by Leo Tolstoy
After the servants had served everyone tea, the Dorpat student asked Frost in Russian, ‘Do you know how to make a rum punch with burnt sugar and spices, Frost?’
‘O, ja,’78 Frost replied, flexing his calves, and the Dorpat student then said to him, in Russian again, ‘Then you take care of that business’ (they were both graduates of Dorpat University and on familiar terms), and Frost, with great strides of his muscular bowed legs, started to go back and forth between the drawing room and the pantry, and the pantry and the drawing room, and soon a big soup tureen appeared on the table with a nine-pound loaf of sugar resting on top on three crossed student swords. Baron Z. had meanwhile been going around to all the guests, who had gathered in the drawing room to look at the tureen, saying the same thing to everyone with an invariably serious face: ‘Let’s all pass the cup around student-style, gentlemen, and drink Bruderschaft, or else there won’t be any comradeship at all in our year. And unbutton or completely take off your coats, just as he’s done.’ The Dorpat student had indeed taken off his coat and, after rolling up his white shirtsleeves above his white elbows and planting his feet in a resolute stance, was already lighting the rum in the tureen.
‘Gentlemen, put out the candles!’ the Dorpat student suddenly shouted so masterfully and loudly as would only have been necessary, had we all been shouting, too. But we were gazing in silence at the tureen and at the Dorpat student’s white shirt, all of us feeling that the solemn moment had arrived.
‘Löschen Sie die Lichter aus, Frost!’79 the Dorpat student shouted again in German, his excitement evidently getting the better of him. Frost and the rest of us proceeded to put out the candles. The room turned dark, with only the white sleeves and the hands supporting the loaf of sugar on the swords illuminated by the bluish flame. The Dorpat student’s loud tenor was no longer alone, since talk and laughter had started up in every corner of the room. Many had taken off their coats (especially those who were wearing fresh shirts of fine quality), and I did the same, realizing that it had begun. Although it still wasn’t any fun, I was sure everything would be fine, once we had each drunk a glass of the beverage they were preparing.
At last it was ready. Spilling it all over the table, the Dorpat student ladled the punch into glasses and shouted, ‘All right, gentlemen, let’s begin!’ After each of us had taken a sticky glassful, the Dorpat student and Frost began to sing a German song with the exclamation juchhe!80 frequently repeated. We awkwardly joined in, started to clink our glasses, shouted something, praised the punch and drank the strong, sweet fluid, both with our arms linked in Bruderschaft and without. There was nothing left to anticipate, for the carousal was already in full swing. I had finished one glass of the punch, another had been poured for me, my temples were throbbing, the flame seemed to have turned crimson and there was shouting and laughter all around, yet not only did it not seem like much fun, but I was even sure that we were all bored, and that for some reason we all considered it necessary to pretend to be having fun. The only one who wasn’t pretending, perhaps, was the Dorpat student, who became more and more flushed and ubiquitous, filling the empty glasses of everyone and spilling more and more punch on the table, which had turned sweet and sticky. I don’t remember how or what came after what, but I do remember being terribly fond of the Dorpat student and Frost that evening, learning a German song by heart and kissing them both on their sugary lips. I also remember hating the Dorpat student that evening and wanting to throw a chair at him, but resisting the urge. I remember that besides the same feeling of disobedience in all my appendages that I had experienced during the dinner at Yar’s, my head ached and spun so much that I was in great fear of dying that very moment. I remember, too, that for some reason we all got down on the floor, moved our arms in imitation of rowing and sang ‘Down Mother Volga’, and that I was thinking the whole time that there was no reason for any of it. I also remember lying on the floor with interlocked legs and wrestling, Gypsy-style, and spraining someone’s neck and thinking that it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been drunk. I remember, too, that we had supper and drank something else, that I went outside for some fresh air and that my head felt cold, and that I noticed, as we were leaving, that it was terribly dark, that the footboard of the droshky was tilted and slippery, and that it was impossible to hold on to Kuzma, since he had become weaker and was swaying like a rag doll. But the main thing I remember is the constant feeling I had the whole evening that I was doing a foolish thing in pretending to have such fun, and to like drinking so much and not even think about being drunk, and that the others were all doing an equally foolish thing in pretending the same. It seemed to me that it was just as individually unpleasant for them as it was for me, but because each of us supposed himself to be the only one who was experiencing that unpleasant feeling, we found it necessary to pretend to be having fun so as not to upset the general merriment. Furthermore, strange although it is to say, I considered it necessary to pretend simply because three bottles of champagne at ten roubles a piece had been poured into the tureen along with ten bottles of rum at four roubles a piece, for a total of seventy roubles, in addition to the supper. So convinced was I of it all that I was quite amazed at the lecture the next day when those who had been at Baron Z.’s carousal were not only not ashamed to remember what they had done there, but even talked about it so the other students could hear. They said that it had been a most excellent carousal, that the Dorpat students were splendid fellows for such affairs, and that forty bottles of rum had been drunk by twenty people, many of whom had passed out under the tables. I couldn’t see why they not only talked about it, but even made up lies against themselves.
FORTY
My Friendship with the Nekhlyudovs
That winter I not only saw a lot of Dmitry, who came by often, but also of his whole family, with whom I was becoming friends.
The Nekhlyudovs – mother, aunt and daughter – spent their evenings at home, and the princess liked to have young visitors – the sort of men who were, she said, able to pass an entire evening without cards or dancing. Evidently, however, there weren’t many such men, since I rarely met any other guests there, although I visited the Nekhlyudovs nearly every evening. I got used to the people in the family, to their various moods, and formed a clear idea for myself of their mutual relations, grew accustomed to their rooms and furnishings and, when there weren’t any other guests, felt completely at ease, except during the times I was alone with Varenka. It always seemed to me that as a not very beautiful young woman she should very much want me to fall in love with her. But that awkwardness with her soon began to pass, too. She showed so naturally that it made no difference to her whether she was talking to me or to her brother or to Lyubov Sergeyevna that I got into the habit of regarding her simply as someone with whom it was in no way shameful or dangerous to express the pleasure taken in her company. The whole time of my acquaintance with her she would, from one day to the next, seem to me to be either very ugly or not bad-looking at all, but never did I ask myself if I was in love with her. Although I did converse with her directly, I more often addressed my words to Lyubov Sergeyevna or to Dmitry in her presence, and I especially liked the second way. I took great pleasure in speaking in her presence, in listening to her sing and, indeed, in just knowing she was in the same room, but thoughts about what kind of relationship she and I might have later on, or daydreams about sacrificing myself for my friend, should he fall in love with my sister, now rarely occurred to me. And if they did, then being content with the present I would unconsciously avoid any thought of the future.
Yet for all that intimacy I continued to regard it my certain duty to conceal from all the Nekhlyudovs, but especially from Varenka, my real feelings and inclinations, and thus to present myself as a completely different young man than I actually was, or than I actually could have been. I tried to seem passionate and enthusiastic, to gasp in amazement and make impassioned gestures whenever I had suppose
dly taken a liking to something, but at the same time to appear indifferent to any unusual occurrence I witnessed or was told about. I also tried to be a fierce mocker for whom nothing was sacred, but at the same time a subtle observer, logical in all my actions, precise and painstaking, yet disdainful of everything material. I can safely say I was much better in reality than the strange creature I tried to make of myself, but all the same the Nekhlyudovs grew to like me, even as the person I pretended to be, although fortunately without, I think, believing any of the pretence. Only Lyubov Sergeyevna, who considered me a great egoist, atheist and mocker, didn’t seem to like me, and often argued with me, got angry and baffled me with her incoherent, disjointed phrases. But Dmitry continued to have the same strange, more than friendly relations with her, and said that no one understood her, and that she had done an extraordinary amount of good for him. Their friendship continued to distress the rest of the family in exactly the same way as before.
Talking to me once about that relationship, so incomprehensible to everyone, Varenka explained it this way.
‘Dmitry’s vain. He’s inordinately proud, and for all his cleverness very fond of praise and astonishment, and always likes to be first, and in the innocence of her heart Auntie is lost in admiration of him, and lacks the tact to hide it, and it comes out as flattery, only not feigned but sincere.’
Varenka’s reasoning stayed with me and, considering it afterwards, I couldn’t help thinking that she was very clever, and I gladly raised my opinion of her. But although that elevation, a result of the intellect and other qualities I had found in her, was carried out gladly, it was done with something like a strict sense of moderation, and never reached delight, the highest point of elevation. Thus, when Sofya Ivanovna, who never tired of talking about her niece, told me how four years before in the country when she was a child, Varenka had without permission given away all her dresses and shoes to peasant children, so that they had to be got back, I didn’t at once see that fact as deserving a further elevation of my view of her, but instead silently scoffed at her for having such an impractical view of things.
When the Nekhlyudovs had other guests, with Volodya and Dubkov sometimes among them, I would withdraw into the background with a sort of calm, contented awareness of my place as a household member, and not take part in the conversations but merely listen to what the others were saying. And everything they said seemed so unbelievably inane that I was privately amazed at how people as clever and logical as the princess and her whole family could listen to those inanities and respond to them. If it had occurred to me then to compare what the others were saying with what I myself had said when I was alone with the Nekhlyudovs, I probably wouldn’t have been amazed at all. And I would have been even less amazed, had I thought that our own Avdotya Vasilyevna, Lyubochka and Katenka were no different from other women and in no way inferior to them, or remembered the things that Dubkov, Katenka and Avdotya Vasilyevna spent whole evenings talking about with merry smiles, or how Dubkov, on taking exception to something, would almost every time recite with feeling the lines ‘Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive …’81 or passages from the ‘Demon’, and in general what rubbish all of them talked, and what pleasure it gave them for hours on end.
Varenka would obviously pay less attention to me when they had company than when we were alone, and then there would be neither the reading nor the music that I was so fond of listening to. When talking to guests, she lost for me her principal charm – her calm rationality and simplicity. I remember how oddly struck I was by the conversations she had with Volodya about the theatre and the weather. I knew that Volodya avoided and despised banalities more than anything in the world, and that Varenka, too, had always laughed at conversations feigning an interest in the weather, and so on – then why when they were together did they both constantly utter the most intolerable platitudes, and do so, moreover, as if they were ashamed of one another? Each time after those conversations I would be secretly furious with Varenka and the next day make fun of the previous evening’s guests, but then find even greater pleasure in being alone again in the Nekhlyudov family circle.
Be that as it may, I was starting to find it more enjoyable to be with Dmitry in his mother’s drawing room than alone by ourselves.
FORTY-ONE
My Friendship with Nekhlyudov
At the time, my friendship with Dmitry was in fact hanging by a thread. I had been thinking about him too long not to find flaws. In first youth we love passionately only those who are perfect, but as soon as the fog of passion little by little starts to lift, or the clear light of reason begins, in spite of us, to shine through the fog, so that we see the object of our passion as he is with his virtues and flaws, then those flaws, as something unexpected, stand out vividly, exaggeratedly, and our appetite for novelty and our hope that perfection may not be impossible in someone else spur not only a cooling but even a hostility towards our previous object of passion, and without regret we cast him aside and hurry on in search of new perfection. If that didn’t happen to me in regard to Dmitry, then I owe it only to his stubborn, pedantic and more rational than heartfelt attachment, which I would have been ashamed to betray. We were, moreover, bound to each other by our strange rule of candour. Having grown apart, we were too afraid of leaving in each other’s power all the shameful personal secrets we had confided, even though our rule of candour had obviously not been observed for a long time, and had often inhibited us and produced strange relations between us.
Almost every time I visited Dmitry that winter I would find there his university classmate Bezobedov, with whom he studied. Bezobedov was a skinny, pockmarked little person with tiny freckled hands and a mass of uncombed red hair, who was always dishevelled, dirty and ill-bred, and even a poor student. Dmitry’s relationship with him, like the one with Lyubov Sergeyevna, made no sense to me. There was no one in the university who looked worse than Bezobedov, but that fact was probably the very reason why Dmitry had chosen him from among all his classmates, and took pleasure in offering him his friendship in defiance of everyone else. Expressed in all his relations with Bezobedov was the proud feeling, ‘Well, it makes no difference to me who you are; everyone’s the same to me, and if I like him, then that means he’s all right.’
I was amazed at the ease with which Dmitry kept forcing himself, and the way the miserable Bezobedov put up with the awkwardnes of his position. I disliked that friendship very much.
Once I arrived at Dmitry’s in order to spend the evening with him talking in his mother’s drawing room and listening to Varenka sing or read, and found Bezobedov already upstairs. Dmitry curtly told me that he couldn’t come down, since, as I could see, he had company.
‘What fun is it down there, anyway?’ he added. ‘Much better to sit here and chat.’ Even though the thought of spending two hours with Bezobedov didn’t entice me at all, I couldn’t bring myself to go down to the drawing room alone, and quietly irritated by my friend’s quirks, I sat in a rocking chair and silently began to rock. I was annoyed with Dmitry and Bezobedov for depriving me of the pleasure of going downstairs, and I waited for Bezobedov’s quick departure, and silently fumed at him and Dmitry as I listened to their conversation. ‘Such a pleasant guest! Go ahead and sit with him!’ I thought, after a servant brought tea and Dmitry had to ask Bezobedov five times to take a glass, since the timid fellow felt obliged to refuse the first and second and say, ‘No, you go ahead.’ Clearly forcing himself, Dmitry occupied his guest with conversation into which he tried in vain to draw me several times. I remained grimly silent.
‘There’s no point in that “Let no one suspect that I’m bored” face,’ I mentally said to Dmitry, as I silently, steadily rocked. Taking a certain pleasure in it, I more and more fanned in myself a feeling of quiet loathing for my friend. ‘What a fool,’ I thought. ‘He could spend an enjoyable evening with his nice relatives, but no, he’s up here with this lout, and it’s getting late and
soon it will be too late to go down to the drawing room,’ and I shot a glance at him from around the back of my chair. His arm and the way he was sitting and his neck and especially the back of his head and his knees seemed so repellent and offensive to me that I might that minute have enjoyed doing something mean to him, even something genuinely mean.
At last Bezobedov got up, but Dmitry couldn’t just let such a pleasant guest go; he invited him to spend the night, which Bezobedov fortunately declined to do and left.
After seeing him out, Dmitry came back, rubbing his palms together with a smug little smile – very likely because he had stood firm yet had at last been delivered from boredom – and started to walk about the room, glancing at me from time to time. That was even more repellent. ‘How dare he walk about and smile?’ I thought.
‘Why are you so angry?’ he suddenly asked, stopping in front of me.
‘I’m not angry at all,’ I replied, as people invariably do in such situations, ‘only it vexes me to see you pretending to me and to Bezobedov and to yourself.’
‘What rubbish! I never pretend to anyone.’
‘I haven’t forgotten our rule of candour,’ I said, ‘and I’m telling you frankly how certain I am that you can’t stand this Bezobedov any more than I can, because he’s a dullard and goodness knows what else, but you enjoy showing off to him.’
‘No! And in the first place, Bezobedov is an excellent person –’
‘And I’m saying, you do! And I’ll even say that your friendship with Lyubov Sergeyevna is also based on the fact that she considers you a god.’