‘‘Talented, richly endowed natures,’’ said Miss Dolzhikov, ‘‘know how to live and follow their own path; but average people, like me, for instance, don’t know anything and can’t do anything themselves; nothing remains for them but to pick out some deep social current and float off where it takes them.’’
‘‘Is it possible to pick out what’s not there?’’ asked the doctor.
‘‘Not there, because we don’t see it.’’
‘‘Is that so? Social currents are an invention of the new literature. We don’t have any.’’
An argument began.
‘‘We don’t have and never have had any deep social currents,’’ the doctor said loudly. ‘‘What has the new literature not invented! It has also invented some sort of intellectual laborers in the villages, but go around all our villages and you’ll find only some Disrespect-Trough12 in a jacket or a black frock coat who makes four spelling errors in the word ‘although.’ Our cultural life hasn’t begun yet. The same savagery, the same overall boorishness, the same worthlessness as five hundred years ago. Currents, trends, but all this is petty, miserable, hitched to a banal groatsworth of little interests—how can we see anything serious in it? If you imagine you’ve picked out some deep social current and, following it, devote your life to such tasks in the contemporary taste as liberating insects from slavery or abstaining from beef cutlets, then—I congratulate you, madam. Study is what we must do, study and study, and let’s wait a little with social currents: we haven’t grown up to them yet and, in all conscience, understand nothing about them.’’
‘‘You don’t understand, but I do,’’ said Marya Viktorovna. ‘‘You’re God knows how boring today!’’
‘‘Our business is to study and study, to try to accumulate as much knowledge as possible, because serious social currents are there where knowledge is, and the happiness of future mankind lies only in knowledge. I drink to learning!’’
‘‘One thing is unquestionable: one should set up one’s life somehow differently,’’ said Marya Viktorovna, after some silence and reflection, ‘‘and life as it has been so far is worth nothing. We won’t talk about it.’’
As we left her house, it was already striking two at the cathedral.
‘‘Did you like her?’’ asked the doctor. ‘‘Nice, isn’t she?’’
On Christmas day we dined with Marya Viktorovna and then, in the course of all the holidays, went to see her almost every day. No one visited her except us, and she was right when she said that, except for me and the doctor, she had no acquaintances in town. We spent most of the time talking: occasionally the doctor brought along some book or magazine and read aloud to us. Essentially, he was the first educated man I had met in my life. I can’t judge how much he knew, but he constantly showed his knowledge, because he wanted others to know as well. When he talked about something related to medicine, he bore no resemblance to any of our town doctors but produced a new, special impression, and it seemed to me that if he had wanted to, he could have become a real scientist. And this was perhaps the only man who had a serious influence on me at that time. Seeing him and reading the books he gave me, I gradually began to feel a need for knowledge that would inspire my cheerless labor. It now seemed strange to me that I hadn’t known before, for example, that the entire world consists of sixty elements, hadn’t known what linseed oil was, what paints were, and somehow could have done without this knowledge. Acquaintance with the doctor raised me morally as well. I often argued with him, and though I usually stuck to my own opinion, still, owing to him, I gradually began to notice that not everything was clear to me, and I then tried to work out for myself some possibly definite convictions, so that the dictates of my conscience would be definite and have nothing vague about them. Nevertheless, this best and most educated man in town was still far from perfection. In his manners, in his habit of reducing every conversation to an argument, in his pleasant tenor voice, and even in his gentleness, there was something slightly coarse, something of the seminarian,13 and when he took off his frock coat and remained in nothing but his silk shirt, or when he tossed a tip to a waiter in a tavern, it seemed to me each time that culture is culture, but there was still a Tartar fermenting in him.
At the Baptism,14 he left for Petersburg again. He left in the morning, and after dinner my sister came to see me. Without taking off her coat and hat, she sat silently, very pale, and stared at one spot. She was shivering but clearly trying to carry on.
‘‘You must have caught a cold,’’ I said.
Her eyes filled with tears, she got up and went to Karpovna without saying a word to me, as if I had offended her. A little later, I heard her speaking in a tone of bitter reproach:
‘‘Nanny, what have I been living for till now? Why? Tell me: haven’t I ruined my youth? To spend the best years of your life doing nothing but writing down expenses, pouring tea, counting kopecks, entertaining guests, and thinking that there was nothing higher than that in the world! Nanny, understand, I, too, have human needs, and I want to live, but I’ve been made into some sort of housekeeper. It’s terrible, terrible!’’
She flung the keys through the doorway, and they landed in my room with a jingle. These were the keys to the sideboard, the pantry, the cellar, and the tea chest—the same keys my mother once carried.
‘‘Ah, oh, dear hearts!’’ the old woman was horrified. ‘‘Saints in heaven!’’
Before going home, my sister came to my room to pick up the keys and said:
‘‘Excuse me. Something strange has been happening to me lately.’’
VIII
ONCE, COMING HOME from Marya Viktorovna’s late in the evening, I found in my room a young police officer in a new uniform; he was sitting at my table and leafing through a book.
‘‘At last!’’ he said, getting up and stretching. ‘‘This is the third time I’ve come to you. The governor orders you to come to him tomorrow at exactly nine o’clock in the morning. Without fail.’’
He had me sign a statement that I would carry out His Excellency’s order punctually, and left. This late visit from a police officer and the unexpected invitation to the governor’s affected me in a most oppressive manner. From early childhood, a fear of gendarmes, policemen, magistrates had remained in me, and I was now tormented by anguish, as if I was indeed guilty of something. And I was quite unable to fall asleep. Nanny and Prokofy were also agitated and couldn’t sleep. Besides that, nanny had an earache; she moaned and began to cry several times from the pain. Hearing that I was not asleep, Prokofy cautiously came into my room with a lamp and sat at the table.
‘‘You ought to drink some pepper vodka...’ he said, pondering. ‘‘In this vale, once you’ve had a drink, it feels all right. And if mama took a drop of pepper vodka in her ear, it would be a great benefit.’’
Between two and three o’clock, he got ready to go to the slaughterhouse for meat. I knew I wouldn’t sleep
