Demons, p.57
Demons, page 57
"In our age it's shameful to read that the world stands on three fishes," a young girl suddenly rattled out. "You couldn't have gone down to some hermit in a cave, Karmazinov. Who even talks about hermits nowadays?"
"What surprises me most, ladies and gentlemen, is that it's all so serious. However... however, you are perfectly right. No one respects real truth more than I do..."
Though he was smiling ironically, all the same he was greatly struck. His face simply said: "I'm not the way you think, I'm for you, only praise me, praise me more, as much as possible, I like it terribly..."
"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried at last, now completely wounded, "I see that my poor little poem got to the wrong place. And I think I myself got to the wrong place."
"Aimed at a crow and got a cow," some fool, undoubtedly drunk, shouted at the top of his lungs, and of course he ought to have been ignored. True, there was irreverent laughter.
"A cow, you say?" Karmazinov picked up at once. His voice was becoming more and more shrill. "Concerning crows and cows, ladies and gentlemen, I shall allow myself to refrain. I have too much respect even for any sort of public to allow myself comparisons, however innocent; but I thought..."
"Anyhow, dear sir, you'd better not be so..." someone shouted from the back rows.
"But I supposed that, as I was putting down my pen and saying farewell to the reader, I would be heard..."
"No, no, we want to listen, we do," several voices, emboldened at last, came from the front row.
"Read, read!" several rapturous ladies' voices picked up, and at last some applause broke through, though scant and thin, it's true. Karmazinov smiled wryly and rose from his place.
"Believe me, Karmazinov, everyone even regards it as an honor..." even the marshal's wife could not restrain herself.
"Mr. Karmazinov," a fresh, youthful voice suddenly came from the depths of the hall. It was the voice of a very young teacher from the district high school, an excellent young man, quiet and noble, still a recent arrival in town. He even rose slightly from his place. "Mr. Karmazinov, if I had the good fortune to love as you have described to us, I really wouldn't put anything about my love into an article intended for public reading..."
He even blushed all over...
"Ladies and gentlemen," Karmazinov cried, "I have ended. I omit the ending and I withdraw. But permit me to read just the six concluding lines.
"Yes, friend and reader, farewell!" he began at once from the manuscript and now without sitting down in his chair. "Farewell, reader; I do not even much insist that we should part friends: why, indeed, trouble you? Abuse me even, oh, abuse me as much as you like, if it gives you any pleasure. But it will be best of all if we forget each other forever. And if all of you, readers, should suddenly be so good as to fall on your knees and entreat me with tears: 'Write, oh, write for us, Karmazinov—for the fatherland, for posterity, for the wreaths of laurel—even then I would answer you, having thanked you, of course, with all courtesy: 'Ah, no, we have had enough of bothering each other, my dear compatriots, merci ! It is time we parted ways! Merci, merci, merci. ‘“
Karmazinov bowed ceremoniously and, all red as though he had been boiled, made for backstage.
"Nobody's going down on his knees—a wild fancy."
"What conceit!"
"It's just humor!" someone a bit more sensible corrected.
"No, spare us your humor!"
"This is impudence, anyhow, gentlemen."
"He's finished now, at least."
"What a heap of boredom!"
But all these ignorant exclamations from the back rows (though not only from the back rows) were drowned by the applause of the other part of the public. Karmazinov was called back. Several ladies, Yulia Mikhailovna and the marshal's wife at their head, crowded up to the platform. In Yulia Mikhailovna's hands there appeared a magnificent wreath of laurel, on a white velvet cushion, inside another wreath of live roses.
"Laurels!" Karmazinov said with a subtle and somewhat caustic grin. "I am moved, of course, and accept this wreath, prepared beforehand but as yet unwithered, with lively emotion; but I assure you, mesdames, I have suddenly become so much of a realist that I consider laurels in our age rather more fitting in the hands of a skillful cook than in mine..."
"Except that cooks are more useful," cried that same seminarian who had attended the "meeting" at Virginsky's. The order was somewhat disrupted. People from many rows jumped up to see the ceremony with the laurel wreath.
"I'd add three more roubles for a cook," another voice picked up loudly, even too loudly, insistently loudly.
"So would I."
"So would I."
"But do they really have no buffet here?"
"Gentlemen, it's sheer deception..."
However, it must be admitted that all these unbridled gentlemen were still very afraid of our dignitaries, and also of the police officer who was there in the hall. After about ten minutes everyone settled down again anyhow, but the former order was not restored. And it was into this burgeoning chaos that poor Stepan Trofimovich stepped...
IV
I ran to him backstage one last time, however, and managed to warn him, beside myself as I was, that in my opinion it had all blown up and he had better not come out at all, but go home at once, excusing himself with his cholerine if need be, and that I, too, would tear off my bow and come with him. At this moment he was already heading for the platform, suddenly stopped, haughtily looked me up and down, and solemnly pronounced:
"Why, my dear sir, do you consider me capable of such baseness?"
I stepped back. I was as sure as two times two that he would not get out of there without a catastrophe. As I was standing in utter dejection, there again flashed before me the figure of the visiting professor, whose turn it was to go out after Stepan Trofimovich, and who earlier kept raising his fist and bringing it down with all his might. He was still pacing back and forth in the same way, absorbed in himself and muttering something under his nose with a wily but triumphant smile. Somehow almost without intending to (what on earth possessed me?), I went up to him as well.
"You know," I said, "based on many examples, if a reader keeps the public longer than twenty minutes, they cease to listen. Even a celebrity can't hold out for half an hour..."
He suddenly stopped and even seemed to tremble all over at the offense. A boundless haughtiness showed in his face.
"Don't worry," he muttered contemptuously, and walked by. At that moment came the sound of Stepan Trofimovich's voice in the hall.
"Eh, confound you all!" I thought, and ran to the hall.
Stepan Trofimovich sat down in the chair amid the still lingering disorder. He apparently met with ill-disposed looks from the front rows. (They had somehow stopped liking him in the club of late, and respected him much less than before.) However, it was good enough that they did not hiss. I had had this strange idea ever since yesterday: I kept thinking he would be hissed off at once, as soon as he appeared. Yet he was not even noticed right away, owing to the lingering disorder. And what could the man hope for, if even Karmazinov was treated in such a way? He was pale; it was ten years since he had appeared before the public. By his agitation and by all that I knew only too well in him, it was clear to me that he himself regarded his present appearance on the platform as the deciding of his fate, or something of the sort. That was what I was afraid of. So dear the man was to me. And what I felt when he opened his mouth and I heard his first phrase!
"Ladies and gentlemen!" he said suddenly, as if venturing all, and at the same time in an almost breaking voice. "Ladies and gentlemen! Only this morning there lay before me one of those lawless papers recently distributed here, and for the hundredth time I was asking myself the question: 'What is its mystery?’“
The entire hall instantly became hushed, all eyes turned to him, some in fear. Yes, indeed, he knew how to get their interest from the first word. Heads were even stuck out from backstage; Liputin and Lyamshin listened greedily. Yulia Mikhailovna waved her hand to me again:
"Stop him, at any cost, stop him!" she whispered in alarm. I merely shrugged; how was it possible to stop a man who has ventured all? Alas, I understood Stepan Trofimovich.
"Aha, it's about the tracts!" was whispered among the public; the whole hall stirred.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I have solved the whole mystery. The whole mystery of their effect lies—in their stupidity!" (His eyes began to flash.) "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, were it an intentional stupidity, counterfeited out of calculation—oh, that would even be a stroke of genius! But we must do them full justice: they have not counterfeited anything. This is the shortest, the barest, the most simplehearted stupidity—c'est la bêtise dans son essence la plus pure, quelque chose comme un simple chimique.[cxliv] Were it just a drop more intelligently expressed, everyone would see at once all the poverty of this short stupidity. But now everyone stands perplexed: no one believes it can be so elementally stupid. 'It can't be that there's nothing more to it,' everyone says to himself, and looks for a secret, sees a mystery, tries to read between the lines—the effect is achieved! Oh, never before has stupidity received so grand a reward, though it has so often deserved it... For, en parenthèse, stupidity, like the loftiest genius, is equally useful in the destinies of mankind..."
"Puns from the forties!" came someone's, incidentally quite modest, voice, but after it everything seemed to break loose; there was loud talking and squawking.
"Hurrah, ladies and gentlemen! I propose a toast to stupidity!" Stepan Trofimovich cried, now in a perfect frenzy, defying the hall.
I ran to him as if on the pretext of pouring him some water.
"Stepan Trofimovich, leave off, Yulia Mikhailovna begs..."
"No, you leave off with me, idle young man!" he fell upon me at the top of his voice. I ran away. "Messieurs!" he went on, "why the excitement, why the shouts of indignation that I hear? I have come with an olive branch. I have brought you the last word, for in this matter the last word is mine—and then we shall make peace."
"Away!" shouted some.
"Quiet, let him speak, let him have his say," another part yelled. Especially excited was the young teacher, who, having once dared to speak, seemed no longer able to stop.
"Messieurs, the last word in this matter is all-forgiveness. I, an obsolete old man, I solemnly declare that the spirit of life blows as ever and the life force is not exhausted in the younger generation. The enthusiasm of modern youth is as pure and bright as in our time. Only one thing has happened: the displacing of purposes, the replacing of one beauty by another! The whole perplexity lies in just what is more beautiful: Shakespeare or boots, Raphael or petroleum?"[176]
"Is he an informer?" grumbled some.
"Compromising questions!"
"Agent provocateur!"
"And I proclaim," Stepan Trofimovich shrieked, in the last extremity of passion, "and I proclaim that Shakespeare and Raphael are higher than the emancipation of the serfs, higher than nationality, higher than socialism, higher than the younger generation, higher than chemistry, higher than almost all mankind, for they are already the fruit, the real fruit of all mankind, and maybe the highest fruit there ever may be! A form of beauty already achieved, without the achievement of which I might not even consent to live... Oh, God!" he clasped his hands, "ten years ago I cried out in the same way from a platform in Petersburg, exactly the same things and in the same words, and in exactly the same way they understood nothing, they laughed and hissed, as now; short people, what more do you need in order to understand? And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here! Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty—are you aware of that, you who are laughing?—it would turn into boorishness, you couldn't invent the nail! ... I will not yield!" he cried absurdly in conclusion, and banged his fist on the table with all his might.
But while he was shrieking without sense or order, the order in the hall was also breaking up. Many jumped from their places, some surged forward, closer to the platform. Generally, it all happened much more quickly than I am describing, and there was no time to take measures. Perhaps there was no wish to, either.
"It's fine for you, with everything provided, spoiled brats!" the same seminarian bellowed, right by the platform, gleefully baring his teeth at Stepan Trofimovich. He noticed it and leaped up to the very edge:
"Was it not I, was it not I who just declared that the enthusiasm of the younger generation is as pure and bright as it ever was, and that it is perishing only for being mistaken about the forms of the beautiful? Is that not enough for you? And if you take it that this was proclaimed by a crushed, insulted father, how then—oh, you short ones—how then is it possible to stand higher in impartiality and tranquillity of vision?... Ungrateful... unjust... why, why do you not want to make peace! ..."
And he suddenly burst into hysterical sobs. He wiped away the flood of tears with his fingers. His shoulders and chest were shaking with sobs... He forgot everything in the world.
The public was decidedly seized with fright, almost everyone rose from their places. Yulia Mikhailovna also jumped up quickly, seized her husband's arm, and pulled him from the chair... The scandal was going beyond bounds.
"Stepan Trofimovich!" the seminarian bellowed joyfully. "Here in town and in the vicinity we've now got Fedka the Convict, an escaped convict, wandering around. He robs people, and just recently committed a new murder. Allow me to ask: if you had not sent him to the army fifteen years ago to pay off a debt at cards—that is, if you had not quite simply lost him in a card game—tell me, would he have wound up at hard labor? Would he go around putting a knife in people, as he does now, in his struggle for existence? What have you got to say, mister aesthete?"
I refuse to describe the ensuing scene. First, there was furious applause. Not everyone applauded, only some fifth part of the hall, but they applauded furiously. The rest of the public surged towards the exit, but since the applauding part of the public was still crowding towards the platform, there was general confusion. Ladies cried out, some young girls started weeping and begged to be taken home. Lembke, standing by his seat, kept glancing around wildly and quickly. Yulia Mikhailovna was quite lost—for the first time during her career among us. As for Stepan Trofimovich, for the first moment he was, it seemed, literally crushed by the seminarian's words; but suddenly he raised both arms, as if stretching them out over the public, and screamed:
"I shake off the dust from my feet[177] and curse you... The end... the end..."
And, turning, he ran backstage, waving and threatening with his arms.
"He has insulted society! ... Verkhovensky!" the furious ones bellowed. They even wanted to rush in pursuit of him. To calm them was impossible, at least for the moment, and—suddenly the final catastrophe crashed down like a bomb on the gathering, and exploded in its midst: the third reader, that maniac who kept waving his fist backstage, suddenly ran out on the platform.
He looked utterly mad. With a broad, triumphant smile, full of boundless self-confidence, he gazed around the agitated hall and, it seemed, was glad of the disorder. He was not embarrassed in the least at having to read in such turmoil, on the contrary, he was visibly glad. This was so obvious that it attracted attention at once.
"What on earth is this?" questions were heard, "who on earth is this? Shh! What does he want to say?"
"Ladies and gentlemen!" the maniac shouted with all his might, standing at the very edge of the platform, and in almost the same shrilly feminine voice as Karmazinov, only without the aristocratic lisp. "Ladies and gentlemen! Twenty years ago, on the eve of war with half of Europe, Russia stood as an ideal in the eyes of all state and privy councillors. Literature served in the censorship; the universities taught military drill;[178] the army turned into a ballet, and the people paid taxes and kept silent under the knout of serfdom. Patriotism turned into the gouging of bribes from the living and the dead. Those who did not take bribes were considered rebels, for they disrupted the harmony. Whole birch groves were destroyed to maintain order. Europe trembled... But never, in all the thousand witless years of her life, did Russia reach such disgrace ..."
He raised his fist, waving it ecstatically and menacingly over his head, and suddenly brought it down furiously, as if crushing his adversary to dust. Frenzied yelling came from all sides, deafening applause broke out. This time almost half the hall applauded; they were most innocently carried away: Russia was being dishonored before all eyes, publicly—how could one not roar in ecstasy?
"That's the business! Now we're getting to business! Hurrah! No, this is none of your aesthetics!"
The maniac went on ecstatically:
"Since then twenty years have passed. Universities have been opened and multiplied. Drill has turned into a legend; we're thousands short of the full complement of officers. Railroads have eaten up all the capital and covered Russia like spiderwebs, so that perhaps in another fifteen years or so one may even be able to take a ride somewhere. Bridges burn only rarely, while towns burn down regularly, in established order, by turns, during the fire seasons. In the courts there are judgments of Solomon, and jurors take bribes solely in the struggle for existence, when they're going to die of hunger. The serfs are free and whack each other with birch rods instead of their former landowners. Seas and oceans of vodka are drunk to support the budget, and in Novgorod, opposite the ancient and useless Sophia, a colossal bronze ball has been solemnly erected to commemorate a millennium of already elapsed disorder and witlessness.[179] Europe is frowning and beginning to worry again... Fifteen years of reforms! And yet never, even in the most caricaturish epochs of her witlessness, has Russia reached..."
The last words could not even be heard over the roar of the crowd. He could be seen raising his hand again and once more bringing it down victoriously. The ecstasy went beyond all bounds: people were yelling, clapping their hands, some of the ladies even shouted: "Enough! You couldn't say anything better!" It was like drunkenness. The orator let his eyes wander over them all and was as if melting in his own triumph. I caught a glimpse of Lembke, in inexpressible agitation, pointing something out to someone. Yulia Mikhailovna, all pale, was hurriedly saying something to the prince, who had run up to her... But at that moment a whole crowd of about six more or less official persons rushed out on the platform from backstage, laid hold of the orator, and drew him backstage. I do not understand how he could have torn free of them, but he did tear free, leaped up to the very edge again, and still managed to shout with all his might, waving his fist:
