loved this ennobling stamp on his verses.
With this lament for Lara, he also finished scribbling down his stuff from various periods about all sorts of things, about nature, about everyday life. As had always happened to him before as well, a multitude of thoughts about personal life and the life of society descended upon him while he worked, simultaneously and in passing.
He again thought that his notion of history, of what is known as the course of history, was not at all the same as the accepted one, and that he pictured it as similar to the life of the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under snow, the bare branches of a deciduous forest are as scraggly and pathetic as the hairs on an old man’s wart. In spring the forest is transformed in a few days, rises to the clouds; one can lose oneself, hide oneself in its leafy maze. This transformation is achieved by a movement that surpasses in speed the movements of animals, since animals do not grow as quickly as plants, and that can never be observed. A forest does not move; we cannot catch it, cannot surprise it changing place. We always find it immobile. And it is in the same immobility that we find the eternally growing, eternally changing life of society, history, in its unobservable transformations.
Tolstoy did not carry his thought through to the end when he denied the role of initiators to Napoleon, to rulers, to generals.3 He thought precisely the same, but he did not voice it with full clarity. No one makes history, it is not visible, just as it is impossible to see grass grow. Wars, revolutions, tsars, Robespierres—these are its organic stimulants, its fermenting yeast. Revolutions are produced by men of action, one-sided fanatics, geniuses of self-limitation. In a few hours or days they overturn the old order. The upheavals last for weeks, for years at the most, and then for decades, for centuries, people bow down to the spirit of limitation that led to the upheavals as to something sacred.
With his lament for Lara, he also lamented that far-off summer in Meliuzeevo, when the revolution was a god come down from heaven to earth, the god of that time, that summer, and each one went mad in his own way, and the life of each existed by itself and not as an explanatory illustration confirming the rightness of superior politics.
With this sketching out of various odds and ends, he again verified and noted down that art always serves beauty, and beauty is the happiness of having form, while form is the organic key to existence, for every living thing must have form in order to exist, and thus art, including tragic art, is an account of the happiness of existing. These reflections and notes also brought him happiness, so tragic and filled with tears that his head grew weary and ached from it.
Anfim Efimovich came to call on him. He also brought vodka and told him about the departure of Antipova with her daughter and Komarovsky. Anfim Efimovich came by rail on a handcar. He scolded the doctor for not taking proper care of the horse and took her back, despite Yuri Andreevich’s request to bear with him for three or four more days. Instead he promised to come in person and fetch the doctor after that time and remove him from Varykino for good.
Sometimes, writing away, working away, Yuri Andreevich suddenly remembered the departed woman in all distinctness and lost his head from tenderness and the keenness of deprivation. As once in childhood, amidst the splendor of summer nature, he had fancied that he heard the voice of his dead mother in the trilling of the birds, so his hearing, accustomed to Lara, grown used to her voice, now sometimes deceived him. “Yurochka,” he sometimes heard in an auditory hallucination from the next room.
Other sensory deceptions also befell him during that week. At the end of it, in the night, he suddenly woke up after an oppressive, absurd dream about a dragon’s lair under the house. He opened his eyes. Suddenly the bottom of the ravine was lit up with fire and resounded with the crack and boom of someone firing a gun. Surprisingly, a moment after this extraordinary occurrence, the doctor fell back to sleep, and in the morning he decided that he had dreamed it all.
15
Here is what happened a little later during one of those days. The doctor finally heeded the voice of reason. He said to himself that if one has set oneself the goal of doing oneself in at all costs, one could find a more effective and less tormenting way. He promised himself that as soon as Anfim Efimovich came for him, he would immediately leave the place.
Before evening, while it was still light, he heard the loud crunch of someone’s footsteps on the snow. Someone was calmly walking towards the house with brisk, resolute strides.
Strange. Who could it be? Anfim Efimovich would have come with a horse. There were no passersby in deserted Varykino. “It’s for me,” Yuri Andreevich decided. “A summons or a request to come to town. Or to arrest me. But how will they take me? And then there should be two of them. It’s Mikulitsyn, Averky Stepanovich,” he surmised, rejoicing, recognizing his guest, as he thought, by his gait. The man, who was still a riddle, paused for a moment at the door with the broken-off bar, not finding the expected padlock on it, and then moved on with assured steps and knowing movements, opening the doors before him and closing them carefully, in a proprietary way.
These strangenesses found Yuri Andreevich at his desk, where he sat with his back to the entrance. While he was getting up from his chair and turning his face to the door so as to receive the visitor, the man was already standing on the threshold, stopped as if rooted to the spot.
“Whom do you want?” escaped from the doctor with an unconsciousness that did not oblige him to anything, and when no answer followed, Yuri Andreevich was not surprised.
The man who had come in was strong and well-built, with a handsome face. He was wearing a short fur jacket, fur-lined trousers, and warm goatskin boots, and had a rifle slung over his shoulder on a leather strap.
Only the moment of the stranger’s appearance was unexpected for the doctor, not his coming. His findings in the house and other tokens had prepared Yuri Andreevich for this meeting. The man who had come in was obviously the one to whom the supplies in the house belonged. In appearance he seemed to be someone the doctor had already seen and knew. The visitor had probably also been forewarned that the house was not empty. He was not surprised enough to find it inhabited. Maybe he had been told whom he would meet inside. Maybe he himself knew the doctor.
“Who is he? Who is he?” The doctor painfully searched his memory. “Lord help me, where have I seen him before? Can it be? A hot May morning in some immemorial year. The railway junction in Razvilye. The ill-omened carriage of the commissar. Clarity of notions, straightforwardness, strictness of principles, rightness, rightness, rightness. Strelnikov!”
16
They had been talking for a long time already, several hours straight, as only Russians in Russia talk, in particular those who are frightened and anguished, and those who are distraught and frenzied, as all people were then. Evening was coming. It was getting dark.
Besides the uneasy talkativeness that Strelnikov shared with everybody, he also talked incessantly for some other reason of his own.
He could not have enough of talking and clung with all his might to the conversation with the doctor, so as to avoid solitude. Did he fear pangs of conscience or sad memories that pursued him, or was he tormented by
