Lectures on Russian literature

by Vladimir Nabokov

hats, he made thirty kopeks on every brace of birds; he bought timber for felling, lent money at interest, and altogether was a resourceful old man." This Grigori will also undergo a very interesting metamorphosis in the course of the story.

  Old Grigori has two sons, a deaf one around the house, married to what seems a pleasant, cheerful young woman but in reality a malicious devil of a woman; the other son is a detective in town, a bachelor as yet. You will notice that Grigori is immensely appreciative of his daughter-in-law Aksinia: we shall see why in a minute. Old Grigori, a widower, has married again, a new wife named Varvara (Barbara): "No sooner had she moved into a little room in the upper story than everything in the house seemed to brighten up as though new glass had been put into all the windows. The oil lamps burned brightly before the sacred pictures, the tables were covered with snow-white cloths, flowers flecked with red made their appearance in the windows and in the front garden, and at dinner, instead of eating from a single bowl, each person had a separate plate set for him." She also seems, at first, a good woman, a delightful woman, and, anyway, she has a kinder heart than the old man. "When on the eve of a fast or during the local church festival, which lasted three days, Grigori's store palmed off on the peasants tainted salt meat, smelling so strong it was hard to stand near the tub of it, and took scythes, caps, and their wives' kerchiefs in pledge from the drunken men; when the factory hands, stupefied with bad vodka, lay in the mud, and degradation seemed to hover thick like a fog in the air, then it was a kind of relief to think that up there in the house there was a quiet, neatly dressed woman who had nothing to do with salt meat or vodka. "

  Grigori is a hard man, and though now in the lower middle class is of direct peasant descent—his father was probably a well-to-do peasant—and naturally he hates peasants. Now comes:

  Mask Two : Under her gay appearance Aksinia is also hard and that is why old Grigori admires her so much. This pretty woman is a swindler: "Aksinia attended to the shop, and from the yard could be heard the clink of bottles and of money, her laughter and loud talk, and the angry voices of customers whom she had cheated, and at the same time it could be seen that the illicit sale of vodka was already going on in the shop. The deaf man sat in the shop, too, or walked about the street bareheaded, with his hands in his pockets looking absent-mindedly now at the log cabins, now at the sky overhead.

  Six times a day they had tea; four times a day they sat down to meals. And in the evening they counted their takings, wrote them down, went to bed, and slept soundly."

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  Now comes a transition to the calico-printing mills of the

  place and to their owners. Let us call them collectively the

  Khrymin family.

  Mask Three (adultery): Aksinia not only deceives customers

  in the store, she also deceives her husband with one of

  those mill owners.

  Mask Four: This is just a little mask, a kind of self-deception.

  "A telephone was installed in the rural administration, too,

  but it soon went out of order when it started to harbor

  bedbugs and cockroaches. The district elder was

  semiliterate and wrote every word in the official

  documents with a capital. But when the telephone went

  out of order he said: 'Yes, now we shall find it hard to be

  without a telephone.' "

  Mask Five: This refers to Grigori's elder son, the detective

  Anisim. We are now deep in the deception theme of the

  story. But Chekhov keeps back some important information

  about Anisim: "The elder son, Anisim, came home very

  rarely, only on great holidays, but he often sent by a

  returning villager presents and letters written by someone

  else in a very beautiful hand, always on a sheet of foolscap

  The opening page of Nabokov's lecture on "In the Gully."

  that looked like a formal petition. The letters were full of

  expressions that Anisim never made use of in conversation: 'Dear papa and mamma, I send you a pound of orange pekoe tea for the satisfaction of your physical needs.' " There is a little mystery here that will be gradually cleared up, as in the

  "someone else in a very beautiful hand."

  It is curious that when he arrives home one day and there is something about him suggesting that he has been dismissed from the police force, nobody bothers about it. On the contrary, the occasion seems festive, encouraging ideas of marriage.

  Says Varvara, Grigori's wife and Anisim's stepmother:

  'How is this, my goodness!' she said. 'The lad's in his twenty-eighth year, and he is still strolling about a bachelor. . . .' From the adjacent room her soft, even speech continued to sound like a series of sighs. She began whispering with her husband and Aksinia, and their faces, too, assumed a sly and mysterious expression as though they are conspirators. It was decided to marry Anisim."

  Child Theme : This is the transition to the main character of the story, the girl Lipa (pronounced Leepa). She was the daughter of a working widow, charwoman, and helped her mother in her various chores. "She was pale, thin, and frail, with soft, delicate features, tanned from working in the open air; a shy, melancholy smile always hovered about her face, and there was a childlike look in her eyes, trustful and curious. She was young, still a child, her bosom still scarcely perceptible, but she could be married because she had reached the legal age [eighteen]. She really was beautiful, and the only thing that might be thought unattractive was her big masculine hands which hung idle now like two big claws."

  Mask Six: This refers to Varvara, who though pleasant enough, is but a hollow shell of superficial kindness beneath which there is nothing.

  Thus Grigori's whole family is a masquerade of deceit.

  Now comes Lipa, and with Lipa a new theme starts —the theme of trust, childish trust.

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  The second chapter ends with another glimpse of Anisim. Everything about him is false: there is something very wrong, and he conceals it not too well. "After the visit of inspection the wedding day was fixed. Anisim kept walking about the rooms at home whistling, or suddenly remembering something, would fall to brooding and would look at the floor fixedly, silently, as though he would probe to the depths of the earth. He expressed neither pleasure that he was to be married, married so soon, the week of St. Thomas [after Easter], nor a desire to see his bride, but simply went on whistling through his teeth. And it was evident that he was only getting married because his father and stepmother wished him to, and because it was a country custom to marry off the son in order to have a woman to help in the house. When he went away he seemed in no haste, and behaved altogether not as he had done on previous visits; he was unusually jaunty and said the wrong things."

  In the third chapter observe Aksinia's green and yellow print dress for the wedding of Anisim and Lipa. Chekhov is going to describe her consistently in the terms of a reptile. (A kind of rattlesnake is found in eastern Russia called the yellow belly.)

  "The dressmakers were making for Varvara a brown dress with black lace and glass beads on it, and for Aksinia a light green dress with a yellow front, and a train." Although these dressmakers are described as belonging to the Flagellant Sect, this did not mean much by 1900—it did not mean that the members actually whipped themselves—it was just one of the numerous sects in Russia, as there are numerous sects in this country. Grigori even practices a deception on the two poor girls: "When the dressmakers had finished their work Grigori paid them not in money but in goods from the shop, and they went away depressed, carrying parcels of tallow candles and tins of sardines which they did not in the least need, and when they got out of the village into the open country they sat down on a hillock and cried."

  "Anisim arrived three days before the wedding, rigged out in new togs from t
op to toe. He wore glistening rubbers, and instead of a tie a red metal cord with little balls hanging on it, and on his shoulders, loosely, its sleeves empty, hung a short overcoat, also new. After crossing himself sedately before the icon, he greeted his father and gave him ten silver rubles and ten half-rubles; to Varvara he gave as much, and to Aksinia twenty quarter-rubles. The chief charm of the present lay in the fact that all the coins, as though carefully matched, were new and glittered in the sun." These were counterfeit coins. An allusion is made to Samorodov, Anisim's friend and co-faker, a dark little man with the beautiful handwriting in which Anisim's letters home were written. It becomes gradually clear that Samorodov is the mastermind in this counterfeiting business, but Anisim tries hard to puff himself up, boasting of his wonderful powers of observation and of his talents as a detective. As a detective, and a mystic, he knows, however, that "anybody can steal but there is no place to hide stolen goods." A streak of curious mysticism runs through this strange character.

  You will enjoy the delightful description of the wedding preparations and then of Anisim's mood in church during the wedding is worth noting. "Here he was being married, he had to take a wife for the sake of doing the proper thing, but he was not thinking of that now, he had somehow forgotten his wedding completely. Tears dimmed his eyes so that he could not see the icons, he felt heavy at heart; he prayed and besought God that the misfortunes that threatened him, that were ready to burst upon him tomorrow, if not today, might somehow pass him by as storm-clouds in time of drought bypass a village without yielding one drop of rain. [He knew how good detectives were, being one himself.] And so many sins were heaped up in the past, so many sins, and getting out of it all was so beyond hope that it seemed incongruous even to ask forgiveness. But he did ask forgiveness, and even gave a loud sob, but no one took any notice of that, since they supposed he had had a drop too much."

  For a moment the child theme appears: "There was the sound of a fretful childish wail. 'Take me away from here, mamma darling!' 'Quiet there!' cried the priest."

  Then a new character is introduced; Yelizarov (nicknamed Crutch), a carpenter and contractor. He is a childish person, very gentle and naive, and a little cracked. He and Lipa are both on the same level of meekness, simplicity, and trust —and he and she are real human beings despite their not having the cunning of the evil characters in the tale. Crutch, who seems vaguely to be endowed with second sight, might be trying intuitively to avert the disaster which the wedding itself will result in: " 'Anisim and you, my child, love one another, lead a godly life, little children, and the Heavenly Mother will not abandon you. . . . Children, children, children,' he muttered rapidly. 'Aksinia my dear, Varvara darling, let's all live in peace and harmony, my dear little hatchets. . . .' " He calls people by the pet names of his pet tools.

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  Mask Eight : Yet another mask, another deception, relates to the elder of the rural district and his clerk, "who had served together for fourteen years, and who had during all that time never signed a single document for anybody or let a single person out of the office without deceiving him or doing him harm. [They] were sitting now side by side, both fat and replete, and it seemed as though they were so steeped in injustice and falsehood that even the skin of their faces was of a peculiar, thievish kind." "Steeped in falsehood" — this is one of the two main notes of the whole story.

  You will notice the various details of the wedding: poor Anisim brooding over his predicament, over the doom that is closing upon him; the peasant woman who shouts outside "You've sucked the blood out of us, you monsters; a plague on you!"; and the wonderful description of Aksinia: "Aksinia had naive gray eyes which rarely blinked, and a naive smile played continually on her face. And in those unblinking eyes, and in that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was something snakelike; all in green, with the yellow front of her bodice and the smile on her lips, she looked like a viper that peers out of the young rye in the spring at the passers-by, stretching itself and lifting its head. The Khrymins were free in their behavior to her, and it was very noticeable that she had long been on intimate terms with the eldest of them. But her deaf husband saw nothing, he did not look at her; he sat with his legs crossed and ate nuts, cracking them with his teeth so loudly that it seemed he was shooting a pistol.

  "But, behold, old Grigori himself walked into the middle of the room and waved his handkerchief as a sign that he, too, wanted to dance the Russian dance, and all over the house and from the crowd in the yard rose a hum of approbation:

  "'It's himself has stepped out! Himself!'. . .

  "It was kept up till late, till two o'clock in the morning. Anisim, staggering, went to take leave of the singers and musicians, and gave each of them a new half-ruble. His father, who was not staggering, but treading more heavily on one leg, saw his guests off, and said to each of them, 'The wedding has cost two thousand.'

  "As the party was breaking up, someone took the Shikalova innkeeper's good overcoat instead of his own old one, and Anisim suddenly flew into a rage and began shouting: 'Stop, I'll find it at once; I know who stole it! Stop!'

  He ran out into the street in pursuit of someone, but he was caught, brought back home, shoved, drunken, red with anger and drenched with sweat, into the room where the aunt was undressing Lipa, and there he and she were locked in."

  After five days Anisim, who respects Varvara for being a decent woman, confesses to her that he may be arrested at any moment. When he leaves for town, we have the following beautiful description:

  "When they drove up out of the gully Anisim kept looking back toward the village. It was a warm, bright day. The cattle were being driven out for the first time, and the peasant girls and women were walking by the herd in their holiday dresses. The brown bull bellowed, glad to be free, and pawed the ground with his forefeet. On all sides, above and below, the larks were singing. Anisim looked back at the graceful little white church—it had only lately been whitewashed—and he thought how he had been praying in it five days before; he looked back at the school with its green roof, at the little river in which he used to bathe and catch fish, and there was a stir of joy in his heart, and he wished that a wall might rise up from the ground and prevent him from going farther, and that he might be left with nothing but the past."

  It is his last glimpse.

  And now the delightful transformation that comes over Lipa. Anisim's conscience had not only weighed upon him but had been impersonated in him and had been a dreadful weight on Lipa although she knew nothing of his complicated life. Now he and his burden are removed and she is free.

  "Wearing an old skirt, her feet bare and her sleeves tucked up to her shoulders, she was scrubbing the stairs in the entry and singing in a silvery little voice, and when she brought out a big tub of slops and looked up at the sun with her childlike smile it seemed as though she, too, were a lark."

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  Now Chekhov is going to do something quite difficult from the author's point of view. He is going to take advantage of Lipa's silence being broken in order to have her, the silent one, the wordless one, now find words and bring out the facts that will lead to the disaster. She and Crutch are coming back from a long excursion on foot to a remote church, her mother is lagging behind, and Lipa says: "And now I am afraid of Aksinia. It's not that she does anything, she is always smiling, but sometimes she glances at the window, and her eyes are so angry and there is a greenish gleam in them—like the eyes of the sheep in the dark pen. The Juniors are leading her astray: 'Your old man,' they tell her, 'has a bit of land at Butyokino, a hundred acres,' they say, 'and there is sand and water there, so you, Aksinia,' they say, 'build a brickyard there and we will go shares in it.' Bricks now are twenty rubles the thousand, it's a profitable business. Yesterday at dinner Aksinia said to the old man: 'I want to build a brickyard at Butyokino; I'm going into th
e business on my own account.' She laughed as she said it. And Grigori Petrovich's face darkened, one could see he did not like it. 'As long as I live,' he said, 'the family must not break up, we must keep together.' She gave him a look and gritted her teeth. . . . Fritters were served, she would not eat them."

  When they come to a boundary post, Crutch touches it to see that it is firm, an act in keeping with his character. At this point he, Lipa, and some girls who are collecting toadstools are representative of Chekhov's happy people, naive gentle people against a background of unhappiness and injustice. They meet people coming from the fair: "A cart would drive by stirring up the dust and behind it would run an unsold horse, and it seemed glad it had not been sold." There is a subtle emblematic connection here between Lipa and the happy "unsold" horse. Lipa's owner has disappeared. And another point, reflecting the child theme: "An old woman led a little boy in a big cap and big boots; the boy was tired out with the heat and the heavy boots which prevented him from bending his legs at the knees, but yet he blew a tin trumpet unceasingly with all his might. They had gone down the slope and turned into the street, but the trumpet could still be heard." Lipa sees and hears that little boy because she herself is going to have a baby. In the passage "Lipa and her mother who were born to poverty and prepared to live so till the end, giving up to others everything except their frightened, gentle souls, may perhaps have fancied for a minute that in this vast, mysterious world, among the endless series of lives, they too counted for something," I recommend to your attention the words "their frightened, gentle souls." And notice too the beautiful little picture of the summer evening:

  "At last they reached home. The mowers were sitting on the ground at the gates near the shop. As a rule the Ukleyevo peasants refused to work for Grigori, and he had to hire strangers, and now in the darkness it seemed as though there were men with long black beards sitting there. The shop was open, and through the doorway they could see the deaf man playing checkers with a boy. The mowers were singing softly, almost inaudibly, or were loudly demanding their wages for the previous day, but they were not paid for fear they should go away before tomorrow. Old Grigori, with his coat off, was sitting in his waistcoat with Aksinia under the birch-tree, drinking tea; a lighted lamp was on the table.