Worlds Apart
Page 14
They passed through a succession of magnificent rooms, full of polite and attentive waiters. Several generals and privy councillors were playing whist; young men, sprawled out on brocade divans, were eating ices and smoking their pipes. In the drawing-room, seated at the head of a long table, around which were crowded about twenty players, the host kept bank. He was a most respectable-looking man of about sixty; his head was covered with silvery grey hair, and his full, fresh face expressed good nature; his eyes, enlivened by a perpetual smile, shone brightly. Narumov introduced Hermann to him. Chekalinskii shook his hand warmly, requested him not to stand on ceremony, and went on dealing.
The game lasted a long time. More than thirty cards lay on the table. Chekalinskii paused after each round in order to give the players time to arrange their cards, wrote down their losses, listened politely to their demands, and more politely still allowed them to retract any stake accidentally left on the table. At last the game finished. Chekalinskii shuffled the cards and prepared to deal again.
“Allow me to place a stake,” Hermann said, stretching out his hand from behind a fat gentleman who was punting there.
Chekalinskii smiled and nodded silently, as a sign of his consent. Narumov laughingly congratulated Hermann on forswearing a longstanding principle and wished him a lucky beginning. “I’ve staked,” Hermann said, as he chalked up the amount, which was very considerable, on the back of his card.
“How much is it?” asked the banker, screwing up his eyes. “Forgive me, but I can’t make it out.”
“47,000 roubles,” Hermann replied.
At these words every head in the room turned, and all eyes were fixed on Hermann.
“He’s gone out of his mind!” Narumov thought.
“Allow me to observe to you,” Chekalinskii said with his invariable smile, “that your stake is extremely high: nobody here has ever put more than 275 roubles on any single card.”
“What of it?” retorted Hermann. “Do you take me or not?”
Chekalinskii, bowing, humbly accepted the stake.
“However, I would like to say,” he said, “that, being judged worthy of the confidence of my friends, I can only bank against ready money. For my own part, of course, I am sure that your word is enough, but for the sake of the order of the game and of the accounts, I must ask you to place your money on the card.”
Hermann drew a banknote from his pocket and handed it to Chekalinskii who, giving it a cursory glance, put it on Hermann’s card.
He began to deal. On the right a nine turned up, on the left a three.
“The three wins,” said Hermann, showing his card.
A murmur arose among the players. Chekalinskii frowned, but instantly the smile returned to his face.
“Do you wish to take the money now?” he asked Hermann.
“If you would be so kind.”
Chekalinskii drew a number of banknotes from his pocket and settled up immediately. Hermann took up his money and left the table. Narumov was too astounded even to think. Hermann drank a glass of lemonade and went home.
The next evening he again appeared at Chekalinskii’s. The host was dealing. Hermann walked up to the table; the players already there immediately gave way to him. Chekalinskii bowed graciously.
Hermann waited for the next deal, took a card and placed on it his 47,000 roubles together with the winnings of the previous evening.
Chekalinskii began to deal. A knave turned up on the right, a seven on the left.
Hermann showed his seven.
There was a general cry of surprise, and Chekalinskii was clearly disconcerted. He counted out 94,000 roubles and handed them to Hermann, who pocketed them coolly and immediately withdrew.
The following evening Hermann again appeared at the table. Everyone was expecting him; the generals and privy councillors abandoned their whist in order to watch such unusual play. The young officers jumped up from their divans; all the waiters gathered in the drawing-room. Hermann was surrounded by a crowd of people. The other players held back their cards, impatient to see how Hermann would get on. Hermann stood at the table and prepared to play alone against the pale but still smiling Chekalinskii. Each unsealed a pack of cards. Chekalinskii shuffled. Hermann drew and placed his card, covering it with a heap of banknotes. It was like a duel. A deep silence reigned all around.
His hands shaking, Chekalinskii began to deal. On the right lay a queen, on the left an ace.
“The ace wins,” said Hermann and showed his card. “Your queen has lost,” Chekalinskii said kindly.
Hermann started: indeed, instead of an ace, before him lay the queen of spades. He could not believe his eyes, could not understand how he could have slipped up.
At that moment it seemed to him that the queen of spades winked at him and smiled. He was struck by an unusual likeness …
“That old hag!” he shouted in terror.
Chekalinskii gathered up his winnings. Hermann stood motionless. When he left the table, people began to converse noisily.
“Famously punted!” the players said.
Chekalinskii shuffled the cards afresh; play went on as usual.
CONCLUSION
Hermann went mad. He is now installed in Room 17 at the Obukhov Hospital; he answers no questions, but merely mutters with unusual rapidity: “Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen!”
Lisaveta Ivanovna has married a very agreeable young man, who has a good position in the service somewhere; he is the son of the former steward of the old Countess. Lisaveta Ivanovna is bringing up a poor relative.
Tomskii has been promoted to the rank of Captain, and is going to marry Princess Polina.
Translated by Gillon R. Aitken; Edited by A. L.
Mikhail Iurievich Lermontov (1814-1841)
The soul-sick Demon, exile’s Spirit,
Soared high above the guilty Earth,
And memories of better seasons
Swarmed by—of these he’d known no dearth,
Of days when, safe in pure Light’s keeping
He shone—a brightest Cherubim,
When on her way the Comet, fleeting,
A smile of welcome and of greeting
Was pleased to interchange with him,
When through the drift of ageless ether
Athirst for knowledge, he had traced
Star caravans—whose cartwheels teetered
Above the emptiness of space;
Where he had known both Love and Faith,
The firstborn Son of all creation
Had felt no anger, vacillation,
His mind had still withstood Time’s threat—
The empty eons aimless rolling …
So much, so much to recollect …
The will now failed him in recalling!
Long banished, he had wandered on,
Creation’s wasteland gave no shelter,
The ages coursed by, one by one,
As minutes upon minutes pelter—
Each one monotonously drear.
Above this trifling earthly sphere
He ruled, sowed evil with no pleasure,
Nowhere opposed for his dark art,
His actions met no countermeasure,
Yet Evil came to dull his heart.
Above the grand Caucasian summits,
Now Heaven’s exile, soaring, raced;
Kazbek—a diamantine facet
Below—in timeless snow-banks blazed.
And lower yet, an ebon crevice,
A fissure for a serpent’s clevis,
Daryal unwound its ice-black lace.
And Terek, like a lion leaping—
A shaggy mane upon its spine—
Roamed wild. The beasts, the eagles sweeping
Their course along the azure height,
All hearkened to his thunderous calling;
In serried ranks the snow-white clouds
From southern climes, in gilded shrouds,
Accompanied its northward falling;
In deep dark slumber, full of dreaming,
Inclined their heads to Terek’s moan
Above the river’s billows gleaming;
The lofty castles on the steeps
Peered through the clouds like haughty sentries,
Who stand their post before the keep,
To Georgia’s foe forbidding entry;
Untamed was God’s world all around,
Estranged. And yet the Demon proud
Viewed all about him with derision,
Creation of his Maker’s will
His lofty forehead scorned this vision,
Expressed no thought—precisely nil.
A proem to Demon, transl. by A.L. and M.K.
THIS SECTION CONTINUES with but a small sample of the creative craft of another superb Russian 19th-century poet who gradually switched his creative focus from poetry to prose: M. Iu. Lermontov. Of all Russia’s nineteenth-century poets, it is Lermontov who at first glance seems to embody the Romantic image of the poète-maudit. Like Pushkin, Lermontov was both a superb poet and a rising master of the story and the novel. Lermontov, commisioned a cornet in the Life Guard Hussars at twenty, was only twenty-three when Pushkin’s death in a duel inspired him to pen the elegy On the Death of a Poet (Na smert’ poeta, 1837), which made him instantly famous. His bitter indictment of the Petersburg Imperial court—responsible, in his view, for Pushkin’s demise—earned him exile to the Caucasus. These magnificent untamed mountains provide the setting for the highly Romantic verse narrative The Demon (Demon, 1839), the initial stanzas of which are quoted above in a new translation. This accomplished narrative poem—with dazzling highland imagery set against a truly cosmic panorama—is imbued with Miltonic pathos and Byronic loneliness, both embraced by the poet in his own life and art with grim earnestness. Also set in the Caucasus is the work of Lermontov best known in the west: the novel A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni, 1840) which is considered by many to be a pioneering work of psychological realism in Russian literature; in its period it stands on a par with Pushkin’s earlier verse novel Eugene Onegin (Evgeny Onegin). While relishing A Hero of our Time as one of the greatest works of nineteenth-century fiction, what most Russians remember about the novel is that in one of its chapters Lermontov predicts with unsettling prescience the place and circumstances of his own death in the Caucasus. At the age of twenty-seven Lermontov, like his idol Pushkin at thirty-seven, was to be killed in a duel.
Only two complete short works representative of Lermontov’s art are in this volume, one of poetry and the other of prose, though such a selection is doubtless an injustice to the scope of Lermontov’s true accomplishments. First is the disquietingly prophetic poem The Dream (Son—in some translations called The Triple Dream), in which—a year before the event—the poet again foretells with eerie exactitude the locus of his own tragic death. The poem also represents Lermontov’s uncanny ability to fold space and time in upon themselves, forming successive dream-layers of perception within a text.
The short story Shtoss (untitled in the manuscript) is another example of this sort of folding. Abandoning for once his beloved Caucasus, Lermontov sets the tale in the surreal urban labyrinth of St. Petersburg through which the protagonist, a painter named Lugin, must feel his way in his quest to transubstantiate ideal beauty—an ethereal female—both in art and life. Parenthetically it should be noted that Lermontov was a serious painter himself and some of the narrator’s comments on the nature of the exceptional in art reflect his own views. Moreover, like Lugin, he apparently considered himself quite ugly. Nonetheless, romantic irony with respect to the protagonist’s artistic quest and his fate permeates this text. For instance, in the mention of how Lugin’s disturbed and excited mind produces the optical illusion that all other people are surrounded with and permeated by a yellow hue, yet by the story’s end the narrator makes Lugin a part and part of that disturbed vision when he mentions that Lugin himself turned yellow. Also connected with the narrator’s irony is the story’s strange syllable “shtoss” (habitually used in lieu of a title, as the extant manuscript version bears none). Shtoss has more than one meaning in Russian: it is a card game (faro) which Lugin plays, but which also stands here for a surname. In addition the word mimics the phrase Shto-s? a colloquial elision of Shto, sudar’? or roughly “What did you say, sir?” At various stages of the story the narrator lets Lugin mistake one of these meanings for another.
Such irony with respect to his protagonist suggests that Lermontov directed his readers to grasp something that lay beyond Lugin’s search—something encompassing narrativity itself and the story’s enigmatic ending. This deliberate aspect is made clear by the story of Lermontov’s single public reading of Shtoss in 1841: according to an account by E. P. Rostopchina, the author promised to read a just-completed novel during a mesmeric seance at her salon, and requested four hours for the presentation. He arrived bearing a huge tome and insisted that all doors to the room be locked and lights dimmed, creating in his audience a mood fraught with tension, an expectation of something monumental and mysterious about to happen. Whereupon Lermontov read through the brief manuscript in less than an hour, leaving an impression that he had planned the evening as an anti-climatic joke.
Lermontov died several months later and the event, as well as the manuscript, were forgotten for many years. When the story resurfaced, it was discussed as an unfinished piece precisely due to its abrupt ending. Nonetheless some scholars (Eikhenbaum, Mersereau) paid close attention to the fact that Shtoss is a story with a multilayered set of subtexts. They noted that Lugin, like Herman in the Queen of Spades, plays faro, and they surmised that Lermontov might have planned for him the same fate suffered by Pushkin’s protagonist. References to Gogol’s fiction were found to be especially abundant and evident, with many allusions to Nevsky Prospect, in which one of the protagonists, Piskarev, shares Lugin’s notion of ideal female beauty (and commits suicide at the end of his story) and to The Portrait, in which a personage depicted in a mysterious painting seems to step out from its frame as a ghost. Some even wondered whether Gogol himself might have contributed to Lermontov’s tale.
Be that as it may, it is clear that this accomplished story was considered unfinished for far too long and surely erroneously (as Vatsuro has also suggested recently). Stoss is closed in upon itself in various formal ways, and we know that it was read by the author himself as a finished work. A reader familiar with Petersburg’s streets who attempted to retrace Lugin’s steps would—in Petersburg’s real topography—arrive at the very place from which the artist set out on his journey. Moreover the story’s last sentence must be read as a pun (one of many Lermontov encoded into this text) on two Russian meanings of the verb reshit’sia, “to come to a decision” or “to go out of one’s mind.” Lermontov thus confronts us here with a double denouement, and his ending must be considered both closed and open at the same time. This does not mean that the author intended to resolve this duality: his end-focused “joke” enhances the enigma of the plot in a pre-modernist way and represents a clear advance over the host of concurrent works with the same subject matter—indeed, over the device of romantic irony itself.
The Dream
At blazing noon, in Dagestan’s deep valley,
A bullet in my chest, dead still I lay,
As steam yet rose above my wound, I tallied
Each drop of blood, as life now seeped away.
Alone I lay within a sandy hollow,
As jagged ledges teemed there, rising steep,
With sun-scorched peaks above me, burning yellow,
I too was scorched, yet slept a lifeless sleep.
I dreamt of lights upon an evening hour,
A lavish feast held in my native land,
And fair young maidens garlanded with flowers:
Their talk—of me—was merry and off-hand.
But one of them, not joining their free chatter,
Sat timidly apart, bemused, alone
Sunk in a dream, her soul with sadness shattered:
God only knows what made her feel forlorn;
She dreamed of sand in Dagestan’s deep valley,
That gorge in which a man she knew lay dead,
Black steam still rose above the wound’s scorched hollow,
As blood streamed down and cooled like molten lead.
Translated by A. L.
< Shtoss >
1.
The Countess V … was hosting a musical evening. The finest artists of the capital were paying with their artistry for the honor of attending an aristocratic reception. Among the guests appeared several literati and scholars, two or three fashionable beauties, several society misses and elderly ladies, and one guards officer. A clutch of home-grown social lions struck poses around the doors of the second drawing room and by the fire. All was as usual; it was neither dull nor lively.
Just as a newly arrived singer was approaching the piano and unfolding her sheets of music … one of the young ladies yawned, rose, and went into the next room, which then was all but deserted. She was wearing a black gown, likely due to the Court’s being in mourning. A diamond insignia fastened to a pale blue sash sparkled on her shoulder; she was of average height, graceful, slow and languid in her movements. Long, black, marvelous tresses set off her still young and regular but pale features, and on those features shone the stamp of thought.
“Good evening, Monsieur Lugin,” said Minskaia, “I’m tired. Say something.” She sank onto a broad divan by the fireplace. The gentleman to whom she had spoken took a seat opposite her and made no reply. They were the only two people in the room, and Lugin’s cold silence showed clearly that he was not one of Minskaia’s admirers.
“I’m bored,” said Minskaia, and yawned again. “You see I don’t play games with you,” she added.
“And I’m having a fit of spleen!” answered Lugin.
“You feel like going to Italy again,” she said after a short silence, “Isn’t that so?”
Lugin for his part had not heard the question; he crossed his legs, unconsciously fixing his gaze on the marble-white shoulders of his interlocutor, and continued. “Imagine the misfortune that has befallen me! What could be worse for one such as myself, who has dedicated himself to painting? For two weeks now people have seemed yellow to me—and only people! It would be fine if it were everything—then there would be harmony in the general palette. But no! Everything else is just as it used to be; only faces have changed. At times it seems to me that people have lemons instead of heads.”