The windows of the house in the small glade were wide open. The twitter of birds was audible and the fresh, delicious aroma of flowers entered in. It was here the children gathered, and the miserable farce of the examination began. Doulebov stood up before an ikon on one side of the room, assumed a stately air, and exclaimed:
“Children, rise to prayer.”
The children rose. Doulebov thrust a finger forward towards a dark-eyed boy’s breast and shouted:
“Read, boy!”
The thin, shrill outcry and the movement of the finger towards the child’s breast were so unexpected by the boy that he trembled and gave a choking sound. Some one behind him laughed, another gave an amused chuckle. Doulebova exchanged glances with Kerbakh and shrugged her shoulders; her face expressed horror.
The boy quickly recovered himself and read the prayer.
“Sit down, children,” ordered Doulebov.
The children resumed their places, while the elders seated themselves at a table in the order of their rank—the Vice-Governor and Doulebov in the middle, with the others to their right and left. Doulebova looked round with an anxious, angry expression. At last she said in a bass voice, extraordinarily coarse for a woman:
“Shut the windows. The birds are making a noise, and the wind too; it is impossible to do anything.”
Trirodov looked at her in astonishment. He said quietly to Nadezhda:
“Close the windows. Our guests can’t stand fresh air.”
The windows were shut. The children looked with melancholy tedium at the depressing window-panes.
Writing exercises were given. A little tale was read aloud from a reader brought by Shabalov. Doulebov asked the class to compose it in their own words.
The boys and girls were about to pick up their pens, but Doulebov stopped them and delivered a long and tedious dissertation on how to write the given composition. Then he said:
“Now you can write it.”
The children wrote. It was quiet. The writers handed in their papers to their instructresses. Doulebov and Shabalov looked them over there and then. They tried to find mistakes, but there were few. Then dictation was given.
Doulebova looked morosely the whole while and blinked often. Trirodov tried to enter into conversation with her, but the angry dame answered so haughtily that it was with great difficulty he refrained from smiling, and finally he left the malicious woman to herself.
After the written exercises Trirodov asked the uninvited guests to luncheon.
“It was such a long journey here,” said Doulebov as if he were explaining why he did not refuse the invitation to eat.
The children scattered a short way into the wood, while the elders went into a neighbouring house, where the luncheon was ready. The conversation during luncheon was constrained and captious. The Doulebovs tried all sorts of pinpricks and coarse insinuations; their companions followed suit. Every one tried to outdo the other in saying caustic, spiteful things.
Doulebov looked with simulated horror at Trirodov’s instructresses who happened to be present, and whispered to Kerbakh:
“Their feet are soiled with earth.”
After luncheon they returned to the school. All resumed their former places. Then the oral examination began. Doulebov bent over the roll-call and called out three boys at once. Each of them was questioned first about the Holy Scriptures, and immediately afterwards about the Russian language and arithmetic.
The examiners cavilled at everything. Nothing satisfied Doulebov. He gave questions the answers to which were bound to make evident whether higher feelings were being instilled in the children—of love for the Fatherland, of allegiance to the Tsar, and of devotion to the Orthodox Church. He asked one boy:
“Which country is better, Russia or France?”
The boy thought a while and said:
“I don’t know. It depends upon which place a man is used to—there he is better off.”
Doulebova laughed viperously. Shabalov said in a preceptorial manner:
“The orthodoxmatushka33Russia! Is it possible to compare any kingdom with ours? Have you heard how our native land is called? Holy Russia, Mother Russia, the holy Russian soil. And you are an idiot, blockhead, a little swine. If you don’t like your Fatherland what are you good for?”
The boy flushed. Tiny tears gleamed in his eyes. Doulebov asked:
“Now tell me what is the very best faith in this world.”
The boy fell into thought. Shabalov asked malignantly:
“Can’t you answer even that?”
The boy said:
“When one believes sincerely, then it is the very best faith for him.”
“What a blockhead!” said Shabalov with conviction.
Trirodov looked at him in astonishment. He said quietly:
“The sincerity of religious mood is surely the best indication of a saving faith.”
“We’ll discuss that later,” piped out Doulebov sternly. “This is not a convenient moment.”
“As you like,” said Trirodov with a smile. “It is all the same to me when you discuss it.”
Doulebov, red with agitation, rose from his chair and, going up to Trirodov, said to him:
“It is absolutely necessary that I should have a talk with you.”
“At your service,” said Trirodov, not without some astonishment.
“Please continue,” said Doulebov to Shabalov.
Doulebov and Trirodov went into the next room. Their conversation soon assumed a very sharp character. Doulebov made some savage accusations and said rather vehemently:
“I have heard improper things about your school, but, indeed, the reality exceeds all expectations.”
“What is there precisely improper?” asked Trirodov. “In what way has reality surpassed gossip?”
“I don’t collect gossip,” squealed Doulebov excitedly. “I see with my own eyes. This is not a school but a pornography!”
His voice had already passed into piggish tones. He struck the table with his palm. There was the hard sound of the wedding-ring against the wood. Trirodov said:
“I too have heard that you were a man with self-control. But this is not the first time to-day that I’ve noticed your violent movements.”
Doulebov made an effort to recover himself. He said more quietly:
“It is a revolting pornography!”
“And what do you call pornography?” asked Trirodov.
“Don’t you know?” said Doulebov with a sarcastic smile.
“Yes, I know,” said Trirodov. “In my conception every written lechery and disfigurement of beautiful truth to gratify the low instincts of the man-beast—that is pornography. Your thrice-assured State school—that is the true example of pornography.”
“They walk about naked here!” squealed Doulebov.
Trirodov retorted:
“They will be healthier and cleaner than those children who leave your school.”
Doulebov shouted:
“Even your instructresses walk about naked. You’ve taken on depraved girls as instructresses.”
Trirodov replied calmly:
“That’s a lie!”
The Headmaster said sharply and excitedly:
“Your school—if this awful, impossible establishment can be called a school—will be closed at once. I will make the application to the District to-day.”
Trirodov replied sharply:
“That you can do.”
Soon the visitors left in an ugly frame of mind. Doulebova hissed and waxed indignant the whole way back.
“He’s clearly a dangerous man,” observed Kerbakh.
Piotr and Rameyev arrived at Trirodov’s together. Rameyev more than once said to Piotr that he had been very rude to Trirodov, and that he ought to smooth out matters somehow. Piotr agreed very unwillingly.
Once more they talked about the war.34Trirodov asked Rameyev:
“I think you see only a political significance in this war.”
“And do you disagree with me?” asked Rameyev.
“No,” said Trirodov, “I admit that. But, in my opinion, aside from the stupid and criminal actions of these or other individuals, there are more general causes. History has its own dialectic. Whether or not a war had taken place is all the same: there would have been a fated collision in any case, in one or another form; there would have begun the decisive struggle between two worlds, two comprehensions of the world, two moralities, Buddha and Christ.”
“The teachings of Buddhism resemble those of Christianity considerably,” said Piotr. “That is its only value.”
“Yes,” said Trirodov. “There appears to be a great resemblance at the first glance; but actually these two systems are as opposite as the poles. They are the affirmation and the denial of life, its Yes and its No, its irony and its lyricism. The affirmation, Yes, is Christianity; the denial, No, is Buddhism.”
“That seems to me to be too much of a generalization,” said Rameyev.
Trirodov continued:
“I generalize for the sake of clearness. The present moment in history is especially convenient. It is history’s zenith hour. Now that Christianity has revealed the eternal contradiction of the world, we are passing through the poignant struggle of those two world conceptions.”
“And not the struggle of the classes?” asked Rameyev.
“Yes,” said Trirodov, “there is also the struggle of the classes, to whatever degree two inimical factors enter into the struggle—social justice and the real relation of forces—a common morality, which is always static, and a common dynamism. The Christian element is in morality, the Buddhistic in dynamism. Indeed, the weakness of Europe consists in that its life has already for a long time nourished itself on a substance Buddhistic in origin.”
Piotr said confidently, in the voice of a young prophet:
“In this duel Christianity will triumph—not the historic Christianity, of course, and not the present, but the Christianity of St. John and the Apocalypse. And it will triumph only then when everything will appear lost, and the world will be in the power of the yellow Antichrist.”
“I don’t think that will happen,” said Trirodov quietly.
“I suppose you think Buddha will triumph,” said Piotr in vexation.
“No,” replied Trirodov calmly.
“The devil, perhaps!” exclaimed Piotr.
“Petya!” exclaimed Rameyev reproachfully.
Trirodov lowered his head slightly, as if he were confused, and said tranquilly:
“We see two currents, equally powerful. It would be strange that either one of them should conquer. That is impossible. It is impossible to destroy half of the whole historical energy.”
“However,” said Piotr, “if neither Christ nor Buddha conquers, what awaits us? Or is that fool Guyau right when he speaks of the irreligiousness of future generations?"35
“There will be a synthesis,” replied Trirodov. “You will accept it for the devil.”
“This contradictory mixture is worse than forty devils!” exclaimed Piotr.
The visitors soon left.
Kirsha came without being called—confused and agitated by an indefinable something. He was silent, and his dark eyes flamed with sadness and fear. He walked up to the window, looked out in an attitude of expectancy. He seemed to see something in the distance. There was a look of apprehension in his dark, wide-open eyes, as if they were fixed on a strange distant vision. Thus people look during a hallucination.
Kirsha turned to his father and, growing pale, said quietly:
“Father, a visitor has come to you from quite afar. How strange that he has come in a simple carriage and in ordinary clothes! I wonder why he has come?”
They could hear the crunching sound of the sand under the iron hoops of the wheels of the calash which had just entered the gates. Kirsha’s face wore a gloomy expression. It was difficult to comprehend what was in his soul—was it a reproach?—astonishment?—fear?
Trirodov went to the window. A man of about forty, impressive for his appearance of calm and self-assurance, stepped out of the calash. Trirodov recognized his visitor at the first glance, though he had never met him before in society. He knew him well, but only from portraits he had seen of him, from his literary works, and from the stories of his admirers and articles about him. In his youth Trirodov had had some slight relations with him through friends, but this was interrupted. He had not even met him.
Trirodov suddenly felt both cheerful and sad. He reflected:
“Why has he come to me? What does he want of me? And why should he suddenly think of me? Our roads have diverged so much, we have become such strangers to one another.”
There was his disturbing curiosity:
“I’ll see and hear him for the first time.”
And the mutinous protest:
“His words are a lie! His preachings the ravings of despair. There was no miracle, there is none, and there will not be!”
Kirsha, very agitated, ran out of the room. The sensitive and painful feeling of aloneness seized Trirodov as in a sticky net, entangled his legs, and obstructed his glances with grey.
A quiet boy entered, smiling, and handed him a card, on which, under a princely crown, was the lithographed inscription:
Immanuel Osipovitch Davidov.36
In a voice dark and deep with suppressed excitement Trirodov said to the boy:
“Ask him to come in.”
The provoking and unanswerable question persisted in his mind:
“Why, why has he come? What does he want of me?”
With an avidly curious glance he looked at the door, and did not take his eyes away. He heard the measured, unhastening footsteps, nearer and nearer—as if his fate were approaching.
The door opened, admitting the visitor—Prince Immanuel Osipovitch Davidov, celebrated as author and preacher, a man of a distinguished family and democratic views, a man beloved of many and possessed of the mystery of extraordinary fascination, attracting to him many hearts.
His face was very smooth, quite un-Russian in type. His lips, slightly descending at the corners, were marked with sorrow. His beard was reddish, short, and cut to a point. His red-gold, slightly wavy hair was cut quite short. This astonished Trirodov, who had always seen the Prince in portraits wearing his hair rather long, like the poet Nadson. His eyes were black, flaming and deep. Deeply hidden in his eyes was an expression of great weariness and suffering, which the inattentive observer might have interpreted as an expression of fatigued tranquillity and indifference. Everything about the visitor—his face and his ways—betrayed his habit of speaking in a large company, even in a crowd.
He walked up tranquilly to Trirodov and said, as he stretched out his hand:
“I wanted to see you. I have observed you for some time, and at last have come to you.”
Trirodov, making an effort to control his agitation and his deep irritation, said with an affectedly amiable voice:
“I’m very pleased to greet you in my house. I’ve heard much about you from the Pirozhkovskys. Of course you know that they have a great admiration and affection for you.”
Prince Davidov looked at him piercingly but calmly, perhaps too calmly. It seemed strange that he answered nothing to the remark about the Pirozhkovskys—as if Trirodov’s words passed by him like momentary shadows, without so much as touching anything in his soul. On the other hand, the Pirozhkovskys have always talked about Prince Davidov as of an intimate acquaintance. “Yesterday we dined at the Prince’s”; “The Prince is finishing a new poem”—by simply “the Prince” they gave one to understand that their remark concerned their friend, Prince Davidov. Trirodov recalled that the Prince had many acquaintances, and that there were always large gatherings in his house.
“Permit me to offer you some refreshment,” said Trirodov. “Will you have wine?”
“I’d rather have tea, if you don’t mind,” said Prince Davidov.
Trirodov pressed the button of the electric bell. Prince Davidov continued in his tranquil, too tranquil, voice:
“My fiancée lives in this town. I’ve come to see her, and have taken advantage of this opportunity to have a chat with you. There are many things I should like to discuss with you but I shall not have the time. We must limit ourselves to the more important matters.”
And he began to talk, and did not wait for answers or refutations. His flaming speech poured itself out—about faith, miracles, about the likely and inevitable transfiguration of the world by means of a miracle, about our triumph over the fetters of time and over death itself.
The quiet boy Grisha brought tea and cakes, and with measured movements put them on the table, pausing now and then to look at the visitor with his blue, quiet eyes.
Prince Davidov looked reproachfully at Trirodov. A repressed smile trembled on Trirodov’s lips and an obstinate challenge gleamed in his eyes. The visitor affectionately drew Grisha to him and stroked him gently. The quiet boy stood calmly there—and Trirodov was gloomy. He said to his visitor: “You love children. I can understand that. They are angelic beings, though unbearable sometimes. It is only a pity that they die too often upon this accursed earth. They are born in order to die.”
Prince Davidov, with a tranquil movement, pushed Grisha away from him. He put his hand on the boy’s head as if in blessing, then suddenly became grave and stern, and asked quietly:
“Why do you do this?”
He asked the question with a great exertion of the will, like one who wished to exercise power. Trirodov smiled:
“You do not like it?” he asked. “Well, what of it—you with your extensive connexions could easily hinder me.”
The tone in which he uttered his words expressed proud irony. Thus Satan would have spoken, tempting a famished one in the desert.
Prince Davidov frowned. His black eyes flared up. He asked again:
“Why have you done all this? The body of the malefactor and the soul of an innocent—why should you have it all?”
Trirodov, looking angrily at his visitor, said resolutely:
“My design has been daring and difficult—but have I alone suffered from despondency, suffered until I perspired with blood? Do I alone bear within me a dual soul, and unite in me two worlds? Am I alone worn out by nightmares as heavy as the burdens of the world? Have I alone in a tragic moment felt myself lonely and forsaken?”
The visitor smiled a strange, sad, tranquil smile. Trirodov continued:
“You had better know that I will never be with you, that I will not accept your comforting theories. All your literary and preaching activity is a complete mistake. I don’t believe anything of what you say so eloquently, enticing the weak. I simply don’t believe it.”
The visitor was silent.
“Leave me alone!” said Trirodov decisively. “There is no miracle. There was no resurrection. No one has conquered death. The establishment of a single will over the inert, amorphous world is a deed not yet accomplished.”
Prince Davidov rose and said sorrowfully:
“I will leave you alone, if you wish it. But you will regret that you have rejected the path I have shown you—the only path.”
Trirodov said proudly:
“I know the true path—my path.”
“Good-bye,” said Prince Davidov simply and calmly.
He left—and in a little while it seemed that he had not been there. Lost in painful reflections, Trirodov did not hear the noise of the departing carriage; the unexpected call of the dark-faced, fascinating visitor, with his flaming speech and his fiery eyes, stirred his memory like a midday dream, like an abrupt hallucination.
“Who is his fiancée, and why is she here?” Trirodov asked himself.
A strange, impossible idea came into his head. Did not Elisaveta once speak about him with rapture? Perhaps the unexpected visitor would take Elisaveta away from him, as he had taken her from Piotr.
This misgiving tormented him. But Trirodov looked into the clearness of her eyes on the portrait taken recently and at the grace and loveliness of her body and suddenly consoled himself. He thought:
“She is mine.”
But Elisaveta, musing and burning, was experiencing passionate dreams; and she felt the tediousness of the grey monotony of her dull life. The strange vision suddenly appearing to her in those terrible moments in the wood repeated itself persistently—and it seemed to her that it was not another but she herself who was experiencing a parallel life, that she was passing the exultantly bright, joyous, and sad way of Queen Ortruda.
1 (return)[ Also the scene of Sologub’s “Little Demon.”]
2 (return)[ Footpath of the dead.]
3 (return)[ This word, which is the Russian equivalent forHamof the Bible, describes a man in a state of serfdom. Since the abolition of serfdom in Russia, it has come to define the plebeian; and is a sort of personification of the rabble. The satirist Stchedrin has definedKhamas “one who eats with a knife and takes milk with his after-dinner coffee.” Merezhkovsky has written a book on Gorky under the title of “The Future Kham.”—Translator.]
4 (return)[ Bossiak literally means “a barefooted one,” but may be more freely translated a “tramp.” This type has come very much into vogue since Gorky has put him into his stories.—Translator.]
5 (return)[ This phrase signifies punishment inflicted by the authorities without a trial.]
6 (return)[ The name by which the members of the Constitutional Democratic Party are known. It is a development of the initials “C. D.”]
7 (return)[Reference to the identity of the Black Hundred.]
8 (return)[ See note on page 44.]
9 (return)[ The Black Hundred.]
10 (return)[ Betty.]
11 (return)[ Nickname for Social Democrats.]
12 (return)[ Nickname for Social Revolutionaries.]
13 (return)[ A political party of moderate liberals which owes its name to the fact that on October 17, 1905, the Russian Constitution was established and the Duma organized.]
14 (return)[ Member of the Social Democratic Party.]
15 (return)[ See note on page 26.]
16 (return)[ See note on page 44.]
17 (return)[ Whips.]
18 (return)[ Members of the Social Revolutionary Party are supposed to wear black shirts, those of the Social Democratic Party red.]
19 (return)[ Forest fires are one of the numerous problems of Russia. They seem to be difficult to put out, and sometimes go on for weeks. Hence the numerous references in the following pages to the constant odour of forest flames.]
20 (return)[ These two Greek Fates are important and recurring symbols in Sologub’s philosophy. The world of Aisa is the world of chaos and chance, in which man is too often lost in trying to emerge from it. The people who belong to Ananke are those who, acting of necessity, define their world clearly and conquer chaos. Theirs is the immutable truth. See also Introduction.]
21 (return)[ A line from a poem by Pushkin.]
22 (return)[ Siberian island famous for its prison.]
23 (return)[ Usually brought along as witnesses.]
24 (return)[ I have it on the authority of one who was of the party that it actually took place at the house of a celebrated living poet in St. Petersburg. The lost cap belonged to Dmitry Merezhkovsky, who immediately wrote a much-discussed article in an important newspaper under the title of “What has become of our Cap?” The above is an actual quotation from it. The sarcastic remark about “throwing back the enemy” is aimed at those “patriots” who used to say that all Russians had to do to repel foreign enemies was to throw their caps at them.—Translator.]
25 (return)[ The second of the novels under the general head of “The Created Legend” deals with the previous existence of Elisaveta when she was the Queen Ortruda of the United Isles in the Mediterranean, and her consort was Prince Tancred, now Trirodov. She died from suffocation in a volcanic eruption, after a vain effort to help her people. The author draws a curious parallel, not only with regard to these two characters, but has also a revolution as the background; it is a rather veiled effort to describe over again the events which took place in Russia in 1905.—Translator.]
26 (return)[ Unleavened bread of the Passover.]
27 (return)[ In a poem in prose which serves as an introduction to his Complete Works, Sologub says: “Born not the first time, and not the first to complete a circle of external transformations, I simply and calmly reveal my soul. I reveal it in the hopethat the intimate part of me shall become the universal.”—Translator.]
28 (return)[ Readers of “The Little Demon” will have no trouble in recognizing in Ardalyon Borisovitch an old acquaintance—Peredonov.]
29 (return)[ Diminutive for father, and used in the sense of “my good fellow,” etc.]
30 (return)[ “Golubushka” is “little dove.” English equivalent as used here: “my dear.”]
31 (return)[ Title of standard didactic work by Karamzin (1766-1826).]
32 (return)[ Mikhail Katkov (1820-1887), a celebrated reactionary and Slavophil.]
33 (return)[ Little Mother.]
34 (return)[ The Russo-Japanese War.]
35 (return)[ A reference to J. M. Guyau’s book, “Non-Religion of the Future.”]
36 (return)[ There is an evident effort here to identify “Immanuel Osipovitch Davidov” as a modern symbol of Christ, or more properly of Christ’s teachings, “Osipovitch” means the “son of Joseph”; “Davidov,” “of David,”—Translator.]