The Lobodovskis! His friend’s wedding had produced on our twenty-year-old hero one of those extraordinary impressions, which in the middle of the night cause a youth to sit down in nothing but his underwear to write in his diary. This exciting wedding was celebrated on May 19, 1848; that same day sixteen years later, Chernyshevski’s civil execution was carried out. A coincidence of anniversaries, a card index of dates. That is how fate sorts them in anticipation of the researcher’s needs; a laudable economy of effort.
He felt joyful at this wedding. What is more, he derived a secondary joy from his basic one (“That means I am able to nourish a pure attachment to a woman”)—yes, he was always doing his utmost to turn his heart so that one side was reflected in the glass of reason, or, as his best biographer, Strannolyubski, puts it: “He distilled his feelings in the alembics of logic.” But who could have said that he was occupied at that moment with thoughts of love? Many years later in his flowery Sketches from Life this same Vasiliy Lobodovski made a careless error when he said that his best man at the wedding, the student “Krushedolin,” looked as serious “as if he were subjecting in his mind to an exhaustive analysis certain learned works from England that he had just read.”
French romanticism gave us the poetry of love, German romanticism the poetry of friendship. The young Chernyshevski’s sentimentality was a concession to an epoch when friendship was magnanimous and moist. Chernyshevski cried willingly and often. “Three tears rolled down,” he notes with characteristic accuracy in his diary—and the reader is tormented momentarily with the involuntary thought, can one have an odd number of tears, or is it only the dual nature of the source which makes us demand an even number? “ ‘Remind me not of foolish tears that many times I shed, alas, when my repose oppressive was,’ ” writes Nikolay Gavrilovich in his diary, addressing his wretched youth, and to the sound of Nekrasov’s plebeian rhymery he really does shed a tear: “At this spot in the manuscript there is the trace of a spilled tear,” comments his son Mihail in a footnote.
The trace of another tear, far hotter, bitterer and more precious, has been preserved on his celebrated letter from the fortress; but Steklov’s description of this second tear contains, according to Strannolyubski, certain inaccuracies—which will be discussed later. Then, in the days of his exile and especially in the Vilyuisk dungeon—But hold! the theme of tears is expanding beyond all reason … let us return to its point of departure.
Now, for example, a funeral is being conducted for a student. In the light blue coffin lies a waxen youth. Another student, Tatarinov (who looked after him when he was ill but who had hardly known him before that) bids him farewell: “He looks long at him, kisses him, and looks again, endlessly …” The student Chernyshevski, jotting this down, is himself faint with tenderness; and Strannolyubski, commenting on these lines, suggests a parallel between them and the sorrowful fragment by Gogol, “Nights at a Villa.”
But to tell the truth … young Chernyshevski’s dreams in connection with love and friendship are not distinguished for their refinement—and the more he yields to them the more clearly comes out their fault—their rationality; he was able to bend the silliest daydream into a logical horseshoe. Musing in detail over the fact that Lobodovski, whom he sincerely admires, is developing tuberculosis, and that in consequence Nadezhda Yegorovna will remain a young widow, helpless and destitute, he pursues a particular aim. He needs a dummy image in order to justify his falling in love with her, so he substitutes for it the urge to assist a poor woman, or in other words sets his love upon a utilitarian foundation.
For otherwise the palpitations of a fond heart are not to be explained by the limited means of that rough-hewn materialism, to whose blandishments he had already hopelessly succumbed. And then, only yesterday, when Nadezhda Yegorovna “was sitting without a shawl, and of course her ‘missionary’ [a plain dress] was slit a little at the front and one could see a certain part just below her neck” (a turn of phrase bearing an unusual resemblance to the idiom of literary characters in Zoshchenko’s impersonations of Soviet-bred Philistine simpletons), he had asked himself with honest anxiety whether he would have looked at “that part” in the early days after his friend’s wedding.
And so, gradually burying his friend in his dreams, with a sigh, with an air of unwillingness and as if submitting to a duty, he sees himself deciding to marry the young widow—a melancholy union, a chaste union (and all these dummy images are repeated even more fully in his diary when he subsequently obtains the hand of Olga Sokratovna). The actual beauty of the poor woman was still in doubt, and the method which Chernyshevski selected in order to verify her charms predetermined the whole of his later attitude to the concept of beauty.
At first he established the best specimen of grace in Nadezhda Yegorovna: chance provided him with a living picture in an idyllic vein, albeit somewhat cumbersome. “Vasiliy Petrovich knelt on a chair facing its back; she approached and began to tilt the chair; she tilted it a little and then laid her little face against his chest … A candle stood on the tea table … and the light fell well enough on her; i.e., a half-light, because she was in her husband’s shadow, but clear.” Nikolay Gavrilovich looked closely, trying to find something that would not be quite right; he did not find any coarse features, but he still hesitated.
What should one do next? He was constantly comparing her features with the features of other women, but the defectiveness of his eyesight prevented the accumulation of the live specimens essential to a comparison. Willy-nilly he was forced to have recourse to the beauty apprehended and registered by others; i.e., to women’s portraits. Thus from the very beginning the concept of art became for him—a myopic materialist (which in itself is an absurd combination)—something subsidiary and applied, and he was now able by experimental means to test something which love had suggested to him: the superiority of Nadezhda Yegorovna’s beauty (her husband called her “dearie” and “dolly”), that is Life, to the beauty of all other “female heads,” that is Art (“Art”!).
On the Nevski Avenue poetic pictures were exhibited in the windows of Junker’s and Daziaro’s. Having studied them thoroughly he returned home and noted down his observations. Oh, what a miracle! The comparative method always provided the necessary result. The Calabrian charmer’s nose in the engraving was so-so: “Particularly unsuccessful was the glabella as well as the parts lying near the nose, on both sides of its bridge.” A week later, still uncertain whether the truth had been sufficiently tested, or else wishing to revel once again in the already familiar compliancy of the experiment, he went once more to the Nevski to see if there were not some new beauty in a shop window.
On her knees in a cave, Mary Magdalene was praying before a skull and cross, and of course her face in the light of the lampad was very sweet, but how much better was Nadezhda Yegorovna’s semi-illumined face! On a white terrace over the sea were two girls: a graceful blonde was sitting on a stone bench with a young man; they were kissing, while a graceful brunette kept a lookout, holding aside a crimson curtain “which separated the terrace from the remaining parts of the house,” as we remark in our diary, for we always like to establish what relation a given detail bears to its speculative environment. Naturally Nadezhda Yegorovna’s little neck is far more pleasing.
Hence comes an important conclusion: life is more pleasing (and therefore better) than painting, for what is painting, poetry, indeed all art, in its purest form? It is “a crimson sun sinking into an azure sea”; it is picturesque folds in a dress; it is the “rosy nuances which the shallow writer wastes on illuminating his glossy chapters”; it is garlands of flowers, fays, fauns, Phrynae … The further it goes the cloudier it gets: the rubbishy idea grows.
The luxury of feminine forms now implies luxury in the economic sense. The concept of “fantasy” appears to Nikolay Gavrilovich in the shape of a transparent but ample-breasted Sylphide, corsetless and practically naked, who, playing with a light veil, flies down to the poetically poeticizing poet. A couple of columns, a couple of trees—not quite cypresses and not quite poplars—some kind of urn that holds little attraction for Nikolay Gavrilovich—and the supporter of pure art is sure to applaud. Contemptible fellow! Idle fellow! And indeed, rather than all this trash, how could one not prefer an honest description of contemporary manners, civic indignation, heart-to-heart jingles?
One can safely assume that during those minutes when he was glued to the shop windows his disingenuous master’s dissertation, “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality,” was composed in its entirety
