The Gift

uniforms, the darkened wood of the scaffold, the smooth, black pillar with chains, glossy from the rain. Suddenly the prison carriage appeared. From it emerged, with extraordinary celerity, as if they had rolled out, Chernyshevski in an overcoat and two peasant-like executioners; all three walked with swift steps along a line of soldiers to the scaffold. The crowd lurched forward and the gendarmes pressed back the front ranks; restrained cries sounded here and there: “Close the umbrellas!” While an official read the sentence, Chernyshevski, who already knew it, sulkily looked around him; he fingered his beard, adjusted his spectacles and spat several times. When the reader stumbled and barely got out “soshulistic ideas” Chernyshevski smiled and then, recognizing someone in the crowd, nodded, coughed, shifted his stance: from beneath the overcoat his black trousers concertinaed over his rubbers. People standing near could see on his chest an oblong plaque with an inscription in white: STATE CRIMIN (the last syllable had not gone in). At the conclusion of the reading the executioners lowered him to his knees; the elder one, with a backhander, knocked the cap off his long, combed-back, light auburn hair. The face, tapering chinward, its large forehead shining, was now bent down, and with a resounding crack they managed to break an insufficiently incised sword over him. Then they took his hands, which seemed unusually white and weak, and put them in black irons secured to the pillar: he had to stand that way for a quarter of an hour. The rain increased: the younger executioner picked up Chernyshevski’s cap and jammed it on his inclined head—and slowly, with difficulty, the chains got in his way—Chernyshevski straightened it. Behind a fence to the left one could see the scaffolding of a house under construction; workmen climbed onto the fence from the other side, one could hear the scrape of their boots; they climbed up, hung there, and abused the criminal from afar. The rain fell; the elder executioner consulted his silver watch. Chernyshevski kept turning his wrists slightly without looking up. Suddenly, out of the better-off part of the crowd, bouquets began to fly. The gendarmes, jumping, tried to intercept them in midair. Roses exploded in the air; fleetingly one was able to see a rare combination: a policeman, wreathed. Bobbed-haired ladies in black burnouses threw racemes of lilac. Meanwhile Chernyshevski was hastily released from his chains and his dead body borne away. No—a slip of the pen; alas, he was alive, he was even cheerful! Students ran beside the carriage with cries of “Farewell, Chernyshevski! Au revoir!” He thrust his head out of the window, laughed and shook his finger at the most zealous runners.

“Alas, alive,” we exclaimed, for how could one not prefer the death penalty, the convulsions of the hanged man in his hideous cocoon, to that funeral which twenty-five insipid years later fell to Chernyshevski’s lot. The paw of oblivion began slowly to gather in his living image as soon as he had been removed to Siberia. Oh yes, oh yes, no doubt students for years sang the song: “Let us drink to him who wrote What to Do? …” But it was to the past they drank, to past glamour and scandal, to a great shade… but who would drink to a tremulous little old man with a tic, making clumsy paper boats for Yakut children somewhere in those fabulous backwoods? We affirm that his book drew out and gathered within itself all the heat of his personality—a heat which is not to be found in its helplessly rational structures but which is concealed as it were between the words (as only bread is hot) and it was inevitably doomed to be dispersed with time (as only bread knows how to go stale and hard). Today, it seems, only Marxists are still capable of being interested by the ghostly ethics contained in this dead little book. To follow easily and freely the categorical imperative of the general good, here is the “rational egoism” which researchers have found in What to Do? Let us recall for comic relief Kautski’s conjecture that the idea of egoism is connected with the development of commodity production, and Plekhanov’s conclusion that Chernyshevski was nevertheless an “idealist,” since it comes out in his book that the masses must catch up with the intelligentsia out of calculation—and calculation is an opinion. But the matter is simpler than that: the idea that calculation is the foundation of every action (or heroic accomplishment) leads to absurdity: in itself calculation can be heroic! Anything which comes into the focus of human thinking is spiritualized. Thus the “calculation” of the materialists was ennobled; thus, for those in the know, matter turns into an incorporeal play of mysterious forces. Chernyshevski’s ethical structures are in their own way an attempt to construct the same old “perpetual motion” machine, where matter moves other matter. We would very much like this to revolve: egoism-altruism-egoism-altruism… but the wheel stops from friction. What to do? Live, read, think. What to do? Work at one’s own development in order to achieve the aim of life, which is happiness. What to do? (But Chernyshevski’s own fate changed the businesslike question to an ironic exclamation.)

Chernyshevski would have been transferred to a private domicile much sooner if it had not been for the affair of the Karakozovites (adherents of Karakozov, who attempted to assassinate Alexander the Second in 1866): it was made clear at their trial that they had wanted to give Chernyshevski the opportunity of escaping from Siberia and heading a revolutionary movement—or at least publishing a political review in Geneva; and checking the dates, the judges found in What to Do? a forecast of the date of the attempt on the Tsar’s life. The protagonist Rakhmetov, on his way abroad, “said among other things that three years later he would return to Russia, because, it seemed, not then, but three years later [a highly significant repetition typical of our author], he would be needed in Russia.” Meanwhile the last part of the novel was signed on April 4, 1863, and exactly three years later to the day the attempt took place. Thus even figures, Chernyshevski’s goldfish, let him down.

Rakhmetov is forgotten today; but in those years he created a whole school of life. With what piety its readers imbibed the sporty, revolutionary element in the novel: Rakhmetov, who “adopted a boxer’s diet,” followed also a dialectical regime: “Therefore if fruit was served he absolutely ate apples and absolutely did not eat apricots (since the poor did not); oranges he ate in St. Petersburg, but did not eat in the provinces, because you see in St. Petersburg the common people eat them, while in the provinces they do not.”

Where did that young, round little face suddenly flit from, with its large, childishly prominent forehead and cheeks like two cups? Who is this girl resembling a hospital nurse, wearing a black dress with a white turn-down collar and a little watch on a cord? It is Sophia Perovski, who is to hang for the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. Coming to Sebastopol in 1872, she toured the surrounding villages on foot in order to become acquainted with the life of the peasants: she was in her period of Rakhmetovism—sleeping on straw, living on milk and gruels. And returning to our initial position we repeat: Sophia Perovski’s instantaneous fate is a hundred times more to be envied than the fading glory of a reformer! For as copies of The Contemporary with the novel, passing from hand to hand, became more and more tattered, so did Chernyshevski’s enchantments fade; and the esteem for him, which had long since turned into a sentimental convention, was no longer able to make hearts glow when he died in 1889. The funeral passed quietly. There were few comments in the newspapers. At the requiem held for him in St. Petersburg the workmen in town clothes, whom the dead man’s friends had brought for the sake of atmosphere, were taken by a group of students for plainclothesmen and insulted—which restored a certain equilibrium: was it not the fathers of these workmen who had abused the kneeling Chernyshevski from over the fence?

On the day following that mock execution, at dusk, “with shackles on my feet and a head full of thoughts,” Chernyshevski left St. Petersburg forever. He traveled in a tarantass, and since “to read books on the way” was permitted only beyond Irkutsk, he was extremely bored for the first month and a half of the journey. On July 23rd they brought him at last to the mines of the Nerchin mountain district at Kadaya: ten miles from China, four thousand six hundred from St. Petersburg. He was not made to work much. He lived in a badly caulked cottage and suffered from rheumatism. Two years passed. Suddenly a miracle happened: Olga Sokratovna prepared to join him in Siberia.

During most of his imprisonment in the fortress she, it is said, had been coursing about in the provinces and caring so little about her husband’s fate that her relatives even wondered whether she was not deranged. On the eve of the public disgrace she had sped back to St. Petersburg, and on the morning of the 20th had sped off again. We would never have believed her capable of making the trip to Kadaya if we had not known her ability to move easily and hectically from one place to another. How he awaited her! Starting at the beginning of summer in 1866, together with seven-year-old Misha and a Dr. Pavlinov (Dr. Peacock—we are again entering the sphere of beautiful names), she got as far as Irkutsk, where she was held up for two months; there they stayed in a hotel with the enchantingly idiotic name (possibly distorted by biographers but most probably selected with particular care by sly fate) of Hotel de Amour et Co. Dr. Pavlinov was not permitted to go any further: he was replaced by a captain in the gendarmes, Hmelevski (a perfected edition of the dashing Pavlovsk hero), passionate, drunken, and brazen. They arrived on August 23rd. In order to celebrate the meeting of man and wife, one of the exiled Poles, a former cook of Count di Cavour, the Italian statesman of whom Chernyshevski had once written so much and so caustically, baked one of those pastries on which his late master had been wont to stuff himself. But the meeting was not a success: it is amazing how everything bitter and heroic which life manufactured for Chernyshevski was invariably accompanied by a flavoring of vile farce. Hmelevski hovered about and would not leave Olga Sokratovna alone; in her gypsy eyes there lurked something hunted but also enticing—against her will, perhaps. In return for her favors