Demons, p.7
Demons, page 7
The most long-standing member of the circle was Liputin, a provincial official, no longer a young man, a great liberal and known around town as an atheist. He got married for the second time to a young and pretty woman, took her dowry, and had, besides, three adolescent daughters. He kept his whole family in fear of God and under lock and key, was exceedingly stingy, and had set aside a little house and some capital for himself from his service. He was a restless person, and of low rank besides, little respected in town, and not received in higher circles. Moreover, he was an undisguised gossip and had more than once been punished, and punished painfully, for it—once by some officer, and another time by a landowner, the respectable head of a family. But we loved his sharp wit, his inquisitiveness, his peculiar wicked gaiety. Varvara Petrovna did not like him, but somehow he was always able to get in good with her.
She also did not like Shatov, who became a member of the circle only in the last year. Shatov had been a student, but was expelled from the university after some student incident; as a child he had been Stepan Trofimovich's pupil, and he had been born Varvara Petrovna's serf, the son of her late valet Pavel Fyodorov, and had been the object of her benefactions. She disliked him for his pride and ingratitude, and simply could not forgive him for not coming to her at once after he was expelled from the university; on the contrary, he did not even reply to the letter she specially sent him then, and preferred putting himself in bondage to some civilized merchant as teacher of his children. He went abroad with this merchant's family, more as a baby-sitter than as a tutor; but at the time he wanted very much to go abroad. The children had a governess as well, a pert Russian girl who also joined the household just before their departure and was taken mainly for her cheapness. About two months later the merchant threw her out for "free thoughts." Shatov went trudging after her and soon married her in Geneva. They lived together for about three weeks, and then parted as free people not bound by anything; also, of course, because of poverty. For a long time afterwards he wandered around Europe alone, living God knows how; they say he shined shoes in the streets and worked as a stevedore in some port. Finally, about a year ago, he came back to his own nest here and stayed with an old aunt, whom he buried within a month. His communications with his sister Dasha, who was also Varvara Petrovna's ward and lived with her as her favorite on the most noble footing, were very rare and distant. With us he was perpetually glum and taciturn; but occasionally, when his convictions were touched upon, he became morbidly irritated and quite unrestrained in his language. "Shatov should be tied up before you try reasoning with him," Stepan Trofimovich sometimes joked; yet he loved him. Abroad, Shatov had radically changed some of his former socialist convictions and leaped to the opposite extreme. He was one of those ideal Russian beings who can suddenly be so struck by some strong idea that it seems to crush them then and there, sometimes even forever. They are never strong enough to master it, but they are passionate believers, and so their whole life afterwards is spent in some last writhings, as it were, under the stone that has fallen on them and already half crushed them. In appearance Shatov corresponded completely to his convictions: he was clumsy, blond, shaggy, short, with broad shoulders, thick lips, bushy, beetling white eyebrows, a scowling forehead, and unfriendly eyes stubbornly downcast and as if ashamed of something. There was this one lock of his hair that simply refused to lie flat and was eternally sticking up. He was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. "It no longer surprises me that his wife ran away from him," Varvara Petrovna once allowed, after studying him intently. He tried to dress neatly, despite his extreme poverty. He again refused to turn to Varvara Petrovna for help, but got by on whatever God sent him; he also had some doings with shopkeepers. One time he sat in a shop; then he almost left altogether on a trading ship as a salesman's assistant, but fell ill just before the departure. It is hard to imagine what poverty he was able to endure without even giving it a thought. After his illness, Varvara Petrovna secretly and anonymously sent him a hundred roubles. He found out the secret, however, pondered, accepted the money, and went to Varvara Petrovna to thank her. She received him warmly, but here, too, he shamefully deceived her expectations: he sat for only five minutes, silent, staring dully at the floor and smiling stupidly, and suddenly, without letting her finish speaking and at the most interesting point of the conversation, got up, bowed somehow sideways, hulkily, dissolved in shame, incidentally brushed against her expensive inlaid worktable, which went crashing to the floor and broke, and walked out nearly dead from disgrace. Liputin later upbraided him strongly, not only for accepting the hundred roubles instead of rejecting them with contempt as coming from his former despot-landowner, but for dragging himself there to thank her on top of it. He lived solitarily on the outskirts of town, and did not like it when anyone, even one of us, stopped to see him. He regularly came to Stepan Trofimovich's evenings, and borrowed newspapers and books to read from him.
There was yet another young man who used to come to the evenings, a certain Virginsky, a local official, who bore some resemblance to Shatov, though he was also apparently his complete opposite in all respects; but he was a "family man" as well. A pathetic and extremely quiet young man, already about thirty, however, with considerable education, but mainly self-taught. He was poor, married, in the civil service, and supported his wife's sister and an aunt. His spouse and all the ladies were of the latest convictions, but with them it all came out somewhat crudely—here, precisely, was "an idea that ended up in the street," as Stepan Trofimovich put it once on a different occasion. They got everything out of books, and even at the first rumor from our progressive corners in the capital were prepared to throw anything whatsoever out the window, provided they were advised to throw it out. Madame Virginsky practiced the profession of midwife in our town; as a young girl, she had lived for a long time in Petersburg. Virginsky himself was a man of rare purity of heart, and rarely have I encountered a more honest flame of the soul. "Never, never shall I abandon these bright hopes," he used to say to me, his eyes shining.
Of these "bright hopes" he always spoke softly, with sweetness, in a half-whisper, as if secretly. He was quite tall but extremely skinny and narrow-shouldered, and had remarkably thin hair of a reddish hue. He bore meekly all of Stepan Trofimovich's scornful jibes at some of his opinions, and his objections to him were sometimes very serious and in many ways nonplussed him. Stepan Trofimovich treated him benignly, and generally took a fatherly attitude towards us all.
"You are all 'half-baked,’” he observed jokingly to Virginsky, "all your sort; though in you, Virginsky, I have not noticed that nar-row-mind-ed-ness that I met with in Petersburg chez ces séminaristes,[v][22]but still you're 'half-baked.' Shatov would very much prefer to have been fully baked, but he, too, is half-baked."
"And me?" asked Liputin.
"And you are simply the golden mean that will get along anywhere ... in your own fashion."
Liputin was offended.
It was told of Virginsky, unfortunately on quite good grounds, that his wife, after less than a year of lawful wedlock, suddenly announced to him that he was being retired and that she preferred Lebyadkin. This Lebyadkin, who was some sort of transient, later turned out to be a rather suspicious character, and was even not a retired captain at all, as he styled himself. He only knew how to twirl his moustaches, drink, and spout the most uncouth nonsense imaginable. The man quite indelicately moved in with them at once, being glad of another man's bread, ate and slept with them, and finally began treating the master of the house with condescension. It was asserted that when his wife announced his retirement, Virginsky said to her: "My friend, up to now I have only loved you, but now I respect you," but it is hardly possible that such an ancient Roman utterance was actually spoken; on the contrary, they say he wept and sobbed.[23] Once, about two weeks after his retirement, all of them, the whole "family," went to a grove in the countryside to have tea with friends. Virginsky was somehow feverishly merry and took part in the dancing; but suddenly and without any preliminary quarrel he seized the giant Lebyadkin—who was dancing a cancan solo - by the hair with both hands, bent him down, and began dragging him around with shrieks, shouts, and tears. The giant was so frightened that he did not even defend himself and hardly broke silence all the while he was being dragged around; but after the dragging he became offended with all the fervor of a noble man. Virginsky spent the whole night on his knees begging his wife's forgiveness; but forgiveness was not granted, since he still would not consent to go and apologize to Lebyadkin; he was denounced, besides, for paucity of convictions and stupidity—the latter because he knelt while talking with a woman. The captain soon vanished and reappeared in our town only quite recently, with his sister and with new purposes; but more will be said of him later. No wonder the poor "family man" needed our company to ease his heart. Though he never spoke of his domestic affairs with us. Only one time, as we were returning together from Stepan Trofimovich's, did he begin speaking remotely about his situation, but at once, seizing me by the hand, he exclaimed ardently:
"It's nothing; it's just a particular case; in no way, in no way will it hinder the 'common cause'!"
Chance guests used to visit our circle; a little Jew named Lyamshin used to come. Captain Kartuzov used to come. For a while we had a certain inquisitive old man, but he died. Liputin started bringing an exiled Polish priest named Slonzevsky, and for a time we received him on principle, but later we even stopped receiving him.
IX
For a while there was talk of us around town, that our circle was a hotbed of freethinking, depravity, and godlessness; and this rumor has always persisted. Yet what we had was only the most innocent, nice, perfectly Russian, jolly liberal chatter. "Higher liberalism" and the "higher liberal"—that is, a liberal without any aim—are possible only in Russia. Stepan Trofimovich, like any witty man, needed a listener, and, besides, he needed an awareness that he was fulfilling the high duty of the propaganda of ideas. And, finally, one also needs someone to drink champagne with, over the wine exchanging jolly little thoughts of a certain sort about Russia and the "Russian spirit,” about God in general and the "Russian God" in particular; for the hundredth time repeating scandalous Russian anecdotes known to everyone and repeated by everyone. We were not above local gossip either, and here sometimes reached the point of stern and highly moral verdicts. We also fell into general human things, sternly discussed the future destiny of Europe and of mankind, prophesied doctrinarily that after Caesarism France would fall at once to the level of a secondary state, which we were quite sure could come about terribly quickly and easily. For the Pope we had long ago prophesied the role of mere metropolitan in a united Italy, and were quite convinced that this whole thousand-year-old question was, in our age of humaneness, industry, and railroads, but a trifling matter. Indeed, "higher Russian liberalism" has no other way of treating things. Stepan Trofimovich sometimes used to speak about art, and rather well, too, though somewhat abstractly. He sometimes recalled the friends of his youth—all noted persons in the history of our development—recalled them with tenderness and reverence, but somewhat enviously, as it were. If things got too boring, the little Jew Lyamshin (a petty postal clerk), a good hand at the piano, would sit down to play, and in the intermissions would do mimicries of a pig, a thunderstorm, a mother giving birth with the first cry of the baby, and so on and so forth; that was the sole reason for inviting him. If there was too much tippling—and it did happen, though not often—we would grow rapturous, and once even sang the "Marseillaise"[24] in chorus to Lyamshin's accompaniment, though I do not know that it came out very well. The great day of February nineteenth[25] we celebrated with raptures and even began emptying toasts in its honor way ahead of time. That was long, long ago when there was as yet no Shatov and no Virginsky, and Stepan Trofimovich still lived in the same house with Varvara Petrovna. Some time prior to the great day, Stepan Trofimovich took to muttering to himself the well-known though somewhat unnatural verses, written most likely by some former liberal landowner:
Peasants come, they're bringing axes, Something terrible will happen.[26]
I believe it went something like that, I do not remember it literally. Varvara Petrovna overheard it once, shouted "Nonsense! Nonsense!" at him, and angrily walked out. Liputin, who happened to be present, remarked caustically to Stepan Trofimovich:
"What a pity if the former serfs get so joyful as to really cause some unpleasantness for their gentleman landowners."
And he drew his index finger across his throat.
"Cher ami," Stepan Trofimovich remarked to him good-humoredly, "believe me, this" (he repeated the gesture across his throat) "will be of no use whatsoever either to our landowners or to the rest of us in general. Even without heads, we will not be able to arrange anything, though it's our heads that hinder our understanding most of all."
I should note that many among us thought something extraordinary, such as Liputin predicted, would take place on the day of the proclamation, and they were all so-called knowers of the people and the state. It seems Stepan Trofimovich also shared these thoughts, so much so that almost on the eve of the great day he suddenly began asking Varvara Petrovna to let him go abroad; in short, he began to worry. But the great day went by, and more time went by, and the scornful smile again appeared on Stepan Trofimovich's lips. In our presence he gave utterance to several remarkable thoughts on the character of the Russian man in general and of the Russian peasant in particular.
"We, being hasty people, were in too great a hurry with our dear little peasants," he concluded his series of remarkable thoughts. "We brought them into fashion, and for several years in a row the whole literary sector fussed over them as over some newly discovered treasure. We placed laurels upon lousy heads. In all its thousand years, the Russian village has given us only the 'komarinsky.'[27] A remarkable Russian poet, and one not wanting in wit, when he saw the great Rachel[28] on stage for the first time, exclaimed in rapture: 'I'd never trade Rachel for a peasant!' I am prepared to go further: I will trade all Russian peasants for one Rachel. It is time to take a more sober look and stop mixing our lumpish native tar with bouquet de l'impératrice."[29]
Liputin agreed at once, but observed that for the moment it was still necessary to play the hypocrite and praise peasants for the sake of the trend; that even high-society ladies flooded themselves with tears reading Anton the Wretch,[30] and some even wrote from Paris to their managers in Russia that henceforth they were to treat the peasants with all possible humaneness.
And, as if by design, just after the rumors about Anton Petrov,[31] it so happened that in our province, too, and only ten miles from Skvoreshniki, a certain misunderstanding occurred, so that in the heat of the moment troops had to be sent. This time Stepan Trofimovich became so excited that he even frightened us. He shouted in the club that more troops were needed, that they should be summoned by telegraph from another district; he ran to the governor and assured him that he had nothing to do with it, begged that he not be somehow mixed up in the affair by force of habit, and suggested that his statement be communicated at once to the proper quarters in Petersburg. It was good that it all passed quickly and ended in nothing; but at the time I simply marveled at Stepan Trofimovich.
About three years later, as everyone knows, there began to be talk of nationhood, and "public opinion" was born. Stepan Trofimovich had a good laugh.
"My friends," he would instruct us, "if our nationhood has indeed been 'born,' as they assure us nowadays in the newspapers, it is still sitting at school, in some German Peterschule,[32] over a German book, grinding out its eternal German lesson, and its German teacher makes it go on its knees when necessary. All praise to the German teacher; but most likely nothing has happened, and nothing of the sort has been born, and everything is still going on as before, that is, by the grace of God. In my opinion, that should be enough for Russia, pour notre sainte Russie.[vi] Besides, all these panslavisms and nationhoods—it's all too old to be new. Nationhood, if you like, has never appeared among us otherwise than as a gentlemen's clubroom fancy—a Moscow one at that! To be sure, I'm not talking about Igor's time.[33] And, finally, it all comes of idleness. With us everything comes of idleness, even what is fine and good. It all comes of our dear, cultivated, whimsical, gentlemanly idleness. I've been repeating it for thirty thousand years. We are unable to live by our own labor. And what is all this fuss nowadays about some public opinion being 'born'—did it just drop from the sky, suddenly, for no rhyme or reason? Don't they understand that in order to acquire an opinion what is needed first of all is labor, one's own labor, one's own initiative and experience! Nothing can ever be acquired gratis. If we labor, we shall have our own opinion. And since we shall never labor, those who have been working for us all along will have the opinion instead—that is, Europe again, the Germans again, our teachers from two hundred years back. Besides, Russia is too great a misunderstanding for us to resolve ourselves, without the Germans and without labor. For twenty years now I've been ringing the alarm and calling to labor! I've given my life to this call, and—madman—I believed! Now I no longer believe, but I still ring and shall go on ringing to the end, to my grave; I shall pull on the rope until the bells ring for my funeral!"
