The Gift

emancipations, the peasants from the landowners, the citizen from the state, women from domestic bondage. And don’t forget that not only were the best principles of the Russian liberation movement born then—a thirst for knowledge, steadfastness of spirit, heroic self-sacrifice—but also it was precisely in this era, fed by it in one way or another, that such giants as Turgenev, Nekrasov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were developing. Moreover it goes without saying that Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevski himself was a man with a vast, versatile mind, with enormous, creative willpower, and the fact that he endured dreadful sufferings for the sake of his ideology, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of Russia, more than redeems a certain harshness and rigidity in his critical views. Moreover I maintain that he was a superb critic—penetrating, honest, brave…. No, no, it’s wonderful, you must certainly write it!”

The engineer Kern had already been on his feet for some time, walking about the room, shaking his head and bursting to say something.

“What are we talking about?” he suddenly exclaimed, taking hold of the back of a chair. “Who cares what Chernyshevski thought of Pushkin? Rousseau was a lousy botanist, and I wouldn’t have been treated by Dr. Chekhov for anything in the world. Chernyshevski was first of all a learned economist and that’s how he should be regarded —and with all my respect for Fyodor Konstantinovich’s poetic talents, I am somewhat doubtful that he is capable of appreciating the merits and demerits of his man’s Commentaries on John Stuart Mill.”

“Your comparison is absolutely wrong,” said Alexandra Yakovlevna. “It’s ridiculous! Chekhov didn’t leave the slightest trace in medicine, Rousseau’s musical compositions are mere curiosities, but in this case no history of Russian literature can omit Chernyshevski. But there’s something else I don’t understand,” she continued swiftly. “What interest does Fyodor Konstantinovich have in writing about people and times to which his whole mentality is completely alien? Of course I don’t know what his approach will be. But if he, let’s speak plainly, wants to show up the progressive critics then it’s not worth the effort: Volynski and Eichenwald did this long ago.”

“Oh, come, come,” said Alexander Yakovlevich, “das kommt nicht in Frage. A young writer has become interested in one of the most important epochs in Russian history and is about to write a literary biography of one of its major figures. I don’t see anything strange in that. It’s not very difficult to get to know the subject, he’ll find more than enough books, and the rest all depends on talent. You say approach, approach. But granted a talented approach to a given subject, sarcasm is a priori excluded, is irrelevant. That’s how it seems to me at least.”

“Did you see how Koncheyev was attacked last week?” asked the engineer Kern, and the conversation took another turn.

Out on the street when Fyodor was saying good-by to Goryainov the latter retained his hand in his own large, soft hand and said puckering up his eyes: “Let me tell you, my lad, you’re quite a joker. Recently there died the social-democrat Belenki—a kind of perpetual emigre, so to speak: he was exiled by both the Tsar and the proletariat, so that whenever he indulged in his reminiscences he would begin: “U nas v Zheneve, chez nous a Geneve….” Perhaps you’ll write about him as well?”

“I don’t understand?” said Fyodor half-questioningly.

“No, but on the other hand I understood perfectly. You are as much preparing to write about Chernyshevski as I am about Belenki, but then you made a fool of your audience and stirred up an interesting argument. All the best, good night,” and he left with his slow, heavy gait, leaning on a cane and holding one shoulder slightly higher than the other.

The way of life to which he had become addicted while studying his father’s activities was now renewed for Fyodor. It was one of those repetitions, one of those thematic “voices” with which, according to all the rules of harmony, destiny enriches the life of observant men. But now, taught by experience, he did not allow himself his former slovenliness in the use of sources and provided even the smallest note with an exact label of its origin. In front of the national library, near a stone pool, pigeons strolled cooing among the daisies on the lawn. The books to be taken out arrived in a little wagon along sloping rails at the bottom of the apparently small premises, where they awaited distribution, and where there seemed to be only a few books lying around on the shelves when in fact there was an accumulation of thousands.

Fyodor would embrace his portion, struggling with its disintegrating weight, and walk to the bus stop. From the very beginning the image of his planned book had appeared to him extraordinarily distinctly in tone and outline, he had the feeling that for every detail he ran to earth there was already a place prepared and that even the work of hunting up material was already bathed in the light of the forthcoming book, just as the sea throws a blue light on a fishing boat, and the boat itself together with this light is reflected in the water. “You see,” he explained to Zina, “I want to keep everything as it were on the very brink of parody. You know those idiotic ‘biographies romancees’ where Byron is coolly slipped a dream extracted from one of his own poems? And there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it. And most essentially, there must be a single uninterrupted progression of thought. I must peel my apple in a single strip, without removing the knife.”

As he studied his subject he saw that in order to completely soak himself in it he would have to extend his field of activity two decades in either direction. Thus an amusing feature of the age was revealed to him— essentially trifling, but proving to be a valuable guideline: during fifty years of utilitarian criticism, from Belinski to Mihailovski, there was not a single molder of opinion who did not take the opportunity to jeer at the poems of Fet. And into what metaphysical monsters turned sometimes the most sober judgments of these materialists on this or that subject, as if the Word, Logos, were avenging itself on them for being slighted! Belinski, that likable ignoramus, who loved lilies and oleanders, who decorated his window with cacti (as did Emma Bovary), who kept five kopecks, a cork and a button in the empty box discarded by Hegel and who died of consumption with a speech to the Russian people on his bloodstained lips, startled Fyodor’s imagination with such pearls of realistic thought as, for example: “In nature everything is beautful, excepting only those ugly phenomena which nature herself has left unfinished and hidden in the darkness of the earth or water (molluscs, worms, infusoria, and so on).” Similarly, in Mihailovski it was easy to discover a metaphor floating belly upwards as for example: “[Dostoevski] struggled like a fish against the ice, ending up at times in the most humiliating positions”; this humiliated fish rewarded one for working through all the writings of the “reporter on contemporary issues.” From here there was a direct transition to the fighting lexicon of the present day, to the style of Steklov speaking of Chernyshevski’s times (“The plebeian writer who nestled in the pores of Russian life… branded routine opinions with the battering ram of his ideas”), or to the idiom of Lenin who in his polemical heat attained the heights of absurdity: (“Here there is no fig leaf… and the idealist stretches out his hand directly to the agnostic”). Russian prose, what crimes are committed in thy name! A contemporary critic wrote about Gogol: “His people are deformed grotesques, his characters, Chinese-lantern shadows, the events he depicts, impossible and ridiculous,” and this fully corresponded to the opinions held by Skabichevski and Mihailovski about Chekhov—opinions that, like a fuse lit at the time, have now blown these critics to bits.

He read Pomyalovski (honesty in the role of tragic passion) and found there this lexical fruit salad: “little raspberry-red lips like cherries.” He read Nekrasov, and sensing a certain urban-journalist defect in his (frequently enchanting) poetry, he found an apparent explanation for the vulgarisms in his pedestrian Russian Women (“How jolly, furthermore, To share your every thought in common With someone you adore”) in the discovery that despite his walks in the country he confused gadflies with bumblebees and wasps ([over the flock] “a restless swarm of bumblebees” and ten lines lower down: the horses under the smoke of a bonfire “seek shelter from the wasps”). He read Herzen and was again better able to understand the flaw (a false glib glitter) in his generalizations when he noticed that this author, having a poor knowledge of English (witnessed by his surviving autobiographical reference, which begins with the amusing Gallicism “I am born”), had confused the sounds of two English words “beggar” and “bugger” and from this had made a brilliant deduction concerning the English respect for wealth.

Such a method of evaluation, taken to its extreme, would be even sillier than approaching writers and critics as exponents of general ideas. What is the significance of Suhoshchokov’s Pushkin’s not liking Baudelaire, and is it fair to condemn Lermontov’s prose because he twice refers to some impossible “crocodile” (once in a serious and once in a joking comparison)? Fyodor stopped in time, thus preventing the pleasant feeling that he had discovered an easily applicable criterion from being impaired by its abuse.

He read a great deal—more than he had ever read. Studying the short stories and novels of the men of the sixties he was surprised by their insistence on the various ways their characters saluted one another. Meditating