quite as much. And as to them throwing their weight about in his presence, what else could you expect? That’s what they were masters for. They may have thrashed their peasants to death, but the people liked them better all the same, because they were nearer to them somehow. In fact all these fellows were simple, sturdy folk, never in anything tried to go to the root of the matter, grabbed, thrashed, stole, fondly sweated their peasants, and went through life peacefully in fat contentment and “in conscientious and childish debauch”.* I even suspect that all those grandfathers of ours were not all that innocent, even in that little matter of the Rohans and the Montbazons.
Some of them were great rogues even, and knew their own worth when it came to all these European influences from above. All that fantastic make-believe, all that masquerading, all those French coats, cuffs, wigs, swords, all those fat, clumsy legs, thrust into silk stockings, those little soldiers in German wigs and boots, all this, it seems to me, was a great swindle, so that even the simple people sometimes noticed it and understood.
Of course one can be a clerk and a swindler or a brigadier and yet be innocently and touchingly convinced that the Chevalier de Rohan is in fact the very embodiment of the most exquisite refinement. But then this did not prevent anyone from behaving as they always did: the Gvozdilovs* bullied as they had always done. Our Potemkin and others of his ilk very nearly had our Rohans thrashed in their stables, our Montbazons fleeced the quick and the dead, boxed people’s ears with lace-cuffed fists and kicked their backsides with silk-stockinged feet, and our marquises at court levees rolled about on the floor:
In valiant disregard of bumps on their heads.*
In short, all this Europe, bespoke and to order, managed surprisingly well to achieve a harmonious coexistence among us, beginning with St Petersburg – the most fantastic town with the most fantastic history of all towns on this planet.
But nowadays it is no longer the same, and St Petersburg has triumphed. Nowadays we have come up to standard and are fully fledged Europeans. Nowadays Gvozdilov himself uses skill when doing his bullying, keeps up appearances, is becoming a French bourgeois and before long will take to quoting texts to defend the slave trade like any American from the southern states of the USA.
As a matter of fact, the habit of quoting texts in self-defence is now increasingly reaching Europe from the United States. When I get there, I said to myself, I shall see it with my own eyes. You can never learn from books as much as you can see with your own eyes.
By the way, talking of Gvozdilov: why did Fonvizin put one of the most remarkable phrases in his Brigadier not into the mouth of Sophia, who in that comedy represents the idea of noble, humane and European progress, but into the mouth of the brigadier’s inane wife, whom he made into such a fool (and a reactionary fool at that, not just a fool) that all the threads are there for everyone to see, and all the inanities she says seem to be said not by her, but by someone else hiding behind her back? But when the truth had to be said, it was not Sophia who said it, but the brigadier’s wife.
After all he made her not only into a perfect fool, but into a bad woman as well; and yet he seemed afraid, and even considered it artistically impossible, that such a phrase should pop out of the mouth of Sophia, with her hothouse-plant upbringing. Instead he apparently considered it more natural that it should have been uttered by a simple, stupid woman. Here is the passage – it is worth recalling. It is very curious and is made so by the fact that it was written with no end in view, not even tongue in cheek, naively and perhaps even accidentally. The brigadier’s wife says to Sophia:
…We had a captain in our regiment who commanded No. 1 Company. His name was Gvozdilov and he had such a pretty little wife. Well now, would you believe it, my dear, whenever he lost his temper, or was drunk rather, he used to bully her within an inch of her life and would never tell her what for. It was none of my business, of course, but I used to weep my eyes out sometimes, looking at her.
SOPHIA: Pray, madam, stop telling us things so revolting to humanity.
BRIGADIER’S WIFE: There you are, my dear, you don’t even want to hear about it, and how do you think the captain’s wife felt, who had to bear it?
Thus, for all her good manners and sensibility, Sophia is made to look a fool by the side of a simple and common woman. This is one of Fonvizin’s remarkable repartees (or retorts), and he has nothing neater, more human and… more accidental.
And we still have a countless number of such hothouse progressives among the most advanced of our public men, who are very well satisfied with their hothouses and demand nothing better. But the most remarkable thing of all is that Gvozdilov still bullies his wife and does it almost in greater comfort than before. He does, really. They say it used to be done in greater amity and with more kindness! To love is to thrash, says the proverb. Wives, they say, became quite worried if they were not beaten: “He doesn’t beat me, means he doesn’t love me,” they said.
But all this is primitive and elemental, harking back to the times of our ancestors. Nowadays even this is subject to development. Nowadays Gvozdilov bullies almost out of principle, and then only because he is still a fool, that is, an old-fashioned man who has failed to keep up with the times. The reason why I expatiate on the theme of Gvozdilov is that people in this country still write paragraphs about him full of profound meaning and human understanding. And they write so much that the public is tired of them. Gvozdilov is sufficiently tenacious of life to be almost immortal. Oh, yes, he is alive and kicking, drunk and replete.
Now he has only one arm and one leg left and, like Captain Kopeykin,* “had shed his blood, in a manner of speaking”. His wife has long ago ceased to be the “pretty little thing” she used to be. She has grown old, and her face is pale, haggard and furrowed by wrinkles and suffering. But when her husband, the captain, lay ill after the loss of his arm, she never left his bedside, spent sleepless nights watching over him, comforted him, wept bitter tears over him, and called him her dear, her valiant knight, the darling of her heart, her own soldier bold and brave. It may, oh it may, arouse our indignation from one point of view.
But from another – long live the Russian woman! There is nothing better in our Russian world than her limitlessly forgiving love. For that is so, is it not? Particularly as nowadays Gvozdilov, too, when he is sober, does not always beat his wife, or rather beats her less frequently, keeps up a semblance of decency and even has an occasional tender word for her. For he has become aware in his old age that he cannot do without her; he is thrifty and bourgeois, and if he does give her a beating even now, it is only when he is drunk or else out of habit, when he feels bored. And this certainly is progress, whatever you say, which is a comfort. And we love so much being comforted.
Oh yes, we are quite comforted now and we have succeeded in comforting ourselves. It may be that reality around us looks none too lovely even yet; but then we are so wonderful ourselves, so civilized, so European that the common people feel sick at the very sight of us.
We have now reached the point when the common people regard us as complete foreigners, and do not understand a single word of ours, a single thought of ours – and this certainly is progress, whatever you say. We have now reached the point when our contempt for the common people and the basic principles of its being is so profound that even our attitude to it is stamped with a new, unprecedented and kind of supercilious disdain, which did not exist even at the time of our Montbazons and Rohans, and this certainly is progress, whatever you say.
And then how self-confident we now are in our civilizing mission, with what an air of superiority we solve all problems, and what problems! There is no soil, we say, and no people, nationality is nothing but a certain system of taxation, the soul is a tabula rasa, a small piece of wax out of which you can readily mould a real man or a homunculus – all that must be done is to apply the fruits of European civilization and read two or three books.
And then how serene, how majestically serene we are, because we have solved all problems and written them off. With what smug self-satisfaction, for instance, we have renounced Turgenev for his refusal to make his peace with the world together with us, for his refusal to be satisfied with our majestic personalities and accept them as his ideal, and for having sought something better than us. Better
