But before we tell who this Lieutenant Pirogov was, it will do no harm if we say a thing or two about the society to which Pirogov belonged. There are officers in Petersburg who constitute a sort of middle class in society. You will always find one of them at a soiree, at a dinner given by a state or actual state councillor, who earned this rank by forty long years of labor. Several pale daughters, completely colorless, like Petersburg, some of them overripe, a tea table, a piano, dancing-all this is usually inseparable from a bright epaulette shining by a lamp, between a well-behaved blonde and the black tailcoat of a brother or a friend of the family. It is very hard to stir up these cool-blooded girls and make them laugh; it takes very great art, or, better to say, no art at all. One must speak so that it is neither too intelligent nor too funny, so that it is all about the trifles that women like. In this the gentlemen under discussion should be given their due. They have a special gift for making these colorless beauties laugh and listen. Exclamations stifled by laughter-"Ah, stop it! Aren't you ashamed to make me laugh so!"-are usually their best reward. Among the upper classes they occur very rarely, or, better to say, never. They are forced out altogether by what this society calls aristocrats; however, they are considered educated and well-bred people. They like talking about literature; they praise Bulgarin, Pushkin, and Grech, and speak with contempt and barbed wit of A. A. Orlov. 7 They never miss a single public lecture, be it on accounting or even on forestry. In the theater, whatever the play, you will always find one of them, unless they are playing some Filatkas, 8 which are highly insulting to their fastidious taste. They are constantly in the theater. For theater managers, these are the most profitable people. In plays, they especially like good poetry; they also like very much to call loudly for the actors; many of them, being teachers in government schools, or preparing students for them, in the end acquire a cabriolet and a pair of horses. Then their circle widens: they finally arrive at marrying a merchant's daughter who can play the piano, with a hundred thousand or so in cash and a heap of bearded relations. However, this honor they cannot attain before being promoted to the rank of colonel at the very least. Because our Russian beards, though still giving off a whiff of cabbage, have no wish for their daughters to marry any but generals, or colonels at the very least. These are the main features of this sort of young men. But Lieutenant Pirogov had a host of talents that belonged to him personally. He declaimed verses from Dmitri Donskoy and Woe from Wit 9 superbly well, and possessed a special art of producing smoke rings from his pipe so skillfully that he could suddenly send ten of them passing one through another. He could very pleasantly tell a joke about a cannon being one thing and a unicorn something else again. However, it is rather difficult to enumerate all the talents fate had bestowed on Pirogov.
He liked talking about some actress or dancer, but not so sharply as a young sub-lieutenant usually talks about this subject. He was very pleased with his rank, to which he had recently been promoted, and though he would occasionally say, while lying on the sofa: "Ah, ah! vanity, all is vanity! So what if I'm a lieutenant?"- secretly he was very flattered by this new dignity; in conversation he often tried to hint at it indirectly, and once, when he ran across some scrivener in the street who seemed impolite to him, he immediately stopped him and in a few but sharp words gave him to know that before him stood a lieutenant and not some other sort of officer. He tried to expound it the more eloquently as two good-looking ladies were just passing by. Generally, Pirogov showed a passion for all that was fine, and he encouraged the artist Piskarev; however, this may have proceeded from his great desire to see his masculine physiognomy in a portrait. But enough about Pirogov's qualities. Man is such a wondrous being that it is never possible to count up all his merits at once. The more you study him, the more new particulars appear, and their description would be endless.
And so Pirogov would not cease his pursuit of the unknown lady, entertaining her now and then with questions to which she replied sharply, curtly, and with some sort of vague sounds. Through the dark Kazan gate they entered Meshchanskaya Street, the street of tobacco and grocery shops, of German artisans and Finnish nymphs. The blonde ran more quickly and fluttered through the gates of a rather dingy house. Pirogov followed her. She ran up the narrow, dark stairway and went in at a door, through which Pirogov also boldly made his way. He found himself in a big room with black walls and a soot-covered ceiling. There was a heap of iron screws, locksmith's tools, shiny coffeepots and candlesticks on the table; the floor was littered with copper and iron shavings. Pirogov realized at once that this was an artisan's dwelling. The unknown lady fluttered on through a side door. He stopped to think for a moment, but, following the Russian rule, resolved to go ahead. He entered a room in no way resembling the first, very neatly decorated, showing that the owner was a German. He was struck by an extraordinarily strange sight.
Before him sat Schiller-not the Schiller who wrote Wilhelm Tell and the History of the Thirty Years' War, but the well-known Schiller, the tinsmith of Meshchanskaya Street. Next to Schiller stood Hoffmann-not the writer Hoffmann, but a rather good cobbler from Ofitserskaya Street, a great friend of Schiller's. 10 Schiller was drunk and sat on a chair stamping his foot and heatedly saying something. All this would not have been so surprising to Pirogov, but what did surprise him was the extremely strange posture of the figures. Schiller was sitting, his rather fat nose stuck out and his head raised, while Hoffmann was holding him by this nose with two fingers and waggling the blade of his cobbler's knife just above the surface of it. Both personages were speaking in German, and therefore Lieutenant Pirogov, whose only German was "Gut Morgen," was able to understand nothing of this whole story. Schiller's words, however, consisted of the following:
"I don't want, I have no need of a nose!" he said, waving his arms. "For this one nose I need three pounds of snuff a month. And I pay in the Russian vile shop, because the German shop doesn't have Russian snuff, I pay in the Russian vile shop forty kopecks for each pound; that makes one rouble twenty kopecks; twelve times one rouble twenty kopecks makes fourteen roubles forty kopecks. Do you hear, Hoffmann my friend? For this one nose, fourteen roubles forty kopecks! Yes, and on feast days I snuff rappee, because I don't want to snuff Russian vile tobacco on feast days. I snuff two pounds of rappee a year, two roubles a pound. Six plus fourteen-twenty roubles forty kopecks on snuff alone. That's highway robbery! I ask you, Hoffmann my friend, is it not so?" Hoffmann, who was drunk himself, answered in the affirmative. "Twenty roubles forty kopecks! I'm a Swabian German; I have a king in Germany. I don't want a nose! Cut my nose off! Here's my nose!"
And had it not been for the sudden appearance of Lieutenant Pirogov, there is no doubt that Hoffmann would have cut Schiller's nose off just like that, because he was already holding his knife in such a position as if he were about to cut out a shoe sole.
Schiller found it extremely vexing that an unknown, uninvited person had suddenly hindered them so inopportunely. Despite his being under the inebriating fumes of beer and wine, he felt it somewhat indecent to be in the presence of an outside witness while looking and behaving in such a fashion. Meanwhile Pirogov bowed slightly and said with his usual pleasantness:
"You will excuse me…"