Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

by Leo Tolstoy

  <‘Morpheus, take me into your embrace.’ Morpheus is a god whose devotee I would most gladly be. Do you recall that young lady who was so offended when someone said to her: ‘Quand je suis passé chez vous, vous étiez encore dans les bras de Morphée’?3 She thought that Morpheus [Morfei] was some man called Andrei Malafei. What a ridiculous name!… But it’s a wonderful expression: dans les bras; I can imagine so vividly and gracefully the position dans les bras – and particularly vividly the bras themselves – arms bare to the shoulder with little dimples and little folds, and a white nightdress indiscreetly open.—How lovely women’s arms are, specially if there is just one little dimple! I stretched myself out in bed. Do you remember, St Thomas4 was always telling us it was bad form to stretch. Just like Diedrichs. The two of them were riding along together. The sport was excellent and just behind them I was riding along too, tally-hoing to my dog Angel, and my other dog Raider was catching enough game for them all, it was a regular slaughter. And wasn’t Seriozha furious!—He was with his sister.—What a charmer Masha is – and what a wife she’d make for someone! Morpheus would make a fine old hunter, if he could cope with a bit of bareback riding, and he might even find you a wife into the bargain.—Phew, just look how St Thomas is bowling along there – and there’s the young lady charging along behind them all; it’s no use just stretching out, though it is really nice dans les bras. At this point I must have fallen asleep properly.—I dreamt that I was trying to catch up with the lady, when suddenly there was a mountain in front of us and I was pushing her, pushing her up it with my hands – but she fell down to the bottom (I had pushed my pillow off the bed), and I rode home to dinner. It was not ready: why not? Vasily started to throw his weight about and to bluster (which made the lady of the house who was on the other side of the partition ask to know what all the noise was about, so the chambermaid explained – I could hear it all, because that too was part of my dream). Vasily came in and everyone was trying to ask him why the dinner wasn’t ready, but they could see – Vasily was wearing a camisole, and a ribbon across his shoulder. I felt scared, and fell to my knees weeping and kissing his feet; I enjoyed this just as much as if I had been kissing her feet – in fact more so. Vasily ignored me and asked: ‘Is it loaded?’ Diedrichs, the pastry-cook from Tula, replied ‘Ready!’—Very well, fire!—And they fired a volley (the shutter banged).—and then there we were walking down Polskaya Street, Vasily and I, but it was no longer Vasily but she. Suddenly, horrors! I noticed that my trousers were so short that my bare knees were showing. I cannot describe how awful I felt (my bare knees had come out of the bedclothes); in my dream I spent a long time trying to cover them up and at last succeeded. But there was more to come: now we were going down Polskaya Street again and the Queen of Württemberg was there; but suddenly I was dancing a Ukrainian kazachok. Why? Because I couldn’t help it. At length someone brought me an overcoat and a pair of boots; but now it was even worse – there were no trousers at all. Of course none of this could be happening in reality: I was most likely asleep and dreaming. I woke up.—And began to drop off again, thinking, then ran out of thoughts and began to see pictures in my imagination, and my imaginings were quite coherent, picturesque even, but then my imagination itself went to sleep, and all that remained were obscure and confused notions; and then my body too fell asleep. A dream is always composed of first and last impressions.>

  It seemed to me that now, underneath this blanket, nothing and no one could possibly get at me.—Sleep is a state of our existence in which we completely lose the consciousness of ourselves; but since a man falls asleep by degrees, he also loses consciousness by degrees.—Consciousness is another name for what we call our soul; but the word soul denotes something which is a unity, whereas there are as many consciousnesses as there are different elements which make up a human being. As I see it there are three of these: (1) the mind, (2) the emotions, (3) the body. (1) is the highest of the three, and this type of consciousness is confined to developed human beings – brute beasts and brutish humans do not possess it; this is the first element to fall asleep. (2) The consciousness of emotion is also the property of human beings alone, and it goes to sleep after the first sort of consciousness. (3) The consciousness of the body goes to sleep last of all, and almost never completely. This gradualness of falling asleep is not to be found in animals, nor in human beings who become unconscious as a result of some powerful shock, or of drunkenness. The consciousness of being asleep is liable to wake us up again at once.

  Our remembrance of the time we spend asleep is not derived from the same source as our remembrance of real life – from memory, the capacity to recall our impressions – but from the capacity to group our impressions together. At the moment of waking we bring together all the impressions we have had while going to sleep and while sleeping (a man is hardly ever completely asleep) into a unity under the influence of the particular impression which contributed to our waking up – and waking up, like going to sleep, proceeds by degrees, from the lowest level to the highest.—This operation takes place so swiftly that it is hard to be completely aware of it, and being accustomed as we are to the sequential nature of things and to the mould of time in which life reveals itself to us, we accept this aggregate of impressions as the remembrance of the time we have spent asleep.—How are you to explain the fact that you may have a long dream which ends with precisely that circumstance which has woken you up? You dream that you are going out hunting, you load your rifle, spring the game, take aim and fire; and the noise you took for the gunshot was actually the water carafe which you have upset on to the floor in your sleep. Or again, you arrive at your friend N.’s house and you are waiting to see him; at length a servant appears and announces that N. has just come in; but in the real world it is your own servant who is talking to you in order to wake you up. In recognizing the truth of this, God forbid that you should believe in all those dreams related to you by people who have invariably seen something in them, and what is more, something both meaningful and important.

  These people, from their habit of drawing conclusions from dreams on the basis of guesses, have provided themselves with a particular form to which they reduce everything: they make up any deficiencies from their own imagination, and reject anything which refuses to fit into the given form. For example, a mother will tell you how she dreamed that she saw her daughter flying off into the heavens and saying ‘Goodbye, dearest Mamma, I shall pray for you!’ Whereas she actually dreamed that her daughter was climbing on to the house roof, not saying anything, and that this daughter, as she climbed higher and higher, suddenly turned into Ivan the cook and said ‘You can’t climb up here.’

  And perhaps by the power of habit, what they relate has actually taken that shape in their imagination: if so, that is further evidence for my theory of dreams …

  If you want to confirm it, try the experiment on yourself: recall the thoughts and imaginings you had while going to sleep and waking up, and if anyone else saw you asleep and can tell you all the circumstances which may have affected you, you will then be able to understand why you had that particular dream and not some other. There are so many of these circumstances, depending on people’s bodily constitution, on their digestion, and on other physical causes, that they are past enumerating. Yet there is a saying that when we dream that we are flying or swimming, it means that we are growing. If you can observe what makes you dream on one occasion that you are swimming, and on another flying, and if you are able to recall it all, you will quite easily arrive at an explanation.

  If my dream had been dreamt by one of those people who, as I have said, are accustomed to interpreting dreams, this is how the account of it (by a lady) might have run: ‘I dreamt that St Thomas was running and running for a very long time, and I seemed to be asking him “Why are you running?” and he said to me “I am looking for a bride.”—So you see, either he is getting married, or I shall soon be receiving a letter from him …’

  Note also that in memor
ies there is no gradation of time. If you are able to recall your dream, then you know you have already dreamt it.

  At night you almost always wake up several times, but it is only the two lower levels of consciousness which are fully awake – the body and the feelings. After this the feelings and the body fall asleep again, and the impressions they have accumulated during the period of wakefulness combine with the general impression of the dream, in no particular order or sequence.—If the third, highest level of consciousness has woken too, and then you fall asleep again, your dream will already be divided into two halves.—

  Another day. (On the Volga)

  I had taken it into my head to travel down the Volga from Saratov to Astrakhan.

  In the first place, I had thought it would be better, should the season turn out to be unpropitious, to extend my journey, but not to go jolting on by road for another seven hundred versts; besides, the picturesque banks of the Volga, my daydreams, the perils of the journey – all these things are agreeable and might prove to have a beneficial effect on me. I imagined myself to be a poet, thought about those characters and heroes whom I liked and tried to put myself in their place, – in a word, I thought as I always think when I am embarking on anything new: now at last real life is about to begin, and everything up to this point has been a sort of feeble preface not worth bothering with. I realize of course that this is all nonsense. How many times have I observed that I remain exactly the same, and am no more a poet when I am on the Volga than when I am on the Voronka,5 yet I still go on believing, seeking, hoping for something. I still cannot help thinking when I am pondering whether to undertake something or not: ‘Suppose you don’t do this thing, you don’t visit that place – that is where happiness was lying in wait for you, and you will have missed it for ever.’ I always think: ‘Look, it is going to start without me.’—This may be absurd, but it is what decided me to go down the Volga to Astrakhan. At first I was afraid, and ashamed to be taking action for such ridiculous reasons, but so far as I can judge in looking at my past life, the grounds for my actions have always been no less ridiculous. I do not know how it is for other people, but I have grown accustomed to this state of affairs, and for me the words trivial, ridiculous, have ceased to have any meaning. So where are these powerful, serious reasons for acting?

  I went down to the Moscow ferry and began to stroll along beside the boats and the barges. ‘Well, are all these boats engaged? Is there one that is free?’ I enquired of the crowd of barge-haulers standing about near the foreshore. ‘And what does your worship require?’ asked an old man with a long beard, in a grey homespun coat and a lambswool hat.—‘A boat to take me to Astrakhan.’ ‘Right you are, sir, it can be done!’—

  1 Literally a soft old mushroom: metaphorically, something battered and knocked about, as here a hard-boiled egg which has been rolled too many times to roll smoothly, and in Anna Karenina, Part 7, Ch. 3, a veteran clubman.

  2 How pleasant he is, this young man.

  3 When I called to see you, you were still in the arms of Morpheus.

  4 Prosper de St Thomas: Tolstoy’s boyhood tutor, the model for St Jérôme in Boyhood.

  5 A local stream neat Tolstoy’s home at Yasnaya Polyana.

  A CHRISTMAS NIGHT

  I

  ON one of the clear, frosty twelve nights of Christmas in January of the year 18—, a cab drawn by a pair of lean and broken-down horses was rolling at a jerky trot down the Kuznetsky Most, in Moscow.

  Only the lofty dark-blue sky scattered with stars hurtling through space, the hoarfrosted beard of the cabman as he snatched a breath, the air stinging your face and the crunch of the wheels on the frosty snow – only these things would have reminded you of those cold yet poetic Christmases which from childhood on have become associated in our minds with a confusion of feelings – affection for the cherished traditions of older times and the folk customs of the simple, uneducated people, but also the expectation that something mysterious, something extraordinary is about to happen …

  Here there are no great white drifts of powdery snow heaped up against doors, fences and windows, no narrow paths beaten between the drifts, no tall black trees with rime-covered branches, no infinite expanses of dazzling white fields lit by a bright winter moon, none of the magical silence of an inexpressibly lovely night in the countryside. Here in the city the tall, oppressively regular buildings block out the horizon and weary the eye with their monotony; the steady urban rumble of wheels never ceases, and inspires in the soul a kind of nagging, intolerable anguish; a patchy, dung-strewn layer of snow lies on the streets, illuminated here and there by lamplight falling from the wide window of a shop, or by a dim streetlight against which a grimy-looking policeman has placed his stepladder and is trying to adjust the light. The whole scene makes a sharp and dismal contrast with the endless, sparkling covering of snow which we associate with a Christmas night. God’s world, man’s world.

  The cab drew up before a brightly lit shop. Out of it jumped a fine, well-proportioned young fellow – of about eighteen, to judge by his appearance – wearing a round hat and an overcoat with a beaver fur collar which partly revealed a white evening tie; ringing the bell, he hurriedly entered the shop.

  ‘Une paire de gants, je vous prie,’1 he replied to the interrogative ‘Bonsoir Monsieur?’ with which he was greeted by a skinny Frenchwoman seated at a writing-desk.

  ‘Vot’ numéro?’2

  ‘Six et demie,’3 he replied, showing her a small, almost femininely delicate hand.

  The young man seemed to be in a great hurry to get somewhere: he paced up and down the shop, then started to put on the gloves so carelessly that he managed to split one pair. With a childish movement of annoyance which was also an indication of the energy within him, he flung the offending glove on the floor and began to stretch another one.

  ‘Is that you, my boy?’ said a pleasant-sounding, confident voice from the next room. ‘Come in here.’

  At the sound of the voice, and especially at the appellation ‘my boy’, the young man realized that this was an acquaintance of his, and went into the adjoining room.

  His friend was a tall, unusually thin man of about thirty, with ginger side-whiskers extending from mid-cheek to the corners of his mouth and the sharp upturned points of his collar. He had a long, fleshless nose, tranquil, rather deep-set blue eyes expressive of intelligence and humour, and exceptionally thin, pale lips which, except when opening in an appealing smile to reveal a set of fine white teeth, had about them an air of firmness and resolution.

  He was sitting, his long legs stretched out, in front of a large pier-glass in which he seemed to be regarding with pleasure the reflection of the young man’s handsome face, and giving Monsieur Charles every opportunity to display his coiffeuring skills. The latter, expertly twirling a pair of curling-tongs in his pomaded hands, shouted for Ernest, who came and took them from him so that he could, in his own words, give ‘un coup de peigne à la plus estimable de ses pratiques’.4

  ‘Well, is it a ball you are off to, dear boy?’

  ‘Yes, Prince; and you?’

  ‘I too have to go out, – as you see,’ he added, indicating his white waistcoat and tie, but still in such a gloomy tone of voice that the young man asked with surprise whether he was in fact unwilling to go, and if so, what he would prefer to spend the evening doing.

  ‘Sleeping,’ he replied calmly and without the least affectation.

  ‘That I cannot believe!’

  ‘Neither would I have believed it, ten years ago: in those days I was ready to gallop three hundred versts by post-chaise and go without sleep for ten nights just to attend one ball; but of course I was young then, and accustomed to falling in love at every
ball, and, even more important – I was cheerful then: because I knew that I was good-looking and whichever way they turned me round no one would see a bald patch or a hairpiece or a false tooth …

  ‘And who is it you are running after, my boy?’ he added, standing in front of the mirror and straightening his shirt collar.

  This question, delivered in such a straightforward conversational tone, appeared to take the young man by surprise and to throw him into such confusion that, blushing and stammering, he was scarcely able to get out the words: ‘I’m not … running after … I mean I’ve never … run after … anyone.’

  ‘Forgive me. I had forgotten that at your time of life you don’t pursue women, you fall in love with them, so do at least tell me, – who are you in love with?’

  ‘You know, Prince,’ said the young man with a smile, ‘that I really have no idea what it means to pursue someone, to faire la cour …’5

  ‘Then I will proceed to explain to you. You know what it means to be in love?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Well, to pursue a woman means doing the exact opposite of what you would do if you were in love with her – expressing your feelings little by little, trying to make her fall in love with you. You really have to do the opposite of what you do in a relationship with some sweet little débardeur6 with whom you are in love.’

  The young man blushed once more.

  ‘I was talking to your cousin about you only this morning, and she revealed your secret to me. Why haven’t you got yourself presented to her yet?’

  ‘I have not had an opportunity.’