the books could serve as a theme for the phantom.
By then the talk had shifted to some unlamented Soviet politician who had fallen from power after Lenin’s death. “Oh, in the years I knew him he was at the ‘height of glory and good deeds,’ “the journalist Vasiliev was saying, professionally misquoting Pushkin (who has “hope,” not “height”).
The boy who looked like Fyodor (to whom the Chernyshevskis had become so attached for this very reason) was now by the door, where he paused before leaving the room, half turning toward his father—and, despite his purely imaginary nature, how much more substantial he was than all those sitting in the room! The sofa could be seen through Vasiliev and the pale girl! Kern, the engineer, was represented only by the glint of his pince-nez; so was Lyubov Markovna; and Fyodor himself existed only because of a vague congruity with the deceased—while Yasha was perfectly real and live, and only the instinct of self-preservation prevented one from taking a good look at his features.
But perhaps, thought Fyodor, perhaps, this is all wrong, perhaps he [Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski] is not imagining his dead son at all right now as I imagine him doing. He may be really occupied with the conversation and if his eyes are wandering it may be only because he has always been fidgety, poor soul. I am unhappy, I am bored, nothing rings true here and I don’t know why I keep sitting here, listening to nonsense.
However he still continued to sit there and smoke and gently swing the toe of his foot—and while the others talked on and he talked on himself, he tried as he did everywhere and always to imagine the inner, transparent motion of this or that other person. He would carefully seat himself inside the interlocutor as in an armchair, so that the other’s elbows would serve as armrests for him, and his soul would fit snugly into the other’s soul—and then the lighting of the world would suddenly change and for a minute he would actually become Alexander Chernyshevski, or Lyubov Markovna, or Vasiliev. Sometimes a sporting excitement would be added to the seltzerlike effervescence of the transformation, and he felt flattered when a chance word aptly confirmed the train of thought he was divining in the other. He, to whom so-called politics (that ridiculous sequence of pacts, conflicts, aggravations, frictions, discords, collapses, and the transformation of perfectly innocent little towns into the names of international treaties) meant nothing, would sometimes immerse himself with a thrill of curiosity and revulsion into the vast bowels of Vasiliev and live for an instant actuated by his, Vasiliev’s, inner mechanism, where next to the “Locarno” button there was one for “Lockout” and where a pseudo-clever, pseudo-entertaining game was conducted by such ill-matched symbols as “The Five Kremlin Rulers,” or “The Kurd Rebellion,” or individual surnames that had lost all human connotations: Hindenburg, Marx, Painleve, Herriot (whose macrocephalic initial in Russian, the reverse E, had become so autonomous in the columns of Vasiliev’s Gazeta as to threaten a complete rift with the original Frenchman); this was a world of prophetic utterances, presentiments, mysterious combinations; a world that was in fact a hundredfold more spectral than the most abstract dream. And when Fyodor moved over into Mme. Chernyshevski he found himself within a soul where not everything was alien to him, but where he marveled at many things, as a prim traveler might marvel at the customs in a distant land: the bazaar at sunrise, the naked children, the din, the monstrous size of fruit. This forty-five-year-old, plain, indolent woman, who two years ago had lost her only son, had suddenly come alive: mourning had given her wings and tears had rejuvenated her—or at any rate so said those who had known her before. The memory of her son, which in her husband had become an illness, burned in her with a quickening fervor. It would be incorrect to say that this fervor filled her completely; no, it far exceeded the confines of her soul, seeming even to ennoble the absurdity of these two rented rooms into which, after the tragedy, she and her husband had moved from the large In den Zelten apartment (where her brother had lived with his family back in the years before the war). Now she regarded all her friends only in the light of their receptivity toward her loss, and also, for greater precision, recalled or imagined Yasha’s opinion of this or that individual with whom she had to keep up acquaintance. She was seized with the fever of activity, with the thirst for an abundant response; her child grew within her and struggled to issue forth; the literary circle newly founded by her husband jointly with Vasiliev, in order to give himself and her something to do, seemed to her the best possible posthumous honor for her poet son. It was just at that time that I first saw her and was more than a little perplexed when suddenly this plump, terribly animated little woman with dazzling blue eyes burst into tears in the midst of her first conversation with me, as if a brimful crystal vessel had broken for no apparent reason, and, without taking her dancing gaze off me, laughing and sobbing, started saying over and over “Goodness, how you remind me of him!” The frankness with which, during our subsequent meetings, she spoke about her son, about all the details of his death and about the way she now dreamed of him (as if big with him and as translucent as a bubble) seemed to me vulgar and shameless; it irked me even more when I learned indirectly that she was “a little hurt” that I did not answer her with corresponding vibrations but instead only changed the subject the moment she mentioned my own grief, my own loss. Very soon, however, I noticed that this rapture of sorrow in which she managed to live without dying of a ruptured aorta was beginning somehow to draw me in and make demands on me. You know that characteristic movement when someone hands you a treasured photograph and watches you in anticipation… and you, having lengthily and piously gazed at the face in the snapshot, which smiles innocently and without a thought of death, feign to delay its return, feign to retard your own hand, while with a lingering glance you give back the picture, as if it would have been impolite to part with it sooner. This sequence of movements she and I repeated endlessly. Her husband would sit at his brightly lit desk in the corner, working and occasionally clearing his throat: he was compiling his dictionary of Russian technical terms, commissioned by a German publisher. All was quiet and wrong. The remains of cherry jam mingled with cigarette ash in my saucer. The more she continued to tell about Yasha, the less attractive he grew: oh no, he and I bore little resemblance to each other (far less than she supposed, projecting inward the coincidental similarity of external features, of which, moreover, she found additional ones that did not exist—in reality, the little there was within us corresponded to the little there was without), and I doubt we would have become friends if he and I had ever met. His somberness, interrupted by the sudden shrill gaiety characteristic of humorless people; the sentimentality of his intellectual enthusiasms; his purity, which would have strongly suggested timidity of the senses were it not for the morbid over-refinement of their interpretation; his feeling for Germany; his tasteless spiritual throes (“For a whole week,” he said, “I was in a daze”—after reading Spengler!); and finally his poetry… in short, everything that to his mother was filled with enchantment only repelled me. As a poet he was, in my opinion, very feeble; he did not create, he merely dabbled in poetry, just as thousands of intelligent youths of his type did; but if they did not meet with some kind of more or less heroic death—having nothing to do with Russian letters, which, however, they knew meticulously (oh, those notebooks of Yasha’s, filled with prosodic diagrams expressing modulations of rhythm in the tetrameter!)—they subsequently abandoned literature altogether; and if they exhibited talent in some field, it would be in science or administration, or else simply in a well-ordered life. His poems, replete with fashionable cliches, exalted his “grievous” love of Russia—autumn scenes a la Esenin, the smoky blue of Blok-ish bogs, the powder snow upon the wooden paving blocks of Mandelshtam’s neoclassicism, and the Neva’s granite parapet on which one can scarcely discern today the imprint of Pushkin’s elbow. His mother would read them to me, stumbling in her agitation, with an awkward schoolgirl intonation which did not at all suit those tragically scudded iambics; Yasha himself must have recited them in an oblivious singsong, dilating his nostrils and swaying in the bizarre blaze of a kind of lyric pride, after which he would immediately sink back, again becoming humble, limp and withdrawn. The sonorous epithets that lived in his throat—neveroyatnyy (incredible), hladnyy (cold), prekrasnyy (beautiful)—epithets avidly employed by the young poets of his generation under the delusion that archaisms, prosaisms, or simply destitute words, having completed their life cycle, now, when used in poems, gained a kind of unexpected freshness, returning from the opposite direction—these words in Mme. Chernyshevski’s stumbling diction made, as it were, another half cycle, faded away again, and again revealed their decrepit poverty—thus exposing the deception of style. Besides patriotic elegies, Yasha had poems about the low haunts of adventurous sailors, about gin and jazz (which he pronounced, in the German way, as “yatz”), and poems about Berlin, in which he attempted to endow German proper names with a lyric voice in the same way, for instance, as Italian street names resound in Russian poetry with a suspiciously euphonious contralto; he also had poems dedicated to friendship, without rhyme and without meter, full of muddled, hazy and timid emotions, of some internal spiritual bickerings, and apostrophes to a male friend in the polite form (the Russian “vy”), as a sick Frenchman addresses God, or a young Russian poetress her favorite gentleman. And all this was expressed in a pale, haphazard manner, with many vulgarisms and incorrect word accents peculiar to his provincial middle-class set. Misled by its augmentative suffix, he assumed that “pozharishche” (the site of a recent fire) meant a “big fire,” and I also remember a rather pathetic reference to “Vrublyov’s frescoes”—an amusing cross between two Russian painters (Rublyov and Vrubel) that only served to prove our dissimilarity: no, he could not have loved painting as I
