One day he saw on his desk a note in which the Academy of Fine Arts asked him, as a worthy member, to come and give his judgment about a new work that had been sent from Italy, by a Russian artist who was perfecting his art there. This artist was one of his former comrades, who had borne within himself a passion for art from an early age; with the fiery power of a toiler he had plunged into it with his whole soul, and for its sake, tearing himself away from his friends, relatives, and his favorite habits, without any financial assistance he had rushed to an unknown land. He endured poverty, degradation, even hunger, but with a rare selflessness, despising everything, was insensible to everything but his beloved art.
Upon entering the hall, Chertkov found a crowd of visitors gathered around the painting. The deepest silence, of a kind rarely encountered among a crowd of connoisseurs, reigned everywhere on this occasion. Chertkov assumed the significant physiognomy of an expert and approached the painting; but God, what he saw there!
Pure, unsullied, beautiful as a bride, the artist’s work stood before him. And if only the slightest desire to shine, if only a perhaps excusable vanity, if only a thought of showing itself off to the mob had been evident there—no, not a one! It rose up humbly. It was simple, innocent, and divine, like talent, like genius. The amazingly beautiful figures grouped themselves without constraint, freely, without touching the canvas, and, amazed by so many gazes directed at them, seemed to bashfully lower their beautiful eyelashes. In the divine features of the faces breathed those secret phenomena that the soul cannot, does not, know how to recount to another person; that which was expressed lay inexpressibly on them; and all this was tossed onto the canvas so easily, so humbly and freely, that it seemed to be the fruit of the artist’s momentary inspiration, a thought that had suddenly dawned upon him. The whole painting was—an instant, but an instant for which a whole human life is nothing but preparation. Involuntary tears were ready to roll down the faces of the visitors surrounding the painting. It seemed that all tastes, all bold, irregular deviations of taste, were merged into a silent hymn to the divine work. Motionless, with mouth open, Chertkov stood in front of the painting, and finally, when the visitors and experts began little by little to stir and to discuss the merits of the work, and when they finally turned to him and asked him to make his thoughts known, he regained consciousness. He wanted to assume an ordinary, indifferent air, wanted to offer the usual sort of banal opinion that stale, hard-hearted artists express: that the work was good and the artist’s talent was evident, but that one would wish for the idea and the finishing to be better executed in many places—but the words died on his lips, tears and sobs broke out discordantly in answer, and like a madman he ran out of the hall.
For about a minute he stood motionless and insensible in the middle of his magnificent studio. His whole being, his whole life was awakened in a single instant, as if youth had returned to him, as if the extinguished sparks of talent had flamed up anew. My God! To ruin so pitilessly all the best years of his youth, to destroy, to put out the spark of a fire that had perhaps been flickering in his breast and that would perhaps by now have developed in majesty and beauty, that would perhaps also have provoked tears of amazement and gratitude! And to ruin all that, to ruin it without any pity! It seemed as if at that moment those efforts and impulses that he had once known came to life again in his soul. He seized a brush and approached a canvas. The sweat of effort broke out on his face, he was transformed into one desire, and one may say that he burned with one thought: He wanted to depict a fallen angel. This idea was the one that was most in harmony with the state of his soul. But, alas! His figures, poses, groups, and thoughts came out onto the canvas in a constrained and incoherent way. His brush and imagination had confined themselves too much to one standard, and the impotent impulse to transgress the boundaries and fetters that he had laid on himself immediately resulted in incorrectness and error. He had neglected the tedious, long ladder of cumulative knowledge and the first basic laws of future greatness.
In vexation he removed all his works from his room, works marked by the dead pallor of superficial fashion. He locked the door and ordered that no one be admitted, and set to work like a passionate youth. But, alas! At every step he was stopped by his ignorance of the most primary elements. A simple, insignificant technical problem cooled off his impulse and stood as a threshold that his imagination could not jump over. Sometimes the sudden phantom of a great thought would dawn upon him, his imagination would see in the dark distance something that, if he could capture it and toss it onto the canvas, could be made into something unusual and at the same time accessible to everyone’s soul. A star of the miraculous sparkled in the indistinct fog of his thoughts, because he did in fact possess the phantom of talent; but God! Some insignificant convention that every schoolboy knows, some dead anatomical rule—and his thought would die, the impulse of his impotent imagination would freeze in its unnarrated, undepicted state; his brush would involuntarily turn to its rote forms: the arms were folded in a single manner learned by heart, the head did not dare to take an unusual turn, even the folds of a dress smacked of something memorized and did not want to obey and drape onto an unfamiliar position of the body. And he felt, he felt and saw this himself! Sweat poured from him, his lips trembled, and after a long pause during which all his feelings rebelled within him, he again set to work, but when one is past thirty it is harder to study the boring ladder of difficult rules and of anatomy; it is even harder to comprehend suddenly that which develops slowly and is obtained by long efforts, great exertions, deep selflessness. Finally he knew that horrible torment that sometimes appears in nature as a striking exception, when a weak talent strives to manifest itself on a scale that exceeds its scope and it fails to manifest itself, that torment that in a young man gives birth to great deeds but in one who has passed beyond the boundary of dreams turns into a futile thirst, that terrible torment that makes a person capable of horrible crimes.
He was overcome by a horrible envy, envy to the point of fury. His face became bilious when he saw a work that carried the stamp of talent. He would gnash his teeth and devour it with the death-dealing gaze of the basilisk.12 Finally in his soul was born the most hellish intention that a person ever nourished, and with mad strength he rushed to carry it out. He began to buy up all the best works that art produced. After buying a painting for a high price, he would carefully carry it to his room, and then with the fury of a tiger he would throw himself on it, rip it, tear it up, cut it up into pieces and stomp on them, accompanying his actions with a horrible laugh of hellish enjoyment. As soon as a fresh work appeared somewhere, breathing with the fire of a new talent, he would use all his efforts to buy it at any cost. The innumerable riches he had amassed afforded him the means to satisfy this hellish desire. He untied all his sacks of gold and opened up his money chests. Never had a monster of ignorance destroyed as many works of beauty as did this ferocious avenger. And people who carried within themselves the spark of divine knowledge, thirsty only for the great, were pitilessly, inhumanly deprived of these holy, beautiful works, in which great art had lifted the veil from heaven and shown to the human being a part of his own inner world, filled with sounds and sacred mysteries. Nowhere, in no corner, could they hide from his rapacious passion, which knew no mercy. His sharp-sighted, fiery eye penetrated everywhere and could find the trace of an artistic brush even in the dust of neglect. At all the auctions where he appeared, everyone despaired in advance of obtaining an artistic creation. It seemed as if angry heaven had purposely sent this horrible scourge into the world, wishing to take away all its harmony. This horrible passion cast a terrible coloration onto his face. His face was almost always bilious; his eyes flashed almost insanely; his beetling brows and forehead, always crisscrossed by wrinkles, gave him a kind of savage expression and separated him completely from the peaceful inhabitants of the earth.
Fortunately for the world and the fine arts, such a strained and violent life could not last long. T
he size of his passions was too irregular and colossal for life’s weak forces. The fits of fury and madness began to occur more often, and finally they turned into the most horrible illness. A severe fever, combined with galloping consumption, overcame him so fiercely that in three days only a shadow of him was left. Added to this were all the signs of hopeless madness. Sometimes several people were unable to restrain him. He began to have visions of the long forgotten living eyes of the unusual portrait, and then his fury was horrible. All the people around his bed seemed to him to be horrible portraits. This portrait doubled, multiplied fourfold before his eyes, and finally he had the vision that all the walls were hung with these horrible portraits that fixed their immobile living eyes on him. The terrible portraits looked at him from the ceiling, from the floor, and moreover he could see the room getting larger and more spacious in order to accommodate more of these motionless eyes. The doctor who had the responsibility of treating him and who had already heard something of his strange story, tried with all his powers to discover the secret relationship between the visions that appeared to him and the events of his life, but he had no success. The patient did not understand or feel anything but his torments, and in a piercing, inexpressibly harrowing voice he cried out and prayed for them to take away the implacable portrait with the living eyes, the location of which he would describe with a degree of detail that was strange for a madman. In vain did they employ all their efforts to find the magical portrait. They rummaged through everything in the house, but couldn’t find the portrait. Then the patient raised himself up anxiously and again began to describe its location with the kind of precision that demonstrated the presence of a clear and penetrating mind; but all their searches were in vain. Finally the doctor concluded that it was nothing more than a particular phenomenon of madness. Soon his life was cut short in a final, now silent, burst of suffering. His corpse was terrifying. They also could find nothing of his huge wealth, but seeing the cut-up pieces of those lofty works of art, whose worth exceeded millions, they understood the horrible use his wealth had been put to.
II
Many coaches, droshkies, and carriages stood in front of the entrance to a house in which an auction was being held, an auction of the belongings of one of those rich art connoisseurs who sweetly sleep their whole life away absorbed in zephyrs and cupids, who innocently pass as Maecenases, and for this purpose ingenuously spend the millions that were amassed by their prosperous fathers, and sometimes even by their own previous labors. The long hall was filled with a motley crowd of visitors who had come flying like birds of prey onto an abandoned corpse. There was a whole flotilla of Russian merchants from the Gostiny Dvor shopping arcade and even from the flea market, in dark-blue German frock coats. Here their aspect and physiognomy were somehow firmer and more impudent, and were devoid of that cloying obsequiousness that is so evident in the Russian merchant. They did not at all stand on ceremony, despite the fact that present in the hall were many of those notable aristocrats before whom, in another context, they would be ready with their bowing to sweep away the dust brought in by their own boots. Here they were completely free and easy, they unceremoniously poked at the books and paintings, trying to find out the quality of the goods, and they boldly outbid the prices set by connoisseur Counts. Present here were many of those inevitable auction visitors who resolve every day to go to an auction instead of breakfast; connoisseur aristocrats, who consider it their duty not to miss a chance to increase their collection and who have no other occupation between twelve and one o’clock; finally, those noble gentlemen whose clothes and pockets are extremely worn, who appear every day without any self-interested motive, but solely in order to see how it will all end, who will offer more, who less, who will outbid whom, and who will end up in possession. Many paintings were scattered about without any order. They were mixed up with furniture and books bearing the monograms of the previous owner, who probably had never had the commendable curiosity to look inside them. Chinese vases, marble tabletops, new and antique furniture with curving lines, with griffins, sphinxes, and lion’s paws, gilded and without gilding, chandeliers, old oil lamps—all of it was piled up and not at all in the same kind of order as in the shops. It all represented a kind of chaos of the arts. In general we have a strange feeling when we see an auction. It seems to evoke something similar to a funeral procession. The hall in which it takes place is always gloomy; the windows, blocked up with furniture and paintings, afford only scanty light; silence is spread over everyone’s faces; and the voices: “A hundred rubles!” “One ruble twenty kopecks!” “Four hundred rubles fifty kopecks!”—which come from the lips in a long, drawn-out way, are somehow savage to the ear. But an even greater impression is made by the funereal voice of the auctioneer, who bangs his little hammer and sings a requiem for the poor arts that are so strangely brought together here.
This auction, however, had not yet begun. The visitors were inspecting various objects that were thrown in a heap on the floor. Meanwhile a small crowd had stopped in front of one portrait. It depicted an old man with such a strange vitality in his eyes that it had riveted their attention against their will. One had to acknowledge that the artist had true talent. Although the work had not been finished, still it carried the clear mark of a powerful brush, but at the same time the supernatural vitality of the eyes aroused an involuntary feeling of reproach toward the artist. They felt that this was the height of truthfulness, that only a genius could have depicted truth to such a degree, but that this genius had too boldly crossed over the boundaries set for the human will. Their attention was broken by a sudden exclamation from a certain rather elderly visitor. “Oh, that’s the one!” he cried with a violent movement, and fixed his eyes motionlessly on the portrait. Such an exclamation naturally ignited everyone’s curiosity, and several of the people inspecting the painting could not help but turn to him and say:
“You probably know something about this portrait?”
“You are not mistaken,” replied the man who had made the involuntary exclamation. “Indeed I know the history of this portrait better than anyone else. Everything convinces me that it must be the same portrait about which I would like to speak. Since I notice that you are all interested in finding out about it, I am prepared to satisfy you to some degree right now.”
The visitors expressed their gratitude with nods of their heads and prepared to listen with great attention.
“No doubt,” he began, “few of you are well familiar with that part of the city known as Kolomna. Its character is sharply distinguished from that of other parts of the city. The mores, occupations, means of support, and customs of the inhabitants are completely different from those of other people. Nothing here resembles a capital city, but at the same time it doesn’t resemble a provincial town either, because the fragmentation of a multifarious and, if I may say, civilized life has penetrated even here and appears in the kind of subtle details that can only be generated by a populous capital city. This is a completely different world, and as you ride into the secluded Kolomna streets, you seem to hear your young desires and impulses abandoning you. The life-giving, rainbow-colored future does not show itself here. Here everything is quietude and retirement. This is where the sediment forms out of the movements of the capital city. And in fact, this is the retreat of retired civil servants whose pensions do not exceed five hundred rubles a year; widows who used to live on the labors of their husbands; people of modest means who have a pleasant acquaintance with law proceedings in the highest courts and thus have condemned themselves to live here their whole lives; retired cooks who spend all day knocking about the markets, chattering nonsense with the peasant in the little grocery store and getting five kopecks’ worth of coffee and four kopecks’ worth of sugar every day; finally, that whole category of people that I will call ashlike, whose clothes, faces, and hair possess a kind of dim, ashlike appearance. They resemble a gray day when the sun does not blind us with its bright shining, when no storm whistles, accompa
nied by thunder, rain, and hail, but when it’s simply neither one thing nor the other in the sky: A fog settles and takes away all the sharp features from objects. The faces of these people are somehow reddish-rust, their hair is also reddish; their eyes are almost always devoid of sparkle; their clothing is also thoroughly drab and presents that turbid color that appears when you mix all the colors together, and in general their appearance is thoroughly drab. This category includes retired theater ushers; fifty-year-old titular councillors who’ve been dismissed; retired military men, nurslings of Mars with a two-hundred-ruble pension, a knocked-out eye, and a swollen lip.13 These people are completely devoid of passion; they don’t care a damn about anything. They walk without paying any attention to any objects; they are silent without thinking about anything. In their room there is only a bed and a liter bottle of pure Russian vodka, which they monotonously suck all day without any bold rush of blood to the head, aroused by a strong swig—the kind of swig a young German craftsman, that student of Meshchanskaya Street, the sole proprietor of the sidewalk after midnight, loves to take for himself on Sundays.
“Life in Kolomna is always monotonous. Rarely does a coach thunder in the peaceful streets, with the possible exception of the one in which some actors are riding and which disturbs the general quietude with its ringing, thundering, and clattering. Here almost everyone is a pedestrian. Seldom does a cabby, almost always without a passenger, drag lazily by, hauling along with himself the hay for his humble nag. Apartment rent is rarely as high as a thousand rubles. Most apartments are fifteen to twenty or thirty rubles a month, not counting the many little corners that go for four rubles fifty kopecks a month, along with heat and morning coffee. Widows of civil servants who receive a pension are the most respectable inhabitants of this neighborhood. They behave themselves very well, they sweep their rooms cleanly and talk to their female neighbors and acquaintances about the high price of beef, potatoes, and cabbage; they very often have a young daughter, a taciturn, silent creature, but sometimes quite comely nevertheless; they also keep a nasty little dog and an antique clock with a sadly ticking pendulum. These same civil servants’ widows occupy the best quarters, the ones that cost from twenty to thirty and sometimes even forty rubles. After them come the actors, whose salaries do not permit them to move out of Kolomna. They are a free-wheeling people, like all artists, who live for pleasure. Sitting in their dressing gowns, they either carve little knickknacks out of bone or repair their pistols, or glue together various useful household objects out of cardboard, or play checkers or cards with a visiting friend and spend the morning that way; they do the same thing in the evening, often adding in a rum punch. After these big shots, this Kolomna aristocracy, follows an unusual collection of small fry, and for the observer it is just as hard to enumerate all the people occupying the various corners and nooks of a single room as to give names to the multitude of insects that are generated in old vinegar. What people you encounter there! Old women who pray, old women who get drunk, old women who get drunk and pray at the same time, old women who make ends meet through incomprehensible means, who like ants drag old rags and linen from the Kalinkin Bridge to the flea market in order to sell them there for fifteen kopecks. In a word, all the pitiful and unfortunate sediment of humanity.
The Nose and Other Stories Page 11