Short Stories by Chekhov
indeed, but had neither skill nor practice in the handling of them. And
this lack of practice was so pronounced in his talk that I did not
always grasp his meaning at once.
"I hate those ideas with all my heart!" he said, "I was infected by them
myself in my youth, I have not quite got rid of them even now, and I
tell you--perhaps because I am stupid and such thoughts were not the
right food for my mind--they did me nothing but harm. That's easy to
understand! Thoughts of the aimlessness of life, of the insignificance
and transitoriness of the visible world, Solomon's 'vanity of vanities'
have been, and are to this day, the highest and final stage in the realm
of thought. The thinker reaches that stage and--comes to a halt! There is
nowhere further to go. The activity of the normal brain is completed
with this, and that is natural and in the order of things. Our
misfortune is that we begin thinking at that end. What normal people end
with we begin with. From the first start, as soon as the brain begins
working independently, we mount to the very topmost, final step and
refuse to know anything about the steps below."
"What harm is there in that?" said the student.
"But you must understand that it's abnormal," shouted Ananyev, looking
at him almost wrathfully. "If we find means of mounting to the topmost
step without the help of the lower ones, then the whole long ladder,
that is the whole of life, with its colours, sounds, and thoughts, loses
all meaning for us. That at your age such reflections are harmful and
absurd, you can see from every step of your rational independent life.
Let us suppose you sit down this minute to read Darwin or Shakespeare,
you have scarcely read a page before the poison shows itself; and your
long life, and Shakespeare, and Darwin, seem to you nonsense, absurdity,
because you know you will die, that Shakespeare and Darwin have died
too, that their thoughts have not saved them, nor the earth, nor you,
and that if life is deprived of meaning in that way, all science,
poetry, and exalted thoughts seem only useless diversions, the idle
playthings of grown up people; and you leave off reading at the second
page. Now, let us suppose that people come to you as an intelligent man
and ask your opinion about war, for instance: whether it is desirable,
whether it is morally justifiable or not. In answer to that terrible
question you merely shrug your shoulders and confine yourself to some
commonplace, because for you, with your way of thinking, it makes
absolutely no difference whether hundreds of thousands of people die a
violent death, or a natural one: the results are the same--ashes and
oblivion. You and I are building a railway line. What's the use, one may
ask, of our worrying our heads, inventing, rising above the hackneyed
thing, feeling for the workmen, stealing or not stealing, when we know
that this railway line will turn to dust within two thousand years, and
so on, and so on. . . . You must admit that with such a disastrous way
of looking at things there can be no progress, no science, no art, nor
even thought itself. We fancy that we are cleverer than the crowd, and
than Shakespeare. In reality our thinking leads to nothing because we
have no inclination to go down to the lower steps and there is nowhere
higher to go, so our brain stands at the freezing point--neither up nor
down; I was in bondage to these ideas for six years, and by all that is
holy, I never read a sensible book all that time, did not gain a
ha'porth of wisdom, and did not raise my moral standard an inch. Was not
that disastrous? Moreover, besides being corrupted ourselves, we bring
poison into the lives of those surrounding us. It would be all right if,
with our pessimism, we renounced life, went to live in a cave, or made
haste to die, but, as it is, in obedience to the universal law, we live,
feel, love women, bring up children, construct railways!"
"Our thoughts make no one hot or cold," the student said reluctantly.
"Ah! there you are again!--do stop it! You have not yet had a good sniff
at life. But when you have lived as long as I have you will know a thing
or two! Our theory of life is not so innocent as you suppose. In
practical life, in contact with human beings, it leads to nothing but
horrors and follies. It has been my lot to pass through experiences
which I would not wish a wicked Tatar to endure."
"For instance?" I asked.
"For instance?" repeated the engineer.
He thought a minute, smiled and said:
"For instance, take this example. More correctly, it is not an example,
but a regular drama, with a plot and a dénouement. An excellent lesson!
Ah, what a lesson!"
He poured out wine for himself and us, emptied his glass, stroked his
broad chest with his open hands, and went on, addressing himself more to
me than to the student.
"It was in the year 187--, soon after the war, and when I had just left
the University. I was going to the Caucasus, and on the way stopped for
five days in the seaside town of N. I must tell you that I was born and
grew up in that town, and so there is nothing odd in my thinking N.
extraordinarily snug, cosy, and beautiful, though for a man from
Petersburg or Moscow, life in it would be as dreary and comfortless as
in any Tchuhloma or Kashira. With melancholy I passed by the high school
where I had been a pupil; with melancholy I walked about the very
familiar park, I made a melancholy attempt to get a nearer look at
people I had not seen for a long time--all with the same melancholy.
"Among other things, I drove out one evening to the so-called
Quarantine. It was a small mangy copse in which, at some forgotten time
of plague, there really had been a quarantine station, and which was now
the resort of summer visitors. It was a drive of three miles from the
town along a good soft road. As one drove along one saw on the left the
blue sea, on the right the unending gloomy steppe; there was plenty of
air to breathe, and wide views for the eyes to rest on. The copse itself
lay on the seashore. Dismissing my cabman, I went in at the familiar
gates and first turned along an avenue leading to a little stone summer-
house which I had been fond of in my childhood. In my opinion that
round, heavy summer-house on its clumsy columns, which combined the
romantic charm of an old tomb with the ungainliness of a Sobakevitch,*
was the most poetical nook in the whole town. It stood at the edge above
the cliff, and from it there was a splendid view of the sea.
*A character in Gogol's Dead Souls.--Translator's Note.
"I sat down on the seat, and, bending over the parapet, looked down. A
path ran from the summer-house along the steep, almost overhanging
cliff, between the lumps of clay and tussocks of burdock. Where it
ended, far below on the sandy shore, low waves were languidly foaming
and softly purring. The sea was as majestic, as infinite, and as
forbidding as seven years before when I left the high school and went
from my native town to the capital; in the distance there was a dark
streak of smoke--a steamer was passing--and except for this hardly visible
and motionless streak and the sea-swallows that flitted over the water,
there was nothing to give life to the monotonous view of sea and sky. To
right and left of the summer-house stretched uneven clay cliffs.
"You know that when a man in a melancholy mood is left tête-à-tête
with the sea, or any landscape which seems to him grandiose, there is
always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, a conviction that he
will live and die in obscurity, and he reflectively snatches up a pencil
and hastens to write his name on the first thing that comes handy. And
that, I suppose, is why all convenient solitary nooks like my summer-
house are always scrawled over in pencil or carved with penknives. I
remember as though it were to-day; looking at the parapet I read: 'Ivan
Korolkov, May 16, 1876.' Beside Korolkov some local dreamer had
scribbled freely, adding:
"'He stood on the desolate ocean's strand, While his soul was filled
with imaginings grand.'
And his handwriting was dreamy, limp like wet silk. An individual called
Kross, probably an insignificant, little man, felt his unimportance so
deeply that he gave full licence to his penknife and carved his name in
deep letters an inch high. I took a pencil out of my pocket
mechanically, and I too scribbled on one of the columns. All that is
irrelevant, however. . . You must forgive me--I don't know how to tell a
story briefly.
"I was sad and a little bored. Boredom, the stillness, and the purring
of the sea gradually brought me to the line of thought we have been
discussing. At that period, towards the end of the 'seventies, it had
begun to be fashionable with the public, and later, at the beginning of
the 'eighties, it gradually passed from the general public into
literature, science, and politics. I was no more than twenty-six at the
time, but I knew perfectly well that life was aimless and had no
meaning, that everything was a deception and an illusion, that in its
essential nature and results a life of penal servitude in Sahalin was
not in any way different from a life spent in Nice, that the difference
between the brain of a Kant and the brain of a fly was of no real
significance, that no one in this world is righteous or guilty, that
everything was stuff and nonsense and damn it all! I lived as though I
were doing a favour to some unseen power which compelled me to live, and
to which I seemed to say: 'Look, I don't care a straw for life, but I am
living!' I thought on one definite line, but in all sorts of keys, and
in that respect I was like the subtle gourmand who could prepare a
hundred appetising dishes from nothing but potatoes. There is no doubt
that I was one-sided and even to some extent narrow, but I fancied at
the time that my intellectual horizon had neither beginning nor end, and
that my thought was as boundless as the sea. Well, as far as I can judge
by myself, the philosophy of which we are speaking has something
alluring, narcotic in its nature, like tobacco or morphia. It becomes a
habit, a craving. You take advantage of every minute of solitude to
gloat over thoughts of the aimlessness of life and the darkness of the
grave. While I was sitting in the summer-house, Greek children with long
noses were decorously walking about the avenues. I took advantage of the
occasion and, looking at them, began reflecting in this style:
"'Why are these children born, and what are they living for? Is there
any sort of meaning in their existence? They grow up, without themselves
knowing what for; they will live in this God-forsaken, comfortless hole
for no sort of reason, and then they will die. . . .'
"And I actually felt vexed with those children because they were walking
about decorously and talking with dignity, as though they did not hold
their little colourless lives so cheap and knew what they were living
for. . . . I remember that far away at the end of an avenue three
feminine figures came into sight. Three young ladies, one in a pink
dress, two in white, were walking arm-in-arm, talking and laughing.
Looking after them, I thought:
"'It wouldn't be bad to have an affair with some woman for a couple of
days in this dull place.'
"I recalled by the way that it was three weeks since I had visited my
Petersburg lady, and thought that a passing love affair would come in
very appropriately for me just now. The young lady in white in the
middle was rather younger and better looking than her companions, and
judging by her manners and her laugh, she was a high-school girl in an
upper form. I looked, not without impure thoughts, at her bust, and at
the same time reflected about her: 'She will be trained in music and