FYODOR IVANOVICH. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing . . . But that’s enough about that. Now let’s have a song from a different opera. I remember, about ten years ago—Lyonya was still in high school at the time—we were celebrating his birthday just as we are now. I was riding home from here, and at my right hand sat Sonya, and at my left Yulka, and both were clinging to my beard. Gentlemen, let’s drink to the health of the friends of my youth, Sonya and Yulya!
DYADIN (laughs loudly). This is fascinating! This is fascinating!
FYODOR IVANOVICH. Once when the war was over17 I was getting drunk with a Turkish pasha in Trebizond . . . He starts asking me . . .
DYADIN (interrupting). Gentlemen, let’s drink a toast to distinguished relations! Vivat friendship! Long may it thrive!
FYODOR IVANOVICH. Stop, stop, stop! Sonya, please pay attention! I’m going to make a wager, damn my eyes! I am putting three hundred rubles down on the table! After lunch let’s play a round of croquet, and I bet I’ll make it through all the hoops and back in one go.
SONYA. I’d accept, only I haven’t got three hundred rubles.
FYODOR IVANOVICH. If you lose, you’ll sing to me forty times.
SONYA. It’s a deal.
DYADIN. This is fascinating! This is fascinating!
YELENA ANDREEVNA (looking at the sky). What kind of bird just flew by?
ZHELTUKHIN. It’s a hawk.
FYODOR IVANOVICH. Ladies and gentlemen, to the health of the hawk!
SONYA bursts out laughing.
ORLOVSKY. Well, our girl’s off and running now! What’s got into you?
KHRUSHCHOV bursts out laughing.
And what’s come over you?
MARIYA VASILYEVNA. Sophie, that’s indecorous!
KHRUSHCHOV. Ugh, sorry, my friends . . . I’ll be over it right away, right away . . .
ORLOVSKY. That’s what you call idle laughter.
VOINITSKY. Just point a finger at the two of them, and they’ll burst out laughing. Sonya! (Shows her a finger.) Here, look . . .
KHRUSHCHOV. That’s enough! (Looks at his watch.) Well, Mikhail was a jolly old soul, he called for his food and called for his bowl, and now his time is up. It’s time to go.
SONYA. Where are you off to?
KHRUSHCHOV. To see a patient. My medical practice is as distasteful as a shrewish wife, or a long winter . . .
SEREBRYAKOV. Excuse me, and yet medicine is your profession, your vocation, so to speak . . .
VOINITSKY (ironically). He’s got another vocation. He excavates peat from his land.
SEREBRYAKOV. What?
VOINITSKY. Peat. Some engineer figured it out, black on white, that his land contains seven hundred and twenty thousand rubles’ worth of peat. No joke.
KHRUSHCHOV. I don’t excavate peat for profit.
VOINITSKY. What do you excavate it for then?
KHRUSHCHOV. So you won’t cut down trees.
VOINITSKY. Why shouldn’t I cut them down? To hear you talk, forests exist only so that lads and lassies can play “peek-a-boo” among the trees.
KHRUSHCHOV. I never said that.
VOINITSKY. And everything I’ve been honored to hear from you so far in defense of forests is old, irrelevant, and tendentious. Excuse me, please. I’m not criticizing without good reason, I practically know your speeches for the defense by heart . . . For instance . . . (Raising his voice and gesticulating, as if imitating Khrushchov.) O, my friends, you destroy the forests, but they beautify the land, they teach people to understand beauty and inspire them with a sense of grandeur. Forests alleviate a harsh climate. In lands where the climate is mild, less energy is spent on the struggle with nature and therefore human beings there are milder and more delicate; there people are beautiful, athletic, very sensitive, their speech is refined, their movements graceful. There art and sciences flourish, their philosophy is not gloomy, their attitude to women is full of exquisite chivalry. And so on and so forth . . . Which is all very charming, but not convincing, so allow me to go on stoking my stoves with logs and building my sheds out of wood.
KHRUSHCHOV. Chop down forests when it’s absolutely necessary, but why destroy them? All the Russian forests are toppling beneath the axe, the habitats of birds and beasts are dwindling, tens of thousands of trees are perishing, rivers are running shallow and drying up, gorgeous natural scenery is disappearing irretrievably, and all because lazy human beings can’t be bothered to bend down and pick up fuel from the earth. A person has to be an unreasoning barbarian (pointing at the trees) to destroy what cannot be re-created. Human beings are endowed with reason and creative faculties in order to enhance what is given to them, but so far they have not created but destroyed. Forests are ever fewer and fewer, rivers dry up, wildlife is wiped out, the climate is spoiled, and every day the earth grows more impoverished and ugly. You stare at me sarcastically, and everything I say strikes you as old and frivolous, but when I walk through the peasants’ forests that I have saved from being chopped down, or when I hear the wind rustling in my stand of saplings, planted by my own hands, I realize that the climate is to some slight degree in my control, and if, a thousand years from now, humanity is happy, then even I will be partially responsible. When I plant a birch tree, and then see how it grows green and sways in the wind, my soul swells with pride at the awareness that I am helping God create an organism.
FYODOR IVANOVICH (interrupting). Your health, Wood Goblin!
VOINITSKY. That’s all very well, but if you were to consider the matter not from a pulp-fiction viewpoint, but from a scientific one, then . . .
SONYA. Uncle Georges, you’re talking through your hat. Be quiet!
KHRUSHCHOV. As a matter of fact, Yegor Petrovich, let’s not talk about this. Please.
VOINITSKY. As you like.
MARIYA VASILYEVNA. Ah!
SONYA. What’s the matter, Granny?
MARIYA VASILYEVNA (to Serebryakov). I forgot to tell you, Aleksandr . . . I must be losing my memory . . . today I got a letter from Kharkov from Pavel Alekseevich . . . He sent his regards . . .
SEREBRYAKOV. Thank you, delighted.
MARIYA VASILYEVNA. He sent his new pamphlet and asked me to show it you.
SEREBRYAKOV. Interesting?
MARIYA VASILYEVNA. Interesting, but rather peculiar. He opposes the very thing he was defending seven years ago. It’s very, very typical of our times. Never have people betrayed their convictions as frivolously as they do now. It’s appalling!
VOINITSKY. It’s not at all appalling. Have some carp, maman.
MARIYA VASILYEVNA. But I want to talk!
VOINITSKY. For fifty years now we’ve been talking about influences and factions, it’s high time we stopped.
MARIYA VASILYEVNA. For some reason you don’t like to listen when I talk. Pardon me, Georges, but this last year you have changed so much that I utterly fail to recognize you . . . You used to be a man of steadfast convictions, a shining light . . .