His memory, too, turned out to be keen-eyed when he recalled that circuitous young yearning for beauty. At the age of fifty in a letter from Siberia he evokes the angelic image of a girl he had once noticed in his youth at an exhibition of Industry and Agriculture: “Now there was a certain aristocratic family walking along,” he narrates in his later, Biblically slow style. “She appealed to me, this girl, verily she appealed to me … I walked alongside about three paces away and admired her … They belonged obviously to the highest society.
Everyone saw this from their extraordinarily nice manners [there is a little Dickensian fly in this treacly pathos, as Strannolyubski would remark, but still we must not forget that this is being written by an old man half-crushed by penal servitude, as Steklov would justly put it]. The crowd gave way before them … I was quite free to walk at about three paces distance without taking my gaze off that girl [poor satellite!]. And this lasted for an hour or more.” (Oddly enough, exhibitions in general, for instance the London one of 1862 and the Paris one of 1889, had a strong effect on his fate; thus Bouvard and Pécuchet, when undertaking a description of the life of the Duke of Angoulême, were amazed by the role played in it … by bridges.)
It follows from all this that upon arriving in Saratov he could not help but fall in love with the twenty-year-old daughter of Doctor Sokrat Vasiliev, a gypsyish young lady with earrings hanging from the long lobes of her ears, which were half-concealed by folds of dark hair. A teasing, affected creature, “the cynosure and ornament of provincial balls” (in the words of a nameless contemporary), she seduced and stupefied our clumsy virgin with the rustle of her sky-blue choux and the melodiousness of her speech. “Look, what a charming little arm,” she would say, stretching it out toward his misted glasses—a bare, dusky arm with a glistening bloom along it. He rubbed himself with attar of roses and shaved bloodily. And what serious compliments he thought up! “You should be living in Paris,” he said earnestly, having learned elsewhere that she was a “democrat”; Paris for her, however, meant not the hearth of science but the kingdom of strumpets, so that she was offended.
Before us is “The Diary of my Relations with Her Who now Constitutes my Happiness.” The easily carried-away Steklov refers to this unique production (reminding one most of all of an extremely conscientious business report) as “an exultant hymn of love.” The maker of the report draws up a project for declaring his love (which is accurately put into effect in February, 1853, and approved without delay) with points for and against marriage (he feared, for example, lest his restive spouse should take it into her head to wear male dress—in the manner of George Sand) and with an estimate of expenses when married, which contains absolutely everything—two stearine candles for the winter evenings, ten kopecks’ worth of milk, the theater; and at the same time he notifies his bride that in view of his way of thinking (“I am frightened neither by dirt nor by [setting loose] drunken peasants with clubs, nor by slaughter”) sooner or later he is “sure to get caught,” and for greater honesty he tells her about the wife of Iskander (Herzen), who being pregnant (“excuse me for going into such details”), upon hearing the news that her husband had been arrested in Italy and sent to Russia, “fell dead.” Olga Sokratovna, as Aldanov might have added at this point, would not have fallen dead.
“If some day,” he wrote further, “your name is stained by rumor, so that you cannot hope to have any husband … I will always be ready at one word from you to become your husband.” A chivalrous position, but based on far from chivalrous premises, and this characteristic turn leads us back at once to the familiar path of those earlier quasi fantasies of love, with his detailed thirst for self-sacrifice and the protective coloration of his compassion; which did not prevent him from having his pride smart when his bride warned him that she was not in love with him. His betrothal period had a German touch about it, with Schillerian songs, with a countinghouse of caresses: “I undid at first two and then three buttons on her mantilla …” He urgently wanted her to place her foot (in its blunt-toed, gray bottekin stitched with colored silk) on top of his head: his voluptuousness fed on symbols. Sometimes he read to her from Lermontov or Koltsov; he read poetry in the monotone of a Psalter lector.
But that which occupies the place of honor in the diary and which is particularly important for an understanding of much of Nikolay Gavrilovich’s fate is his detailed account of the joke ceremonies with which the Saratov evenings were richly adorned. He could not polka nimbly and was a bad dancer of the Grossvater, but on the other hand he loved clowning, for even the penguin is not above a certain playfulness when he surrounds the female he courts with a ring of pebbles.
Young people, as the phrase goes, would get together, and setting in motion à device of coquetry fashionable in those days and among that set, Olga Sokratovna would feed one or another of the guests at table from a saucer, like a child, while Nikolay Gavrilovich, miming jealousy, would press a napkin to his heart and threaten to pierce his breast with a fork. In her turn she would pretend to be cross with him. He would then beg forgiveness (all this is horribly unfunny) and kiss the exposed parts of her arms, which she tried to hide, saying: “How dare you!”
The penguin assumed “a serious, mournful look, because indeed it was possible that I had said something which would have given offense to another (i.e., a less bold girl) in her place.” On holidays he played tricks in the Temple of God, amusing his bride-to-be—but the Marxist commentator (i.e., Steklov) errs in seeing in this “a healthy blasphemousness.” As the son of a priest Nikolay felt quite at home in church (thus the young prince who crowns a cat with his father’s crown is decidedly not expressing any sympathy with popular government). Even less can one reproach him with mocking the Crusaders because he chalked a cross upon the back of everyone in turn: the mark of Olga Sokratovna’s lovesick admirers. And after some more horseplay of the same sort there takes place—let us remember this—a mock duel with sticks.
Now a few years later when he was arrested, the police confiscated this old diary, which was written in an even hand with little striggles and was in a homemade code, with such abbreviations as weakns! sillns! (weakness, silliness), lbrty, =ty (liberty, equality) and ch-k (chelovek, man,—not Cheka, Lenin’s police).
It was deciphered by people who were evidently incompetent, since they made a number of mistakes: for example, they read dzrya as druzya (friends) instead of podozreniya (suspicions), which twisted the sentence “I shall arouse strong suspicions” into “I have strong friends.” Chernyshevski grasped at this and began to maintain that the whole diary was the draft of a novel, a writer’s invention, since he, he said, “did not then have any influential friends, whereas this was obviously a character with powerful friends in the government.”
It is not important (although the question is interesting in itself) whether he remembered the actual words in his diary exactly; what is important is that subsequently these words are given a curious alibi in What to Do? where their inner “draft” rhythm is fully worked out (for instance in the song of one of the girls at the picnic: “Oh maid, I dwell in gloomy woods, I am an evil friend, and perilous will be my life, and sad will be my end”). Lying in prison and knowing that the dangerous diary was being deciphered, he hastened to send the Senate “examples of my manuscript drafts”; i.e., things which he had written exclusively in order to justify his diary, turning it ex post facto also into some draft for some novel.
(Strannolyubski makes the direct supposition that it was this that impelled him to write in jail What to Do?—dedicated, by the way, to his wife, and begun on St. Olga’s day.) Therefore he could express his indignation over the fact that a judicial meaning was being given to scenes he had invented. “I place myself and others in various positions and develop them quite fancifully … One ‘I’ speaks of the possibility of arrest, another ‘I’ is beaten with a stick in front of his fiancée.” He hoped, recalling this part of his old diary, that the detailed account of all sorts of parlor games would be regarded in itself as “fanciful,” since a sedate person would hardly … The sad thing was that in official circles he was considered not a sedate person, but precisely a buffoon, and it was in the very buffoonery of his journalist devices in The Contemporary that they detected a fiendish infiltration of harmful ideas.
And for a complete conclusion of the theme of the Saratov petits-jeux let us move on still further, as far as the penal servitude, where their echo still lives in the playlets he composes for his comrades and especially in the
