There were languorous and dim evenings when he lay supine on his dreadful leathern couch—a thing of lumps and rents with an inexhaustible (just pull) supply of horsehair—and “my heart beat somehow wondrously from Michelet’s first page, from Guizot’s views, from thoughts of Nadezhda Yegorovna, and all this together,” and then he would begin to sing off-key, in a ululant voice—he sang “the song of Marguerite,” simultaneously thinking of the Lobodovskis’ relations with one another—and “gently tears rolled from my eyes.” Suddenly he would rise from his couch with the decision to see her immediately; it was, we imagine, an October evening, clouds flew overhead, a sour stench came from the saddlers’ and carriage-makers’ workshops on the ground floors of houses painted a dreary yellow, and merchants in smocks and sheepskin coats, keys in hand, were already locking up their stores. One bumped into him but he passed quickly by. A ragged lamplighter, his hand-cart rumbling over the cobbles, was bringing lamp oil to a bleary lamp on a wooden post; he wiped the glass with an oily rag and moved on creakily to the next—a long way off. It was beginning to drizzle. Nikolay Gavrilovich flew along with the swift gait of a poor Gogolian character.
At night he was unable to sleep for a long time, tormented by the questions: would Vasiliy Petrovich Lobodovski manage to educate his wife sufficiently so that she might be a helper to him; and in order to stimulate his friend’s feelings, should he not send, for example, an anonymous letter which would inflame her husband with jealousy? This already foretells the methods used by the heroes of Chernyshevski’s novels.
Similar, very carefully calculated but boyishly absurd schemes were thought up by exiled Chernyshevski, old man Chernyshevski, for attaining the most touching objectives. Look how this theme takes advantage of a momentary lack of attention and blossoms out. Halt, roll up again. There is, in fact, no need to go so far ahead. In the student diary one can find the following example of calculation: to print a false manifesto (proclaiming the abolition of conscription) in order to stir up the peasants by a trick; but then he himself abjured it, knowing as a dialectician and a Christian that an inner rot must eat away the whole of a created structure, and that a good end, justifying bad means, will only reveal its fatal kinship with them. Thus politics, literature, painting, even vocal art, were pleasantly entwined with Nikolay Gavrilovich’s amorous emotions (we have returned to the point of departure).
How poor he was, how dirty and sloppy, how far removed from the lure of luxury … Attention! This was not so much proletarian chastity as the natural disregard with which an ascetic treats the prickle of a permanent hair shirt or the bite of sedentary fleas. Even a hair shirt, however, has at times to be repaired. We are present when the inventive Nikolay Gavrilovich contemplates darning his old trousers: he turned out to have no black thread, so what there was he undertook to soak in ink; an anthology of German verse was lying nearby, open at the beginning of William Tell.
As a result of his waving the thread about (in order to dry it), several drops of ink fell on the page; the book did not belong to him. He found a lemon in a paper bag behind the window and attempted to get the blots out, but he only succeeded in dirtying the lemon, plus the windowsill where he had left the pernicious thread. Then he sought the aid of a knife and began to scrape (this book with the punctured poems is now in the Leipzig University library; unfortunately it has not been possible to ascertain how it got there). Ink, indeed, was the natural element of Chernyshevski (he literally bathed in it), who used to smear with it the cracks in his shoes when he was out of shoe polish; or else, in order to disguise a hole in his shoe, he would wrap his foot in a black tie.
He broke crockery, soiled and spoiled everything. His love for materiality was not reciprocated. Subsequently, during penal servitude, he turned out to be not only incapable of doing any of a convict’s special tasks but also was famous for his inability to do anything at all with his hands (at the same time he was constantly butting in to help his fellow man: “Keep out of what does not concern you, you pillar of virtue,” the other convicts used to say gruffly). We have already glimpsed the confusedly hurrying youth being shoved on the street.
He rarely grew angry; once, however, not without pride, he noted how he had revenged himself upon a young cabdriver who had caught him a blow with his shaft: wordlessly diving across the sled between the legs of two startled merchants, he tore out a tuft of his hair. In general, however, he was mild and open to insults, but secretly he felt himself capable of “the most desperate, the most crazy” actions. On the side he began dabbling in propaganda by conversing with mujiks, with an occasional Neva ferryman or an alert pastry cook.
Enter the theme of pastry shops. They have seen a good deal in their time. It was there that Pushkin gulped down a glass of lemonade before his duel; there that Sophia Perovski and her companions each took a portion (of what? history did not quite manage to …) before proceeding to the Canal Quay to assassinate Alexander II. Our hero’s youth had been bewitched by pastry shops, so that later, while on hunger strike in the fortress, he—in What to Do?—filled this or that speech with an involuntary howl of gastric lyricism: “Do you have a pastry shop in the vicinity?
I wonder if they have ready-made walnut tarts—to my taste they’re the best of the tarts, Maria Alexeyevna.” But in contradiction to his future recollection, pastry shops and cafés seduced him not at all with their victuals—not with puff pastry made with rancid butter and not even with cherry-jam doughnuts; newspapers, gentlemen, newspapers, that is what they seduced him with! He tried various cafés—choosing such as had the most newspapers, or places where it was simpler and freer.
Thus at Wolf’s “both last times, instead of his [read: Wolf’s] white bread I had coffee with a [read: my] five-kopeck-twist, the last time not hiding”-i.e., the first of these last two times (the punctilious detail of his diary causes an itching in the cerebellum) he hid, not knowing how they would accept pastry brought from outside. The place was warm and quiet and only now and then did a southwest little wind blowing from the newspaper pages cause the candle flames to vacillate (“disturbances have already touched the Russia entrusted to us” as the Tsar put it). “May I have the Indépendance belge? Thank you.” The candle flames straighten up, it is quiet (but shots ring out on the Boulevard des Capucines, the révolution is nearing the Tuileries—and now Louis Philippe takes to flight: along the Avenue de Neuilly, in a fiacre).
And afterwards he was plagued by heartburn. In general he fed on all sorts of odds and ends, being indigent and impractical. Nekrasov’s ditty is appropriate here:
Since delicacies tougher
Than tinware I would eat,
Such bellyaches I’d suffer
That death itself seemed sweet.
I’d walk miles with that feeling,
I’d read until day broke.
My room had a low ceiling
And goodness how I’d smoke!
Nikolay Gavrilovich, incidentally, did not smoke without reason—it was precisely Zhukov cigarettes that he used for relieving indigestion (and also toothache). His diary, particularly for the summer and autumn of 1849, contains a multitude of most exact references as to how and where he vomited. Besides smoking, he treated himself with rum and water, hot oil, English salts, centaury with bitter-orange leaves, and constantly, conscientiously, with a kind of odd gusto, employed the Roman method—and probably he would ultimately have died of exhaustion if he (graduated as a candidate and retained at the university for advanced work) had not gone to Saratov.
And then in Saratov … But no matter how much we should like to lose no time in getting out of this back alley, to which talk of patisseries has led us, and cross over to the sunny side of Nikolay Gavrilovich’s life, still (for the sake of a certain hidden continuity) we must hang around here a little longer. Once, in great need, he rushed into a tenement house on the Gorohovaya (there follows a wordy description—with afterthoughts—of the house’s location) and was already adjusting his dress when “a girl in red” opened the door. Catching sight of his hand—he had wanted to hold the door—she let out a cry, “as is usually the case.”
The heavy creak of the door, its loose, rusty hook, the stink, the icy cold—all this is dreadful … and yet the queer fellow is quite prepared to debate with himself about true purity, noting with satisfaction that “I didn’t even try to discover whether she was good-looking.” When dreaming, on the other hand, he looked with a keener eye, and the contingency of sleep was kinder to him than his public destiny—but even here, how delighted he is that when in his dream he thrice kisses the gloved hand of “an extremely fair-haired” lady (the mother of a presupposed
