Nikolai crossed himself, but Pyotr Ignatievich turned to me and asked:
“Which Skobelev is that?”
Another time—this was a little earlier—I announced that Professor Perov8 had died. Dear old Pyotr Ignatievich asked:
“What did he teach?”
I believe if Patti9 started singing right in his ear, if hordes of Chinese invaded Russia, even if there was an earthquake, he wouldn’t stir a single limb and would quite calmly go on peering with his screwed-up eye into his microscope. In short, Hecuba is nothing to him.10 I’d pay dearly to see how that dry crust sleeps with his wife.
Another feature: a fanatical faith in the infallibility of science and above all of everything the Germans write. He’s sure of himself, of his slides, he knows the goal of life, and is totally unacquainted with the doubts and disappointments that turn talented heads gray. A slavish worship of authority and a lack of any need for independent thinking. To talk him out of anything is difficult, to argue with him is impossible. Try arguing with a person who is profoundly convinced that the best science is medicine, the best people are doctors, the best traditions are medical traditions. The nefarious past of medicine has survived only in one tradition—the white tie now worn by doctors; for the scientist and for the educated man in general, only university-wide traditions can exist, with no divisions into medical, legal, and so on, but Pyotr Ignatievich finds it hard to agree with that, and he is prepared to argue with you till doomsday
His future I can picture clearly In his lifetime he will prepare several hundred slides of an extraordinary neatness, write a lot of dry but quite decent papers, make a dozen or so conscientious translations, but he won’t set the world on fire. To set the world on fire, you need fantasy, inventiveness, intuition, and Pyotr Ignatievich has nothing of the sort. To put it briefly, in science he is not a master, but a servant.
Pyotr Ignatievich, Nikolai and I are talking in low voices. We’re slightly ill at ease. You feel something peculiar when the auditorium murmurs like the sea behind the door. In thirty years I’ve never gotten used to that feeling, and I experience it every morning. I nervously button my frock coat, ask Nikolai unnecessary questions, get angry … It looks as if I turn coward, yet this is not cowardice, but something else I can neither name nor describe.
I needlessly look at my watch and say:
“Well, we must go.”
And we proceed in the following order: in front walks Nikolai with the slides or atlases, I come after him, and after me, his head humbly lowered, strides the cart horse; or else, if necessary, a cadaver is carried in first, after the cadaver walks Nikolai, and so on. At my appearance, the students rise, then sit down, and the murmur of the sea suddenly grows still. Calm ensues.
I know what I will lecture about, but I don’t know how I will lecture, what I will begin with and where I will end. There is not a single ready-made phrase in my head. But I have only to look over the auditorium (it is built as an amphitheater) and pronounce the stereotypical “In the last lecture we stopped at …” for a long string of phrases to come flying out of my soul and—there the province goes scrawling!11 I speak irrepressibly quickly, passionately, and it seems no power can stem the flow of my speech. To lecture well, that is, not boringly and with some profit for your listeners, you must have not only talent but a certain knack and experience, you must possess a very clear notion of your own powers, of those to whom you are lecturing, and of what makes up the subject of your talk. Besides that, you must be self-possessed, keenly observant, and not lose your field of vision even for a second.
A good conductor, as he conveys a composer’s thought, does twenty things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer, gestures now towards the drum, now towards the French horn, and so on. It is the same with me when I lecture. Before me are a hundred and fifty faces, no two alike, and three hundred eyes looking me straight in the face. My goal is to conquer this many-headed hydra. If, as I lecture, I have at every moment a clear notion of the degree of its attention and the power of its comprehension, then it is in my control. My other adversary sits inside myself. It is the infinite diversity of forms, phenomena, and laws, and the host of thoughts, my own and other people’s, that they call forth. At every moment I must be adroit enough to snatch what is most important and necessary from this vast material and, in pace with my speech, to clothe my thinking in such form as will be accessible to the hydra’s understanding and arouse its attention, and at the same time I must observe keenly that the thoughts are conveyed, not as they accumulate, but in a certain order necessary for the correct composition of the picture I wish to paint. Furthermore, I try to make my speech literary, my definitions brief and precise, my phrasing as simple and elegant as possible. At every moment I must rein myself in and remember that I have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In short, it’s no little work. I have to figure at one and the same time as a scientist, a pedagogue, and an orator, and it’s a bad business if the orator in you overwhelms the pedagogue and scientist, or the other way round.
You lecture for a quarter, a half hour, and then you notice that the students have started looking up at the ceiling, at Pyotr Ignatievich, one feels for his handkerchief, another tries to settle more comfortably, a third smiles at his own thoughts … This means their attention is flagging. Measures must be taken. Availing myself of the first opportunity, I make some quip. All hundred and fifty faces smile broadly, eyes shine merrily, there is a momentary murmur of the sea … I, too, laugh. Attention has been refreshed, and I can go on.
No argument, no amusement or game ever gave me such pleasure as lecturing. Only while lecturing could I give myself entirely to passion and understand that inspiration is not an invention of poets but exists in reality. And I imagine that Hercules, after the most piquant of his great deeds, did not feel such sweet exhaustion as I experienced each time after a lecture.
That was before. Now lectures are nothing but torture for me. Before half an hour has gone by, I begin to feel an insuperable weakness in my legs and shoulders; I sit down in a chair, but I’m not accustomed to lecturing while seated; after a minute I get up, go on standing, then sit down again. My mouth is dry, my voice is hoarse, my head spins … To conceal my condition from my listeners, I keep drinking water, cough, blow my nose frequently, as if I were bothered by a cold, produce inappropriate quips, and in the end announce the break sooner than I should. But the main thing is that I’m ashamed.
My conscience and intelligence tell me that the best thing I could do now is give the boys a farewell lecture, speak my last words to them, bless them, and yield my place to a man who is younger and stronger than I. But, God be my judge, I lack the courage to follow my conscience.
Unfortunately, I’m not a philosopher and not a theologian. I know very well that I have no more than another six months to live; it would seem I should now be most occupied with questions about the darkness beyond the grave and the visions that will haunt my sepulchral sleep. But for some reason my soul rejects those questions, though my mind is aware of all their importance. As twenty or thirty years ago, so now in the face of death I am interested only in science. Breathing my last, I will still believe that science is the most important, the most beautiful and necessary thing in man’s life, that it has always been and always will be the highest manifestation of love, and that only by science will man conquer nature and himself. This faith may be naive and incorrect in its
