Nikolai Nikolaevich resisted at first but then agreed.
The object of the visit was exhausted. Nikolai Nikolaevich was not keeping Nil Feoktistovich. He could get up and leave. But it seemed improper to Vyvolochnov to leave so soon. It was necessary to say something lively and unforced in farewell. A strained and unpleasant conversation began.
“So you’ve become a decadent? Gone in for mysticism?”
“Why so?”
“A lost man. Remember the zemstvo?”
“Of course I do. We worked on the elections together.”
“We fought for village schools and teachers’ education. Remember?”
“Of course. Those were hot battles.”
“Afterwards I believe you went into public health and social welfare? Right?”
“For a while.”
“Mm—yes. And now it’s these fauns, nenuphars, ephebes, and ‘let’s be like the sun.’9 For the life of me, I can’t believe it. That an intelligent man with a sense of humor and such knowledge of the people … Drop it all, please … Or maybe I’m intruding … Something cherished?”
“Why throw words around at random without thinking? What are we quarreling about? You don’t know my thoughts.”
“Russia needs schools and hospitals, not fauns and nenuphars.”
“No one disputes that.”
“The muzhiks go naked and swollen with hunger …”
The conversation progressed by such leaps. Aware beforehand of the futility of these attempts, Nikolai Nikolaevich began to explain what brought him close to certain writers of the symbolist school, and then went on to Tolstoy.
“I’m with you up to a point. But Lev Nikolaevich says that the more a man gives himself to beauty, the more he distances himself from the good.”
“And you think it’s the other way round? Beauty will save the world, mysteries and all that, Rozanov and Dostoevsky?”10
“Wait, I’ll tell you what I think myself. I think that if the beast dormant in man could be stopped by the threat of, whatever, the lockup or requital beyond the grave, the highest emblem of mankind would be a lion tamer with his whip, and not the preacher who sacrifices himself. But the point is precisely this, that for centuries man has been raised above the animals and borne aloft not by the rod, but by music: the irresistibility of the unarmed truth, the attraction of its example. It has been considered up to now that the most important thing in the Gospels is the moral pronouncements and rules, but for me the main thing is that Christ speaks in parables from daily life, clarifying the truth with the light of everyday things. At the basis of this lies the thought that communion among mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic because it is meaningful.”
“I understand nothing. You should write a book about it.”
When Vyvolochnov left, Nikolai Nikolaevich was overcome by a terrible irritation. He was angry with himself for blurting out some of his innermost thoughts to that blockhead Vyvolochnov without making the slightest impression on him. As sometimes happens, Nikolai Nikolaevich’s vexation suddenly changed direction. He forgot all about Vyvolochnov, as if he had never existed. He recalled something else. He did not keep a diary, but once or twice a year he wrote down in his thick notebook the thoughts that struck him most. He took out the notebook and began jotting in a large, legible hand. Here is what he wrote:
“Beside myself all day because of this foolish Schlesinger woman. She comes in the morning, sits till dinnertime, and for a whole two hours tortures me reading that galimatias. A poetic text by the symbolist A for the cosmogonic symphony of the composer B, with the spirits of the planets, the voices of the four elements, etc., etc. I suffered it for a while, then couldn’t take it anymore and begged her, please, to spare me.
“I suddenly understood it all. I understood why it is always so killingly unbearable and false, even in
“But the point is not only the outdatedness of these forms, their anachronism. The point is not that these spirits of fire and water again darkly entangle what science had brightly disentangled. The point is that this genre contradicts the whole spirit of today’s art, its essence, its motive forces.
“These cosmogonies were natural to the old earth, so sparsely populated by man that he did not yet obscure nature. Mammoths still wandered over it, and the memories of dinosaurs and dragons were fresh. Nature leaped so manifestly into man’s eye and so rapaciously and tangibly onto his neck, that everything indeed might still have been filled with gods. Those were the very first pages of the chronicles of mankind, they were only the beginning.
“In Rome that ancient world ended from overpopulation.
“Rome was a marketplace of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a two-tiered throng, on earth and in heaven, a swinishness that bound itself up in a triple knot, like twisted bowels. Dacians, Herulians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy, spokeless wheels, eyes wallowing in fat, bestiality, double chins, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves, illiterate emperors. There were more people in the world than ever again, and they were squeezed into the passageways of the Coliseum and suffered.
“And then into the glut of this gold and marble tastelessness came this one, light and clothed in radiance, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, a Galilean, and from that moment peoples and gods ceased, and man began, man the carpenter, man the tiller, man the shepherd with his flock of sheep at sunset, man without a drop of proud sound, man gratefully dispersed through all mothers’ lullabies and through all the picture galleries of the world.”
11
The Petrovsky Lines made the impression of a corner of Petersburg in Moscow. The matching buildings on either side of the street, the entrances with tasteful stucco moldings, a bookshop, a reading room, a cartography establishment, a very decent tobacco store, a very decent restaurant, in front of the restaurant gaslights in frosted
