the portrait he had bought between two small canvases, and threw himself down on a narrow couch, of which one could not say that it was covered in leather, because the row of brass tacks formerly attaching it had long since existed on its own, and the leather over it also existed on its own, so that Nikita could shove black stockings, shirts, and all the dirty linen under it. Sitting there, sprawling as much as one could on this narrow couch, he finally asked for a candle.
'We have no candles,' said Nikita.
'No?'
'And we had none yesterday either,' said Nikita.
The artist remembered that in fact they had not had any candles yesterday, so he calmed down and fell silent. He allowed himself to be undressed and put on his well- and much-worn dressing gown.
'And the landlord also came,' said Nikita.
'Well, so he came for money? I know,' the artist said, waving his hand.
'He didn't come alone,' said Nikita.
'With whom, then?'
'I don't know… some policeman.'
'Why a policeman?'
'I don't know why. He says the rent isn't paid.'
'Well, so what will come of it?'
'I don't know. He said, 'If he doesn't want to pay, he can move out.' They're both coming back tomorrow.'
'Let them,' Chartkov said with sad indifference. And a dreary state of mind came over him completely.
Young Chartkov was an artist with a talent that promised much: in flashes and moments his brush bespoke power of observation, understanding, a strong impulse to get closer to nature. 'Watch out, brother,' his professor had told him more than once, 'you have talent; it would be a sin to ruin it. But you're impatient. Some one thing entices you, some one thing takes your fancy-and you occupy yourself with it, and the rest can rot, you don't care about it, you don't even want to look at it. Watch out you don't turn into a fashionable painter. Even now your colors are beginning to cry a bit too loudly. Your drawing is imprecise, and sometimes quite weak, the line doesn't show; you go for fashionable lighting, which strikes the eye at once. Watch out or you'll fall right into the English type. Beware. You already feel drawn to the world: every so often I see a showy scarf on your neck, a glossy hat… It's enticing, you can start painting fashionable pictures, little portraits for money. But that doesn't develop talent, it ruins it. Be patient.
Ponder over every work, drop showiness-let the others make money. You won't come out the loser.'
The professor was partly right. Sometimes, indeed, our artist liked to carouse or play the dandy-in short, to show off his youth here and there. Yet, for all that, he was able to keep himself under control. At times he was able to forget everything and take up his brush, and had to tear himself away again as if from a beautiful, interrupted dream. His taste was developing noticeably. He still did not understand all the depth of Raphael, but was already carried away by the quick, broad stroke of Guido, paused before Titian's portraits, admired the Flemish school. 6 The dark surface obscuring the old paintings had not yet been entirely removed for him; yet he already perceived something in them, though inwardly he did not agree with his professor that the old masters surpassed us beyond reach; it even seemed to him that the nineteenth century was significantly ahead of them in certain things, that the imitation of nature as it was done now had become somehow brighter, livelier, closer; in short, he thought in this case as a young man thinks who already understands something and feels it in his proud inner consciousness. At times he became vexed when he saw how some foreign painter, a Frenchman or a German, sometimes not even a painter by vocation, with nothing but an accustomed hand, a quick brush, and bright colors, would produce a general stir and instandy amass a fortune. This would come to his mind not when, all immersed in his work, he forgot drinking and eating and the whole world, but when he would finally come hard up against necessity, when he had no money to buy brushes and paints, when the importunate landlord came ten times a day to demand the rent. Then his hungry imagination enviously pictured the lot of the rich painter; then a thought glimmered that often passes through a Russian head: to drop everything and go on a spree out of grief and to spite it all. And now he was almost in such a situation.
'Yes! be patient, be patient!' he said with vexation. 'But patience finally runs out. Be patient! And on what money will I have dinner tomorrow? No one will lend to me. And if I were to go and sell all my paintings and drawings, I'd get twenty kopecks for the lot. They've been useful, of course, I feel that: it was not in vain that each of them was undertaken, in each of them I learned something. But what's the use? Sketches, attempts-and there will constantly be sketches, attempts, and no end to them. And who will buy them, if they don't know my name? And who needs drawings from the antique, or from life class, or my unfinished Love of Psyche, or a perspective of my room, or the portrait of my Nikita, though it's really better than the portraits of some fashionable painter? What is it all, in fact? Why do I suffer and toil over the ABC's like a student, when I could shine no worse than the others and have money as they do?'
Having said that, the artist suddenly shuddered and went pale: gazing at him, peering from behind the canvas on the easel, was someone's convulsively distorted face. Two terrible eyes were fixed directly on him, as if preparing to devour him; on the mouth was written the threatening command to keep silent. Frightened, he wanted to cry out and call Nikita, who had already managed to set up a mighty snoring in the front room; but suddenly he stopped and laughed. The feeling of fear instantly subsided. It was the portrait he had bought, which he had quite forgotten about. Moonlight illuminated the room and, falling on it, endowed it with a strange aliveness. He began studying it and cleaning it. Wetting a sponge, he went over it several times, washed off almost all the dust and dirt that had accumulated and stuck to it, hung it on the wall before him, and marveled still more at the extraordinary work: the whole face almost came to life, and the eyes stared at him so that he finally gave a start and stepped back, saying in an amazed voice, 'It stares, it stares at you with human eyes!' A story he had heard long ago from his professor suddenly came to his mind, about a certain portrait by the famous Leonardo da Vinci, which the great master had labored over for several years and still considered unfinished, but which, according to the words of Vasari, 7 everyone nevertheless considered a most perfect and finished work of art. Most finished of all in it were the eyes, at which his contemporaries were amazed; even the tiniest, barely visible veins were not omitted but were rendered on the canvas. But here, in the portrait now before him, there was nevertheless something strange. This was no longer art: it even destroyed the har- mony of the portrait itself. They were alive, they were human eyes! It seemed as if they had been cut out of a living man and set there. Here there was not that lofty pleasure which comes over the soul at the sight of an artist's work, however terrible its chosen subject; here there was some morbid, anguished feeling. 'What is it?' the artist asked himself involuntarily. 'It's nature all the same, it's living nature-why, then, this strangely unpleasant feeling? Or else the slavish, literal imitation of nature is already a trespass and seems like a loud, discordant cry? Or else, if you take the subject indifferently, unfeelingly, with no feeling for it, it inevitably stands out only in its terrible reality, not illumined by the light of some incomprehensible,
