And vengeance unfolds: in Siberia, where his only listeners were the larches and the Yakuts, he was haunted by the image of a “platform” and a “lecture hall,” in which it was so convenient for the public to gather and where the latter would ripple so responsively, for, in the final analysis, he, as Pushkin’s Improvvisatore (he of the “Egyptian Nights”) but a poorer versificator, had chosen for his profession—and later as an unrealizable ideal—variations on a given theme; in the very twilight of his life he composes a work in which he embodies his dream: from Astrakhan, not long before his death, he sends Lavrov his “Evenings at the Princess Starobelski’s” for the literary review Russian Thought (which did not find it possible to print them), and follows this up with “An Insertion”—addressed straight to the printer:
In that part where it says that the people have gone from the salon dining room into the salon proper, which has been prepared for them to listen to Vyazovski’s fairy tale, and there is a description of the arrangement of the auditorium … the distribution of the male and female stenographers into two sections at two tables either is not indicated or else is indicated unsatisfactorily. In my draft this part reads as follows: “Along the sides of the platform stood two tables for the stenographers … Vyazovski went up to the stenographers, shook hands with them, and stood chatting with them while the company took their places.” The lines in the fair copy whose sense corresponds to the passage quoted from my draft should be replaced now by the following lines: “The men, forming a constricted frame, stood near the stage and along the walls behind the last chairs; the musicians with their stands occupied both sides of the stage.… The improvvisatore, greeted by deafening applause rising from all sides …”
Sorry, sorry, we’ve mixed everything up—got hold of an extract from Pushkin’s “The Egyptian Nights.” Let us restore the situation: “Between the platform and foremost hemicycle of the auditorium [writes Chernyshevski to a nonexistent printer], a little to the right and left of the platform, stood two tables; at the one which was on the left in front of the platform, if you looked from the middle of the hemicycles toward the platform …” etc., etc.—with many more words of the same sort, none of them really expressing anything.
“Here is a theme for you,” said Charski to the improvvisatore. “The poet himself chooses the subjects for his poems; the multitude has no right to direct his inspiration.”
We have been led a long way by the impetus and revolution of the Pushkin theme in Chernyshevski’s life; meanwhile a new character—whose name once or twice has already burst impatiently into our discourse—is awaiting his entrance. Now it is just time for him to appear—and here he comes in the tightly buttoned, blue-collared regulation coat of a university student, fairly reeking of chestnost’ (“progressive principle”), ungainly, with tiny, shortsighted eyes and a scanty Newport Frill (that barbe en collier which seemed so symptomatic to Flaubert); he offers his hand jabwise; i.e., thrusting it oddly forward with the thumb turned out, and introduces himself in a catarrhally confidential little bass: Dobrolyubov.
Their first meeting (summer 1856) was recalled almost thirty years later by Chernyshevski (when he also wrote about Nekrasov) with his familiar wealth of detail, essentially sickly and impotent, but supposed to set off the irreproachability of thought in its transactions with time. Friendship joined these two men in a monogrammatic union which a hundred centuries are incompetent to untie (on the contrary: it becomes even faster in the consciousness of posterity). This is not the place to enlarge upon the literary activities of the younger man.
Let us merely say that he was uncouthly crude and uncouthly naïve; that in the satirical review The Whistle he poked fun at the distinguished Dr. Pirogov while parodying Lermontov (the use of some of Lermontov’s lyrical poems as a canvas for journalistic jokes about people and events was in general so widespread that in the long run it turned into a caricature of the very art of parody); let us say also, in Strannolyubski’s words, that “from the push given it by Dobrolyubov, literature rolled down an inclined plane, with the inevitable result, once it had rolled to zero, that it was put into inverted commas: the student brought some literature’ ” (meaning propaganda leaflets). What else can one add? Dobrolyubov’s humor? Oh, those blessed times when “mosquito” was in itself funny, a mosquito settling on someone’s nose twice as funny, and a mosquito flying into a governmental office and biting a civil servant caused the listeners to groan and double up with laughter!
Much more engaging than Dobrolyubov’s obtuse and ponderous critique (all this pleiade of radical critics in fact wrote with their feet) is the frivolous side of his life, that feverish, romantic sportiveness which subsequently supplied Chernyshevski with material for the “love intrigues” of Levitski (in The Prologue). Dobrolyubov was extraordinarily prone to falling in love (here we catch a glimpse of him playing assiduously durachki, a simple card game, with a much-decorated general whose daughter he courts). He had a German girl in Staraya Russa, a strong, onerous tie.
From immoral visits to her, Chernyshevski held him back in the full sense of the word: for a long time they would wrestle, both of them limp, scrawny and sweaty—toppling all over the floor, colliding with the furniture—all the time silent, all you could hear was their wheezing; then, stumbling into one another, they would both search for their spectacles beneath the upturned chairs. At the beginning of 1859, gossip reached Chernyshevski that Dobrolyubov (just like d’Anthès), in order to cover his “intrigue” with Olga Sokratovna, wanted to marry her sister (who already had a fiancé). Both the young women played outrageous tricks on Dobrolyubov; they took him to masked balls dressed as a Capuchin or an ice-cream vendor and confided all their secrets in him.
Walks with Olga Sokratovna “completely bemused” him. “I know there is nothing to be gained here,” he wrote to a friend, “because not a single conversation goes by without her mentioning that although I am a good man, nevertheless I am too clumsy and almost repulsive. I understand that I should not try to gain anything anyway, since in any case I am fonder of Nikolay Gavrilovich than of her. But at the same time I am powerless to leave her alone.” When he heard the gossip, Nikolay Gavrilovich, who entertained no illusions concerning his wife’s morals, still felt some resentment: the betrayal was a double one; he and Dobrolyubov had a frank explanation and soon afterwards he sailed to London to “maul Herzen” (as he subsequently expressed it); i.e., to give him a good scolding for his attacks on that same Dobrolyubov in the Kolokol (The Bell), a liberal periodical published abroad, but of less radical views than the endemic Contemporary.
Perhaps, however, the object of this meeting was not only to intercede for his friend: Dobrolyubov’s name (especially later, in connection with his death), Chernyshevski very skillfully handled “as a matter of revolutionary tactics.” According to certain reports from the past his main object in visiting Herzen was to discuss the publishing of The Contemporary abroad: everyone had a premonition that soon it would be closed down. But in general this trip is surrounded with such a haze and has left so few traces in Chernyshevski’s writings that one would almost prefer, in spite of the facts, to consider it apocryphal.
He who had always been interested in England, he who had nourished his soul on Dickens and his mind on the Times—how avidly he should have gulped it down, how many impressions he should have garnered, how insistently he should later have kept turning back to it in memory! Actually, Chernyshevski never spoke of his journey and whenever anyone really pressed him, he would reply briefly: “Well, what’s there to talk about—there was fog, the ship rocked, what else could there be?” Thus, life itself (how many times now) refuted his axiom: “The tangible object acts much more strongly than the abstract concept of it.”
However that may have been, on the 26th June (New Style?), 1859, Chernyshevski arrived in London (everyone thought that he was in Saratov) and stayed there until the 30th. An oblique ray pierces the fog of these four days: Mme. Tuchkov-Ogaryov walks through a drawing room and into a sunny garden, carrying in her arms her year-old baby girl dressed in a little lace pelerine. In the drawing room (the action takes place in Putney, at Herzen’s house) Alexander Ivanovich is walking back and forth (these indoor walks were very much the thing in those days) with a gentleman of medium height whose face is unattractive “but illumined by a wonderful expression of self-abnegation and submissiveness to fate” (which most likely was merely a trick of the memoirist’s memory, recalling that face through the prism of a fate which had already been accomplished).
Herzen introduced his companion to her. Chernyshevski stroked the infant’s hair and said in his quiet voice: “I also have some like this, but I hardly ever see them.”
