The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

by Nikolai Gogol

  He stopped and suddenly shook all over: his eyes met with eyes fixed motionlessly on him. It was that extraordinary portrait he had bought in the Shchukin market. All this time it had been covered up, blocked by other paintings, and had left his mind completely. But now, as if by design, when all the fashionable portraits and pictures that had filled the studio were gone, it surfaced together with the old works of his youth. When he remembered all its strange story, remembered that in some sense it, this strange portrait, had been the cause of his transformation, that the hidden treasure he had obtained in such a miraculous way had given birth to all the vain impulses in him which had ruined his talent—rage nearly burst into his soul. That same moment he ordered the hateful portrait taken out. But that did not calm his inner agitation: all his feelings and all his being were shaken to their depths, and he came to know that terrible torment which, by way of a striking exception, sometimes occurs in nature, when a weak talent strains to show itself on too grand a scale and fails; that torment which gives birth to great things in a youth, but, in passing beyond the border of dream, turns into a fruitless yearning; that dreadful torment which makes a man capable of terrible evildoing. A terrible envy possessed him, an envy bordering on rage. The bile rose in him when he saw some work that bore the stamp of talent. He ground his teeth and devoured it with the eyes of a basilisk. 14 A plan was born in his soul, the most infernal a man ever nursed, and with furious force he rushed to carry it out. He began to buy up all the best that art produced. Having bought a painting for a high price, he would take it carefully to his room, fall upon it with the fury of a tiger, tear it, shred it, cut it to pieces, and trample it with his feet, all the while laughing with delight. The inestimable wealth he had acquired provided him with the means of satisfying this infernal desire. He untied all his bags of gold and opened his coffers. No monster of ignorance ever destroyed so many beautiful works as did this fierce avenger.

  Whenever he appeared at an auction, everyone despaired beforehand of acquiring a work of art. It seemed as if a wrathful heaven had sent this terrible scourge into the world on purpose, wishing to deprive it of all harmony. This terrible passion lent him some frightful coloration: his face was eternally bilious. Denial and blasphemy against the world were expressed in his features. He seemed the incarnation of that terrible demon whom Pushkin had portrayed ideally. 15 His lips uttered nothing but venomous words and eternal despite. Like some sort of harpy, he would appear in the street and even his acquaintances, spotting him from far off, would try to dodge and avoid the encounter, saying it was enough to poison all the rest of the day. Fortunately for the world and for the arts, such a strained and violent life could not long continue: the scope of its passions was too exaggerated and colossal for its feeble forces.

  Attacks of rage and madness began to come more often, and finally it all turned into a most terrible illness. A cruel fever combined with galloping consumption came over him with such fierceness that in three days nothing but a shadow of him remained. This was combined with all the signs of hopeless insanity. Sometimes several men could not hold him back. He would begin to imagine the long forgotten, living eyes of the extraordinary portrait, and then his rage was terrible. All the people around his bed seemed to him like terrible portraits. It doubled, quadrupled in his eyes; all the walls seemed hung with portraits, their motionless, living eyes fixed on him. Frightful portraits stared from the ceiling, from the floor; the room expanded and went on endlessly to make space for more of these motionless eyes. The doctor who had assumed the charge of caring for him, having heard something of his strange story, tried his best to find the mysterious relation between the phantoms he imagined and the circumstances of his life, but never succeeded. The sick man neither understood nor felt anything except his own torments, and uttered only terrible screams and incoherent talk. Finally his life broke off in the last, already voiceless strain of suffering. His corpse was frightful. Nothing could be found of his enormous wealth, either; but seeing the slashed remains of lofty works of art whose worth went beyond millions, its terrible use became clear.

  PART II

  A GREAT MANY carriages, droshkies, and barouches stood outside the entrance of a house in which an auction was under way of the belongings of one of those wealthy lovers of art who spend their whole life drowsing sweetly, immersed in their zephyrs and cupids, who innocently pass for Maecenases16 and simple-heartedly spend on it the millions accumulated by their substantial fathers, and often even by their own former labors. Such Maecenases, as we know, exist no longer, and our nineteenth century has long since acquired the dull physiognomy of a banker who delights in his millions only as numbers on paper. The long room was filled with a most motley crowd of visitors, who had come flying like birds of prey to an unburied body. There was a whole fleet of Russian merchants from the Merchants' Arcade, 17 and even from the flea market, in dark blue German frock coats. Their appearance and the expression of their faces was somehow more firm here, more free, and not marked by that cloying subservience so conspicuous in the Russian merchant when he is in his shop with a customer before him. Here they dropped all decorum, even though there were in this same hall a great many of those counts before whom, in some other place, they would be ready with their bowing to sweep away the dust brought in on their own boots. Here they were completely casual, unceremoniously fingered the books and paintings, wishing to see if the wares were good, and boldly upped the bids offered by aristocratic experts. Here there were many of those inevitable auction-goers whose custom it was to attend one every day in place of lunch; aristocratic experts who considered it their duty not to miss a chance of adding to their collections and who found nothing else to do between twelve and one; and, lastly, those noble gentlemen whose clothes and pockets were quite threadbare, who came daily with no mercenary purpose but solely to see how it would end, who would offer more, who less, who would bid up whom, and who would be left with what. A great many paintings were thrown around without any sense at all; they were mixed in with furniture and books bearing the monogram of their former owner, who probably never had the laudable curiosity to look into them. Chinese vases, marble table tops, new and old pieces of furniture with curved lines, gryphons, sphinxes, and lions' paws, gilded and ungilded, chandeliers, Quinquet lamps18— it was all lying in heaps, and by no means in the orderly fashion of shops. It all presented some sort of chaos of the arts. Generally, we experience a dreadful feeling at the sight of an auction: it all smacks of something like a funeral procession. The rooms in which they are held are always somehow gloomy; the windows, blocked by furniture and paintings, emit a scant light, silence spreads over the faces, and the funereal voice of the auctioneer, as he taps with his hammer, intones a panikhida19 over the poor arts so oddly come together there. All this seems to strengthen still more the strange unpleasantness of the impression.

  The auction seemed to be at its peak. A whole crowd of decent people, clustered together, vied excitedly with each other over something. The words "Rouble, rouble, rouble," coming from all sides, gave the auctioneer no time to repeat the rising price, which had already grown four times over the initial one. The surrounding crowd was excited over a portrait that could not have failed to stop anyone with at least some understanding of painting. The lofty brush of an artist was clearly manifest in it. The portrait had evidently already been renewed and restored several times, and it represented the swarthy features of some Asian in loose attire, with an extraordinary, strange expression on his face; but most of all, the people around it were struck by the extraordinary aliveness of the eyes. The more they looked at them, the more the eyes seemed to penetrate into each of them. This strangeness, this extraordinary trick of the artist, occupied almost everyone's attention. Many of the competitors had already given up, because the bids rose incredibly. There remained only two well-known aristocrats, lovers of painting, who simply refused to give up such an acquisition. They were excited and would probably have raised the bid impossibly, if one of t
he onlookers there had not suddenly said: "Allow me to interrupt your dispute for a time. I have perhaps more right to this portrait than anyone else."

  These words instantly drew everyone's attention to him. He was a trim man of about thirty-five with long black hair. His pleasant face, filled with some carefree brightness, spoke for a soul foreign to all wearisome worldly shocks; in his clothing there was no pretense to fashion: everything in him spoke of the artist. This was, in fact, the painter B., known personally to many of those present.

  "Strange as my words may seem to you," he went on, seeing the general attention directed at him, "if you are resolved to listen to a brief story, you will perhaps see that I had the right to speak them. Everything assures me that this portrait is the very one I am looking for."

  A quite natural curiosity lit up on the faces of almost all of them, and the auctioneer himself stopped, openmouthed, with the upraised hammer in his hand, preparing to listen. At the beginning of the story, many kept involuntarily turning their eyes to the portrait, but soon they all fixed their eyes on the narrator alone, as his story became ever more engrossing.

  "You know that part of the city which is called Kolomna." So he began. "There everything is unlike the other parts of Petersburg; there it is neither capital nor province; you seem to feel, as you enter the streets of Kolomna, that all youthful desires and impulses are abandoning you. The future does not visit there, everything there is silence and retirement; everything has settled out of the movement of the capital. Retired clerks move there to live, and widows, and people of small income who, after some acquaintance with the Senate, 20 condemned themselves to this place for almost their whole lives; pensioned-off cooks who spend all day jostling in the marketplaces, babbling nonsense with some peasant in a small-goods shop, and every day take five kopecks' worth of coffee and four of sugar; and, finally, that whole class of people who may be called by one word: ashen—people whose clothing, faces, hair, eyes have a sort of dull, ashen appearance, like a day on which there is neither storm nor sun in the sky, but simply nothing in particular: a drizzling mist robs all objects of their sharpness. Retired theater ushers, retired titular councillors, retired disciples of Mars with a blind eye and a swollen lip, can be included here. These people are utterly passionless: they walk about without looking at anything, they are silent without thinking about anything. They have few chattels in their rooms, sometimes simply a bottle of pure Russian vodka, which they sip monotonously all day, without any strong rush to the head aroused by a heavy intake such as a young German artisan likes to treat himself to on Sundays—that daredevil of Meshchanskaya Street, who takes sole possession of the pavements once it's past midnight.

  "Life in Kolomna is terribly solitary: there is rarely a carriage, except maybe the kind actors go around in, which with its rumbling, jingling, and clanking is all that disturbs the universal silence. There everybody goes on foot; a cabby with no passengers quite often plods along, bringing hay to his bearded little nag. You can find lodgings for five roubles a month, even with morning coffee. Widows living on pensions are the aristocrats of the place—they behave themselves well, sweep their room frequently, discuss the high price of beef and cabbage with their lady friends; there's often a young daughter with them, a silent, speechless, sometimes comely being, a vile little dog, and a wall clock with a sadly ticking pendulum.

  Then come actors, whose earnings do not allow them to move out of Kolomna—free folk who, like all artists, live for pleasure. Sitting in their dressing gowns, they repair a pistol, glue up various useful household objects from cardboard, play checkers or cards with a visiting friend, spend the morning that way, and do almost the same thing in the evening, with the addition of an occasional glass of punch. After these aces and the aristocracy of Kolomna come the extraordinarily puny and piddling. It's as difficult to name them as it is to count the multitude of insects that generate in stale vinegar. There are old women who pray, old women who drink, old women who both pray and drink, old women who get along by incomprehensible means, like ants— they drag old rags and linens from the Kalinkin Bridge to the flea market and sell them there for fifteen kopecks; in short, often the most wretched sediment of mankind, whose condition no philanthropic political economist could find the means to improve.

  "I mention them in order to show you how often these people have the need to seek one-time, sudden, temporary assistance, to resort to borrowing; and then there settle among them a special sort of moneylenders, who provide them with small sums on a pledge and at high interest. These small moneylenders are oftentimes more unfeeling than any of the big ones, because they emerge in the midst of poverty and the most manifest beggarly rags, something not seen by the wealthy moneylender, who deals only with those who come to him in carriages. And therefore human feeling dies all too early in their souls. Among these moneylenders there was one . . . but it will do no harm to inform you that the event I've begun to tell you about took place in the last century—namely, during the reign of the late empress Catherine II. You can understand yourselves that the very appearance and inner life of Kolomna must have changed significantly. And so, among the moneylenders there was one—an extraordinary being in all respects—who had long since settled in that part of the city. He went about in loose Asian attire; the dark color of his face pointed to his southern origin, but precisely what his nationality was—Indian, Greek, Persian—no one could say for certain. Tall, almost extraordinary stature, a swarthy, lean, burnt face, its color somehow inconceivably terrible, large eyes of an extraordinary fire, and thick, beetling brows, distinguished him greatly and sharply from all the ashen inhabitants of the capital. His dwelling itself was unlike all the other little wooden houses. It was a stone building, like those once built in great numbers by Genoese merchants—with irregular, unequal-sized windows, iron shutters, and iron bars. This moneylender differed from other moneylenders in that he was able to supply any sum to anyone, from a destitute old woman to an extravagant courtier. The most brilliant carriages often turned up in front of his house, in the windows of which the heads of magnificent society ladies often appeared. The rumor spread, as usual, that his iron coffers were filled with an inestimable fortune in money, jewelry, diamonds, and various pledges, but that nonetheless he was not mercenary in the same way other moneylenders were. He gave money out willingly, fixing seemingly advantageous terms of payment; but through certain strange mathematical calculations, he somehow made the interest increase enormously. So, at least, rumor said. But strangest of all, and what could not fail to strike many, was the strange fate that befell all those who took money from him: they all ended their lives in some unfortunate way. Whether this was simply people's opinion, absurd superstitious talk, or a deliberately spread rumor, remained unknown. But within a short period of time several vivid and spectacular examples occurred before everyone's eyes.

  "Among the aristocracy of the time, a young man from one of the best families soon drew everyone's eyes, who distinguished himself in the government service while still young—an ardent admirer of everything genuine and lofty, a zealot of everything produced by human art and intellect, a promising Maecenas. He soon deserved to be distinguished by the empress herself, who entrusted him with an important post that agreed perfectly with his own expectations, a post in which he could do much for learning and for the good in general. The young courtier surrounded himself with painters, poets, scholars. He wanted to give work to all, to encourage all. He undertook at his own expense a great many useful publications, commissioned a great many things, announced encouraging awards, spent heaps of money on it, and in the end was ruined. Yet, full of magnanimous impulse, he did not want to abandon his cause, sought to borrow everywhere, and turned at last to the famous moneylender.

  Having taken a considerable loan from him, in a short period of time the man changed completely: he became an enemy, a persecutor of developing minds and talents. In all writings he began to see the bad side, he twisted the meaning of every phrase.
As luck would have it, the French Revolution occurred just then. This suddenly served him as a tool for every possible nastiness. He began to see some sort of revolutionary trend in everything, he imagined allusions everywhere. He became suspicious to such a degree that he finally began to suspect his own self, started writing terrible, unjust denunciations, made innumerable people miserable. It goes without saying that such behavior could not fail in the end to reach the throne. The magnanimous empress was horrified and, filled with that nobility of soul which is the adornment of crowned heads, spoke words which, though they could not have been conveyed to us exactly, yet imprinted their deep meaning in the hearts of many. The empress observed that it is not under monarchy that the lofty, noble impulses of the soul are suppressed, it is not there that works of intellect, poetry, and art are scorned and persecuted; that, on the contrary, only monarchs patronize them; that the Shakespeares and Molieres flourished under their magnanimous rule, while Dante could not find himself a corner in his republican fatherland; that true geniuses emerge in times of the splendor and power of sovereigns and states, and not at times of outrageous political phenomena and republican terrors, which up to now have never presented the world with a single poet; that poets and artists ought to be held in distinction, for they bring only peace and a beautiful quiet to the soul, not agitation and murmuring; that scholars, poets, and all those who produce art are pearls and diamonds in the imperial crown: by them the epoch of a great sovereign is adorned and acquires still greater splendor. In short, the empress, at the moment of speaking these words, was divinely beautiful. I remember that old people couldn't speak of it without tears.