between its variegated green shores, then passed into the distance where it narrowed between two enormous promontories, and, darkening, leaned against and disappeared among the pile of mountains, clouds, and glaciers, that towered one above the other. In the foreground were the moist, fresh-green, far-stretching shores with their reeds, meadows, gardens, and chalets; further off were dark-green wooded promontories crowned by ruined castles; in the background was the rugged, purple-white distance with its fantastic, rocky, dull-white, snow-covered mountain crests, the whole bathed in the delicate, transparent azure of the air and lit up by warm sunset rays that pierced the torn clouds. Neither on the lake nor on the mountains, nor in the sky, was there a single precise line, or one precise colour, or one unchanging moment: everywhere was motion, irregularity, fantastic shapes, an endless intermingling and variety of shades and lines, and over it all lay tranquillity, softness, unity, and inevitable beauty. And here, before my very window, amid this undefined, confused, unfettered beauty, the straight white line of the quay stretched stupidly and artificially, with its lime trees, their supports, and the green benches – miserable, vulgar human productions which did not blend with the general harmony and beauty as did the distant chalets and ruins, but on the contrary clashed coarsely with it. My eyes continually encountered that dreadfully straight quay, and I felt a desire to push it away or demolish it, as one would wipe off a black smudge that disfigured the nose just under one’s eye. But the embankment with the English people walking about on it remained where it was, and I instinctively tried to find a point of view from which it would not be visible. I found a way to do this, and sat till dinner-time all alone, enjoying the incomplete, but all the more tormentingly sweet feeling one experiences when one gazes in solitude on the beauty of Nature.
At half-past seven I was called to dinner. In the large, splendidly decorated room on the ground floor two tables were laid for at least a hundred persons. For about three minutes the silent movement of assembling visitors continued – the rustle of women’s dresses, light footsteps, whispered discussions with the very polite and elegant waiters – but at last all the seats were occupied by men and women very well and even richly and generally most immaculately dressed. As usual in Switzerland the majority of the visitors were English, and therefore the chief characteristic of the common table was the strict decorum they regard as an obligation – a reserve not based on pride, but on the absence of any necessity for social intercourse, and on content with the comfortable and agreeable satisfaction of their requirements. On all sides gleamed the whitest of laces, the whitest of collars, the whitest of teeth – natural or artificial – and the whitest of complexions and hands. But the faces, many of them very handsome, expressed only a consciousness of their own well-being and a complete lack of interest in all that surrounded them unless it directly concerned themselves; and the whitest of hands in rings and mittens moved only to adjust a collar, to cut up beef, or to lift a wine glass: no mental emotion was reflected in their movements. Occasionally families would exchange a few words among themselves in subdued voices about the pleasant flavour of this or that dish or wine, or the lovely view from Mount Rigi. Individual tourists, men and women, sat beside one another not even exchanging a look. If occasionally some two among these hundred people spoke to one another it was sure to be about the weather and the ascent of Mount Rigi. Knives and forks moved on the plates with scarcely any sound, food was taken a little at a time, peas and other vegetables were invariably eaten with a fork. The waiters, involuntarily subdued by the general silence, asked in a whisper what wine you would take. At such dinners I always feel depressed, uncomfortable, and at last melancholy. I always feel as if I were guilty of something and am being punished, as I used to be when, as a child, I was put in a chair when I had been naughty, and ironically told: ‘Rest yourself, my dear!’ while my youthful blood surged in my veins and I heard the merry shouts of my brothers in the next room. Formerly I tried to rebel against the feeling of oppression I experienced during such dinners, but in vain: all those inanimate countenances have an insuperable effect on me and I become similarly inanimate myself. I wish nothing, think nothing, and cease even to observe what is going on. At first I used to try to talk to my neighbours; but except for phrases apparently repeated a hundred thousand times in the same place and by the same people I got no response. And yet not all these frozen people are stupid and unfeeling, on the contrary many of them, no doubt, have an inner life just such as my own, and in many of them it may be much more complex and interesting. Then why do they deprive themselves of one of life’s greatest pleasures – the enjoyment that comes from the intercourse of man with man?