SONYA. Hopeless?
FYODOR IVANOVICH. Don’t be ridiculous! Hopeless . . . If a man seriously wanted to make a catch, he could catch anything at all! Hopeless, unrequited love, oohing and aahing—that’s just self-indulgence. If I will my gun not to misfire, it won’t. I can’t recall any time it misfired. Just like that, Sonya, old pal. And once I have my eye on a woman, I think it’ll be easier for her to fly to the moon than get away from me. You won’t get away from me, no! I wouldn’t have to say three sentences to her, before she’s in my power. Yes. I only have to say to her: “Madam, every time you look out a certain window, you must remember me. I will it.” Which means, she’ll remember me a thousand times a day. That’s not all, I bombard her every day with letters.
YELENA ANDREEVNA. Letters are an unreliable medium. She may receive them but not read them.
FYODOR IVANOVICH. You think so? Hm . . . I’ve lived on this earth thirty-five years, and somehow haven’t met with such phenomenal women as have the fortitude not to open a letter.
ORLOVSKY (admiring him). How do you like that? My sonny boy! I was just the same, down to the last detail! Only I didn’t go to war, just drank vodka and wasted money—dreadful business!
FYODOR IVANOVICH. I do love her, Misha, seriously. If she only made the wish, I would give her everything: my freedom, my strength, my money. I’d carry her off to my place in the Caucasus, the mountains, we would live in clover . . . Yelena Andreevna, I would protect her, like a loyal hound, and for me she would be, like our marshal of nobility sings, “And thou shalt be queen of the world, my love for all eternity.” Ech, she doesn’t know the happiness she’s missing!
KHRUSHCHOV. Who is this happy creature?
FYODOR IVANOVICH. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing . . . But enough about this. 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 on my left Yulka, and both were holding on 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 over 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 live!
FYODOR IVANOVICH. Stop, stop, stop! Sonya, please pay attention! I’m going to make a wager! I am putting three hundred rubles down on the table! After lunch let’s go play croquet, and I’ll bet that I’ll get through all the hoops and back in one go.
SONYA. I accept. Only I haven’t got three hundred rubles.
FYODOR IVANOVICH. If you lose, you’ll sing to me forty times.
SONYA. Agreed.
DYADIN. This is fascinating! This is fascinating!
ZHELTUKHIN (getting up). Ladies and gentlemen, if we’re going to drink, let’s drink to better days, better people, to ideals!
SONYA bursts out laughing.
ORLOVSKY. Well, our girl’s gone off now! What’s come over you?
KHRUSHCHOV bursts out laughing.
And what’s wrong with you?
MARIYA VASILYEVNA. Sophie, that’s indecorous!
KHRUSHCHOV. Ugh, sorry, my friends . . . I’ll be done right away . . . right away . . . .
ZHELTUKHIN. You found something funny about my toast . . .
KHRUSHCHOV. Not at all. Word of honor, no. Absolutely no reason at all.
VOINITSKY. Just show the two of them a finger, 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 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 on his land.
SEREBRYAKOV. What?
VOINITSKY. Peat. Some engineer figured it out, like two times two, 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. I like that question . . . What do I excavate it for? For tooth powder! (Annoyed.) 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. I don’t see anything to laugh about in that.
VOINITSKY. I’m not laughing. Where’d you get that idea?
KHRUSHCHOV. You destroy the forests, but they beautify the land, they teach people to understand beauty, their grandeur inspires us with a sense of grandeur. Forests alleviate a harsh climate. Where the climate is mild, less energy is spent on the struggle with nature and therefore human beings there are milder and more delicate. In countries where the climate is mild, the 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. 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. Your health, Wood Goblin!
KHRUSHCHOV. A person has to be an unreasoning barbarian and have no fear of God to burn up this beauty in his stove, to destroy what we cannot create. 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.
VOINITSKY. Which is all very charming, but where, my dear fellow, did you get the idea that climates become milder because of forests? If you were to consider the matter not from a pulp-fiction point of view, but from a scientific one, you’d say quite the opposite . . .
KHRUSHCHOV. If you think things would be better without forests, then why are you sitting still and not destroying what’s left? Yegor Petrovich, you know what? Let’s not talk about this.