The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“And that’s not all: the spirit confirms one of my opinions, that ‘the best of serpents is still a serpent,’ and what’s more, the better the serpent, the more dangerous it is, because it holds its venom in its tail.”

If we had satire in our country, this would be an excellent subject for it.

Unfortunately, having no satirical ability, I can recount it only in the simple form of a story.

* Habits. Trans.

† Drawers or panties. Trans.

‡ I have spoken. Trans.

§ From the bottom of [its] heart. Trans.

The Toupee Artist

A Story Told on a Grave

(To the sacred memory of the blessed day of February 19, 1861)¹

Their souls will abide with the blessed.

FUNERAL CHANT

I

Many among us think that the only “artists” are painters and sculptors, and then only those who have been granted this title by the Academy, and they refuse to consider others artists. Sazikov and Ovchinnikov are for many no more than “silversmiths.” It is not so for other peoples: Heine mentions a tailor who “was an artist” and “had ideas,” and Worth made ladies’ dresses that are now called “works of art.”² Of one of them it was written recently that it “concentrates an abyss of fantasy in a basque waist.”

In America the artistic sphere is understood still more broadly: the famous American writer Bret Harte tells of the extraordinary fame of an “artist” there who “worked on the dead.”³ He endowed the faces of the deceased with various “comforting expressions,” which testified to the more or less happy state of their flown-off souls.

There were several degrees in this art—I remember three: “(1) serenity, (2) lofty contemplation, and (3) the bliss of immediate converse with God.” The artist’s fame corresponded to the high perfection of his work, that is, it was enormous, but, regrettably, the artist fell victim to the coarse crowd, which did not respect the freedom of artistic creativity. He was stoned to death for giving “the expression of blissful converse with God” to the face of a certain fraudulent banker, who had died after robbing the whole town. The swindler’s lucky heirs were moved by the wish to express their gratitude to their departed relation, but the artistic executor paid for it with his life …

We also had a master of this extraordinarily artistic sort here in Russia.

II

My younger brother’s nanny was a tall, dry, but very shapely old woman whose name was Lyubov Onisimovna. She was a former actress from the onetime theater of Count Kamensky in Orel,⁴ and it was in Orel that all I shall tell about further on took place.

My brother is seven years younger than I; consequently, when he was two years old and was being carried in Lyubov Onisimovna’s arms, I was already over nine and could easily understand the stories I was told.

Lyubov Onisimovna was not yet very old then, but her hair was snow white; the features of her face were fine and tender, and her tall figure was perfectly straight and astonishingly shapely, like a young girl’s.

My mother and my aunt, looking at her, said of her more than once that she had undoubtedly been a beauty in her time.

She was infinitely honest, meek, and sentimental; loved the tragic in life and … occasionally got drunk.

She used to take us for walks to the cemetery of the Trinity church, would always sit down on the same simple grave with an old cross, and often told me one thing or another.

It was there that I heard from her the story of the “toupee artist.”

III

He had been our nanny’s fellow in the theater; the difference was that she “performed on stage and danced dances,” while he was a “toupee artist”—that is, a hairdresser and makeup man, who “painted and dressed the hair” of all the count’s serf actresses. But he was not a simple, banal workman with a comb behind his ear and a tin of rouge mixed with grease in his hand; he was a man with ideas—in short, an artist.

In the words of Lyubov Onisimovna, nobody was able “to do impression on a face” so well as he.

I am unable to specify under precisely which of the counts Kamensky these two artistic natures blossomed. There are three known counts Kamensky, and the old-timers of Orel called them all “unheard-of tyrants.” Field Marshal Mikhail Fedotovich was murdered by his serfs in 1809 on account of his cruelty, and he had two sons: Nikolai, who died in 1811; and Sergei, who died in 1835.

A child in the forties, I still remember a huge, gray wooden building, with false windows painted crudely in soot and ochre, and surrounded by a long, half-dilapidated fence. This was the theater at the cursed country seat of Count Kamensky. It stood in a place where it could be very well seen from the cemetery of the Trinity church, and therefore when it happened that Lyubov Onisimovna wanted to tell something, she almost always began with the words:

“Look there, my dear … See how terrible it is?”