Short Stories by Chekhov
"Don't talk nonsense, doctor. To hate and despise a microbe is stupid,
but to look upon everybody one meets without distinction as one's
neighbour, whatever happens--thanks very much, that is equivalent to
giving up criticism, renouncing a straightforward attitude to people,
washing one's hands of responsibility, in fact! I consider your Laevsky
a blackguard; I do not conceal it, and I am perfectly conscientious in
treating him as such. Well, you look upon him as your neighbour--and you
may kiss him if you like: you look upon him as your neighbour, and that
means that your attitude to him is the same as to me and to the deacon;
that is no attitude at all. You are equally indifferent to all."
"To call a man a blackguard!" muttered Samoylenko, frowning with
distaste--"that is so wrong that I can't find words for it!"
"People are judged by their actions," Von Koren continued. "Now you
decide, deacon. . . . I am going to talk to you, deacon. Mr. Laevsky's
career lies open before you, like a long Chinese puzzle, and you can
read it from beginning to end. What has he been doing these two years
that he has been living here? We will reckon his doings on our fingers.
First, he has taught the inhabitants of the town to play vint: two years
ago that game was unknown here; now they all play it from morning till
late at night, even the women and the boys. Secondly, he has taught the
residents to drink beer, which was not known here either; the
inhabitants are indebted to him for the knowledge of various sorts of
spirits, so that now they can distinguish Kospelov's vodka from
Smirnov's No. 21, blindfold. Thirdly, in former days, people here made
love to other men's wives in secret, from the same motives as thieves
steal in secret and not openly; adultery was considered something they
were ashamed to make a public display of. Laevsky has come as a pioneer
in that line; he lives with another man's wife openly. . . . Fourthly .
. ."
Von Koren hurriedly ate up his soup and gave his plate to the orderly.
"I understood Laevsky from the first month of our acquaintance," he went
on, addressing the deacon. "We arrived here at the same time. Men like
him are very fond of friendship, intimacy, solidarity, and all the rest
of it, because they always want company for vint, drinking, and eating;
besides, they are talkative and must have listeners. We made
friends--that is, he turned up every day, hindered me working, and
indulged in confidences in regard to his mistress. From the first he
struck me by his exceptional falsity, which simply made me sick. As a
friend I pitched into him, asking him why he drank too much, why he
lived beyond his means and got into debt, why he did nothing and read
nothing, why he had so little culture and so little knowledge; and in
answer to all my questions he used to smile bitterly, sigh, and say: 'I
am a failure, a superfluous man'; or: 'What do you expect, my dear
fellow, from us, the debris of the serf-owning class?' or: 'We are
degenerate. . . .' Or he would begin a long rigmarole about Onyegin,
Petchorin, Byron's Cain, and Bazarov, of whom he would say: 'They are
our fathers in flesh and in spirit.' So we are to understand that it was
not his fault that Government envelopes lay unopened in his office for
weeks together, and that he drank and taught others to drink, but
Onyegin, Petchorin, and Turgenev, who had invented the failure and the
superfluous man, were responsible for it. The cause of his extreme
dissoluteness and unseemliness lies, do you see, not in himself, but
somewhere outside in space. And so--an ingenious idea!--it is not only he
who is dissolute, false, and disgusting, but we . . . 'we men of the
eighties,' 'we the spiritless, nervous offspring of the serf-owning
class'; 'civilisation has crippled us' . . . in fact, we are to
understand that such a great man as Laevsky is great even in his fall:
that his dissoluteness, his lack of culture and of moral purity, is a
phenomenon of natural history, sanctified by inevitability; that the
causes of it are world-wide, elemental; and that we ought to hang up a
lamp before Laevsky, since he is the fated victim of the age, of
influences, of heredity, and so on. All the officials and their ladies
were in ecstasies when they listened to him, and I could not make out
for a long time what sort of man I had to deal with, a cynic or a clever
rogue. Such types as he, on the surface intellectual with a smattering
of education and a great deal of talk about their own nobility, are very
clever in posing as exceptionally complex natures."
"Hold your tongue!" Samoylenko flared up. "I will not allow a splendid
fellow to be spoken ill of in my presence!"
"Don't interrupt, Alexandr Daviditch," said Von Koren coldly; "I am just
finishing. Laevsky is by no means a complex organism. Here is his moral
skeleton: in the morning, slippers, a bathe, and coffee; then till
dinner-time, slippers, a constitutional, and conversation; at two
o'clock slippers, dinner, and wine; at five o'clock a bathe, tea and
wine, then vint and lying; at ten o'clock supper and wine; and after
midnight sleep and la femme. His existence is confined within this
narrow programme like an egg within its shell. Whether he walks or sits,
is angry, writes, rejoices, it may all be reduced to wine, cards,
slippers, and women. Woman plays a fatal, overwhelming part in his life.
He tells us himself that at thirteen he was in love; that when he was a
student in his first year he was living with a lady who had a good
influence over him, and to whom he was indebted for his musical
education. In his second year he bought a prostitute from a brothel and
raised her to his level--that is, took her as his kept mistress, and she
lived with him for six months and then ran away back to the brothel-
keeper, and her flight caused him much spiritual suffering. Alas! his
sufferings were so great that he had to leave the university and spend
two years at home doing nothing. But this was all for the best. At home
he made friends with a widow who advised him to leave the Faculty of
Jurisprudence and go into the Faculty of Arts. And so he did. When he
had taken his degree, he fell passionately in love with his present . .
. what's her name? . . . married lady, and was obliged to flee with her
here to the Caucasus for the sake of his ideals, he would have us
believe, seeing that . . . to-morrow, if not to-day, he will be tired of
her and flee back again to Petersburg, and that, too, will be for the
sake of his ideals."
"How do you know?" growled Samoylenko, looking angrily at the zoologist.
"You had better eat your dinner."
The next course consisted of boiled mullet with Polish sauce. Samoylenko
helped each of his companions to a whole mullet and poured out the sauce
with his own hand. Two minutes passed in silence.
"Woman plays an essential part in the life of every man," said the
deacon. "You can't help that."
"Yes, but to what degree? For each of us woman means mother, sister,
wife, friend. To Laevsky she is everything, and at the same time nothing
but a mistress. She--that is, cohabitation with her-- is the happiness and
object of his life; he is gay, sad, bored, disenchanted--on account of
woman; his life grows disagreeable --woman is to blame; the dawn of a new
life begins to glow, ideals turn up--and again look for the woman. . . .
He only derives enjoyment from books and pictures in which there is
woman. Our age is, to his thinking, poor and inferior to the forties and
the sixties only because we do not know how to abandon ourselves
obviously to the passion and ecstasy of love. These voluptuaries must
have in their brains a special growth of the nature of sarcoma, which
stifles the brain and directs their whole psychology. Watch Laevsky when
he is sitting anywhere in company. You notice: when one raises any
general question in his presence, for instance, about the cell or
instinct, he sits apart, and neither speaks nor listens; he looks
languid and disillusioned; nothing has any interest for him, everything
is vulgar and trivial. But as soon as you speak of male and female--for
instance, of the fact that the female spider, after fertilisation,
devours the male--his eyes glow with curiosity, his face brightens, and
the man revives, in fact. All his thoughts, however noble, lofty, or
neutral they may be, they all have one point of resemblance. You walk
along the street with him and meet a donkey, for instance. . . . 'Tell
me, please,' he asks, 'what would happen if you mated a donkey with a
camel?' And his dreams! Has he told you of his dreams? It is
magnificent! First, he dreams that he is married to the moon, then that
he is summoned before the police and ordered to live with a guitar . .
."
The deacon burst into resounding laughter; Samoylenko frowned and
wrinkled up his face angrily so as not to laugh, but could not restrain
himself, and laughed.
"And it's all nonsense!" he said, wiping his tears. "Yes, by Jove, it's
nonsense!" IV
The deacon was very easily amused, and laughed at every trifle till he
got a stitch in his side, till he was helpless. It seemed as though he
only liked to be in people's company because there was a ridiculous side
to them, and because they might be given ridiculous nicknames. He had
nicknamed Samoylenko "the tarantula," his orderly "the drake," and was
in ecstasies when on one occasion Von Koren spoke of Laevsky and
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna as "Japanese monkeys." He watched people's faces
greedily, listened without blinking, and it could be seen that his eyes
filled with laughter and his face was tense with expectation of the
moment when he could let himself go and burst into laughter.
"He is a corrupt and depraved type," the zoologist continued, while the
deacon kept his eyes riveted on his face, expecting he would say
something funny. "It is not often one can meet with such a nonentity. In
body he is inert, feeble, prematurely old, while in intellect he differs
in no respect from a fat shopkeeper's wife who does nothing but eat,
drink, and sleep on a feather-bed, and who keeps her coachman as a
lover."
The deacon began guffawing again.
"Don't laugh, deacon," said Von Koren. "It grows stupid, at last. I
should not have paid attention to his insignificance," he went on, after
waiting till the deacon had left off laughing; "I should have passed him
by if he were not so noxious and dangerous. His noxiousness lies first
of all in the fact that he has great success with women, and so
threatens to leave descendants--that is, to present the world with a
dozen Laevskys as feeble and as depraved as himself. Secondly, he is in
the highest degree contaminating. I have spoken to you already of vint
and beer. In another year or two he will dominate the whole Caucasian
coast. You know how the mass, especially its middle stratum, believe in
intellectuality, in a university education, in gentlemanly manners, and
in literary language. Whatever filthy thing he did, they would all
believe that it was as it should be, since he is an intellectual man, of
liberal ideas and university education. What is more, he is a failure, a
superfluous man, a neurasthenic, a victim of the age, and that means he
can do anything. He is a charming fellow, a regular good sort, he is so
genuinely indulgent to human weaknesses; he is compliant, accommodating,
easy and not proud; one can drink with him and gossip and talk evil of
people. . . . The masses, always inclined to anthropomorphism in
religion and morals, like best of all the little gods who have the same
weaknesses as themselves. Only think what a wide field he has for
contamination! Besides, he is not a bad actor and is a clever hypocrite,
and knows very well how to twist things round. Only take his little