Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  ‘You’re going to die soon,’ I said to him.

  He turned round quickly but answered slowly and calmly, ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

  Then he asked the Major if the pistol was loaded. The Major was too confused to remember clearly.

  ‘All right, Vulich!’ someone shouted. ‘That’ll do. If it was hanging by the head of the bed, it’s sure to be loaded. Stop playing the fool!’

  ‘Yes, stop fooling around,’ said someone else.

  ‘Fifty roubles to five the pistol’s not loaded!’ shouted a third person.

  Fresh bets were laid.

  This ritual was dragging on too long for me.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Either shoot yourself or put the pistol back where it came from so we can all go to bed.’

  ‘That’s right,’ several of us shouted. ‘Let’s get some sleep.’

  ‘Gentlemen, please don’t move,’ said Vulich, putting the muzzle to his forehead. Everyone froze.

  ‘Mr Pechorin,’ he continued, ‘take a card and throw it in the air.’

  I took a card from the table – it was the ace of hearts, I can see it now – and threw it into the air. Everyone held his breath; everyone’s eyes, full of fear and a certain undefined curiosity, were darting between the pistol and the fateful ace, which hung trembling in the air; when it reached the table, Vulich pulled the trigger. The pistol misfired.

  ‘Thank God!’ people shouted. ‘It wasn’t loaded.’

  ‘Let’s just see,’ said Vulich. He cocked the pistol again and took aim at a cap hanging over the window. A shot rang out; the room filled with smoke. Once the smoke had cleared, someone took down the cap: there was a hole right through the middle, and a bullet was lodged deep in the wall.

  For several minutes no one could say a word. With absolute composure, Vulich poured my gold pieces into his purse.

  A discussion began as to why the pistol had misfired the first time. Some said the pan must have been clogged; others whispered that the powder had been damp and that Vulich had then added fresh. But I said this last suggestion was unfair, because I had not once taken my eyes off the pistol.

  ‘You’ve been lucky!’ I said to Vulich.

  ‘For the first time in my life,’ he replied, smiling complacently. ‘This is better than faro or stoss.’

  ‘But a little more dangerous.’

  ‘So, do you believe in predestination now?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I replied. ‘Only I can’t understand why I was so sure you were going to die today.’

  The man who, only a moment ago, had been so calmly pointing a pistol at his own forehead suddenly looked flushed and confused.

  ‘That’ll do,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Our bet has been settled and your remark, it seems to me, is out of place.’ He took his cap and left. I thought this strange – and not without reason.

  Soon afterwards the other officers went off to their lodgings, each with his own interpretation of Vulich’s eccentricities and all, no doubt, in agreement about how heartless I’d been to bet against a man who wanted to shoot himself – as though he couldn’t have found an opportunity without me!

  I walked home through the empty side streets. A full moon, red as the glow of a distant blaze, was just rising over a jagged horizon of rooftops. Stars were shining calmly in the deep blue heavens and it made me laugh to think there had once been people of great wisdom who believed that the stars took part in our petty quarrels over a patch of land or some imaginary rights or other. And what had happened? Those lamps, which they imagined had been lit only to shine on their battles and triumphs, still burned on as bright as ever, while all their passions and hopes, and they themselves, had long been extinguished, like a little fire lit on the edge of a forest by some carefree traveller. And yet what strength of will they had derived from the certainty that the whole sky, with its countless inhabitants, was watching them with a sympathy that was mute but never failing. And we, their pitiful descendants, roaming the earth without convictions or pride, with no pleasure or fear except the involuntary fear that grips the heart at the thought of our inevitable end – we are no longer capable of great sacrifices, whether for the good of mankind or even for our own personal happiness, whose impossibility we well know; and, just as our ancestors once rushed from one delusion to another, we ourselves move indifferently from doubt to doubt, without our ancestors’ hope, without even that undefined but real delight the soul derives from any struggle with men or with Fate.

  And many other similar thoughts passed through my mind. I didn’t try to hold on to them, since I prefer not to dwell on abstract ideas: where do they lead you? As a boy I was a dreamer: I loved to caress the images, now gloomy, now iridescent, traced by my restless and avid imagination. But what did that leave me with? Weariness – as if I had been struggling all night with a phantom – only weariness and some dim memory, filled with regrets. In this hopeless battle I exhausted all the ardour of soul and constancy of will required for life; I entered real life only after living through it all in my mind and I felt bored and disgusted, as if I were reading a poor imitation of a book I had known for a long time.

  The events of the evening had made a rather deep impression on me and had irritated my nerves. I no longer know for sure whether or not I believe in predestination, but that evening I was certain of it: the evidence for it had been startling and, although I laughed at our ancestors and their obliging astrology, I found myself slipping into their way of thinking. This, however, is a dangerous path and I managed to pull myself up in time; since it is a rule of mine never to believe anything blindly or reject anything absolutely, I put metaphysics to one side and began to look at the ground under my feet. This precaution proved most timely: I almost fell, stumbling against something fat and soft but apparently not alive. I bent down – the moon was now shining straight on to the road – and what did I see? Before me lay a pig, sliced in two by a sword… I’d barely had time for a proper look when I heard steps. Two Cossacks rushed out of a side street. One of them came up to me: had I seen a drunken Cossack chasing a pig? I told them I hadn’t, then pointed to the unfortunate victim of the man’s frenzied daring.

  ‘Damn him,’ said the second Cossack. ‘Gets some chikhir3 inside him – and off he goes, hacking up everything he sees. Come on, Yeremeich, we must catch him – or else…’

  They went off and I continued on my way with more caution; in the end I got safely home.

  I was billeted with an old Cossack sergeant, a man I loved for his good nature and – even more – for his pretty young daughter, Nastya.4

  As usual, she was waiting for me by the gate, wrapped in a fur coat; I could see in the moonlight that her sweet lips were blue from the night cold. She smiled when she saw me, but I had other things on my mind. ‘Good night, Nastya!’ I said, and walked past her. She almost said something back, but instead she just sighed.

  I closed the door of my room, lit a candle and threw myself down on the bed; sleep, however, kept me waiting longer than usual. The east was beginning to turn pale by the time I dropped off – but it was clearly written in the heavens that I was not to get my fill of sleep. At four in the morning, two fists started pounding at my window. I jumped up: what was going on? There were shouts of ‘Get up! Get dressed!’ I dressed quickly and went out. ‘Do you know what’s happened?’ asked the three officers who had come for me, all trying to speak at once; they were as pale as death.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Vulich has been killed.’

  I stood stock-still.

  ‘Yes, killed,’ they repeated. ‘Quick!’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘We’ll tell you on the way.’

  We set off. They told me all that had happened, interjecting a variety of comments about the strangeness of predestination – which had saved Vulich from certain death only half an hour before he died. Vulich had been walking alone down a dark street. Up ran the drunken Cossack who had sliced through the pig. Probably the man would have gone
on his way, paying no attention to Vulich, except that Vulich suddenly stopped and said, ‘Who are you looking for, brother?’ ‘You!’ answered the Cossack, striking him a blow with his sword that split him in two, from the shoulder almost to the heart. Then the two Cossacks I’d seen had come up; they picked up the wounded officer, but he was already at his last gasp, and he said only three words: ‘He was right!’ I alone understood the dark meaning of this: he was referring to me. Involuntarily I had foretold the poor man’s fate. My instinct had not deceived me: in the changed look on Vulich’s face I really had seen a sign of his imminent death.

  The murderer had locked himself up in an empty hut at the end of the village: that was where we were going. Crowds of sobbing women were hurrying the same way; now and again a Cossack would dash belatedly on to the street, hurriedly fastening on his dagger, and come running past us. The commotion was terrible.

  At last we were there. Around the hut, whose doors and shutters were locked from inside, we could see a crowd of people. Officers and men were arguing excitedly; women were howling, lamenting, keening. I was immediately struck by the look of crazed despair on the face of one old woman. She was sitting on a thick log, her elbows propped on her knees and her hands supporting her head; she was the murderer’s mother. From time to time her lips moved: were they whispering a prayer or a curse?

  Meanwhile we had to decide on some way of seizing the criminal. No one, however, was daring enough to be first through the door.

  I went up to the window and looked through a crack in the shutter. There he was, white-faced, lying on the floor and holding a pistol in his right hand; a bloodstained sword lay beside him. His eyes were rolling about wildly; sometimes he shuddered and put his hands to his head, as if dimly recalling the events of the night. I could see little resolution in those restless eyes and I asked the Major why he didn’t order the Cossacks to break down the door and rush in, since it would be better to act now rather than wait until the man had recovered his senses.

  Just then an old Cossack captain walked up to the door and called out the man’s name. The murderer answered.

  ‘You’ve done wrong, brother Yefimych,’ said the Captain. ‘There’s nothin’ for it – you must give yourself up!’

  ‘I won’t!’

  ‘Have you no fear of the Lord? You’re an honest Christian, aren’t you, not some accursed Chechen? If sin has led you astray, there’s nothin’ for it. There’s no escapin’ your fate.’

  ‘I won’t give in!’ the Cossack shouted fiercely, and there was the click of a pistol being cocked.

  ‘Hey, you there!’ the Captain then said to the old woman. ‘Have a word with your son – perhaps he’ll listen to you. Or he’ll bring down the wrath of the Lord. And these gentlemen here have been waitin’ two hours now.’

  The old woman looked at the Captain intently and shook her head.

  He went up to the Major.

  ‘Vasily Petrovich,’ he said, ‘I know him – he won’t give in. And if we smash down the door, he’ll slaughter a good few of our lads. Wouldn’t it be better to give orders to shoot him? There’s a wide crack in the shutter.’

  Just then a strange thought flashed through my mind: I took it into my head, like Vulich, to test Fate.

  ‘Wait,’ I said to the Major. ‘I’ll take him alive.’ I told the Captain to engage the murderer in conversation, and I posted three Cossacks by the door, ready to break in and rush to my aid the moment I gave the signal. Then I went round the hut and approached the fateful window; my heart was pounding.

  ‘Ay, you cursed wretch!’ the Captain was shouting. ‘Laughin’ at us, are you? Think we can’t get you, do you?’ He began banging on the door as hard as he could. My eye to the crack, I watched the Cossack, who was not expecting to be attacked from this side. Suddenly I wrenched off the shutter and flung myself head first through the window. There was an explosion just above my ear, and the bullet ripped off one of my epaulettes. But the smoke filling the room prevented my adversary from finding his sword. I seized him by the arms, the Cossacks broke in, and within three minutes the criminal had been bound and taken away under guard. The crowd melted away and the officers began congratulating me – and not without reason.

  How, after all that, could a man not become a fatalist? But who can ever be sure whether he’s convinced of something or not? And how often what seems like conviction is simply the deceit of the senses or an error of reasoning! I like to doubt everything. Such a disposition of mind is no impediment to resoluteness of character. With me, at least, it’s the opposite: I always go forward more boldly when I don’t know what awaits me. After all, the worst that can happen to you is death – and death is inescapable!

  Back in the fortress, I told Maksim Maksimych all I had seen and been through and I asked him what he thought about predestination. At first he didn’t understand the word, but I explained it as best I could. He then replied, shaking his head ponderously, ‘Well yes, of course… Quite a tricky matter. But then these Asiatic triggers often do misfire if they’re badly oiled or you don’t press hard enough with your finger. I must admit, I don’t like Circassian rifles either; somehow they don’t seem right for the likes of us. And with that short butt of theirs you’ve got to watch out – you can easily get your nose burnt. But the swords they make – no, you can’t do better than Circassian swords!’

  After thinking for a moment, he added, ‘Pity about that poor fellow, though… What the devil made him start chatting to a drunk at night? But I suppose that must have been the fate he was dealt at birth!’

  That was all I could get out of Maksim Maksimych; he’s not someone who likes metaphysical discussions.

  First published in 1839

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  NIKOLAY VASILYEVICH GOGOL (1809–52)

  Born near Poltava in the Ukraine into a family of minor gentry, Gogol first travelled to St Petersburg at the age of nineteen. There he worked as a civil servant, progressing from the lowest of the fourteen ranks to the eighth. He then taught at a girls’ school and attempted, with little success, to teach history at St Petersburg University. From 1837 to 1839 he lived in Rome, and he spent much of the rest of his life travelling in Russia and Western Europe.

  Gogol made his name with colourful, often fantastic, stories about the Ukrainian peasantry, collected in the volumes Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka and Mirgorod. These were followed by his Petersburg stories, which fuse fantasy and realism. Pushkin had been quick to recognize Gogol’s talent, and Gogol claimed that Pushkin gave him the plots for his satirical play The Government Inspector and his one long work, Dead Souls.

  Dead Souls (published, like ‘The Greatcoat’, in 1842) was intended as the first part of a Russian Divine Comedy. Gogol’s inability to conceive of a Purgatorio, let alone a Paradiso, seems to have triggered a lasting depression. In 1847 he published Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, a collection of tedious moral exhortations that alienated liberals and even many conservatives and was famously denounced by the influential radical critic Vissarion Belinsky. In despair, Gogol went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but this only deepened his depression. Feeling it lacked true moral content, he burned much of the second part of Dead Souls. He died ten days afterwards, in March 1852, probably of starvation; he had refused to eat any food at all since the beginning of Lent.

  The hero of ‘The Greatcoat’, the last and most famous of Gogol’s St Petersburg stories, bears the unusual name of Akaky Akakiyevich; this is probably derived both from kaka, a child’s word for ‘faeces’, and from the Greek akakos, meaning ‘innocent’. Several saints bore the name of Acacius, and one, a monk (and tailor), died after being tormented for years by a cruel elder, who later repented. Like ‘The Queen of Spades’, this story has given rise to a variety of interpretations. Some critics read it as a defence of the ‘little man’ against an oppressive bureaucracy. Others see it as an allegory about sexual and material temptation, the greatcoat being a devil
ish lure. Still others have seen the greatcoat as a paradigm of humanity’s search for meaning; in the words of the critic Cathy Popkin, ‘our own quest for significance – for something substantial and important – is closely re-enacted in Akaky Akakiyevich’s ill-fated quest for a coat. In his seeking and losing the “thread”, the meaning and the reason to go on, we recognize our own vain pursuit of sense, significance, and substance.’1

  Gogol’s influence on Russian literature has been huge. The statement ‘We have all come out of Gogol’s Greatcoat’ has been quoted countless times, sometimes attributed to Dostoyevsky, sometimes to Turgenev. Leskov, Bulgakov, Zoshchenko and Platonov are only a few of the many writers who followed Gogol’s example in exploiting the comic and philosophical effects of mixing different registers of speech: colloquial, literary, religious and bureaucratic.

  THE GREATCOAT

  In the department of… but it’s better not to name the department. There is nothing more touchy and bad-tempered than all these departments, regiments, government offices – in a word, all these official bodies. Nowadays, if you say a word against any private individual he carries on as if the whole of society has been insulted. Not so very long ago, I’ve heard, a petition was received from some police captain, I don’t remember of what town, in which he makes it quite plain that governmental decrees are going to rack and ruin and that his own sacred name is being taken most decidedly in vain. In substantiation of this, he appended to his petition a most exceedingly enormous tome of some romantic work in which, every ten pages, a police captain appears, sometimes even in a totally drunken state. And so, in order to avoid any unpleasantness, it’s best if we call the department in question a certain department. And so, in a certain department there served a certain clerk – a clerk who cannot be described as especially remarkable: of shortish height, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even apparently somewhat shortsighted, going a little bald in front, and with wrinkles on both cheeks and the kind of complexion we call haemorrhoidal… This just cannot be helped: the Petersburg climate is to blame. As for his rank (for here in Russia a man’s rank is the very first thing that must be announced), he was what people call an eternal titular councillor; a rank which, as is well known, has been the butt of many a sneer and jeer from various writers possessed of the commendable habit of attacking those who cannot bite back. The clerk’s surname was Bashmachkin. It is immediately clear that this surname came at some time or other from the word bashmak or ‘shoe’; but when, at what time, and in what manner, it came from bashmak – none of this is known. His father, his grandfather and even his brother-in-law – absolutely every Bashmachkin – walked about in boots, which they had resoled two or three times a year. His first name and patronymic were Akaky Akakiyevich. This may seem somewhat strange and far-fetched, but the reader can be assured that it was not fetched from anywhere and that circumstances simply occurred of themselves which made it quite impossible for him to be given any other name – and here now is the precise way that it all came about. Akaky Akakiyevich was born, if my memory serves me right, on the night of 23 March. His late mother, the wife of a clerk and a very good woman, intended, as was fitting, to have the child christened. She was still lying in bed, opposite the door, while to her right stood the godfather, a most excellent man, Ivan Ivanovich Yeroshkin, who served as a head clerk in the Senate,1 together with the godmother, Arina Semyonovna Belobryushkova,2 the wife of a police officer and a woman of rare virtue. The new mother was offered a choice of any of three names, whichever she wanted to choose: Mokkiya, Sossiya, or she could call the baby after the martyr Khozdazat.3 ‘No,’ thought his late mother, ‘none of these names are right.’ To please her, they opened the calendar at another page; out came another three names: Trifily, Dula and Varakhasy. ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ said the good woman. ‘What names they all are. Really, I’ve never heard the like. Varadat or Varukh would be one thing, but not Trifily or Varakhasy.’ They turned over another page; out came Pavsikakhy and Vakhtisy. ‘Well,’ said the good woman, ‘it’s plainly to be seen that this is his fate. If that’s the way it is, then let him be called after his father. The father was Akaky, so let the son be Akaky.’ So it was that Akaky Akakiyevich came about. The boy was christened. During the ceremony he cried and made such a face it was as if he understood that he was to be a titular councillor. Yes, this is how it all came about. We have related this in order that the reader should be able to see for himself that it happened entirely out of necessity and that it was quite impossible to give him any other name. When and at what time he entered the department, and who appointed him, is something that no one could recall. However many directors and other higher officials might come and go, he was always to be seen in one and the same place, in the same position, at the same task, the very same copying clerk; eventually people came to believe that he must have come into the world all ready and prepared, in uniform and going bald in front. No respect whatsoever was shown to him in the department. Not only did the caretakers remain seated when he went by, they did not even look at him; it was as if a mere fly had flown through the waiting room. The directors treated him with a kind of cold despotism. Some assistant head clerk would simply thrust papers under his nose without so much as a ‘Copy these’ or a ‘Here’s an interesting little job for you’ or some other pleasant remark of the kind that is customary in well-bred offices. And he would take these papers, not looking at anything else, not noticing who had put them there or whether they had the right to do this. He would take the papers and immediately set about copying them. The young clerks joked and made witticisms at his expense, as far as their office wit would stretch. There, in his presence, they told all kinds of stories they had made up about him and his landlady, an old woman of seventy; they said she beat him, asked when the wedding would be, and showered little scraps of paper on to his head, saying it was snowing. But not a word of response came from Akaky Akakiyevich, who carried on as if there were no one else there; it did not even affect his work: amid all these aggravations he made not one error in his copying. Only when the joke became too unbearable, when they jogged his elbow and stopped him carrying on with his work, would he say, ‘Let me be. Why do you torment me?’ And there was something strange in the words, and in the voice that uttered them. In that voice was something so evocative of pity that one young man, who had recently been appointed, and who, following the example of others, was on the point of allowing himself to make fun of Akaky Akakiyevich, suddenly stopped, as if transfixed, and from that moment everything was changed before him and appeared in a different light. Some strange power pushed him away from his colleagues, whom he had taken, on first meeting them, to be decent, cultivated men. And for a long time afterwards, at moments of the greatest merriment, there would appear before him the figure of the little clerk with the balding forehead, uttering his piercing words, ‘Let me be. Why do you torment me?’ In these piercing words was an echo of other words: ‘I am your brother.’ And the poor young man would bury his face in his hands, and many a time in his life he would shudder to see how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness can lie concealed in refined, cultivated manners and – dear God! – even in a man society regards as noble and honourable.