Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  ‘Mama!’

  And for no apparent reason she burst into tears. Just at that moment Khanov drove up in his coach-and-four, and when she saw him she imagined the happiness she had never had and smiled at him, nodding her head as if she was a close acquaintance and his equal, and it felt to her as if her happiness, her exultation, was reflected in the sky, in all the windows and in the trees. No, her father and mother had never died, and she had never been a teacher; that was just a long, terrible, bizarre dream, and she had just woken up…

  ‘Vasilyevna, get in!’

  And suddenly everything disappeared. The barrier was slowly rising. Shivering and numb with cold, Marya Vasilyevna got into the cart. The coach-and-four crossed the tracks, and Semyon followed. The guard at the crossing took off his hat.

  ‘Here’s Vyazovye. We’re home.’

  First published in 1897

  Translated by Rosamund Bartlett

  LIDIYA ZINOVYEVA-ANNIBAL (1866–1907)

  Zinovyeva-Annibal was born in Kogore on the Gulf of Finland, into an aristocratic family (her mother was descended from the African Gannibal, Pushkin’s great-grandfather). Lidiya was educated at home and in private boarding schools, from which she was expelled for her rebellious behaviour. Somewhat against her parents’ wishes, she married her history tutor Konstantin Shvarsalon in 1884; she left him in 1890. In 1893, in Rome, after three years travelling in Western Europe, she met the classical scholar and Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949), who saw her as an embodiment of the Dionysian principle he had spent so long studying. They lived together in Western Europe until 1899, when Zinovyeva-Annibal was finally able to divorce her husband and marry Ivanov. Soon after this they returned to Russia.

  Ivanov and Zinovyeva-Annibal presided together over an influential weekly salon, known as ‘The Tower’, where they received the leading figures of St Petersburg’s ‘Silver Age’; Zinovyeva-Annibal, in her flowing robes, was a vivid and emotional presence there. Her plays and poetry, however, now seem of only historical interest.

  She died in 1907, during an outbreak of scarlet fever (she had been ministering to peasants suffering from the disease). Her two most important works, the short novel Thirty-three Abominations and the story-cycle The Tragic Menagerie were published shortly before her death. The former is one of the first Russian works of literature devoted to a lesbian relationship; it is the latter, however, that is her masterpiece. In the words of a contemporary, the poet Maksimilian Voloshin, ‘Zinovyeva-Annibal, who has until now been recherchée, artificial, obscure… has found herself at last, has found her own language, simple and expressive, her own style, her own wings.’1 The book was no less admired by the poets Aleksandr Blok and Marina Tsvetayeva. Nevertheless, it was forgotten both in the Soviet Union and by the émigré world, and the Russian text was not republished as a whole until 1997.

  The connected stories, told in the first person by the tomboy heroine, Vera, seem to be re-creations of the author’s own childhood. Much of the book is set on her family’s estate near the Baltic. Several chapters – including the one I have chosen, ‘The Monster’ – are centred on various wild creatures she encounters; another evokes her awakening both to her own sexuality and to social injustice. Like D. H. Lawrence, Zinovyeva-Annibal writes equally perceptively about the wildness within us and the wildness outside us. Vera’s behaviour is appalling: she kills pet animals through neglect, steals from her favourite brother and torments everyone around her. Her acts of cruelty are presented without self-justification or self-recrimination.

  The longest chapter, ‘The Devil’, is set in St Petersburg, which Vera sees as a prison, and in a German boarding school. Sent there after yet another governess has proved unable to govern her, she conducts simultaneous ‘affairs’ with two of her fellow-pupils; by arranging trysts with Gertrude and Lucia in adjacent hiding places, she forces Gertrude to witness her intimacies with Lucia. Gertrude suffers an emotional breakdown and Vera is expelled; no one, least of all she herself, can cope with the ‘devil’ that has got into her. Only in the final story, in the words of her translator Jane Costlow, does she intuit ‘a mode of being that involves neither violence nor the will to power’.2

  THE MONSTER

  Dedicated to

  Konstantin Aleksandrovich Siunnerberg1

  In the spring I caught a monster with a net in the bog.

  It didn’t come by itself. I brought it home in a small bucket, poured everything I’d caught into a jam jar and put the jar on the small round table by the window in my room.

  If you looked through the murky water towards the light, a whole bog world appeared there.

  Some kind of whirligig minnows, thin, almost transparent, with heads and whiskers, turned jaunty somersaults. Scratchy little sticks, like bits of narrow twig, went swinging forward, and suddenly a shaggy head emerged from one of their ends. A small snake cut the murk with an angular clearing motion, first gathering its tiny body in a rose-coloured clump, then spreading it out in a slender thread.

  Then there were lots of shadowy, incredible grubs, just awakening to life, which I barely remembered having caught; they shifted among the grasses at the bottom of my jar.

  Jellylike frogs’ eggs lay in dense clusters. Inside each murky green egg was a black seedlet-embryo.

  Soon the black seedlets started growing, and the egg jelly melted off somewhere. And suddenly I saw that each seedlet had grown a small tail.

  Often I would come stand by my bog jar, watching the bog life, waiting: now I would see it, now it would begin. But nothing noticeable was wrong. I kept waiting for the monster to reappear.

  I had seen him then for only one moment, that morning when a ray of sunlight suddenly illuminated the boggy murk, held in the net above the water, but not yet lifted completely out; it had swum towards the top and then slipped once more into darkness.

  Had I in fact dreamed him, but clearly, as things can only be when waking, not in sleep? Yellowish-brown, a small tough body of flat, linked pieces, a strong rudder tail and two claws coming out of the head; huge, strong and round, with sharp linked tips. I observed it all in a sunny moment, despite the fact that the monster was no longer in size than one quarter of my pinky, and me only ten years old.

  It lay in hiding three days or more, and I finally almost stopped believing I’d caught it. The net probably had a tear somewhere, or it had died in the jar. And I grew bored…

  I longed to see the monster. And I did see him, of course.

  It swam up once from the mass of frogs’ eggs, quite unexpectedly, so that I cried out abruptly, ‘There it is!’

  My startled teacher asked severely, ‘Who?… You frightened me.’

  I was silent. For some reason I never wanted to talk about the monster.

  ‘What are you so happy about?’

  Was I, in fact, happy? I hadn’t known I was happy, and I looked once more at the disgusting flat body of links and claws, swimming slowly, with sinister confidence, steering true with its strong, sharp tail.

  ‘I’m not happy,’ I finally answered decisively.

  ‘Then why did you shout that way?’

  ‘I found a monster.’

  Now my teacher laughed, with her mirthless, condescending laugh, and came towards me.

  We stood in front of the jar and scrutinized it.

  I found it revolting, but at the same time that fear and revulsion drew me to it.

  ‘It’s a disgusting grub!’ my teacher said, after a long pause. ‘Throw it out. It will make all sorts of trouble here.’

  But I didn’t throw it out, and it disappeared once more.

  The frog jelly melted not by the day but by the hour and, instead of the indistinct seedlets, fat black heads appeared, indisputably ugly and awkward, near the broad, transparent grey tails that I found so dapper.

  They were tadpoles being born and swimming to freedom; lethargic, kind, soft all through and amusingly slow, despite the ardour of their broad, dapper, waving tails. They knoc
ked awkward heads with a kind of trust and muddle-headedness; their muslin tails got entangled one with another.

  I loved them tenderly.

  In innocence they grew, in innocence they fed – on what and how I had no idea.

  I felt in them something akin to myself. I envied them, I disdained them, I loved them tenderly; yes, their silly fat heads, where, of course, there were backs and stomachs lurking; and their dapper, much too tender tails.

  And they grew not by the day but by the hour.

  The yellow-brown monster disappeared behind the fat, black host.

  But it was strange: my tadpoles fattened and grew, but they grew inexplicably fewer.

  And then I saw it a third time and at first didn’t understand. Already one-third the size of my pinky, it seemed enormous. The flat, rough body arched its linked back sharply upward, dropped its powerful tail like a stake, and as it paddled along with that rough tail, a different tail went down, its delicate muslin torn to shreds.

  Then I saw both head and claws. The fat, silly, awkward head of a tadpole in the rough, powerful, piercing claws of the monster. And I understood.

  I stared at the two bog brothers, held in such dreadful embrace. ‘There’s the trouble it will make,’ I recalled the teacher’s words.

  And suddenly my heart stilled completely, as though it had stopped and gone into hiding, heavy as a lead weight, frightened and greedy, strangely greedy.

  I stood still that way for a long time, and for a long time the silent bog doings carried on, in the murk of the boggy jar.

  The black body-head turned grey, its colour grew closer and closer to that of the gentle grey tail, its form grew tapered and the ragged little tail shook more weakly… stopped shaking altogether. The film of grey fell slowly to the bottom of the jar.

  In the pond there is an island, quite small, all covered in resinous old poplars that hang right down to the water, quiet and dark.

  I sit beneath a poplar on the narrow shore, by the water, dark and quiet. My small boat doesn’t move; it’s an old one, with worn-off paint that was once a festive colour. The oar is tossed aside. I poled here with one oar, along the shallow pond’s bottom, from the nearby shore.

  So here I am, sitting in the shade above the water, and crying. There in the water move drowsy, lazing fish. For it’s noon, and farther off, where the poplars’ shadows don’t hang along the water, the water is all overlaid with the thick viscous light of midday.

  There are silver fish and thin ones – they’re more lively – and then there are black ones with thick heads and bellies that sag downwards. Those are quite like my tadpoles, only they’re five times bigger and just as awkward, just sleepier, and their tails aren’t like muslin.

  So I cry and cry. Not bitterly or abundantly, just crying, also with a noonday laziness.

  And inside me I feel quite sour.

  ‘Vera! Vera! Not again!’

  It’s the angry, somewhat raspy voice of my older brother.

  ‘Bring me the boat, quickly. Since when are you allowed on the island alone?’

  ‘Mama let me yesterday.’

  ‘Well, yesterday isn’t today.’

  ‘She let me for today and tomorrow and for ever!’

  But even as I’m shouting at the top of my voice, I’m in the boat and steering straight for my brother; I give a powerful shove and turn to the left from the stern like a wing, with my bow heading right. Quite a little minnow, I’ve grasped the long oar and turn with it. A shove to the right, a shove to the left.

  To the right, to the left.

  Uneven, impatient, shuddering passionately – just like my passionate, impatient, independent will – my boat flies up to the shore. The bow has almost touched. My brother is already rasping out, ‘Where are you going? Where? And they let you go out alone!’

  ‘You’ve got the dogs!’

  The two sleek setters, Piron and Boyar, and the long, wavy-haired Gordon setter, Bertha, yelp by the water from excitement and nerves.

  ‘What, you’ve only just noticed?’

  ‘Are you going to let them swim?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  I look pleadingly into the boat, because I’ve long since shifted to the planks of the pier, and my brother is in the boat, in my place.

  ‘You can’t; somebody was looking for you at home. You still haven’t learned some scales or other.’

  ‘Vasenka, Vasenka, please let me!”

  ‘You can’t, I tell you. I just remembered: it was Emiliya Lvovna looking for you. She’s in the drawing room, and she’s very angry. I’d get a move on.’

  And then, quite gently, uncharacteristically, my brother adds, ‘What’s the matter, Vera? Were you crying? You’re all puffy from tears. Were you punished?’

  I flared up.

  ‘Just the opposite.’

  ‘And what’s the opposite of punishment? A reward? Think we’ll live that long? Let’s ask Emiliya Lvovna at dinner, let’s ask!’

  Oh, how I hate this Emiliya Lvovna, the lazybones. She’s only come to the country to give music lessons and she’s ill-humoured from boredom, thrusting sheets of music in my face!

  But I don’t want to tell my brother about them and about it. And I’m afraid to keep silent: won’t he really start to believe it? I mean, won’t he believe I’m being punished? Shame! Shame! And he’s kind today, even though his teasing is unpleasant, like always, and his voice is tender, and he’s become just like Mama himself.

  ‘Vasenka, it’s the tadpoles.’

  And once again I’m crying and telling him about them, and about it – the monster.

  Vasya listens to me attentively, one foot planted on the bottom of the boat, the other thrust up on the high edge of the pier. Then for a fairly long time he’s quiet.

  And then, quite resolutely, he says, ‘That’s nature, Vera.’

  I don’t know what to make of it.

  ‘A normal person gets used to nature. It becomes like second nature.’

  I don’t know what to make of it.

  He notices my stupidity. He smiles at it condescendingly, but also a bit sadly.

  ‘You see, don’t you understand, all of that around us,’ he drew a big arc with his hand, ‘in the water, on the earth and in the earth, understand? It all lives according to nature, understand, and that means it can’t do any differently. And, as a result, that’s how it has to be. That’s all very well, but then people sometimes want to live in ways they can’t. That means making things complicated, understand, and not even obeying God, understand, God!? So don’t cry… Piron! Piroshka!… You’ll get used to it… Boyarka! Bertha! Here!… There’s no help for it… Into the water you cowards, you scoundrels!… So don’t cry, silly girl!’

  He rowed standing up, to see the dogs better; he quietly worked both oars, heading down along the pond towards the dam where the water was deep, and the two dogs’ heads, their ears laid back, swam close behind the stern.

  Only Bertha was still yelping and barking on the shore; she would run into the water up to her belly and jump back out, shaking off the diamond-like spray from her long, wavy hair. She looked up at me with her big brown eyes; they were guilty and frightened, greedily, restlessly beseeching. There was an exhausting, frightened longing in her bark and in the unpleasant twists and turns of her body, wet through and suddenly grotesquely thin.

  My brother yelled wildly.

  ‘Bertha! Come here, you bitch!’

  With one leap Bertha is in the water. The long white back with a patch of yellow in the middle still trembles unevenly above the water. It’s clear that her paws can still reach the bottom, they’re stepping. But now the back has sunk under, only the patch just sticks out. Bertha swims evenly, effortlessly, and her luxurious tail lies on the water like a trusty rudder. Soon in the distance I can see only her white head, and with my too-seeing eyes I make out russet ears trembling with fright, glistening with sun on their long, wavy silk.

  ‘Or you kn
ow what? Throw out your jar!’ my brother yells, his overly loud voice travelling over the quiet water. ‘Faster, Bertha, faster!… Throw it in the wash pail… Hello, friends, after me!… What are you keeping slime in your room for?’

  ‘Why don’t you throw that disgusting grub out of the jar?’ asked my teacher, quite unexpectedly interrupting the explication of Schiller’s ballad ‘The Goblet’.

  I stared straight into her eyes, but didn’t see them and didn’t answer. She repeated the question.

  ‘Because… that’s how it has to be.’

  ‘What has to be?’

  ‘That – so it will eat.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘That’s how God made it.’

  ‘And who explained that to you?’

  ‘Vasya himself.’

  And my eyes, still not heeding the tall, sinewy woman sitting opposite, grew hard and impudent.

  Then I added with a laugh, drawling out my words: ‘Because – that’s nature.’

  ‘In no way is what you have in that disgusting stupid jar nature. It’s plain old capriciousness.’

  She’s very indignant. She’s right and she’s not right, because in the swamp there is more room for them to hide, but then there are more things to attack them.

  So I say angrily, ‘Well, so much the better.’

  Now I saw the eyes I’d been staring at so long, so impudently, without seeing. But the pale, unattractively flared-out eyes were unusually agitated, even frightened. My strict, righteous, extremely shortsighted teacher is frightened by sure signs of resurgent rebellion. Something pushed me to rebel. Words of some kind – incomprehensible even to me – squeezed upwards and out of my mouth. She kept on asking, ‘What is better? Why is it better?’