Fifty-Two Stories

The March sun was shining brightly, and hot rays fell on the desk through the windowpanes. It was still only the twentieth, but wheels were already rolling on the roads and starlings were making noise in the garden. It seemed as if Manyusya would now come in, put her arm around his neck, and say that saddle horses or the charabanc should be brought to the porch, and ask him what she should wear so as not to get chilled. Spring was beginning, as wonderful as the year before, and promising the same joys…But Nikitin was thinking how good it would be to take a vacation and go to Moscow and stay in the familiar furnished rooms on Neglinny Passage. In the next room they were drinking coffee and talking about Staff-Captain Polyansky, but he tried not to listen and wrote in his diary: “My God, where am I? I’m surrounded by banality upon banality. Boring, worthless people, pots of sour cream, jugs of milk, cockroaches, stupid women…There’s nothing more terrible, more insulting, more dreary than banality. I must flee from here, flee today, or I’ll go out of my mind!”

1894

IN A COUNTRY HOUSE

PAVEL ILYICH RASHEVICH walked about, stepping lightly on the floor covered with Ukrainian rugs, and casting a long, narrow shadow on the wall and ceiling, while his guest, Meier, the acting examining magistrate, sat on the Turkish divan, one leg tucked under, smoking and listening. The clock already showed eleven, and there were sounds of the table being set in the room next to the study.

“As you like, sir,” Rashevich was saying, “from the point of view of brotherhood, equality, and all that, the swineherd Mitka may be as much of a human being as Goethe or Frederick the Great; but put yourself on a scientific footing, have the courage to look facts straight in the face, and it will be obvious to you that blue blood is not a prejudice, not an old wives’ tale. Blue blood, my dear fellow, has a natural-historical justification, and to deny it, in my opinion, is as strange as to deny that a deer has antlers. We must reckon with the facts! You’re a jurist and haven’t sampled any other studies than the humanities, and you may still deceive yourself with illusions concerning equality, brotherhood, and all that. I’m an incorrigible Darwinist, and for me words like race, aristocratism, noble blood are not empty sounds.”

Rashevich was excited and spoke with feeling. His eyes flashed, his pince-nez refused to stay on his nose, he twitched his shoulders nervously, winked, and at the word “Darwinist” glanced dashingly in the mirror and stroked his gray beard with both hands. He was dressed in a very short, much-worn jacket and narrow trousers; his quick movements, dashing air, and this curtailed jacket somehow did not suit him; and it seemed that his big, long-haired, fine-looking head, reminiscent of a bishop or a venerable poet, had been attached to the body of a tall, lean, and affected adolescent. When he spread his legs wide, his long shadow resembled a pair of scissors.

Generally he liked to talk, and it always seemed to him that he was saying something new and original. In the presence of Meier, he felt an extraordinary inspiration and influx of thoughts. He found the magistrate sympathetic and was inspired by his youth, health, excellent manners, seriousness, and above all by his cordial attitude towards himself and his family. Generally acquaintances did not like Rashevich, avoided him, and, as he knew, told of him that he had supposedly driven his wife into the grave by his talk, and behind his back called him a hate-monger and a toad. Only Meier, a new and unprejudiced man, visited him frequently and willingly, and even said somewhere that Rashevich and his daughters were the only people in the district with whom he felt as warm as with his own family. Rashevich also liked him, because he was a young man who might make a suitable match for Zhenya, his older daughter.

And now, enjoying his thoughts and the sound of his own voice, and glancing with pleasure at the moderately plump, handsomely cropped, respectable Meier, Rashevich dreamed of how he would set his daughter up with a good man, and how the cares of the estate would then pass to his son-in-law. Unpleasant cares! The interest to the bank had not been paid for the last two periods, and over two thousand were owing in various fines and penalties!