Fifty-Two Stories

“All of these not very numerous attempts,” thought Vassilyev, “can be divided into three groups. Some, having bought a woman out of the brothel, would rent her a room, buy her a sewing machine, and she would become a seamstress. And having bought her out, willy-nilly, he made her his kept woman; then, on finishing his studies, he would leave and hand her over to some other decent man, like some sort of object. And the fallen woman remained fallen. Others, having bought her out, also rented her a furnished room, bought the inevitable sewing machine, and set about on literacy, sermonizing, reading books. The woman lived and sewed as long as it was interesting and new, but then, getting bored, she would start receiving men in secret from the preacher, or would run away and go back to where she could sleep until three o’clock, drink coffee, and have good dinners. The third group, the most ardent and self-sacrificing, took a bold, resolute step. They married. And when the insolent, spoiled, or stupid downtrodden animal became a wife, a homemaker, and then a mother, it turned her life and worldview upside down, so that in the wife and mother it was hard to recognize the former fallen woman. Yes, marriage is the best and perhaps the only way.”

“But it’s impossible!” Vassilyev said aloud and fell back on the bed. “I’m the first who couldn’t marry! For that you need to be a saint, to know no hatred and feel no revulsion. But suppose that I, the medic, and the artist overcome ourselves and get married, and they all marry us. What would be the result? The result? The result would be that while they’re getting married here, in Moscow, the bookkeeper from Smolensk will be corrupting a new batch, and that batch will swarm here to the vacant places, along with others from Saratov, Nizhni-Novgorod, Warsaw…And where to put the hundred thousand from London? From Hamburg?”

The lamp, which was running out of kerosene, began to smoke. Vassilyev did not notice it. He started pacing again and went on thinking. Now he put the question differently: What must be done so that fallen women are no longer needed? For that it is necessary that the men who buy them and do them in feel all the immorality of their slave-owning role and are horrified. The men must be saved.

“Science and the arts are obviously no help…,” thought Vassilyev. “The only solution here is to become an apostle.”

And he began to dream of how, the very next evening, he would stand at the corner of the lane and say to every passerby:

“Where are you going and for what? Have fear of God!”

He would turn to the indifferent cabbies and say to them:

“Why are you standing here? Why aren’t you indignant, outraged? You believe in God, and you know that it’s sinful, that people will go to hell for that, so why are you silent? True, they’re strangers to you, but they, too, have fathers, brothers, just as you do…”

One of his friends once said of Vassilyev that he was a talented man. There are talents for writing, acting, painting, but he had a special talent—for being human. He possessed a refined, superb sense of pain in general. As a good actor reflects other people’s movements and voices in himself, so Vassilyev could reflect other people’s pain in his soul. Seeing tears, he wept; next to a sick person, he himself became sick and moaned; if he saw violence, it seemed to him that the violence was being done to him, he became afraid like a little boy and, turning coward, ran for help. Other people’s pain chafed him, roused him, brought him to a state of ecstasy, and so on.

Whether this friend was right, I don’t know, but what Vassilyev experienced when it seemed to him that the question had been resolved was very much like inspiration. He wept, laughed, recited aloud the words he would speak the next day; he felt an ardent love for the people who would listen to him and stand beside him at the corner of the lane in order to preach; he sat down to write letters, made vows to himself…

All this was like inspiration also in that it did not last long. Vassilyev soon became tired. The London, Hamburg, and Warsaw women weighed on him in their mass as mountains weigh upon the earth; he quailed before this mass, felt at a loss; he remembered that he had no gift for words, that he was cowardly and fainthearted, that indifferent people would hardly want to listen to him and understand him, a third-year law student, a timid and insignificant man, that a true apostolic calling consisted not only in preaching, but also in acts…