The Gift

And then Sasha came to Astrakhan. Nikolay Gavrilovich saw those radiant, bulging eyes, heard that strange, evasive speech… Having entered the service of the oilman Nobel, and being entrusted to accompany a bargeload along the Volga, Sasha, en route, one sultry, oil-soaked, satanic noon, knocked the bookkeeper’s cap off, threw the keys into the rainbow water, and went home to Astrakhan. That same summer four of his poems appeared in The Messenger of Europe; they show a gleam of talent:

If life’s hours appear to you bitter,
Do not rail against life, for it’s best
To admit it’s your fault you’ve been born with
An affectionate heart in your breast.
And if you do not wish to acknowledge
Even such a self-evident fault…

(Incidentally, let us note the ghost of an additional syllable in “life’s hou-urs” matching zhiz- en’, instead of zhizn’ which is extremely characteristic of unbalanced Russian poets of the woebegone sort: a flaw corresponding, it would seem, to something lacking in their lives, something that might have turned life into song. The last line quoted has however an authentic poetic ring.)

The joint domicile of father and son was a joint hell. Chernyshevski drove Sasha to agonizing insomnia with his endless admonitions (as a “materialist” he had the fanatic effrontery to suppose that the main cause of Sasha’s disorder was his “pitiful material condition”), and he himself suffered in a way that he had not done even in Siberia. They both breathed easier when that winter Sasha went away—at first to Heidelberg with the family in which he was tutor and then to St. Petersburg “because of the need to get medical advice.” Petty, falsely funny misfortunes continued to spatter him. Thus we learn from a letter of his mother’s (1888) that while “Sasha was pleased to go out for a stroll, the house in which he was living burned down,” and everything that he possessed burned with it; and, by now utterly destitute, he moved to the country house of Strannolyubski (the critic’s father?).

In 1889, Chernyshevski received permission to go to Saratov. Whatever emotions this might have awakened in him, these were in any case poisoned by an intolerable family worry: Sasha, who had always had a pathological passion for exhibitions, suddenly undertook a most extravagant and happy trip to the notorious Exposition universelle in Paris—having at first got stuck in Berlin, where it was necessary to send him money in the consul’s name with a request to dispatch him back; but no: when he received the money Sasha made his way to Paris, had his fill “of the wonderful wheel, of the gigantic, filigree tower”—and again was penniless.

Chernyshevski’s feverish work on huge masses of Weber (which turned his brain into a forced labor factory and represented in fact the greatest mockery of human thought) did not cover unlooked-for expenditures—and day after day dictating, dictating, dictating, he felt that he could not go on, could not go on turning world history into rubles—and in the meantime he was also tormented by the panicky fear that from Paris, Sasha would come crashing into Saratov. On October 11th, he wrote Sasha that his mother was sending him the money for his return to St. Petersburg, and—for the millionth time—advised him to take any job and do everything that his superiors might tell him to do: “Your ignorant, ridiculous sermons to your superiors cannot be tolerated by any superiors” (thus ends the “theme of writing exercises”). Continuing to twitch and mutter, he sealed the envelope and himself went to the station to mail the letter. Through the town whirled a cruel wind, which on the very first corner chilled the hurrying, angry little old man in his light coat. The following day, despite a fever, he translated eighteen pages of close print; on the 13th he wanted to continue, but he was persuaded to desist; on the 14th delirium set in: “Inga, inc [nonsense words, then a sigh] I’m quite unsettled… Paragraph… If some thirty thousand Swedish troops could be sent to Schleswig-Holstein they would easily rout all the Danes’ forces and overrun… all the islands, except, perhaps Copenhagen, which will resist stubbornly, but in November, in parentheses put the ninth, Copenhagen also surrendered, semicolon; the Swedes turned the whole population of the Danish capital into shining silver, banished the energetic men of the patriotic parties to Egypt… Yes, yes, where was I… New paragraph …” Thus he rambled on for a long time, jumping from an imaginary Weber to some imaginary memoirs of his own, laboriously discoursing about the fact that “the smallest fate of this man has been decided, there is no salvation for him… Although microscopic, a tiny particle of pus has been found in his blood, his fate has been decided …” Was he talking about himself, was it in himself that he felt this tiny particle that had kept mysteriously impairing all he did and experienced in life? A thinker, a toiler, a lucid mind, populating his utopias with an army of stenographers—he had now lived to see his delirium taken down by a secretary. On the night of the 16th he had a stroke—he felt the tongue in his mouth to be somehow thick; after which he soon died. His last words (at 3 A.M. on the 17th) were: “A strange business: in this book there is not a single mention of God.” It is a pity that we do not know precisely which book he was reading to himself.

Now he lay surrounded by the dead tomes of Weber; a pair of spectacles in their case kept getting into everybody’s way.

Sixty-one years had passed since that year of 1828 when the first omnibuses had appeared in Paris and when a Saratov priest had noted down in his prayer book: “July 12th, in the third hour of morning, a son born, Nikolay… Christened the morning of the 13th before mass. Godfather: Archpriest Fyod. Stef. Vyazovski …” This name was subsequently given by Chernyshevski to the protagonist and narrator of his Siberian novellas—and by a strange coincidence it was thus, or nearly thus (F.V……ski) that an unknown poet signed, in the magazine Century (1909, November), fourteen lines dedicated, according to information which we possess, to the memory of N. G. Chernyshevski—a mediocre but curious sonnet which we here give in full:

What will it say, your far descendant’s voice–
Lauding your life or blasting it outright:
That it was dreadful? That another might
Have been less bitter? That it was your choice?

That your high deed prevailed, and did ignite
Your dry work with the poetry of Good,
And crowned the white brow of chained martyrhood
With a closed circle of ethereal light?

Chapter Five

ABOUT a fortnight after The Life of Chernyshevski appeared it was greeted by the first, artless echo. Valentin Linyov (in a Russian emigre paper published in Warsaw) wrote as follows:

“Boris Cherdyntsev’s new book opens with six lines of verse which the author for some reason calls a sonnet (?) and this is followed by a pretentiously capricious description of the well-known Chernyshevski’s life.

“Chernyshevski, says the author, was the son of ‘a kindly cleric’ (but does not mention when and where he was born); he finished the seminary and when his father, having lived a holy life which inspired even Nekrasov, died, his mother sent the young man to study in St. Petersburg, where he immediately, practically on the station, became intimate with the then “molders of opinion,” as they were called, Pisarev and Belinski. The youth entered the university and devoted himself to technical inventions, working very hard and having his first romantic adventure with Lyubov’ Yegorovna Lobachevski, who infected him with a love for art. After a clash on romantic grounds with some officer or other in Pavlovsk, however, he was forced to return to Saratov, where he proposed to his future