very strong, enduring, capable of the most heavy labor. I had a monotonous working life ahead of me, with hunger, stench, and coarse surroundings, with the constant thought of wages and a crust of bread. And—who knows?— returning from work down Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya Street, maybe more than once I’d envy the engineer Dolzhikov, who lived by intellectual work, but now I enjoyed the thought of all these future adversities of mine. Once I used to dream of mental activity, imagining myself now a teacher, now a doctor, now a writer, but my dreams remained dreams. The inclination to intellectual pleasures, for instance, the theater and reading, was developed in me to the point of passion, but whether I had the capacity for intellectual work, I don’t know. In high school I had an invincible aversion to Greek, so that I had to be taken out of the fourth class.4 For a long time, tutors came and prepared me for the fifth class, then I served in various departments, spending the greater part of the day in total idleness, and was told that it was intellectual work; my activity in the spheres of learning and service called neither for mental effort, nor for talent, nor for personal ability, nor for a creative uplifting of spirit: it was mechanical; and such intellectual work I place lower than physical, and I don’t think it can serve even for a moment as justification for an idle, carefree life, since it is nothing but a deception itself, one of the forms of that same idleness. In all likelihood, I have never known real intellectual work.
Evening came. We lived on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya—it was the main street of the town, and in the evenings our beau monde, for lack of a decent public garden, promenaded on it. This lovely street could partly replace a garden, because on both sides of it grew poplars, which were fragrant, especially after rain, and from behind fences and palisades hung acacias, tall lilac bushes, bird cherries, apple trees. The May twilight, the tender young greenery with its shadows, the smell of the lilacs, the hum of beetles, the silence, the warmth—how new it all is, and how extraordinary, though spring is repeated every year! I stood by the gate and looked at the promenaders. I had grown up and used to play pranks with most of them, but now my proximity might embarrass them, because I was dressed poorly, not fashionably, and on account of my very tight trousers and big, clumsy boots, people called me macaroni on ships. What’s more, I had a bad reputation in town because I had no social position and often played billiards in cheap taverns, and maybe also because, without any cause on my part, I was twice taken to the police.
In the big house opposite, at the engineer Dolzhikov’s, somebody was playing the piano. It was growing dark, and stars twinkled in the sky. Now my father, in an old top hat with a wide, turned-up brim, arm in arm with my sister, walked by slowly, responding to bows.
‘‘Look!’’ he was saying to my sister, pointing at the sky with the very umbrella he had struck me with earlier that day. ‘‘Look at the sky! The stars, even the smallest of them, are all worlds! How insignificant man is compared to the universe!’’
And he said it in such a tone as if he found it extremely flattering and agreeable to be so insignificant. What a giftless man! Unfortunately, he was our only architect, and in the last fifteen or twenty years, as I recall, not a single decent house was built in town. When he was asked for a plan, he usually drew the reception room and drawing room first; as boarding-school girls in the old days could only start dancing on the same foot, so his artistic idea could proceed and develop only from the reception room and drawing room. To them he added a dining room, a nursery, a study, connecting the rooms with doors, so that you inevitably had to pass through one to get to the next, and each had two or even three superfluous doors. His idea must have been unclear, extremely confused, curtailed; each time, as if sensing that something was lacking, he resorted to various sorts of annexes, attaching them one to the other, and I can see even now the narrow little entries, the narrow little corridors, the crooked stairways leading to entresols where you could only stand bent over and where, instead of a floor, there were three huge steps, like shelves in a bathhouse; and the kitchen was unfailingly under the house, with vaulting and a brick floor. The facade had a stubborn, hard expression; the lines were dry, timid, the roof low, flattened; and the fat, muffinlike chimneys unfailingly had wire covers with black, squeaking weathervanes. And for some reason, all these houses my father built, which were so like one another, vaguely reminded me of his top hat, the dry and stubborn nape of his neck. In the course of time, my father’s giftless-ness became a familiar sight in town, it struck root and became our style.
Father introduced this style into my sister’s life as well. Beginning with the fact that he called her Cleopatra (and me Misail).5 When she was still a little girl, he used to frighten her by telling her about the stars, about the ancient sages, about our ancestors, explaining to her at length what life was, what duty was; and now, when she was twenty-six, he went on the same way, allowing her to walk arm in arm only with him, and imagining for some reason that sooner or later a decent young man must appear who would wish to contract a marriage with her out of respect for his personal qualities. And she adored my father, feared him, and believed in his extraordinary intelligence.
It grew quite dark, and the street gradually became deserted. In the house opposite, the music ceased; the gates were thrust open, and a troika of prancing horses drove down our street with a soft ringing of little bells. It was the engineer and his daughter going for a ride. Time for bed!
I had my own room in the house, but I lived in the yard, in a little shack under the same roof as the brick shed, probably built once for storing harness—there were big spikes driven into the walls—but now no longer needed, and for thirty years my father had been storing his newspapers in it, which for some reason he had bound every six months and allowed no one to touch. Living there, I ran across my father and his visitors less often, and it seemed to me that if I didn’t live in my real room and didn’t go to the house every day for dinner, my father’s words about my living on his neck wouldn’t sound so offensive.
My sister was waiting for me. She had brought me supper in secret from my father: a small piece of cold veal and a slice of bread. ‘‘Money loves counting,’’ ‘‘A kopeck saves a rouble,’’ and the like, were often repeated in our house, and my sister, oppressed by these banalities, did her utmost to reduce expenses, and therefore we ate badly. She set the plate on the table, sat down on my bed, and began to cry.
‘‘Misail,’’ she said, ‘‘what are you doing to us?’’
She didn’t cover her face, the tears dropped on her breast and hands, and her expression was grief-stricken. She fell on the pillow and let her tears flow freely, shaking all over and sobbing.
‘‘Again you’ve left your job...’ she said. ‘‘Oh, it’s so terrible!’’
‘‘But understand, sister, understand...’ I said, and despair came over me because she was crying.
As if on purpose, all the kerosene had burnt up in my lamp, it smoked and was about to go out, and the old spikes in the walls looked stern, and their shadows wavered.
‘‘Spare us!’’ my sister said, getting up. ‘‘Father is awfully grieved, and I’m sick, I’m losing my mind. What will become of you?’’ she asked, sobbing and reaching her arms out to me. ‘‘I beg you, I implore you, in the name of our late mama, I beg you: go back to your job!’’
‘‘I can’t, Cleopatra!’’ I said, feeling that a little more and I’d give in. ‘‘I can’t!’’
‘‘Why?’’ my sister went on. ‘‘Why? Well, if you didn’t get along with your superior, look for another position. For instance, why don’t you go and work for the railway? I was just talking with Anyuta Blagovo, and she assures me you’d be accepted at the railway, and even promised to put in a word for you. For God’s sake, Misail, think! Think, I implore you!’’
