most interesting days.
Only three guests used to come. The most solid and perhaps the most interesting was a guest by the name of Pekarsky, a tall lean man of about forty-five, with a long hooked nose, a big black beard, and a bald spot. He had large protruding eyes and a serious, pensive expression on his face, like a Greek philosopher’s. He worked in railway administration and in a bank, was a legal adviser in some important government institution, and maintained business relations with a number of private persons as a trustee, committee chairman, and so on. He was of quite low rank and modestly referred to himself as an attorney-at-law, but his influence was enormous. His calling card or a note was enough for you to be received without waiting by a famous doctor, a railway director, or an important official; it was said that through his patronage you even could obtain a fourth-class post or hush up any unpleasant matter you liked. He was considered a very intelligent man, but his was some sort of special, strange intelligence. In an instant he could multiply 213 by 373 or calculate the exchange of sterling for marks without the aid of a pencil or any tables, had an excellent knowledge of the railway business and finance, and nothing that concerned administration held any secrets for him; in civil cases, he was said to be a most skillful lawyer, and it was not easy to go up against him. But this extraordinary intelligence was totally uncomprehending of much that is known even to some stupid men. Thus he decidedly could not comprehend why people get bored, weep, shoot themselves, and even kill others, why they worry over things and events that do not concern them personally, and why they laugh when they read Gogol or Shchedrin3... All that is abstract, vanishing into the realm of thought and feeling, was incomprehensible and boring for him, like music for someone with no ear. He looked at people only from a business point of view, and divided them into the capable and the incapable. No other divisions existed for him. Honesty and decency merely constitute a sign of capability. To carouse, play cards, and indulge in depravity is possible but only so long as it doesn’t interfere with business. To believe in God is not intelligent, but religion should be protected as a necessary restraining principle for the people, otherwise they won’t work. Punishment is needed only to instill fear. There’s no reason for going to country houses, since it’s quite nice in the city. And so on. He was a widower, had no children, but lived in grand family style and paid three thousand a year in rent.
The second guest, Kukushkin, an actual state councillor4 of the younger generation, was not very tall and was distinguished by a highly unpleasant expression, which came from the disproportion between his fat, pudgy body and his small, lean face. His lips were shaped like a little heart, and his trimmed little mustache looked as though it had been stuck on with varnish. He was a man with the manner of a lizard. He did not walk but somehow crept in with tiny mincing steps, swaying and tittering, and he bared his teeth when he laughed. He was an official on special assignment to someone, and did nothing, though he earned a big salary, particularly during the summer, when special business trips were invented for him. He was a careerist, not to the marrow of his bones but much deeper, to the last drop of blood and with that, a petty careerist, unsure of himself, who had built his career on nothing but handouts. For some small foreign cross, or for having it published in the newspapers that he had been present at a memorial or a prayer service together with certain high-ranking individuals, he was ready for any humiliation, ready to beg, flatter, promise. He flattered Orlov and Pekarsky out of cowardice, because he considered them powerful, flattered Polya and me because we served an influential person. Each time I relieved him of his fur coat, he tittered and asked me: ‘‘Are you married, Stepan?’’—and then came scabrous banalities, as a sign of special attention to me. Kukushkin flattered Orlov’s weaknesses, his depravity, his satiety; to please him, he pretended to be a godless and wicked scoffer, criticized with him those before whom, in other places, he was a slavish hypocrite. When there was conversation about love and women over supper, he pretended to be a refined and subtle debauchee. In general, it must be noted, Petersburg philanderers enjoy talking about their extraordinary tastes. Your actual state councillor of the younger generation is excellently well satisfied with the caresses of his scullery maid or some wretched girl strolling on Nevsky Prospect, 5 but to listen to him, he is contaminated by all the vices of Orient and Occident, is an honorary member of a whole dozen secret reprehensible societies, and is under police surveillance. Kukushkin lied shamelessly about himself, and it was not that they didn’t believe him, but all his fabrications somehow went right past their ears.
The third guest was Gruzin, son of a respectable, learned general, Orlov’s peer, long-haired and weak-sighted, blond, with gold spectacles. I recall his long pale fingers, like a pianist’s; and in his whole figure there was something of the musician, the virtuoso. Such figures play first violin in orchestras. He coughed and suffered from migraine, and generally seemed sickly and frail. At home they probably helped him to dress and undress like a child. He graduated from law school and served first in the Justice Department, then was transferred to the Senate,6 left there and received through connections a post in the Ministry of State Property, and soon left again. In my time he was serving in Orlov’s department, was a chief clerk, but kept saying that he would soon go back to the Justice Department. He treated his service and his migrations from place to place with a rare light-mindedness, and when people spoke seriously about ranks, decorations, and salaries in his presence, he smiled good-naturedly and repeated an aphorism from Prutkov:7 ‘‘One learns the truth only in government service!’’ He had a small wife with a shriveled face, a very jealous woman, and five skinny children; he was unfaithful to his wife, loved his children only when he saw them, and in general was quite indifferent to his family and made fun of them. He and his family lived in debt, borrowing wherever and from whom-ever at every convenient opportunity, not excluding even his superiors and porters. He was of a flimsy nature, lazy to the point of total indifference to himself, and drifted with the current, no one knew where or why. Wherever he was taken, he went. If he was taken to some dive, he went; if wine was put in front of him, he drank; if not, he didn’t; if wives were denounced in his presence, he denounced his, maintaining that she had ruined his life; but if they were praised, he also praised his and said sincerely: ‘‘I love the poor thing very much.’’ He had no winter coat and always wore a plaid, which smelled of the nursery. When he lapsed into thought over supper, rolling little balls of bread and drinking a good deal of red wine, then, strangely enough, I was almost certain that there was something sitting in him which he probably sensed vaguely himself, but which, because of bustle and banalities, he never managed to understand and appreciate. He played the piano a little. He would sit down at the piano, strike two or three chords, and sing softly:
What does the morrow hold for me?8
but then at once, as if frightened, he would get up and move further away from the piano.
The guests usually arrived by ten o’clock. They would play cards in Orlov’s study while Polya and I served them tea. Only here could I properly perceive all the sweetness of lackeydom. To stand at the door for a stretch of four or five hours, seeing that no glasses remained empty, changing ashtrays, running to the table to pick up a dropped piece of chalk or a card, but, above all, to stand, to wait, to be attentive, not daring to speak or cough or smile— that, I can assure you, is harder than any hard peasant labor. I once stood a four-hour watch through stormy winter nights, and I find standing watch incomparably easier.
They would play cards till two, sometimes till three, then, stretching, would go to the dining room to have supper, or, as Orlov used to say, a bite to eat. They talked over supper. It usually began with Orlov, his eyes laughing, initiating a conversation about some acquaintance, about a recently read book, about a new appointment or project; the flattering Kukushkin would pick up in the same tone, and there would begin, for the mood I was then in, a most disgusting music. The irony of Orlov and his friends knew no bounds and spared no one and nothing. If they talked about religion—irony; if about philosophy and the meaning and aims of life—irony; if anyone raised the question of the people—irony. In Petersburg there exists a peculiar breed of people who are specially occupied with making fun of every phenomenon of life; they cannot even pass by a starveling or a suicide without uttering some banality. But Orlov and his friends did not joke or make fun, they spoke with irony. They said there is no God and at death a person vanishes completely; immortals exist only in the French Academy. 9 There is no true good and cannot be, because its existence depends on human perfection, and the latter is a logical absurdity. Russia is as dull and squalid a country as Persia. The intelligentsia is hopeless; in Pekarsky’s opinion, the vast majority of it consists of incapable and good-for-nothing people. The folk are drunken, lazy, thievish, and degenerate. We have no science, our literature is bumpkinish, trade survives by swindling: ‘‘No deceit—no sale.’’ And all of it in the same vein, and all of it funny.
