“In Novocherkassk, at the Donskoy boarding school.”
“So you have no higher education? That means you don’t know what science is. All the sciences, however many there are in the world, have one and the same passport, without which they consider themselves unthinkable: striving for the truth! Each of them, even some sort of pharmacognosis, has as its aim not usefulness, not the comforts of life, but truth. Remarkable! When you set about the study of some science, you’re struck first of all by its beginnings. I’ll tell you, there is nothing more fascinating and grandiose, nothing that so astonishes and captivates the human spirit, as the beginnings of some science. After the first five or six lectures, you’re already inspired by the brightest hopes, you already fancy yourself the master of truth. And I gave myself to science selflessly, passionately, as to a beloved woman. I was its slave and didn’t want to know any other sun. Day and night I studied, never straightening my back, I went broke on books, I wept when before my eyes people exploited science for their personal ends. But I was not passionate for long. The thing is that each science has a beginning, but no end, like a recurrent decimal. Zoology has discovered thirty-five thousand kinds of insects, chemistry numbers sixty elements. If in time ten zeroes are added to the right of these numbers, zoology and chemistry will be as far from their ends as they are now, and all contemporary scientific work consists precisely in increasing the numbers. I caught on to this trick when I discovered the thirty-five-thousand-and-first species and did not feel any satisfaction. Well, ma’am, I had no time to be disappointed, because soon a new faith took hold of me. I threw myself into nihilism with its leaflets, black repartitions, and the like.6 I went to the people, worked in factories, was an oiler, a hauler. Later, wandering around Russia, I got a taste of Russian life, and turned into an ardent admirer of that life. I loved the Russian people to the point of suffering, loved and believed in their God, their language, their creativity…And so on, and so forth…For some time I was a Slavophile, pestered Aksakov with letters,7 was a Ukrainophile, an archaeologist, collected specimens of folk art…I was fascinated by ideas, people, events, places…endlessly fascinated! Five years ago I served the repudiation of private property; my last belief was in non-resistance to evil.”8
Sasha sighed fitfully and stirred. Likharev got up and went over to her.
“Would you like some tea, sweetie?” he asked tenderly.
“Drink it yourself!” the girl replied rudely.
Likharev became embarrassed and with a guilty step went back to the table.
“So you’ve had fun in your life,” said Miss Ilovaiskaya. “There’s a lot to remember.”
“Well, yes, it’s all fun, when you sit chattering over tea with a nice fellow talker, but if you ask what this fun cost me? What was the price of this diversity in my life? You see, madam, I did not believe like a German doctor of philosophy, zierlichmännerlich,9 I didn’t live in the desert, no, each of my beliefs bowed me down, tore my life to pieces. Judge for yourself. I was as rich as my brothers, but now I’m a beggar. In the whirl of my passions, I ran through my own fortune and my wife’s as well—a huge amount of other people’s money. I’m now forty-two, old age is at the door, and I’m as homeless as a dog left behind by the baggage train at night. All my life I’ve known no peace. My soul was constantly pining, suffering even in its hopes…I wore myself out with hard, random tasks, I suffered privation, was in prison maybe five times, dragged myself around the provinces of Archangelsk and Tobolsk10…It’s painful to remember! I’ve lived, but in the whirl I’ve never felt the process of life itself. Would you believe it, I don’t remember a single spring, I never noticed my wife’s love, my children’s births. What else shall I tell you? I was a misfortune for all those who loved me…My mother has been in mourning for me for fifteen years now, and my proud brothers, who, on account of me, had to feel sick at heart, to blush, to bend their backs, to waste their money, in the end came to hate me like poison.”
Likharev stood up and sat down again.
“If I were merely unhappy, I’d give thanks to God,” he went on, not looking at Miss Ilovaiskaya. “My personal unhappiness falls into the background when I remember how often in my passions I was absurd, far from the truth, unfair, cruel, dangerous! How often I hated and despised with all my soul those I should have loved, and—vice versa. I’ve been unfaithful a thousand times. Today I believe, I fall on my knees, but tomorrow I already flee in cowardice from my gods and friends of today and silently swallow the ‘scoundrel’ they send after me. God alone saw how often I wept and chewed the pillow from shame at my passions. Never once in my life have I deliberately lied or done evil, but my conscience isn’t clean! I can’t even boast of having no one’s life on my conscience, madam, because my wife died before my eyes, worn out by my recklessness. Yes, my wife! Listen, in our everyday life there are now two prevailing attitudes towards women. Some measure women’s skulls so as to prove that women are inferior to men, seek out their shortcomings so as to deride them, play the original in their eyes and justify their own animality. Others try with all their might to raise women up to them, that is, to make them learn thirty-five thousand species, and speak and write the same stupidities that they themselves speak and write…”
Likharev’s face darkened.
“But I tell you that woman has always been and will always be man’s slave,” he began in a bass voice, pounding his fist on the table. “She is tender, soft wax from which man has always molded whatever he liked. Lord God, for two cents’ worth of masculine passion, she’ll cut her hair, abandon her family, die in a foreign land…Among the ideas for which she has sacrificed herself, not one is feminine…A selfless, devoted slave! I haven’t measured skulls, I’m speaking from hard, bitter experience. The most proud and independent women, once I managed to convey my inspiration to them, followed me without reasoning, without questioning, and did everything I wanted; I turned a nun into a nihilist, who, as I later learned, shot a policeman; my wife never left me for a moment in my wanderings and, like a weathercock, changed her beliefs parallel to how I changed my passions.”