The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Pushkin does not figure in the list of books sent to Chernyshevski at the fortress, and no wonder: despite Pushkin’s services (“he invented Russian poetry and taught society to read it”—two statements completely untrue), he was nevertheless above all a writer of witty little verses about women’s little feet—and “little feet” in the intonation of the sixties—when the whole of nature had been Philistinized into travka (diminutive of “grass”) and pichuzhki (diminutive of “birds”)—already meant something quite different from Pushkin’s “petits pieds” something that had now become closer to the mawkish “Füsschen” It seemed particularly astonishing to him (as it did also to Belinski) that Pushkin became so “aloof” toward the end of his life. “An end was put to those friendly relations whose monument has remained the poem ‘Arion,’ ” explains Chernyshevski in passing, but how full of sacred meaning was this casual reference to the forbidden subject of Decembrism for the reader of The Contemporary (whom we suddenly imagine as absentmindedly and hungrily biting into an apple—transferring the hunger of his reading to the apple, and again eating the words with his eyes). Therefore Nikolay Gavrilovich must have been more than a little irritated by a stage direction in the penultimate scene of Boris Godunov, a stage direction resembling a sly hint and an encroachment upon civic laurels hardly deserved by the author of “vulgar driver (see Chernyshevski’s remarks on the poem “Stamboul is by the giaours now lauded”): “Pushkin comes surrounded by the people.”

  “Reading over the most abusive critics,” wrote Pushkin during an autumn at Boldino, “I find them so amusing that I don’t understand how I could have been angry at them; meseems, if I wanted to laugh at them, I could think of nothing better than just to reprint them with no comment at all.” Curiously enough, that is exactly what Chernyshevski did with Professor Yurkevich’s article: a grotesque repetition! And now “a revolving speck of dust has got caught in a ray of Pushkin’s light, which has penetrated between the blinds of Russian critical thought,” to use Strannolyubski’s caustic metaphor. We have in mind the following magic gamut of fate: in his Saratov diary Chernyshevski applied two lines from Pushkin’s “The Egyptian Nights” to his courtship, completely misquoting the second one, with a characteristic (for him who had no ear) distortion: “I [he] met the challenge of delight / As warfare’s challenge met I’d have (instead of “As he would meet in days of war / The challenge of a savage battle”). For this “I’d have,” fate—the ally of the muses (and herself an expert in conditional forms), took revenge on him—and with what refined stealth in the evolution of the punishment!

  What connection, it seems, could there be between this ill-starred misquotation and Chernyshevski’s remark ten years later (in 1862): “If people were able to announce all their ideas concerning public affairs at … meetings there would be no need to make magazine articles out of them”? However, at this point Nemesis is already awakening. “Instead of writing, one would speak,” continues Chernyshevski, “and if these ideas had to reach everyone who had not taken part in the meeting they could be noted down by a stenographer.” And vengeance unfolds: in Siberia, where his only listeners were the larches and the Yakuts, he was haunted by the image of a “platform” and a “lecture hall,” in which it was so convenient for the public to gather and where the latter would ripple so responsively, for, in the final analysis, he, as Pushkin’s Improvvisatore (he of the “Egyptian Nights”) but a poorer versificator, had chosen for his profession—and later as an unrealizable ideal—variations on a given theme; in the very twilight of his life he composes a work in which he embodies his dream: from Astrakhan, not long before his death, he sends Lavrov his “Evenings at the Princess Starobelski’s” for the literary review Russian Thought (which did not find it possible to print them), and follows this up with “An Insertion”—addressed straight to the printer:

  In that part where it says that the people have gone from the salon dining room into the salon proper, which has been prepared for them to listen to Vyazovski’s fairy tale, and there is a description of the arrangement of the auditorium … the distribution of the male and female stenographers into two sections at two tables either is not indicated or else is indicated unsatisfactorily. In my draft this part reads as follows: “Along the sides of the platform stood two tables for the stenographers … Vyazovski went up to the stenographers, shook hands with them, and stood chatting with them while the company took their places.” The lines in the fair copy whose sense corresponds to the passage quoted from my draft should be replaced now by the following lines: “The men, forming a constricted frame, stood near the stage and along the walls behind the last chairs; the musicians with their stands occupied both sides of the stage.… The improvvisatore, greeted by deafening applause rising from all sides …”

  Sorry, sorry, we’ve mixed everything up—got hold of an extract from Pushkin’s “The Egyptian Nights.” Let us restore the situation: “Between the platform and foremost hemicycle of the auditorium [writes Chernyshevski to a nonexistent printer], a little to the right and left of the platform, stood two tables; at the one which was on the left in front of the platform, if you looked from the middle of the hemicycles toward the platform …” etc., etc.—with many more words of the same sort, none of them really expressing anything.

  “Here is a theme for you,” said Charski to the improvvisatore. “The poet himself chooses the subjects for his poems; the multitude has no right to direct his inspiration.”

  We have been led a long way by the impetus and revolution of the Pushkin theme in Chernyshevski’s life; meanwhile a new character—whose name once or twice has already burst impatiently into our discourse—is awaiting his entrance. Now it is just time for him to appear—and here he comes in the tightly buttoned, blue-collared regulation coat of a university student, fairly reeking of chestnost’ (“progressive principle”), ungainly, with tiny, shortsighted eyes and a scanty Newport Frill (that barbe en collier which seemed so symptomatic to Flaubert); he offers his hand jabwise; i.e., thrusting it oddly forward with the thumb turned out, and introduces himself in a catarrhally confidential little bass: Dobrolyubov.

  Their first meeting (summer 1856) was recalled almost thirty years later by Chernyshevski (when he also wrote about Nekrasov) with his familiar wealth of detail, essentially sickly and impotent, but supposed to set off the irreproachability of thought in its transactions with time. Friendship joined these two men in a monogrammatic union which a hundred centuries are incompetent to untie (on the contrary: it becomes even faster in the consciousness of posterity). This is not the place to enlarge upon the literary activities of the younger man. Let us merely say that he was uncouthly crude and uncouthly naïve; that in the satirical review The Whistle he poked fun at the distinguished Dr. Pirogov while parodying Lermontov (the use of some of Lermontov’s lyrical poems as a canvas for journalistic jokes about people and events was in general so widespread that in the long run it turned into a caricature of the very art of parody); let us say also, in Strannolyubski’s words, that “from the push given it by Dobrolyubov, literature rolled down an inclined plane, with the inevitable result, once it had rolled to zero, that it was put into inverted commas: the student brought some literature’ ” (meaning propaganda leaflets). What else can one add? Dobrolyubov’s humor? Oh, those blessed times when “mosquito” was in itself funny, a mosquito settling on someone’s nose twice as funny, and a mosquito flying into a governmental office and biting a civil servant caused the listeners to groan and double up with laughter!

  Much more engaging than Dobrolyubov’s obtuse and ponderous critique (all this pleiade of radical critics in fact wrote with their feet) is the frivolous side of his life, that feverish, romantic sportiveness which subsequently supplied Chernyshevski with material for the “love intrigues” of Levitski (in The Prologue). Dobrolyubov was extraordinarily prone to falling in love (here we catch a glimpse of him playing assiduously durachki, a simple card game, with a much-decorated general whose daughter he co
urts). He had a German girl in Staraya Russa, a strong, onerous tie. From immoral visits to her, Chernyshevski held him back in the full sense of the word: for a long time they would wrestle, both of them limp, scrawny and sweaty—toppling all over the floor, colliding with the furniture—all the time silent, all you could hear was their wheezing; then, stumbling into one another, they would both search for their spectacles beneath the upturned chairs. At the beginning of 1859, gossip reached Chernyshevski that Dobrolyubov (just like d’Anthès), in order to cover his “intrigue” with Olga Sokratovna, wanted to marry her sister (who already had a fiancé). Both the young women played outrageous tricks on Dobrolyubov; they took him to masked balls dressed as a Capuchin or an ice-cream vendor and confided all their secrets in him. Walks with Olga Sokratovna “completely bemused” him. “I know there is nothing to be gained here,” he wrote to a friend, “because not a single conversation goes by without her mentioning that although I am a good man, nevertheless I am too clumsy and almost repulsive. I understand that I should not try to gain anything anyway, since in any case I am fonder of Nikolay Gavrilovich than of her. But at the same time I am powerless to leave her alone.” When he heard the gossip, Nikolay Gavrilovich, who entertained no illusions concerning his wife’s morals, still felt some resentment: the betrayal was a double one; he and Dobrolyubov had a frank explanation and soon afterwards he sailed to London to “maul Herzen” (as he subsequently expressed it); i.e., to give him a good scolding for his attacks on that same Dobrolyubov in the Kolokol (The Bell), a liberal periodical published abroad, but of less radical views than the endemic Contemporary.

  Perhaps, however, the object of this meeting was not only to intercede for his friend: Dobrolyubov’s name (especially later, in connection with his death), Chernyshevski very skillfully handled “as a matter of revolutionary tactics.” According to certain reports from the past his main object in visiting Herzen was to discuss the publishing of The Contemporary abroad: everyone had a premonition that soon it would be closed down. But in general this trip is surrounded with such a haze and has left so few traces in Chernyshevski’s writings that one would almost prefer, in spite of the facts, to consider it apocryphal. He who had always been interested in England, he who had nourished his soul on Dickens and his mind on the Times—how avidly he should have gulped it down, how many impressions he should have garnered, how insistently he should later have kept turning back to it in memory! Actually, Chernyshevski never spoke of his journey and whenever anyone really pressed him, he would reply briefly: “Well, what’s there to talk about—there was fog, the ship rocked, what else could there be?” Thus, life itself (how many times now) refuted his axiom: “The tangible object acts much more strongly than the abstract concept of it.”

  However that may have been, on the 26th June (New Style?), 1859, Chernyshevski arrived in London (everyone thought that he was in Saratov) and stayed there until the 30th. An oblique ray pierces the fog of these four days: Mme. Tuchkov-Ogaryov walks through a drawing room and into a sunny garden, carrying in her arms her year-old baby girl dressed in a little lace pelerine. In the drawing room (the action takes place in Putney, at Herzen’s house) Alexander Ivanovich is walking back and forth (these indoor walks were very much the thing in those days) with a gentleman of medium height whose face is unattractive “but illumined by a wonderful expression of self-abnegation and submissiveness to fate” (which most likely was merely a trick of the memoirist’s memory, recalling that face through the prism of a fate which had already been accomplished). Herzen introduced his companion to her. Chernyshevski stroked the infant’s hair and said in his quiet voice: “I also have some like this, but I hardly ever see them.” (He used to confuse the names of his children: little Victor was in Saratov, where he soon died, for the fate of children does not forgive such slips of the pen—but he sent a kiss to “little Sasha” who had already been brought back to St. Petersburg). “Say how do you do, give us your hand,” said Herzen rapidly, and then immediately began to reply to something that had been said by Chernyshevski: “Yes, exactly—that’s why they sent them to the Siberian mines”; while Mme. Tuchkov floated into the garden and the oblique ray was extinguished forever.

  Diabetes and nephritis added to tuberculosis soon put an end to Dobrolyubov. He was dying in the late autumn of 1861; Chernyshevski paid him a daily call and from there went about his conspiratorial affairs, which were amazingly well concealed from police spies. It is generally considered that he was the author of the proclamation “To the Serfs of Landowners.” “There was not much talk,” recalls Shelgunov (who wrote the one “To the Soldiers”); and evidently not even Vladislav Kostomarov, who printed these appeals, knew with any certainty about Chernyshevski’s authorship. Their style is very reminiscent of Count Rastopchin’s corny little placards against Napoleon’s invasion: “So this is what it comes to, this thorough-true freedom.… And let courts be just and let all be alike before justice.… And what’s the sense of kicking up a ruction in one village only?” If this was written by Chernyshevski (incidentally, “bulga,” “ruction,” is a Volga word), it was in any case touched up by someone else.

  According to information stemming from the People’s Freedom organization, Chernyshevski suggested to Sleptsov and his friends in July, 1861, that they form a basic cell of five—the nucleus of an “underground” society. The system consisted in every member forming, moreover, his own cell, and thus knowing only eight people. Only the center knew all the members. All the members were known only to Chernyshevski. This account does not seem free from some stylization.

  But let us repeat: he was ideally cautious. After the student disorders of October, 1861, he was put under permanent surveillance, but the agents’ work was not distinguished for its subtlety: Nikolay Gavrilovich had as a cook the wife of the house janitor, a tall, red-cheeked old woman with a somewhat unexpected name: Musa. She was bribed with no trouble—five rubles for coffee, to which she was much addicted. In return Musa used to supply the police with the contents of her employer’s wastebasket.

  Meanwhile, on November 17, 1861, at twenty-five years of age, Dobrolyubov died. He was buried in the Volkov cemetery “in a simple oak coffin” (the coffin in such cases is always simple) next to Belinski. “Suddenly there stepped forth an energetic, clean-shaven gentleman,” recalls a witness (Chernyshevski’s appearance was still unfamiliar), and since few people had gathered, and this irritated him, he started to speak of it with detailed irony. While he was speaking, Olga Sokratovna shook with tears, leaning upon the arm of one of those devoted students who were always with her: another, besides his own regulation cap, held the raccoon cap of the “boss,” who with his fur coat unbuttoned—in spite of the frost—took out an exercise book and began in an angry, didactic voice to read from it Dobrolyubov’s lumpy gray poems about honest principles and approaching death; hoarfrost shone on the birches; and a little to one side, next to the doddering mother of one of the gravediggers, in new felt boots and full of humility, stood an agent of the Secret Police. “Yes,” concluded Chernyshevski, “we are not concerned here with the fact that the censorship, by cutting his articles to bits, brought Dobrolyubov to a disease of the kidneys. For his own glory he did enough. For his own sake he had no reason to live longer. For men of such a cast and with such aspirations life has nothing but burning grief to offer. Honest principles—that was his fatal illness,” and pointing with his rolled-up notebook to an adjacent, empty place on the other side, Chernyshevski exclaimed: “There is not a man in Russia worthy of occupying that grave!” (There was: it was occupied soon afterwards by Pisarev.)

  It is difficult to escape the impression that Chernyshevski, who in his youth had dreamed of being the leader of a national uprising, was now reveling in the rarefied air of danger surrounding him. This significance in the secret life of his country he acquired inevitably, by agreement with his epoch, a family likeness with which he himself realized. Now, it seemed, he needed only a day, only an hour’s run of luck in
the game of history, one moment of passionate union between chance and destiny, in order to soar. A revolution was expected in 1863, and in the cabinet of the future constitutional government he was listed as prime minister. How he nursed that precious ardor within him! That mysterious “something” which Steklov talks about in spite of his Marxism, and which was extinguished in Siberia (although “learning” and “logic” and even “implacability” remained), undoubtedly existed in Chernyshevski and manifested itself with unusual strength just before his banishment to Siberia. Magnetic and dangerous, it was this that frightened the government far more than any proclamations. “This demented gang is thirsting for blood, for outrages,” excitedly said the reports. “Deliver us from Chernyshevski.…”

  “Desolation … Lone mountain ranges … A myriad lakes and marshes … A shortage of the most essential things … Inefficient postmasters … [All this] exhausts even the patience of genius.” (This is what he had copied into The Contemporary from the geographer Selski’s book on the Yakutsk province—thinking of certain things, supposing certain things—perhaps having a presentiment.)

  In Russia the censorship department arose before literature; its fateful seniority has been always in evidence: and what an urge to give it a tweak! Chernyshevski’s activities on The Contemporary turned into a voluptuous mockery of the censorship, which unquestionably was one of our country’s most remarkable institutions. And right then, at a time when the authorities were fearful, for example, lest “musical notes should conceal antigovernmental writings in code” (and so commissioned well-paid experts to decode them), Chernyshevski, in his magazine, under the cover of elaborate clowning, was frenziedly promulgating Feuerbach. Whenever, in articles about Garibaldi or Cavour (one shrinks from computing the miles of small print this indefatigable man translated from the Times), in his commentaries on Italian events, he kept adding in brackets with drilling insistence after practically every other sentence: “Italy,” “in Italy,” “I am talking about Italy”—the already corrupted reader knew that he meant he was talking about Russia and the peasant question. Or else: Chernyshevski would pretend he was chattering about anything that came to mind, just for the sake of incoherent and vacant prattle—but suddenly, striped and spotted with words, dressed in verbal camouflage, the important idea he wished to convey would slip through. Subsequently the whole gamut of this “buffoonery” was carefully put together by Vladislav Kostomarov for the information of the secret police; the work was mean, but it gave essentially a true picture of “Chernyshevski’s special devices.”