The third guest was Gruzin, son of a respectable, learned general, Orlov’s peer, long-haired and weak-sighted, blond, with gold spectacles. I recall his long pale fingers, like a pianist’s; and in his whole figure there was something of the musician, the virtuoso. Such figures play first violin in orchestras. He coughed and suffered from migraine, and generally seemed sickly and frail. At home they probably helped him to dress and undress like a child. He graduated from law school and served first in the Justice Department, then was transferred to the Senate,6 left there and received through connections a post in the Ministry of State Property, and soon left again. In my time he was serving in Orlov’s department, was a chief clerk, but kept saying that he would soon go back to the Justice Department. He treated his service and his migrations from place to place with a rare light-mindedness, and when people spoke seriously about ranks, decorations, and salaries in his presence, he smiled good-naturedly and repeated an aphorism from Prutkov:7 ‘‘One learns the truth only in government service!’’ He had a small wife with a shriveled face, a very jealous woman, and five skinny children; he was unfaithful to his wife, loved his children only when he saw them, and in general was quite indifferent to his family and made fun of them. He and his family lived in debt, borrowing wherever and from whom-ever at every convenient opportunity, not excluding even his superiors and porters. He was of a flimsy nature, lazy to the point of total indifference to himself, and drifted with the current, no one knew where or why. Wherever he was taken, he went. If he was taken to some dive, he went; if wine was put in front of him, he drank; if not, he didn’t; if wives were denounced in his presence, he denounced his, maintaining that she had ruined his life; but if they were praised, he also praised his and said sincerely: ‘‘I love the poor thing very much.’’ He had no winter coat and always wore a plaid, which smelled of the nursery. When he lapsed into thought over supper, rolling little balls of bread and drinking a good deal of red wine, then, strangely enough, I was almost certain that there was something sitting in him which he probably sensed vaguely himself, but which, because of bustle and banalities, he never managed to understand and appreciate. He played the piano a little. He would sit down at the piano, strike two or three chords, and sing softly:
What does the morrow hold for me?8
but then at once, as if frightened, he would get up and move further away from the piano.
The guests usually arrived by ten o’clock. They would play cards in Orlov’s study while Polya and I served them tea. Only here could I properly perceive all the sweetness of lackeydom. To stand at the door for a stretch of four or five hours, seeing that no glasses remained empty, changing ashtrays, running to the table to pick up a dropped piece of chalk or a card, but, above all, to stand, to wait, to be attentive, not daring to speak or cough or smile—that, I can assure you, is harder than any hard peasant labor. I once stood a four-hour watch through stormy winter nights, and I find standing watch incomparably easier.
They would play cards till two, sometimes till three, then, stretching, would go to the dining room to have supper, or, as Orlov used to say, a bite to eat. They talked over supper. It usually began with Orlov, his eyes laughing, initiating a conversation about some acquaintance, about a recently read book, about a new appointment or project; the flattering Kukushkin would pick up in the same tone, and there would begin, for the mood I was then in, a most disgusting music. The irony of Orlov and his friends knew no bounds and spared no one and nothing. If they talked about religion—irony; if about philosophy and the meaning and aims of life—irony; if anyone raised the question of the people—irony. In Petersburg there exists a peculiar breed of people who are specially occupied with making fun of every phenomenon of life; they cannot even pass by a starveling or a suicide without uttering some banality. But Orlov and his friends did not joke or make fun, they spoke with irony. They said there is no God and at death a person vanishes completely; immortals exist only in the French Academy. 9 There is no true good and cannot be, because its existence depends on human perfection, and the latter is a logical absurdity. Russia is as dull and squalid a country as Persia. The intelligentsia is hopeless; in Pekarsky’s opinion, the vast majority of it consists of incapable and good-for-nothing people. The folk are drunken, lazy, thievish, and degenerate. We have no science, our literature is bumpkinish, trade survives by swindling: ‘‘No deceit—no sale.’’ And all of it in the same vein, and all of it funny.
Wine made them merrier towards the end of supper, and they would go on to merry conversations. They would make fun of Gruzin’s family life, of Kukushkin’s conquests, or of Pekarsky, whose account book supposedly had a page with the heading For Works of Charity, and another For Physiological Needs. They said there were no faithful wives; there was no wife from whom, given a certain knack, one could not obtain caresses without leaving the drawing room, with the husband sitting right next door in his study. Adolescent girls are depraved and already know everything. Orlov keeps the letter of one fourteen-year-old schoolgirl; on her way home from school, she ‘‘hitched up with a little officer on Nevsky’’ who supposedly took her to his place and let her go only late at night, and she hastened to write to a friend about it in order to share her rapture. They said that there is not and never has been any purity of morals, that it is obviously not needed; mankind has so far done perfectly well without it. The harmfulness of so-called depravity is undoubtedly exaggerated. The perversity specified in our penal code did not keep Diogenes10 from being a philosopher and a teacher; Caesar and Cicero were debauchees and at the same time great men. Old Cato11 married a young girl and, even so, went on being considered a strict faster and observer of morals.