Dead Souls

"There the province goes scrawling!" Chichikov said, backing up, and as soon as the ladies took their seats, he again began spying out whether it was possible by the expression of the face and eyes to tell which one was the writer; but it was not possible to tell either by the expression of the face, or by the expression of the eyes, which one was the writer. One could see everywhere something so faintly disclosed, so elusively subtle, ooh! so subtle! . . . "No," Chichikov said to himself, "women are such a subject...” (here he even waved his hand) "there's simply no point in talking! Go on, try telling or conveying all that flits across their faces, all those little curves and allusions—you simply won't convey a thing. Their eyes alone are such an endless country, a man gets into it—and that's the last you hear of him! You won't pull him out of there with hooks or anything. Try, for instance, just telling about the lustre of them: moist, velvety, sugary. God knows whatnot else!—hard, and soft, and even altogether blissful, or, as some say, in languor, or else without languor, but worse than in Ianguor—it just grips your heart and passes over your whole soul as if with a fiddle bow. No, there's simply no way to find a word: the cockety half of mankind, and nothing else!"

Beg pardon! It seems a little word picked up in the street just flew out of our hero's mouth. No help for it! Such is the writer's position in Russia! Anyway, if a word from the street has got into a book, it is not the writer's fault, the fault is with the readers, high-society readers most of all: they are the first not to use a single decent Russian word, but French, German, and English they gladly dispense in greater quantity than one might wish, and dispense even preserving all possible pronunciations: French through the nose and with a burr, English they pronounce in the manner of a bird, and even assume a bird's physiognomy, and they will even laugh at anyone who cannot assume a bird's physiognomy; and they will only not dispense anything Russian, unless perhaps out of patriotism they build themselves a Russian-style cottage as a country house. Such are readers of the higher tanks, and along with them all those who count themselves among the higher ranks! And yet what exactingness! They absolutely insist that everything be written in the most strict, purified, and noble of tongues—in short, they want the Russian tongue suddenly to descend from the clouds on its own, all properly finished, and settle right on their tongue, leaving them nothing to do but gape their mouths open and stick it out. Of course, the female half of mankind is a puzzle; but our worthy readers, it must be confessed, are sometimes even more of a puzzle.

And Chichikov meanwhile was getting thoroughly perplexed deciding which of the ladies was the writer of the letter. Trying to aim an attentive glance at them, he saw that on the ladies' part there was also the expression of a certain something that sent down both hope and sweet torment at once into the heart of a poor mortal, so that he finally said: "No, it's simply impossible to guess!" That, however, in no way diminished the merry mood he was in. With ease and adroitness he exchanged pleasant words with some of the ladies, approaching one or another of them with small, rapid steps, or, as they say, mincingly, as foppish little old men, called "mousey colts," usually do, scampering around the ladies quite nimbly on their high heels. After mincing through some rather adroit turns to the right and left, he made a little scrape with his foot, in the form of a short tail or comma. The ladies were very pleased and not only discovered a heap of agreeable and courteous things in him, but even began to find a majestic expression in his face, something even Mars-like and military, which, as everyone knows, women like very much. They were even beginning to quarrel a bit over him: noticing that he usually stood by the door, some hastened to vie with each other in occupying the chair nearest the door, and when one had the good fortune of being the first to do so, it almost caused a very unpleasant episode, and to many who wished to do the same, such impudence seemed all too repugnant.