The Gift

Metamorphoses of Thought. Busch reacted to the Life of Chernyshevski as to a good slap at Marxism (to the delivery of which Fyodor had not given the least thought when writing his work) and at the second meeting the publisher, evidently the nicest of men, promised to publish the book by Easter; i.e., in a month’s time. He gave no advance and offered five percent on the first thousand copies, but on the other hand he raised the author’s percentage to thirty on the second thousand, which seemed to Fyodor both just and generous. However, he was completely indifferent to this side of the business (and to the fact that the sales of emigre writers seldom reached five hundred copies). Other emotions overwhelmed him. Having shaken the moist hand of radiant Busch he emerged onto the street like a ballerina flying out onto the fluorescent stage. The drizzle seemed a dazzling dew, happiness stood in his throat, rainbow nimbi trembled around the streetlamps, and the book he had written talked to him at the top of its voice, accompanying him the whole time like a torrent on the other side of a wall. He headed for the office where Zina worked; opposite that black building, with benevolent-looking windows inclined toward him, he found the pub where they were to meet.

“Well, what news?” she asked, entering quickly.

“No, he won’t take it,” said Fyodor watching, with delighted attention, her face cloud as he toyed with his power over it and anticipated the exquisite light he was about to summon.

Chapter Four

Alas! In vain historians pry and probe:
The same wind blows, and in the same live robe
Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise;

And with a woman’s smile and a child’s care
Examines something she is holding there
Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes.

A SONNET, apparently barring the way, but perhaps, on the contrary, providing a secret link which would explain everything—if only man’s mind could withstand that explanation. The soul sinks into a momentary dream— and now, with the peculiar theatrical vividness of those risen from the dead they come out to meet us: Father Gavriil, a long staff in his hand, wearing a silk, garnet-red chasuble, with an embroidered sash across his big stomach; and with him, already illuminated by the sun, an extremely attractive little boy—pink, awkward, delicate. They draw near. Take off your hat, Nikolya. Hair with a russet glint, freckles on his little forehead, and in his eyes the angelic clarity characteristic of nearsighted children. Afterwards (in the quiet of their poor and distant parishes) priests with names derived from Cypress, Paradise, and Golden Fleece recalled his bashful beauty with some surprise: the cherub, alas, proved to be pasted on tough gingerbread which was too hard for many to bite into.

Having greeted us, Nikolya again dons his hat, a gray, downy top hat, and quietly withdraws, very sweet in his homemade little coat and nankeen breeches, while his father, a kindly cleric who dabbles in horticulture, entertains us with talk of Saratov cherries, plums and pears. A whirl of torrid dust veils the picture.

As is invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary biographies, the little boy was a glutton for books. He excelled in his studies. For his first writing exercise he painstakingly reproduced: “Obey your sovereign, honor him and submit to his laws,” and the compressed ball of his index finger thus remained ink-stained forever. Now the thirties are over and the forties have begun.

At the age of sixteen he had a sufficient grasp of languages to read Byron, Eugene Sue and Goethe (being ashamed to the end of his days of his barbarous pronunciation) and already had a command of seminary Latin, owing to his father’s being an educated man. Besides this he took Polish with a certain Sokolovski, while a local orange merchant taught him Persian—and also tempted him with the use of tobacco.

Upon entering the Saratov seminary, he showed himself there to be a meek pupil and was never once flogged. He was nicknamed “the little toff,” although in fact he was not averse to general fun and games. In the summer he played dibs and took pleasure in bathing; never did he learn to swim, however, nor to fashion sparrows out of clay, nor to make nets for catching tiddlers: the holes came out uneven and the threads got tangled—fish are harder to catch than human souls (but even the souls later escaped through the rents). In winter, in the snowy darkness, a rowdy gang used to tear downhill in a huge, horse-drawn, flat sled while roaring out dactylic hexameters—and the chief of police, in his nightcap, would pull aside his curtain and grin encouragingly, happy that the seminarists’ frolics would frighten off any night burglars.

He would have been a priest, like his father, and would have reached, very likely, a high rank—but for the regrettable incident with Major Protopopov. This was a local landowner, a bon vivant, a wencher, a dog lover: it was his son that Father Gavriil too hastily recorded in the parish register as illegitimate; meanwhile, it transpired that the wedding had been celebrated—without fuss, true, but honorably—forty days before the child’s birth. Dismissed from his post as member of the consistory, Father Gavriil fell into such a depression that his hair turned gray. “That’s how they reward the labors of poor priests,” repeated his wife wrathfully—and it was decided to give Nikolya a secular education. What later became of the young Protopopov—did he find out one day that because of him… ? Was he seized with a sacred thrill …? Or tiring rapidly of the pleasures of ebullient youth… withdrawing …?

Incidentally: the landscape which not long before had with wondrous languor unfolded along the passage of the immortal brichka; all that Russian viatic lore, so untrammeled as to bring tears to the eyes; all the humbleness that gazes from the field, from a hillock, from between oblong clouds; that suppliant, expectant beauty which is ready to rush toward you at the slightest sigh and share your tears; in short, the landscape hymned by Gogol passed unnoticed before the eyes of the eighteen-year-old Nikolay Gavrilovich, who with his mother was traveling in a carriage drawn by their own horses from Saratov to St. Petersburg. The whole way he kept reading a book. It goes without saying that he preferred his “war of words” to the “corn ears bowing in the dust.”

Here the author remarked that in some of the lines he had already composed there continued without his knowledge a fermentation, a growth, a swelling of the pea, or, more precisely: at one or another point the further development of a given theme became manifest—the theme of the “writing exercises” for example: already during his student days Nikolay Gavrilovich was copying out for his own benefit Feuerbach’s “Man is what he eats” (it comes out smoother in German and even better with the help of the spelling now accepted in Russian: chelovek est’ to chto est). We remark also that the theme of “nearsightedness” develops, too, beginning with the fact that as a child he knew only those faces which he kissed and could see only four out of the seven stars of the Great Bear. His first—copper—spectacles donned at the age of twenty. A teacher’s silver spectacles bought for six rubles so as to distinguish his students in the Cadet School. The gold spectacles of a molder of public opinion put on in the days when The Contemporary was penetrating to the most fabulous depths of the Russian countryside. Again copper spectacles, bought at a little trading post beyond Lake Baikal, where they also sold felt boots and vodka. The yearning for spectacles in a letter to his sons from Yakutsk territory—requesting lenses for such and such vision (with a line marking the distance at which he could make out writing). Here the theme of spectacles dims for a time…. Let us follow another theme—that of “angelic clarity.” This is how it develops subsequently: Christ died for mankind because he loved mankind, which I also love, for which I shall also die. “Be a second Savior,” his best friend advises him—and how he glows—oh, timid! Oh, weak! (an almost Gogolian exclamation mark appears fleetingly in his student diary). But the “Holy Ghost” must be replaced by “Common Sense.” Is not poverty the mother of vice? Christ should first have shod everybody and crowned them with flowers and only then have preached morality. Christ the Second would begin by putting an end to material want (aided here by the machine which we have invented). And strange to say, but… something came true—yes, it was as if something came true. His biographers mark his thorny path with evangelical signposts (it is well known that the more leftist the Russian commentator the greater is his weakness for expressions like “the