“Oh, come, come,” said Alexander Yakovlevich, “das kommt nicht in Frage. A young writer has become interested in one of the most important epochs in Russian history and is about to write a literary biography of one of its major figures. I don’t see anything strange in that. It’s not very difficult to get to know the subject, he’ll find more than enough books, and the rest all depends on talent. You say approach, approach. But granted a talented approach to a given subject, sarcasm is a priori excluded, is irrelevant. That’s how it seems to me at least.”
“Did you see how Koncheyev was attacked last week?” asked the engineer Kern, and the conversation took another turn.
Out on the street when Fyodor was saying good-by to Goryainov the latter retained his hand in his own large, soft hand and said puckering up his eyes: “Let me tell you, my lad, you’re quite a joker. Recently there died the social-democrat Belenki—a kind of perpetual émigré, so to speak: he was exiled by both the Tsar and the proletariat, so that whenever he indulged in his reminiscences he would begin: “U nas v Zheneve, chez nous à Genève.…” Perhaps you’ll write about him as well?”
“I don’t understand?” said Fyodor half-questioningly.
“No, but on the other hand I understood perfectly. You are as much preparing to write about Chernyshevski as I am about Belenki, but then you made a fool of your audience and stirred up an interesting argument. All the best, good night,” and he left with his slow, heavy gait, leaning on a cane and holding one shoulder slightly higher than the other.
The way of life to which he had become addicted while studying his father’s activities was now renewed for Fyodor. It was one of those repetitions, one of those thematic “voices” with which, according to all the rules of harmony, destiny enriches the life of observant men. But now, taught by experience, he did not allow himself his former slovenliness in the use of sources and provided even the smallest note with an exact label of its origin. In front of the national library, near a stone pool, pigeons strolled cooing among the daisies on the lawn.
The books to be taken out arrived in a little wagon along sloping rails at the bottom of the apparently small premises, where they awaited distribution, and where there seemed to be only a few books lying around on the shelves when in fact there was an accumulation of thousands.
Fyodor would embrace his portion, struggling with its disintegrating weight, and walk to the bus stop. From the very beginning the image of his planned book had appeared to him extraordinarily distinctly in tone and outline, he had the feeling that for every detail he ran to earth there was already a place prepared and that even the work of hunting up material was already bathed in the light of the forthcoming book, just as the sea throws a blue light on a fishing boat, and the boat itself together with this light is reflected in the water.
“You see,” he explained to Zina, “I want to keep everything as it were on the very brink of parody. You know those idiotic ‘biographies romancées’ where Byron is coolly slipped a dream extracted from one of his own poems? And there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it. And most essentially, there must be a single uninterrupted progression of thought. I must peel my apple in a single strip, without removing the knife.”
As he studied his subject he saw that in order to completely soak himself in it he would have to extend his field of activity two decades in either direction. Thus an amusing feature of the age was revealed to him—essentially trifling, but proving to be a valuable guideline: during fifty years of utilitarian criticism, from Belinski to Mihailovski, there was not a single molder of opinion who did not take the opportunity to jeer at the poems of Fet.
And into what metaphysical monsters turned sometimes the most sober judgments of these materialists on this or that subject, as if the Word, Logos, were avenging itself on them for being slighted! Belinski, that likable ignoramus, who loved lilies and oleanders, who decorated his window with cacti (as did Emma Bovary), who kept five kopecks, a cork and a button in the empty box discarded by Hegel and who died of consumption with a speech to the Russian people on his bloodstained lips, startled Fyodor’s imagination with such pearls of realistic thought as, for example: “In nature everything is beautful, excepting only those ugly phenomena which nature herself has left unfinished and hidden in the darkness of the earth or water (molluscs, worms, infusoria, and so on).”
Similarly, in Mihailovski it was easy to discover a metaphor floating belly upwards as for example: “[Dostoevski] struggled like a fish against the ice, ending up at times in the most humiliating positions”; this humiliated fish rewarded one for working through all the writings of the “reporter on contemporary issues.” From here there was a direct transition to the fighting lexicon of the present day, to the style of Steklov speaking of Chernyshevski’s times (“The plebeian writer who nestled in the pores of Russian life … branded routine opinions with the battering ram of his ideas”), or to the idiom of Lenin who in his polemical heat attained the heights of absurdity: (“Here there is no fig leaf … and the idealist stretches out his hand directly to the agnostic”). Russian prose, what crimes are committed in thy name! A contemporary critic wrote about Gogol: “His people are deformed grotesques, his characters, Chinese-lantern shadows, the events he depicts, impossible and ridiculous,” and this fully corresponded to the opinions held by Skabichevski and Mihailovski about Chekhov—opinions that, like a fuse lit at the time, have now blown these critics to bits.
He read Pomyalovski (honesty in the role of tragic passion) and found there this lexical fruit salad: “little raspberry-red lips like cherries.” He read Nekrasov, and sensing a certain urban-journalist defect in his (frequently enchanting) poetry, he found an apparent explanation for the vulgarisms in his pedestrian Russian Women (“How jolly, furthermore, To share your every thought in common With someone you adore”) in the discovery that despite his walks in the country he confused gadflies with bumblebees and wasps ([over the flock] “a restless swarm of bumblebees” and ten lines lower down: the horses under the smoke of a bonfire “seek shelter from the wasps”).
He read Herzen and was again better able to understand the flaw (a false glib glitter) in his generalizations when he noticed that this author, having a poor knowledge of English (witnessed by his surviving autobiographical reference, which begins with the amusing Gallicism “I am born”), had confused the sounds of two English words “beggar” and “bugger” and from this had made a brilliant deduction concerning the English respect for wealth.
Such a method of evaluation, taken to its extreme, would be even sillier than approaching writers and critics as exponents of general ideas. What is the significance of Suhoshchokov’s Pushkin’s not liking Baudelaire, and is it fair to condemn Lermontov’s prose because he twice refers to some impossible “crocodile” (once in a serious and once in a joking comparison)? Fyodor stopped in time, thus preventing the pleasant feeling that he had discovered an easily applicable criterion from being impaired by its abuse.
He read a great deal—more than he had ever read. Studying the short stories and novels of the men of the sixties he was surprised by their insistence on the various ways their characters saluted one another. Meditating over the thralldom of Russian thought, that eternal tributary to this or that Golden Horde, he was carried away by weird comparisons.
Thus, in paragraph 146 of the censorship code for 1826, in which authors were enjoined to “uphold chaste morals and not to replace them solely by beauty of the imagination,” one had only to replace “chaste” by “civic” or some such word in order to get the private censorship code of the radical critics; and similarly, when the reactionary Bulgarin informed the government in a confidential letter of his readiness to color the characters in the novel he was writing to suit the censor, one could not help thinking of the later fawning that even such authors as Turgenev indulged in before the Court of Progressive Public Opinion; and the radical Shchedrin, using a cart shaft to fight with and ridiculing Dostoevski’s sickness, or Antonovich, who called that author “a whipped and expiring animal,” were little different from right-winger Burenin, who persecuted the unfortunate poet Nadson.
In the writings of another radical critic, Zaytsev, it was comical to find, forty years before Freud, the theory that “all these aesthetic feelings and similar illusions ‘elevating us’ are only modifications of the sexual instinct …”; this was the same Zaytsev who called Lermontov a “disillusioned idiot,” bred silkworms in leisured exile at Locarno (they never cocooned), and often crashed down the stairs from shortsightedness.
Fyodor tried to sort out the mishmash of philosophical ideas of the time, and it seemed to him that in the very roll call of names, in their burlesque consonance, there was manifested a kind of sin against thought, a mockery of it, a blemish of the age, when some extravagantly praised Kant, others Kont (Comte), others again Hegel or Schlegel.
