We are the temptation of the thirsting,
We are a laughing-stock,
At a desecrated altar
We are the dying sparks.
We are steps above the void,
Children of darkness, we wait for the sun—
We will glimpse its rays, and then, like shadows,
We will die when it comes.
Dmitry Merezhkovsky, 1894
Captive Beasts
We are captive beasts,
We wail as best we can.
The doors are shut tight,
And we dare not open them.
Our hearts true to tradition,
Finding solace in howling, we howl,
We forgot long ago, we don’t notice
That the zoo is fetid and foul.
Monotonously and tediously we cuckoo,
Our hearts accustomed to repeat;
The zoo is impersonal and boring,
But we no longer wish to be freed.
We are captive beasts,
We wail as best we can.
The doors are shut tight,
And we dare not open them.
Fyodor Sologub, 1906
In the Fog
Leonid Andreyev
From the first rays of dawn on that day, a strange, motionless fog hung over the streets. It was thin and translucent, not a blanketing fog, but whatever went through it took on an anxious, dark-yellow colour, and the fresh rosiness of women’s cheeks and the bright splotches of their dresses peeped out from it as through a black veil, darkly and distinctly. Towards the south, where the low November sun was hidden behind a bank of storm clouds, the sky was light, lighter than the earth, but to the north it descended in a broad, evenly darkening curtain, becoming yellowish-black and opaque as night where it met the earth. Against this oppressive background the dark buildings looked light grey, and the two white columns at the entrance to a desolate, autumnal garden were like two yellow candles over the deceased. And the flowerbeds in that garden had been dug up and trampled over by rude feet, and the late flowers, painfully bright in the fog, were gently dying on their broken stems.
And no matter how many people were out on the streets, everyone was in a hurry, and everyone was gloomy and taciturn. That eerie day, choking in the yellow fog, was dismal and terribly disquieting.
In the dining room, twelve o’clock had already struck, and then the short chime of half-past twelve, but it seemed like dusk in Pavel Rybakov’s room, and a blackish-yellow reflected gleam lay over everything. In this light the notebooks and papers scattered over the table looked yellowed, like old ivory, and on one of the papers an unsolved algebra problem, with its clear figures and mysterious letters, looked ancient, abandoned and useless, as if many dull years had passed it by; and Pavel’s face, too, was yellow in the light, as he lay on the bed. His strong young arms were folded behind his head and were bare almost to the elbows; an open book lay face down on his chest, and his dark eyes stared fixedly at the painted stucco ceiling. There was something monotonous, tiresome and tasteless in the motley, dirty shades of paint that recalled the dozens of people who had lived in that flat before the Rybakovs, where they had slept, talked, thought, done whatever they did, and left everywhere their alien imprint. And these people made Pavel think of hundreds of other people, of teachers and companions, of noisy and crowded streets where women walked, and (this was for him the most oppressive and frightening of all) of what he would prefer to forget and not to think about at all.
“Boring … bo-or-r-ing!” Pavel drew out the syllables, closed his eyes and stretched out so that the toes of his boots touched the iron springs of the bed. The corners of his thick brows contorted, and his face twisted in a grimace of pain and revulsion, strangely distorting and deforming his features; when the wrinkles smoothed out, it became evident that his face was young and handsome. And especially lovely were the bold outlines of his full lips, and the youthful absence of a moustache above them made them look pure and sweet, like a young girl’s.
But lying with closed eyes and seeing in the darkness of his closed lids the same, horrible thing again and again, the thing he wanted to forget forever, was even more tormenting, and Pavel’s eyes started open. Their bewildered gleam lent his face an aged and anxious air.
“What a poor fellow I am! What a poor fellow!” he pitied himself aloud, and turned his eyes to the window, greedily seeking light. But there wasn’t any, and yellow semi-darkness insistently crept through the window and spread over the room, and it was so palpable that it seemed one could touch it with one’s fingers. And once again before his eyes the ceiling unfolded above him.
The stucco moulding on the ceiling depicted a Russian village: a peasant’s hut stood at a diagonal, as is never the case in reality. Next to it stood a peasant frozen in mid-stride, and he held a stick that was taller than he was, and he himself was taller than the hut. Further on was a tiny, crooked church, and near it a huge cart bulged out, with a horse so small it resembled not a horse, but a hunting dog. And it had a sharp muzzle like a dog’s. Then everything repeated in the same order: the hut, the big peasant, the church and the huge cart, and so on around the room. And all this was yellow against a dirty pink background; it was ugly and boring and recalled not a village, but someone’s dreary and senseless life. The craftsman who had sculpted the village without giving it a single tree was detestable.
“Why isn’t it breakfast-time yet?” Pavel whispered, although he didn’t feel at all like eating, and he turned impatiently on his side. The movement dislodged the book, which fell to the floor, its pages flapping randomly, but Pavel didn’t reach out to pick it up. On the cover, in gold on black, were the words: Buckle. The History of Civilisation, and this made him think about something old, about the multitude of people who for untold centuries have wanted to make something of their lives but couldn’t; and about life, in which everything is incomprehensible and happens with cruel inevitability; and about that sad and oppressive thing, something like a crime that had been committed, that Pavel didn’t want to think about. And suddenly he felt such a yearning for light, broad and clear light, that his eyes ached. Pavel jumped up, avoiding the book lying on the floor, and began to tug at the drapes by the window, trying to open them as wide as possible.
“Ah, dammit!” he swore, and threw aside the material, but it was heavy and fell dully back into its orderly, indifferent folds. Suddenly tired and spent, Pavel flipped it idly aside and sat down on the cold windowsill.
Outside was the fog, and the sky beyond the grey rooftops was yellowish-black, and its shade fell over the houses and the lane. A week ago the first, insubstantial snow had fallen and melted, and since then a sticky, greyish scum coated the lane. Here and there, wet stones reflected the black sky and gave off an oblique, dark gleam, and carriages rolled over them, jolting and swaying along. The rumbling was not audible from higher up; it died out in the fog, helpless to rise above the earth, and this senseless movement beneath the black sky, among the dark, sodden houses, seemed pointless and boring. But there were women among the pedestrians and riders, and their presence gave the picture a cryptic, anxious meaning. They were going about their errands and to all appearances were absolutely ordinary and unremarkable; but Pavel saw their strange and terrifying particularity: they were different, alien from the rest of the crowd, and did not blend into it, but were like sparks in the midst of darkness. And everything was for them: the streets, houses and people, everything gravitated towards them, thirsted for them—without understanding them. The word “woman” was burnt in fiery letters into Pavel’s brain; it was the first thing he saw on every turned page; people spoke quietly, but when the word “woman” came up, it seemed as if they were shouting it out—and for Pavel, it was the most incomprehensible, most fantastic and terrifying word. His sharp and suspicious glance followed every woman, as if she were just about to come up to his house and blow it up with everyone in it, or do something even more horrifying. But when his glance happ
ened on a pretty, feminine face, he drew himself up to his full height, tried to look handsome and attractive, and commanded with his eyes that she should turn around and look at him. But she never did turn around, and again his heart would feel empty, dark and frightened, like a desolate house through which a sombre plague had passed, killing all the living and boarding up the windows.
“Bo-or-ring!” Pavel drawled, and he turned from the street.
For some time now there had been movement, talking and the clanking of dishes in the dining room, next to his room. Then it grew quiet except for the voice of the man of the house, Pavel’s father Sergey Andreyevich—a throaty, fatherly bass. From its very first rounded, pleasant sounds it seemed redolent of fine cigarettes, clever books and clean linen. But now there was something cracked and distorted in it, as if the dirty-yellow, monotonous fog had penetrated even Sergey Andreyevich’s larynx.
“And what about our young man, does he please to sleep in?”
Pavel couldn’t hear his mother’s answer.
“And at the institute, of course, he didn’t please to go to mass?”
Again the answer couldn’t be heard.
“Well, naturally,” his father continued mockingly, “the custom is antiquated and…”
Pavel didn’t catch the end of the sentence, because Sergey Andreyevich had turned away; but no doubt it was something funny, and Lily laughed loudly. When Pavel’s father was secretly displeased with him for something, he always scolded him for getting up late on holidays and skipping mass, although he himself was completely indifferent to religion and hadn’t set foot in church for twenty years or so—since his marriage. And since the beginning of summer at their cottage, he had been holding something against Pavel, and Pavel thought he probably suspected. But now he decided sullenly, “Let him!”
Taking a notebook from the table, he pretended to read. But his eyes remained directed with belligerence and caution towards the dining room, like a man accustomed to hiding and prepared for an attack at any moment.
“Call Pavel!” said Sergey Andreyevich.
“Pavel! Pavel darling!” his mother called.
Pavel quickly got up from the bed and evidently hurt himself badly in doing so: he doubled over, his face contorted in a grimace of suffering, and his hands convulsively clutched at his stomach. Slowly he straightened up, clenched his teeth, which made the corners of his mouth pull downward towards his chin, and smoothed his jacket with trembling hands. Then his face grew pale and lost all expression, like a blind man’s, and he went out into the dining room with unfaltering steps that nonetheless betrayed traces of the cruel pain he had just experienced.
“What were you doing?” Sergey Andreyevich asked abruptly; they were not in the habit of saying good morning.
“Reading,” answered Pavel just as abruptly.
“What?”
“Buckle.”
“Oh-ho, Buckle!” Sergey Andreyevich said, gazing threateningly through his pince-nez at his son.
“What about it?” replied Pavel unhesitatingly and defiantly, and he looked his father straight in the eye.
After a brief silence, his father retorted, with heavy significance, “Nothing.”
Here Lily intervened, feeling sorry for her brother, “Pavel, are you going to be home tonight?”
Pavel remained silent.
“He who doesn’t answer when he is asked a question is usually deemed a boor. What is your opinion on this matter, Pavel Sergeyevich?” asked his father.
“Drop it, Sergey Andreyevich!” his mother intervened. “Eat, the cutlets are getting cold. What awful weather, even with the lamps lit! And how will I manage this trip? I just don’t know.”
“I’ll be home …” Pavel answered Lily, whereupon Sergey Andreyevich adjusted his pince-nez and said, “I can’t bear this melancholy, this world-weariness … A proper boy must be bright and cheery.”
“You can’t be cheery all the time,” said Lily, who always was.
“I’m not forcing anyone to enjoy himself. Why aren’t you eating anything? I’m talking to you, Pavel!”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“And where were you last night? Gadding about?”
“I was home.”
“Home, were you?”
“And where do you think I was?” Pavel asked insolently.
Sergey Andreyevich answered with killing politeness, “How would I know where Pavel Sergeyevich deigns to amuse himself?” he said, stressing the word “amuse.” “Pavel Sergeyevich is an adult. Pavel Sergeyevich will soon grow a moustache. Pavel Sergeyevich, perhaps, even drinks vodka … How would I know?”
Breakfast continued in silence, and everything touched by the light falling through the window seemed yellow and strangely gloomy. Sergey Andreyevich gazed attentively and curiously into Pavel’s face and thought, “And bags under his eyes … But surely it can’t be true, that he’s intimate with women—a boy of his age?”
That frightening and tormenting question, which Sergey Andreyevich didn’t have the strength to think through to the end, had arisen recently, this summer, and he remembered vividly how it had happened—he would never forget. Behind their little shed, where the grass was thick and a white birch cast its cool, dark-blue shadow, he had happened to spot a torn and crumpled sheet of paper. There was something peculiar and disquieting about it. That was the way people tear and crumple notes that provoke hatred and anger, and Sergey Andreyevich had picked it up, smoothed it out and taken a look. It was a drawing. At first he didn’t recognise what it was; he smiled and thought, “It’s one of Pavel’s drawings! How well he draws!” Then he turned the paper sideways and clearly discerned the monstrously cynical and dirty picture.
“Disgusting!” he said angrily and threw the paper down.
In about ten minutes he came back for it, took it to his study and examined it for quite a while, trying to solve the tormenting, gnawing riddle: did Pavel draw this, or someone else? He could not imagine that Pavel could have drawn such a dirty, vulgar thing, and that as he drew it, he knew all about the lewdness and filth it contained. In the boldness of the lines an experienced and depraved hand was evident, unwaveringly approaching the most secret of secrets, which unspoiled people were ashamed to think about; the naïvety of a profound and unconscious fall was clear in the studiousness with which the lines had been rubbed out, redrawn and emphasised with red pencil. As Sergey Andreyevich looked, he could not believe that his Pavel, his intelligent and cultivated boy, whose every thought was known to him, could draw with his own hand—the tanned hand of a strong, pure young man—such a disgusting thing, and know and understand everything he was drawing. And since it was very frightening to think that it was Pavel who had done this, he decided that it was someone else; but he folded the paper away. And when he saw Pavel jumping down off his bicycle, cheerful, lively, still full of the clean scents of the fields he had been riding through, he decided again that it wasn’t Pavel who had done it, and he was glad.
But the gladness quickly passed, and just half an hour later Sergey Andreyevich looked at Pavel and thought: who is this alien and unknown youth, strangely tall and like a man? He talks in a coarse and manly voice, eats a lot and greedily, calmly and independently pours wine into his glass and jokes patronisingly with Lily. He calls himself Pavel, and his face is Pavel’s and he laughs like Pavel, and when he just now bit off the top crust of bread, he did it in the way Pavel does—but Pavel isn’t there inside him.
“Pavel, how old are you?” Sergey Andreyevich asked. Pavel laughed.
“I’m an old man already, dad! Almost eighteen.”
“It’s a long way yet to eighteen,” his mother corrected him. “You won’t be eighteen until December sixth.”
“And you don’t even have a moustache!” Lily said. And they all started joking that Pavel didn’t have a moustache, and he made as if he were crying; and after dinner he stuck some cotton a
bove his lip and said in an old man’s voice, “Where’s my old woman?”
And he went around seeming happy and relaxed. And then Lily remarked that Pavel seemed especially cheerful; after which Pavel frowned, took off the moustache and went to his room. And ever since then, whenever Sergey Andreyevich looked for that dear and familiar boy he once knew, he found something new and mysterious, and he was sorely perplexed.
And then he discovered something else new in Pavel: his son was having mood swings. One day he would be cheerful and full of mischief, and then he would frown for whole hours at a time, become irritable and exasperating, and even if he kept it under control, it was clear that something was causing him to suffer. And it was very distressing and hard to see that a loved one was sad, and not to know any reason for it, but that it was causing this loved one to become a distant stranger. Simply from the way he would come in, drink his tea without relish and crumble his bread in his hands, all the while staring off in another direction, towards the neighbouring forest—his father could sense his bad mood, and he fumed. He wanted Pavel to notice this and to understand how uncomfortable he was making his father with his bad moods; but Pavel never noticed, and he was always in a hurry to leave as soon as he finished his tea.
“Where are you going?” his father would ask.
“To the forest.”
“Again to the forest!” his father would angrily remark.
Pavel, a note of surprise in his voice, would reply, “So what? I go to the forest every day.”
His father would turn away in silence, and Pavel would leave, and it was always obvious from his broad, calmly swaying back that he hadn’t even given a thought as to why his father was angry, and had completely forgotten his existence.
And for a long time already Sergey Andreyevich had wanted to have a forthright and open talk with Pavel, but the impending conversation was too distressing, and day after day he put it off. And since they had moved back to the city, Pavel had become especially gloomy and nervous, and Sergey Andreyevich was afraid he wouldn’t be able to speak with enough calm and conviction. But on that day, at that lengthy and monotonous breakfast, he decided that today they had to talk. “It could be that he’s just in love, as happens with all young boys and girls,” he reassured himself. “Look how Lily’s in love with that Avdeyev fellow; and I can’t even remember which one he is—a high school student, I think.”
Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence Page 23