Stories

Over patience the younger generation also comes in for rough treatment.

“Our public has become paltry these days,” sighs Mikhail Fyodorovich. “I’m not even talking about ideals and all that, but they don’t even know how to work or think properly! It’s precisely: ‘In sorrow I gaze upon our generation.’”¹⁶

“Yes, terribly paltry,” Katya agrees. “Tell me, have you had at least one outstanding student in the last five or ten years?”

“I don’t know about other professors, but I don’t remember any among mine.”

“I’ve seen lots of students in my time, and your young scientists, and lots of actors … And what? Never once was I deemed worthy of meeting not only a hero or a talent, but even simply an interesting human being. They’re all gray, giftless, puffed up with pretensions …”

All these conversations about paltriness give me the feeling each time of having accidentally overheard some nasty conversation about my own daughter. It offends me that the accusations are so sweeping and built on such worn-out commonplaces, such bogeys, as paltriness, lack of ideals, or references to the beautiful past. Any accusation, even if it’s spoken in the company of ladies, must be formulated as definitely as possible, otherwise it’s not an accusation but empty maligning, unworthy of decent people.

I’m an old man, I’ve been teaching for thirty years, but I don’t see any paltriness or lack of ideals, nor do I find it worse now than before. My porter Nikolai, whose experience in this case is valid, says that today’s students are no better or worse than before.

If I were asked what I do not like in my present students, I would not answer at once or at length, but I would be sufficiently definite. I know their shortcomings and therefore have no need to resort to a fog of commonplaces. I do not like it that they smoke, use alcoholic beverages, and marry late; that they are careless and often indifferent to such a degree that they suffer people to go hungry in their midst and do not pay into the student aid society. They don’t know modern languages and speak Russian incorrectly; just yesterday a colleague of mine, a hygienist, complained to me that he had to lecture twice as long, because they have a poor knowledge of physics and are totally unacquainted with meteorology. They willingly submit to the influence of modern writers, and not even the best of them, but are completely indifferent to such classics as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability to distinguish great from small betrays most of all their everyday impracticality All difficult questions of a more or less social character (resettlement, for instance) they solve by subscriptions, and not by means of scientific research and experiment, though the latter are entirely at their disposal and best correspond to their purposes. They willingly become orderlies, assistants, laboratory technicians, adjuncts, and are ready to occupy those positions till the age of forty, though independence, a sense of freedom, and personal initiative are no less necessary in science than, for instance, in art or in trade. I have students and auditors, but no helpers or heirs, and therefore, though I feel love and tenderness for them, I am not proud of them. And so on and so forth.

Such shortcomings, numerous though they are, can produce a pessimistic or abusive spirit only in a fainthearted and timid man. They all have an accidental, transient character and are totally dependent on life’s circumstances; some ten years are enough for them to disappear or yield their place to new and different shortcomings, which it is impossible to do without and which, in their turn, will frighten the fainthearted. I’m often vexed by my students’ sins, but this vexation is nothing compared with the joy I’ve experienced for thirty years, when I talk with my students, lecture to them, study their relations, and compare them with people in other circles.

Mikhail Fyodorovich maligns, Katya listens, and neither notices what a deep abyss this apparently innocent amusement of judging their neighbors draws them into. They don’t feel how their simple conversation gradually turns into jeering and scoffing, and how they both even start using slanderous methods.

“Some specimens are killingly funny,” says Mikhail Fyodorovich. “Yesterday I come to our Yegor Petrovich and find a studiosus, one of your medics, in his third year, I think. A face in the … the Dobrolyubov¹⁷ style, the stamp of profundity on his brow. We get to talking. ‘Thus and so, young man,’ I say. ‘I read that some German—I forget his name—has obtained a new alkaloid, idiotine, from the human brain.’ And what do you think? He believed me and his face even showed respect: That’s our boys for you! Then the other day I come to the theater. I sit down. In the row just in front of me these two are sitting: one of ‘our boyth,’ apparently doing law, the other all disheveled—a medic. The medic is drunk as a cobbler. Pays zero attention to the stage. Keeps dozing and nodding his head. But as soon as some actor starts loudly reciting a monologue or simply raises his voice, my medic gives a start, nudges his neighbor in the side, and asks: ‘What’s he saying? Something no-o-oble?’ ‘Something noble,’ answers the one from our boyth. ‘Brrravo!’ bawls the medic. ‘Something no-o-oble! Bravo!’ You see, the drunken blockhead has come to the theater not for art but for nobility. He’s after nobility.”

And Katya listens and laughs. Her laughter is somehow strange: her inhalations alternate quickly and in regular rhythm with her exhalations, as if she were playing the harmonica, and yet all that laughs on her face are her nostrils. I’m dispirited and don’t know what to say. Beside myself, I explode, jump up from my place and shout:

“Be quiet, finally! What are you doing sitting here like two toads poisoning the air with your breath? Enough!”

And without waiting for them to finish their maligning, I prepare to go home. And it’s high time: past ten o’clock.

“I’ll stay a little longer,” says Mikhail Fyodorovich. “May I, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?”

“You may,” Katya answers.

“Bene. In that case tell them to serve another little bottle.”

The two of them see me off to the front door with candles, and while I’m putting my coat on, Mikhail Fyodorovich says:

“You’ve grown terribly thin and old recently, Nikolai Stepanych. What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

“Yes, I’m a bit ill.”

“And he won’t be treated …” Katya puts in glumly.

“Why won’t you be treated? My dear man, the Lord helps those who help themselves. Regards to your family and my apologies for not visiting them. One of these days, before I go abroad, I’ll stop and say good-bye. Without fail! I leave next week.”

I go out of Katya’s annoyed, frightened by the talk of my illness, and displeased with myself. I ask myself: should I not, indeed, consult one of my colleagues? And I immediately imagine how my colleague, having auscultated me, goes silently to the window, ponders, then turns to me, and, trying to keep me from reading the