He was engaged to teach grammar and literature in the gymnasium there and proved to be an extremely popular teacher: in the unwritten classification which the boys applied swiftly and exactly to all the instructors, he was assigned to the type of nervous, absentminded, good-natured fellow who would easily lose his temper but who was also easily led off the subject—to fall at once into the soft paws of the class virtuoso (Fioletov junior in this case): at the critical moment when disaster already seemed inevitable for those who did not know the lesson, and there was only a short time until the caretaker rang his bell, he would ask a saving, delaying question: “Nikolay Gavrilovich, there is something here about the Convention …” and forthwith Nikolay Gavrilovich would kindle, would go to the board and crushing the chalk would draw a plan of the hall where the National Convention of 1792–95 held its meetings (he was, as we know, a great expert at plans), and then, becoming more and more animated, he would also point out the places where the members of every party had sat.
During those years in the provinces he evidently behaved rather imprudently, frightening moderate people and God-fearing youths with the harshness of his views and the brashness of his ways. A slightly touched-up story has been preserved to the effect that the coffin had hardly been lowered at his mother’s funeral before he lit up a cigarette and went off arm-in-arm with Olga Sokratovna, whom he married ten days later.
But the upper-formers were swept away by him; some of them subsequently became attached to him with that rapturous ardor with which the young people of this didactic era clung to the teacher who was on the brink of becoming a leader; as far as “grammar” was concerned, it must be said in all conscience that his charges never learned to handle commas. Were many of their number there forty years later at his funeral? According to some sources there were two, according to others, none at all. And when the funeral procession was about to stop by the Saratov school building in order to chant a litany, the director sent to inform the priest that this, you know, was undesirable, and accompanied by a stumbling, long-skirted October wind, the procession went by.
Much less successful than his career in Saratov was his teaching after his transfer to St. Petersburg, where for several months during 1854 he taught in the Second Cadet Corps. The cadets behaved rowdily at his lessons. Shouting shrilly at the recreants only served to augment the confusion. You couldn’t get very warmed up about Montagnards there! Once during an interval there was some noise in one of the classrooms, the officer on guard went in, barked, and left relative order behind him; in the meantime noise broke out in another classroom which (the interval was now over) Chernyshevski had just entered with his briefcase under his arm. Turning to the officer, he stopped him with a touch of his hand and said with restrained irritation, looking over his glasses: “No, sir, you can’t come here now.” The officer felt insulted; the teacher refused to apologize and left. Thus began the theme of “officers.”
The preoccupation with enlightenment, however, had now been formed in him for the rest of his life, and from 1853 to 1862 his journalistic activities were thoroughly imbued with an aspiration to feed the lean Russian reader with a diet of the most variegated information: the portions were huge, the bread supply inexhaustible, and nuts were provided on Sundays; for while stressing how important were the meat dishes of politics and philosophy, Nikolay Gavrilovich never forgot the sweet either. From his review of Amarantov’s Indoor Magic it is clear that he had tried out this entertaining physics at home, and to one of the best tricks, namely “carrying water in a sieve,” he added his own amendment: like all popularizers, he had a weakness for such Kunststücke; nor must we forget that hardly a year had passed since by agreement with his father he had finally abandoned his idea for perpetual motion.
He loved to read almanacs, noting for the general information of the Contemporary subscribers (1855): “A guinea is 6 rubles and 47½ kopecks; the North American dollar is 1 silver ruble and 31 kopecks”; or else he would inform them that “telegraph towers between Odessa and Ochakov have been built from donations.” A genuine encyclopedist, a kind of Voltaire—with the stress, true, on the first syllable—he unstintingly copied out thousands of pages (he was always ready to embrace the rolled-up carpet of any chance subject and unfold the whole of it before the reader), translated a whole library, cultivated all genres right down to poetry, and dreamed to the end of his life of composing “a critical dictionary of ideas and facts” (which recalls Flaubert’s caricature, that “Dictionnaire des idées reçues” whose ironic epigraph—“the majority is always right”—Chernyshevski would have adopted in all seriousness).
On this subject he writes to his wife from the fortress, telling her with passion, sorrow, bitterness, about all the titanic works which he will still complete. Later, during all the twenty years of his Siberian isolation, he sought solace in this dream; but then, one year before his death, when he learned of Brockhaus’s dictionary, he saw in it its realization. Then he yearned to translate it (otherwise “they would stuff it with all sorts of rubbish, such as minor German artists”), deeming that such a work would be the crown of his entire life; it turned out that this, too, had been already undertaken.
In the beginning of his journalistic pursuits, writing on Lessing (who had been born exactly a hundred years before him, and a resemblance to whom he himself admitted), he said: “For such natures there exists a sweeter service than service to one’s favorite science—and that is service to the development of one’s people.” Like Lessing, he was accustomed to develop general ideas on the basis of particular cases. And remembering that Lessing’s wife had died in childbirth, he feared for Olga Sokratovna, about whose first pregnancy he wrote to his father in Latin, just as, a hundred years before, Lessing had done.
Let us shed a little light here: on the twenty-first of December, 1853, Nikolay Gavrilovich intimated that according to knowledgeable women his wife had conceived. Her labor was difficult. It was a boy. “My sweety-tweety,” cooed Olga Sokratovna over her first-born—very soon, however, becoming disenchanted with little Sasha. The doctors warned them that a second child would kill her. Still, she became pregnant anew—“somehow in expiation of our sins, against my will,” he wrote plaintively, in dull anguish, to Nekrasov.… No, it was something else, stronger than fear for his wife, that oppressed him.
According to some sources, Chernyshevski contemplated suicide during the fifties; he even seems to have drunk—what an awe-inspiring vision: a drunken Chernyshevski! There was no use hiding it—the marriage had turned out unhappy, thrice unhappy, and even in later years, when he had managed with the aid of his reminiscences to “freeze his past into a state of static happiness” (Strannolyubski), nevertheless he still bore the marks of that fateful, deadly heartache—made of pity, jealousy and wounded pride—which a husband of quite a different stamp had experienced and had dealt with in quite a different way: Pushkin.
Both his wife and the infant Victor survived; and in December, 1858, she again almost died, giving birth to a third son, Misha. Amazing times—heroic, prolific, wearing a crinoline—that symbol of fertility.
“They are intelligent, educated, kind, I know it—while I am stupid, uneducated, bad,” Olga Sokratovna would say (not without that spasm of the soul termed nadryv) in reference to her husband’s relatives, the Pypin sisters, who with all their kindness did not spare “this hysteric, this unbalanced wench with her insufferable temper.” How she used to fling the plates around! What biographer can stick the pieces together?
And that passion for moving … Those weird indispositions … In her old age, she loved to recall how on a dusty, sunny evening at Pavlovsk, in a phaeton with trotter, she had overtaken Grand Duke Konstantin, suddenly throwing off her blue veil and smiting him with a fiery glance, or how she had deceived her husband with the Polish émigré, Ivan Fyodorovich Savitski, a man renowned for the length of his mustaches: “Raffy [Kanashka, a vulgar nickname] knew about it … Ivan Fyodorovich and I would be in the alcove, while he went on writing at his desk by the window.” One feels very sorry for Raffy; he must have been sorely tormented by the young men who surrounded his wife and were in different stages of amorous intimacy with her. Mme. Chernyshevski’s parties were particularly enlivened by a gang of Caucasian students. Nikolay Gavrilovich hardly ever came out to join them in the parlor. Once,
