Through two of the study windows and the glass of the balcony door, the whole length of the lane was visible—a sleigh road running into the distance, little houses in a crooked line, crooked fences.
Violet shadows reached from the garden into the study. Trees peered into the room, looking as if they wanted to strew the floor with their branches covered with heavy hoarfrost, which resembled lilac streams of congealed stearine.
Nikolai Nikolaevich was looking into the lane and remembering the last Petersburg winter, Gapon, Gorky, the visit of Witte, the fashionable contemporary writers.7 From that turmoil he had fled here, to the peace and quiet of the former capital, to write the book he had in mind. Forget it! He had gone from the frying pan into the fire. Lectures and talks every day—he had no time to catch his breath. At the Women’s Institute, at the Religious-Philosophical Society, for the benefit of the Red Cross, for the Fund of the Strike Committee. Oh, to go to Switzerland, to the depths of some wooded canton. Peace and serenity over a lake, the sky and the mountains, and the vibrant, ever-echoing, alert air.
Nikolai Nikolaevich turned away from the window. He had an urge to go and visit someone or simply to go outside with no purpose. But then he remembered that the Tolstoyan Vyvolochnov was supposed to come to him on business and he could not leave. He started pacing the room. His thoughts turned to his nephew.
When Nikolai Nikolaevich moved to Petersburg from the backwoods of the Volga region, he brought Yura to Moscow, to the family circles of the Vedenyapins, the Ostromyslenskys, the Selyavins, the Mikhaelises, the Sventitskys, and the Gromekos. At the beginning, Yura was settled with the scatterbrained old babbler Ostromyslensky, whom his relations simply called Fedka. Fedka privately cohabited with his ward, Motya, and therefore considered himself a shaker of the foundations, the champion of an idea. He did not justify the trust put in him and even turned out to be light-fingered, spending for his own benefit the money allotted for Yura’s upkeep. Yura was transferred to the professorial family of the Gromekos, where he remained to this day.
At the Gromekos’ Yura was surrounded by an enviably propitious atmosphere.
“They have a sort of triumvirate there,” thought Nikolai Nikolaevich, “Yura, his friend and schoolmate Gordon, and the daughter of the family, Tonya Gromeko. This triple alliance has read itself up on The Meaning of Love and The Kreutzer Sonata, and is mad about the preaching of chastity.”8
Adolescence has to pass through all the frenzies of purity. But they are overdoing it, they have gone beyond all reason.
They are terribly extravagant and childish. The realm of the sensual that troubles them so much, they for some reason call “vulgarity,” and they use this expression both aptly and inaptly. A very unfortunate choice of words! The “vulgar”—for them it is the voice of instinct, and pornographic literature, and the exploitation of women, and all but the entire world of the physical. They blush and blanch when they pronounce the word!
If I had been in Moscow, thought Nikolai Nikolaevich, I would not have let it go so far. Modesty is necessary, and within certain limits …
“Ah, Nil Feoktistovich! Come in, please,” he exclaimed and went to meet his visitor.
10
Into the room came a fat man in a gray shirt girded with a wide belt. He was wearing felt boots, and his trousers were baggy at the knees. He made the impression of a kindly fellow who lived in the clouds. On his nose a small pince-nez on a wide black ribbon bobbed angrily.
Divesting himself in the front hall, he had not finished the job. He had not taken off his scarf, the end of which dragged on the floor, and his round felt hat was still in his hands. These things hampered his movements and prevented Vyvolochnov not only from shaking Nikolai Nikolaevich’s hand, but even from greeting him verbally.
“Umm,” he grunted perplexedly, looking into all the corners.
“Put it wherever you like,” said Nikolai Nikolaevich, restoring to Vyvolochnov his gift of speech and his composure.
He was one of those followers of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy in whose heads the thoughts of the genius who had never known peace settled down to enjoy a long and cloudless repose and turned irremediably petty.
Vyvolochnov had come to ask Nikolai Nikolaevich to appear at a benefit for political exiles at some school.
“I’ve already lectured there.”
“At a benefit for political exiles?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to do it again.”
Nikolai Nikolaevich resisted at first but then agreed.
The object of the visit was exhausted. Nikolai Nikolaevich was not keeping Nil Feoktistovich. He could get up and leave. But it seemed improper to Vyvolochnov to leave so soon. It was necessary to say something lively and unforced in farewell. A strained and unpleasant conversation began.
“So you’ve become a decadent? Gone in for mysticism?”
“Why so?”
“A lost man. Remember the zemstvo?”
“Of course I do. We worked on the elections together.”
“We fought for village schools and teachers’ education. Remember?”
“Of course. Those were hot battles.”
“Afterwards I believe you went into public health and social welfare? Right?”
“For a while.”
“Mm—yes. And now it’s these fauns, nenuphars, ephebes, and ‘let’s be like the sun.’9 For the life of me, I can’t believe it. That an intelligent man with a sense of humor and such knowledge of the people … Drop it all, please … Or maybe I’m intruding … Something cherished?”
“Why throw words around at random without thinking? What are we quarreling about? You don’t know my thoughts.”
“Russia needs schools and hospitals, not fauns and nenuphars.”
“No one disputes that.”
“The muzhiks go naked and swollen with hunger …”
The conversation progressed by such leaps. Aware beforehand of the futility of these attempts, Nikolai Nikolaevich began to explain what brought him close to certain writers of the symbolist school, and then went on to Tolstoy.
“I’m with you up to a point. But Lev Nikolaevich says that the more a man gives himself to beauty, the more he distances himself from the good.”
“And you think it’s the other way round? Beauty will save the world, mysteries and all that, Rozanov and Dostoevsky?”10
“Wait, I’ll tell you what I think myself. I think that if the beast dormant in man could be stopped by the threat of, whatever, the lockup or requital beyond the grave, the highest emblem of mankind would be a lion tamer with his whip, and not the preacher who sacrifices himself. But the point is precisely this, that for centuries man has been raised above the animals and borne aloft not by the rod, but by music: the irresistibility of the unarmed truth, the attraction of its example. It has been considered up to now that the most important thing in the Gospels is the moral pronouncements and rules, but for me the main thing is that Christ speaks in parables from daily life, clarifying the truth with the light of everyday things. At the basis of this lies the thought that communion among mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic because it is meaningful.”
“I understand nothing. You should write a book about it.”
When Vyvolochnov left, Nikolai Nikolaevich was overcome by a terrible irritation. He was angry with himself for blurting out some of his innermost thoughts to that blockhead Vyvolochnov without making the slightest impression on him. As sometimes happens, Nikolai Nikolaevich’s vexation suddenly changed direction. He forgot all about Vyvolochnov, as if he had never existed. He recalled something else. He did not keep a diary, but once or twice a year he wrote down in his thick notebook the thoughts that struck him most. He took out the notebook and began jotting in a large, legible hand. Here is what he wrote: