A month later, on a Monday, he took the fair copy to Vasiliev, who as early as last autumn, knowing of his investigations, had half offered to have the Life of Chernyshevski published by the house attached to the Gazeta. The following Wednesday Fyodor was again there, chatting quietly with old Stupishin, who used to wear bedroom slippers at the office. Suddenly the study door opened and filled with the bulk of Vasiliev, who looked blackly at Fyodor for a moment, and then said impassively: “Be so good as to come in,” and moved to one side for him to slip through.
“Well, have you read it?” asked Fyodor as he took a seat across the table.
“I have,” replied Vasiliev in a gloomy bass.
“Personally,” said Fyodor briskly, “I would like it to come out this spring.”
“Here’s your manuscript,” said Vasiliev suddenly, knitting his brows and handing him the folder. “Take it. There can be no question of my being party to its publication. I assumed that this was a serious work, and it turns out to be a reckless, antisocial, mischievous improvisation. I am amazed at you.”
“Well, that’s nonsense, you know,” said Fyodor.
“No, my dear sir, it’s not nonsense,” roared Vasiliev, irately fingering the objects on his desk, rolling a rubber stamp, changing the positions of meek books “for review,” conjoined accidentally, with no hopes for permanent happiness. “No, my dear sir! There are certain traditions of Russian public life which the honorable writer does not dare to subject to ridicule. I am absolutely indifferent to whether you have talent or not, I only know that to lampoon a man whose works and sufferings have given sustenance to millions of Russian intellectuals is unworthy of any talent. I know that you won’t listen to me, but nevertheless [and Vasiliev, grimacing with pain, clutched at his heart] I beg you as a friend not to try to publish this thing, you will wreck your literary career, mark my words, everyone will turn away from you.”
“I prefer the backs of their heads,” said Fyodor.
That night he was invited to the Chernyshevskis, but Alexandra Yakovlevna put him off at the last minute: her husband was “down with flu” and “ran a high temperature.” Zina had gone to the cinema with someone so that he only met her the next evening. “
‘Kaput on the first try,’ as your stepfather would put it,” he said in reply to her question about the manuscript and (as they used to write in the old days) briefly recounted his conversation at the editorial office. Indignation, tenderness toward him, the urge to help him immediately, found expression with her in a burst of enterprising energy. “Oh, that’s how it is!” she exclaimed. “All right. I’ll get the money for publication, that’s what I’ll do.”
“For the baby a meal, for the father a coffin,” he said (transposing the words in a line of Nekrasov’s poem about the heroic wife who sells her body to get her husband his supper), and another time she would have taken offense at this bold joke.
She borrowed somewhere a hundred and fifty marks and added seventy of her own which she had put away for winter—but this sum was insufficient, and Fyodor decided to write to Uncle Oleg in America, who regularly helped his mother and who also used occasionally to send a few dollars to him. The composition of this letter was put off from day to day, however, just as he put off, in spite of Zina’s exhortations, an attempt to get his book printed serially by an émigré literary magazine in Paris, or to interest the publishing house there which had brought out Koncheyev’s verses.
In her free time she undertook to type the manuscript in the office of a relation of hers and from him she collected another fifty marks. She was angered by Fyodor’s inertia—a consequence of his hatred for any practical affairs. He in the meantime occupied himself lightheartedly with composing chess problems, dreamily went about his lessons, and rang up Mme. Chernyshevski daily: Alexander Yakovlevich’s flu had changed into an acute inflammation of the kidneys.
One day in the Russian bookshop he noticed a tall, portly gentleman with a large-featured face, wearing a black felt hat (a strand of chestnut hair falling from under it) who glanced at him affably and even with a kind of encouragement. Where have I met him? thought Fyodor quickly, trying not to look. The other approached and offered his hand, generously, naively, defenselessly spreading it wide, spoke … and Fyodor remembered: it was Busch, who two and a half years ago had read his play at that literary circle. Recently he had published it and now, pushing Fyodor with his hip, nudging him with his elbow, an infantine smile trembling on his noble, always slightly sweaty face, he produced a wallet, from the wallet an envelope and from the envelope a clipping—a pitiful little review which had appeared in the Rigan émigré newspaper.
“Now,” he said with awesome weightiness, “this Thing is also coming out in German. Moreover I am now working on a Novel.”
Fyodor tried to get away from him, but the latter left the shop with him and suggested they should go together, and since Fyodor was on his way to a lesson, and thus was tied to a definite route, all he could do to try and save himself from Busch was to quicken his step, but this so speeded up his companion’s speech that he slowed down again in horror.
“My Novel,” said Busch, looking into the distance and stretching aside his hand, with a rattling cuff protruding from the sleeve of his black overcoat, in order to stop Fyodor Konstantinovich (the overcoat, the black hat and the strand of hair gave him the appearance of a hypnotist, a chess maestro or a musician), “my Novel is the tragedy of a philosopher who has discovered the absolute formula.
He starts speaking and speaks thus [Busch, like a conjurer, plucked a notebook out of the air and began to read on the move]: ‘One has to be a complete ass not to deduct from the fact of the atom the fact that the universe itself is merely an atom, or, it would be truer to say, some kind of trillionth of an atom. This was realized with his intuition already by that genius Blaise Pascal.
But let us proceed, Louisa! [At the sound of this name Fyodor started and clearly heard the sounds of the German grenadier march: “Fa-are-well, Louisa! wipe your eyes and don’t cry; not every bullet kills a good guy,” and this subsequently continued to sound as if passing under the window of Busch’s subsequent words.] Exert, my dear, your attention. First, let me give a fanciful example. Let us assume that a certain physicist has managed to track down, out of the absolute-unthinkable sum of atoms out of which the All is composited, that fatal atom with which our reasoning is concerned.
We are supposing that he has brought his splitting down to the least essence of that very atom, at which moment the Shadow of a Hand [the physicist’s hand!] falls on our universe with catastrophic results, because the universe is but the final fraction of one, I think, central atom, of those it consists of. It’s not easy to understand, but if you understand this you will understand everything. Out of the prison of mathematics! The whole is equal to the smallest part of the whole, the sum of the parts is equal to one part of the sum. This is the secret of the world, the formula of absolute-infinity, but having made such a discovery, the human personality can no longer go on walking and talking. Shut your mouth, Louisa!’ That’s him talking to a cutie, his lady friend,” added Busch with good-natured indulgence, shrugging one mighty shoulder.
“If you’re interested, I can read it to you from the beginning sometime,” he continued. “The theme is colossal. And you, may I ask, what are you doing?”
“I?” said Fyodor with a slight smile. “I have also written a book, a book about the critic Chernyshevski, only I can’t find a publisher for it.”
“Ah! The popularizator of German materialism—of Hegel’s traducers, the grobianistic philosophers! Very honorable. I am more and more convinced that my publisher will take your work with pleasure. He’s a comic personality and for him literature is a closed book. But I have the position of adviser to him and he will hear me out. Give me your telephone number. I’ll be seeing him tomorrow—and if he agrees in principle, then I’ll skim through your manuscript, and I dare to hope that I’ll recommend it in the most flattering manner.”
What rot, thought Fyodor and therefore was extremely surprised when the next day the kind soul did in fact ring. The publisher turned out to be a plumpish man with a sad nose, reminding him somewhat of Alexander Yakovlevich, with the same red ears and a stipple of black hairs along each side of his polished baldpate. His list of published books was small, but remarkably eclectic: translations of some German psychoanalytic novels done by an uncle of Busch’s; The Poisoner by Adelaida Svetozarov; a collection
