Fyodor Sologub : Four Stories

Light and shadows

I

Volodya Lovlev, a pale meagre lad of twelve, had returned home from school and was waiting for his dinner. He was standing in the drawing-room at the piano, and was turning over the pages of the latest number of the Niva which had come only that morning.

A leaflet of thin grey paper fell out; it was an announcement issued by an illustrated journal. It enumerated the future contributors—the list contained about fifty well-known literary names; it praised at some length the journal as a whole and in detail its many-sidedness, and it presented several specimen illustrations.

Volodya began to turn the pages of the leaflet in an absent way and to look at the miniature pictures. His large eyes, looked wearily out of his pale face.

One page suddenly caught his attention, and his wide eyes opened slightly wider. Running from top to bottom were six drawings of hands throwing shadows in dark silhouette upon a white wall—the shadows representing the head of a girl with an amusing three-cornered hat, the head of a donkey, of a bull, the sitting figure of a squirrel, and other similar things.

Volodya smiled and looked very intently at them. He was quite familiar with this amusement. He could hold the fingers of one hand so as to cast a silhouette of a hare’s head on the wall. But this was quite another matter, something that Volodya had not seen before; its interest for him was that here were quite complex figures cast by using both hands.

Volodya suddenly wished to reproduce these shadows. Of course there was no use trying now, in the uncertain light of a late autumn afternoon.

He had better try it later in his own room. In any case, it was of no use to any one.

Just then he heard the approaching footsteps and voice of his mother. He flushed for some reason or other and quickly put the leaflet into his pocket, and left the piano to meet her. She looked at him with a caressing smile as she came toward him; her pale, handsome face greatly resembled his, and she had the same large eyes.

She asked him, as she always did: “Well, what’s the news to-day?”

“There’s nothing new,” said Volodya dejectedly.

But it occurred to him at once that he was being ungracious, and he felt ashamed. He smiled genially and began to recall what had happened at school; but this only made him feel sadder.

“Pruzhinin has again distinguished himself,” and he began to tell about the teacher who was disliked by his pupils for his rudeness. “Lentyev was reciting his lesson and made a mess of it, and so Pruzhinin said to him: ‘Well, that’s enough; sit down, blockhead!’”

“Nothing escapes you,” said his mother, smiling.

“He’s always rude.”

After a brief silence Volodya sighed, then complained: “They are always in a hurry.”

“Who?” asked his mother.

“I mean the masters. Every one is anxious to finish his course quickly and to make a good show at the examination. And if you ask a question you are immediately suspected of trying to take up the time until the bell rings, and to avoid having questions put to you.”

“Do you talk much after the lessons?”

“Well, yes—but there’s the same hurry after the lessons to get home, or to study the lessons in the girls’ class-rooms. And everything is done in a hurry—you are no sooner done with the geometry than you must study your Greek.”

“That’s to keep you from yawning.”

“Yawning! I’m more like a squirrel going round on its cage-wheel. It’s exasperating.”

His mother smiled lightly.

II

After dinner Volodya went to his room to prepare his lessons. His mother saw that the room was comfortable, that nothing was lacking in it. No one ever disturbed Volodya here; even his mother refrained from coming in at this time. She would come in later, to help Volodya if he needed help.

Volodya was an industrious and even a clever pupil. But he found it difficult to-day to apply himself. No matter what lesson he tried he could not help remembering something unpleasant; he would recall the teacher of each particular subject, his sarcastic or rude remark, which propped in passings had entered in the impressionable boy’s mind.

Several of his recent lessons happened to turn out poorly; the teachers appeared dissatisfied, and they grumbled incessantly. Their mood communicated itself to Volodya, and his books and copy-books inspired him at this moment with a deep confusion and unrest.

He passed hastily from the first lesson to the second and to the third; this bother with trifles for the sake of not appearing “a blockhead” the next day seemed to him both silly and unnecessary. The thought perturbed him. He began to yawn from tedium and from sadness, and to dangle his feet impatiently; he simply could not sit still.

But he knew too well that the lessons must be learnt, that this was very important, that his future depended upon it; and so he went on conscientiously with the tedious business.

Volodya made a blot on the copy-book, and he put his pen aside. He looked at the blot, and decided that it could be erased with a penknife. He was glad of the distraction.

Not finding the penknife on the table he put his hand into his pocket and rummaged there. Among all such rubbish as is to be found in a boy’s pocket he felt his penknife and pulled it out, together with some sort of leaflet.

He did not see at first what the paper was he held in his hands, but on looking at it he suddenly remembered that this was the little book with the shadows, and quite as suddenly he grew cheerful and animated.

And there it was—that same little leaflet which he had forgotten when he began his lessons.

He jumped briskly off his chair, moved the lamp nearer the wall, looked cautiously at the closed door—as though afraid of some one entering—and, turning the leaflet to the familiar page, began to study the first drawing with great intentness, and to arrange his fingers according to directions. The first shadow came out as a confused shape, not at all what it should have been. Volodya moved the lamp, now here, now there; he bent and he stretched his fingers; and he was at last rewarded by seeing a woman’s head with a three-cornered hat.

Volodya grew cheerful. He inclined his hand somewhat and moved his fingers very slightly—the head bowed, smiled, and grimaced amusingly.

Volodya proceeded with the second figure, then with the others. All were hard at the beginning, but he managed them somehow in the end.

He spent a half-hour in this occupation, and forgot all about his lessons, the school, and the whole world.

Suddenly he heard familiar footsteps behind the door. Volodya flushed; he stuffed the leaflet into his pocket and quickly moved the lamp to its place, almost overturning it; then he sat down and bent over his copy-book. His mother entered.

“Let’s go and have tea, Volodenka,” she said to him.

Volodya pretended that he was looking at the blot and that he was about to open his penknife. His mother gently put her hands on his head. Volodya threw the knife aside and pressed his flushing face against his mother. Evidently she noticed nothing, and this made Volodya glad. Still, he felt ashamed, as though he had actually been caught at some stupid prank.

III

The samovar stood upon the round table in the dining-room and quietly hummed its garrulous song. The hanging-lamp diffused its light upon the white tablecloth and upon the dark walls, filling the room with dream and mystery.

Volodya’s mother seemed wistful as she leant her handsome, pale face forward over the table. Volodya was leaning on his arm, and was stirring the small spoon in his glass. It was good to watch the tea’s sweet eddies and to see the little bubbles rise to the surface. The little silver spoon quietly tinkled.

The boiling water, sputtering, ran from the tap into his mother’s cup.

A light shadow was cast by the little spoon upon the saucer and the tablecloth, and it lost itself in the glass of tea. Volodya watched it intently: the shadows thrown by the tiny little eddies and bubbles recalled something to him—precisely what, Volodya could not say. He held up and he turned the little spoon, and he ran his fingers over it—but nothing came of it.

“All the same,” he stubbornly insisted to himself, “it’s not with fingers alone that shadows can be made. They are possible with anything. But the thing is to adjust oneself to one’s material.”

And Volodya began to examine the shadows of the samovar, of the chairs, of his mother’s head, as well as the shadows cast on the table by the dishes; and he tried to catch a resemblance in all these shadows to something. His mother was speaking—Volodya was not listening properly.

“How is Lesha Sitnikov getting on at school?” asked his mother.

Volodya was studying then the shadow of the milk-jug. He gave a start, and answered hastily: “It’s a tom-cat.”

“Volodya, you must be asleep,” said his astonished mother. “What tom-cat?”

Volodya grew red.

“I don’t know what’s got into my head,” he said. “I’m sorry, mother, I wasn’t listening.”

IV

The next evening, before tea, Volodya again thought of his shadows, and gave himself up to them. One shadow insisted on turning out badly, no matter how hard he stretched and bent his fingers.

Volodya was so absorbed in this that he did not hear his mother coming. At the creaking of the door he quickly put the leaflet into his pocket and turned away, confused, from the wall. But his mother was already looking at his hands, and a tremor of fear lit up her eyes.

“What are you doing, Volodya? What have you hidden?”

“Nothing, really,” muttered Volodya, flushing and changing colour rapidly.

It flashed upon her that Volodya wished to smoke, and that he had hidden a cigarette.

“Volodya, show me at once what you are hiding,” she said in a frightened voice.

“Really, mamma....”

She caught Volodya by the elbow.

“Must I feel in your pocket myself?”

Volodya grew even redder, and pulled the little book out of his pocket.

“Here it is,” he said, giving it to his mother.

“Well, what is it?”

“Well, here,” he explained, “on this side are the drawings, and here, as you see, are the shadows. I was trying to throw them on the wall, and I haven’t succeeded very well.”

“What is there to hide here!” said his mother, becoming more tranquil. “Now show me what they look like.”

Volodya, taken aback, began obediently to show his mother the shadows.

“Now this is the profile of a bald-headed man. And this is the head of a hare.”

“And so this is how you are studying your lessons!”

“Only for a little, mother.”

“For a little! Why are you blushing then, my dear? Well, I shan’t say anything more. I think I can depend on you to do what is right.”

His mother moved her hand over his short, bristling hair, whereupon Volodya laughed and hid his flushing face under his mother’s elbow.

Then his mother left him, and for a long time Volodya felt awkward and ashamed. His mother had caught him doing something that he himself would have ridiculed had he caught any of his companions doing it.

Volodya knew that he was a clever lad, and he deemed himself serious; and this was, after all, a game fit only for little girls when they got together.

He pushed the little book with the shadows deeper into the table-drawer, and did not take it out again for more than a week; indeed, he thought little about the shadows that week. Only in the evening sometimes, in changing from one lesson to another, he would smile at the recollection of the girl in the hat—there were, indeed, moments when he put his hand in the drawer to get the little book, but he always quickly remembered the shame he experienced when his mother first found him out, and this made him resume his work at once.

V

Volodya and his mother lived in their own house on the outskirts of the district town. Eugenia Stepanovna had been a widow for nine years. She was now thirty-five years old; she seemed young and handsome, and Volodya loved her tenderly. She lived entirely for her son, studied ancient languages for his sake, and shared all his school cares. A quiet and gentle woman, she looked somewhat apprehensively upon the world out of her large, benign eyes.

They had one domestic. Praskovya was a widow; she was gruff, sturdy, and strong; she was forty-five years old, but in her stern taciturnity she was more like a woman a hundred years old.

Whenever Volodya looked at her morose, stony face he wondered what she was thinking of in her kitchen during the long winter evenings, as the cold knitting-needles, clinking, shifted in her bony fingers with a regular movement, and her dry lips stirred yet uttered no sound. Was she recalling her drunken husband, or her children who had died earlier? or was she musing upon her lonely and homeless old age?

Her stony face seemed hopelessly gloomy and austere.

VI

It was a long autumn evening. On the other side of the wall were the wind and the rain.

How wearily, how indifferently the lamp flared! Volodya, propping himself up on his elbow, leant his whole body over to the left and looked at the white wall and at the white window-blinds.

The pale flowers were almost invisible on the wall-paper ... the wall was a melancholy white....

The shaded lamp subdued the bright glare of light. The entire upper portion of the room was twilit.

Volodya lifted his right arm. A long, faintly outlined, confused shadow crept across the shaded wall.

It was the shadow of an angel, flying heaven-ward from a depraved and afflicted world; it was a translucent shadow, spreading its broad wings and reposing its bowed head sadly upon its breast.

Would not the angel, with his gentle hands, carry away with him something significant yet despised of this world?

Volodya sighed. He let his arm fall languidly. He let his depressed eyes rest on his books.

It was a long autumn evening.... The wall was a melancholy white.... On the other side of the wall something wept and rustled.

VII

Volodya’s mother found him a second time with the shadows.

This time the bull’s head was a success, and he was delighted. He made the bull stretch out his neck, and the bull lowed.

His mother was less pleased.

“So this is how you are taking up your time,” she said reproachfully.

“For a little, mamma,” whispered Volodya, embarrassed.

“You might at least save this for a more suitable time,” his mother went on. “And you are no longer a little boy. Aren’t you ashamed to waste your time on such nonsense!”

“Mamma, dear, I shan’t do it again.”

But Volodya found it difficult to keep his promise. He enjoyed making shadows, and the desire to make them came to him often, especially during an uninteresting lesson.

This amusement occupied much of his time on some evenings and interfered with his lessons. He had to make up for it afterwards and to lose some sleep. How could he give up his amusement?

Volodya succeeded in evolving several new figures, and not by means of the fingers alone. These figures lived on the wall, and it even seemed to Volodya at times that they talked to him and entertained him.

But Volodya was a dreamer even before then.

VIII

It was night. Volodya’s room was dark. He had gone to bed but he could not sleep. He was lying on his back and was looking at the ceiling.

Some one was walking in the street with a lantern. His shadow traversed the ceiling, among the red spots of light thrown by the lantern. It was evident that the lantern swung in the hands of the passer-by—the shadow wavered and seemed agitated.

Volodya felt a sadness and a fear. He quickly pulled the bed-cover over his head, and, trembling in his haste, he turned on his right side and began to encourage himself.

He then felt soothed and warm. His mind began to weave sweet, naïve fancies, the fancies which visited him usually before sleep.

Often when he went to bed he felt suddenly afraid; he felt as though he were becoming smaller and weaker. He would then hide among the pillows, and gradually became soothed and loving, and wished his mother were there that he might put his arms round her neck and kiss her.

IX

The grey twilight was growing denser. The shadows merged. Volodya felt depressed. But here was the lamp. The light poured itself on the green tablecloth, the vague, beloved shadows appeared on the wall.

Volodya suddenly felt glad and animated, and made haste to get the little grey book. The bull began to low ... the young lady to laugh uproariously.... What evil, round eyes the bald-headed gentleman was making!

Then he tried his own. It was the steppe. Here was a wayfarer with his knapsack. Volodya seemed to hear the endless, monotonous song of the road....

Volodya felt both joy and sadness.

X

“Volodya, it’s the third time I’ve seen you with the little book. Do you spend whole evenings admiring your fingers?”

Volodya stood uneasily at the table, like a truant caught, and he turned the pages of the leaflet with hot fingers.

“Give it to me,” said his mother.

Volodya, confused, put out his hand with the leaflet. His mother took it, said nothing, and went out; while Volodya sat down over his copy-books.

He felt ashamed that, by his stubbornness, he had offended his mother, and he felt vexed that she had taken the booklet from him; he was even more vexed at himself for letting the matter go so far. He felt his awkward position, and his vexation with his mother troubled him: he had scruples in being angry with her, yet he couldn’t help it. And because he had scruples he felt even more angry.

“Well, let her take it,” he said to himself at last, “I can get along without it.”

And, in truth, Volodya had the figures in his memory, and used the little book merely for verification.

XI

In the meantime his mother opened the little book with the shadows—and became lost in thought.

“I wonder what’s fascinating about them?” she mused. “It is strange that such a good, clever boy should suddenly, become wrapped up in such nonsense! No, that means it’s not mere nonsense. What, then, is it?” she pursued her questioning of herself.

A strange fear took possession of her; she felt malignant toward these black pictures, yet quailed before them.

She rose and lighted a candle. She approached the wall, the little grey book still in her hand, and paused in her wavering agitation.

“Yes, it is important to get to the bottom of this,” she resolved, and began to reproduce the shadows from the first to the last.

She persisted most patiently with her hands and her fingers, until she succeeded in reproducing the figure she desired. A confused, apprehensive feelings stirred within her. She tried to conquer it. But her fear fascinated her as it grew stronger. Her hands trembled, while her thought, cowed by life’s twilight, ran on to meet the approaching sorrows.

She suddenly heard her son’s footsteps. She trembled, hid the little book, and blew out the candle.

Volodya entered and stopped in the doorway, confused by the stern look of his mother as she stood by the wall in a strange, uneasy attitude.

“What do you want?” asked his mother in a harsh, uneven voice.

A vague conjecture ran across Volodya’s mind, but he quickly repelled it and began to talk to his mother.

XII

Then Volodya left her.

She paced up and down the room a number of times. She noticed that her shadow followed her on the floor, and, strange to say, it was the first time in her life that her own shadow had made her uneasy. The thought that there was a shadow assailed her mind unceasingly—and Eugenia Stepanovna, for some reason, was afraid of this thought, and even tried not to look at her shadow.

But the shadow crept after her and taunted her. Eugenia Stepanovna tried to think of something else—but in vain.

She suddenly paused, pale and agitated.

“Well, it’s a shadow, a shadow!” she exclaimed aloud, stamping her foot with a strange irritation, “what of it?”

Then all at once she reflected that it was stupid to make a fuss and to stamp her feet, and she became quiet.

She approached the mirror. Her face was paler than usual, and her lips quivered with a kind of strange hate.

“It’s nerves,” she thought; “I must take myself in hand.”

XIII

Twilight was falling. Volodya grew pensive.

“Let’s go for a stroll, Volodya,” said his mother.

But in the street there were also shadows everywhere, mysterious, elusive evening shadows; and they whispered in Volodya’s ear something that was familiar and infinitely sad.

In the clouded sky two or three stars looked out, and they seemed equally distant and equally strange to Volodya and to the shadows that surrounded him.

“Mamma,” he said, oblivious of the fact that he had interrupted her as she was telling him something, “what a pity that it is impossible to reach those stars.”

His mother looked up at the sky and answered: “I don’t see that it’s necessary. Our place is on earth. It is better for us here. It’s quite another thing there.”

“How faintly they glimmer! They ought to be glad of it.”

“Why?”

“If they shone more strongly they would cast shadows.”

“Oh, Volodya, why do you think only of shadows?”

“I didn’t mean to, mamma,” said Volodya in a penitent voice.

XIV

Volodya worked harder than ever at his lessons; he was afraid to hurt his mother by being lazy. But he employed all his invention in grouping the objects on his table in a way that would produce new and ever more fantastic shadows. He put this here and that there—anything that came to his hands—and he rejoiced when outlines appeared on the white wall that his mind could grasp. There was an intimacy between him and these shadowy outlines, and they were very dear to him. They were not dumb, they spoke to him, and Volodya understood their inarticulate speech.

He understood why the dejected wayfarer murmured as he wandered upon the long road, the autumn wetness under his feet, a stick in his trembling hand, a knapsack on his bowed back.

He understood why the snow-covered forest, its boughs crackling with frost, complained, as it stood sadly dreaming in the winter stillness; and he understood why the lonely crow cawed on the old oak, and why the bustling squirrel looked sadly out of its tree-hollow.

He understood why the decrepit and homeless old beggar-women sobbed in the dismal autumn wind, as they shivered in their rags in the crowded graveyard, among the crumbling crosses and the hopelessly black tombs.

There was self-forgetfulness in this, and also tormenting woe!

XV

Volodya’s mother observed that he continued to play.

She said to him after dinner: “At least, you might get interested in something else.”

“In what?”

“You might read.”

“No sooner do I begin to read than I want to cast shadows.”

“If you’d only try something else—say soap-bubbles.”

Volodya smiled sadly.

“No sooner do the bubbles fly up than the shadows follow them on the wall.”

“Volodya, unless you take care your nerves will be shattered. Already you have grown thinner because of this.”

“Mamma, you exaggerate.”

“No, Volodya.... Don’t I know that you’ve begun to sleep badly and to talk nonsense in your sleep. Now, just think, suppose you die!”

“What are you saying!”

“God forbid, but if you go mad, or die, I shall suffer horribly.”

Volodya laughed and threw himself on his mother’s neck.

“Mamma dear, I shan’t die. I won’t do it again.”

She saw that he was crying now.

“That will do,” she said. “God is merciful. Now you see how nervous you are. You’re laughing and crying at the same time.”

XVI

Volodya’s mother began to look at him with careful and anxious eyes. Every trifle now agitated her.

She noticed that Volodya’s head was somewhat asymmetrical: his one ear was higher than the other, his chin slightly turned to one side. She looked in the mirror, and further remarked that Volodya had inherited this too from her.

“It may be,” she thought, “one of the characteristics of unfortunate heredity—degeneration; in which case where is the root of the evil? Is it my fault or his father’s?”

Eugenia Stepanovna recalled her dead husband. He was a most kind-hearted and most lovable man, somewhat weak-willed, with rash impulses. He was by nature a zealot and a mystic, and he dreamt of a social Utopia, and went among the people. He had been rather given to tippling the last years of his life.

He died young; he was but thirty-five years old.

Volodya’s mother even took her boy to the doctor and described his symptoms. The doctor, a cheerful young man, listened to her, then laughed and gave counsel concerning diet and way of life, throwing in a few witty remarks; he wrote out a prescription in a happy, off-hand way, and he added playfully, with a slap on Volodya’s shoulder: “But the very best medicine would be—a birch.”

Volodya’s mother felt the affront deeply, but she followed all the rest of the instructions faithfully.

XVII

Volodya was sitting in his class. He felt depressed. He listened inattentively.

He raised his eyes. A shadow was moving along the ceiling near the front wall. Volodya observed that it came in through the first window. To begin with it fell from the window toward the centre of the class-room, but later it started forward rather quickly away from Volodya—evidently some one was walking in the street, just by the window. While this shadow was still moving another shadow came through the second window, falling, as did the first one, toward the back wall, but later it began to turn quickly toward the front wall. The same thing happened at the third and the fourth windows; the shadows fell in the class-room on the ceiling, and in the degree that the passer-by moved forward they retreated backward.

“This,” thought Volodya, “is not at all the same as in an open place, where the shadow follows the man; when the man goes forward, the shadow glides behind, and other shadows again meet him in the front.”

Volodya turned his eyes on the gaunt figure of the tutor. His callous, yellow face annoyed Volodya. He looked for his shadow and found it on the wall, just behind the tutor’s chair. The monstrous shape bent over and rocked from side to side, but it had neither a yellow face nor a malignant smile, and Volodya looked at it with joy. His thoughts scampered off somewhere far away, and he heard not a single thing of what was being said.

“Lovlev!” His tutor called his name.

Volodya rose, as was the custom, and stood looking stupidly at the tutor. He had such an absent look that his companions tittered, while the tutor’s face assumed a critical expression.

Volodya heard the tutor attack him with sarcasm and abuse. He trembled from shame and from weakness. The tutor announced that he would give Volodya “one” for his ignorance and his inattention, and he asked him to sit down.

Volodya smiled in a dull way, and tried to think what had happened to him.

XVIII

The “one” was the first in Volodya’s life! It made him feel rather strange.

“Lovlev!” his comrades taunted him, laughing and nudging him, “you caught it that time! Congratulations!”

Volodya felt awkward. He did not yet know how to behave in these circumstances.

“What if I have,” he answered peevishly, “what business is it of yours?”

“Lovlev!” the lazy Snegirev shouted, “our regiment has been reinforced!”

His first “one”! And he had yet to tell his mother.

He felt ashamed and humiliated. He felt as though he bore in the knapsack on his back a strangely heavy and awkward burden—the “one” stuck clumsily in his consciousness and seemed to fit in with nothing else in his mind.

“One”!

He could not get used to the thought about the “one,” and yet could not think of anything else. When the policeman, who stood near the school, looked at him with his habitual severity Volodya could not help thinking: “What if you knew that I’ve received ‘one’!”

It was all so awkward and so unusual. Volodya did not know how to hold his head and where to put his hands; there was uneasiness in his whole bearing.

Besides, he had to assume a care-free look before his comrades and to talk of something else!

His comrades! Volodya was convinced that they were all very glad because of his “one.”

XIX

Volodya’s mother looked at the “one” and turned her uncomprehending eyes on her son. Then again she glanced at the report and exclaimed quietly:

“Volodya!”

Volodya stood before her, and he felt intensely small. He looked at the folds of his mother’s dress and at his mother’s pale hands; his trembling eyelids were conscious of her frightened glances fixed upon them.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Don’t you worry, mamma,” burst out Volodya suddenly; “after all, it’s my first!”

“Your first!”

“It may happen to any one. And really it was all an accident.”

“Oh, Volodya, Volodya!”

Volodya began to cry and to rub his tears, child-like, over his face with the palm of his hand.

“Mamma darling, don’t be angry,” he whispered.

“That’s what comes of your shadows,” said his mother.

Volodya felt the tears in her voice. His heart was touched. He glanced at his mother. She was crying. He turned quickly toward her.

“Mamma, mamma,” he kept on repeating, while kissing her hands, “I’ll drop the shadows, really I will.”

XX

Volodya made a strong effort of the will and refrained from the shadows, despite strong temptation. He tried to make amends for his neglected lessons.

But the shadows beckoned to him persistently. In vain he ceased to invite them with his fingers, in vain he ceased to arrange objects that would cast a new shadow on the wall; the shadows themselves surrounded him—they were unavoidable, importunate shadows.

Objects themselves no longer interested Volodya, he almost ceased to see them; all his attention was centred on their shadows.

When he was walking home and the sun happened to peep through the autumn clouds, as through smoky vestments, he was overjoyed because there was everywhere an awakening of the shadows.

The shadows from the lamplight hovered near him in the evening at home.

The shadows were everywhere. There were the sharp shadows from the flames, there were the fainter shadows from diffused daylight. All of them crowded toward Volodya, recrossed each other, and enveloped him in an unbreakable network.

Some of the shadows were incomprehensible, mysterious; others reminded him of something, suggested something. But there were also the beloved, the intimate, the familiar shadows; these Volodya himself, however casually, sought out and caught everywhere from among the confused wavering of the others, the more remote shadows. But they were sad, these beloved, familiar shadows.

Whenever Volodya found himself seeking these shadows his conscience tormented him, and he went to his mother to make a clean breast of it.

Once it happened that Volodya could not conquer his temptation. He stood up close to the wall and made a shadow of the bull. His mother found him.

“Again!” she exclaimed angrily. “I really shall have to ask the director to put you into the small room.”

Volodya flushed violently and answered morosely: “There is a wall there also. The walls are everywhere.”

“Volodya,” exclaimed his mother sorrowfully, “what are you saying!”

But Volodya already repented of his rudeness, and he was crying.

“Mamma, I don’t know myself what’s happening to me!”

XXI

Volodya’s mother had not yet conquered her superstitious dread of shadows. She began very often to think that she, like Volodya, was losing herself in the contemplation of shadows. Then she tried to comfort herself.

“What stupid thoughts!” she said. “Thank God, all will pass happily; he will be like this a little while, then he will stop.”

But her heart trembled with a secret fear, and her thought, frightened of life persistently ran to meet approaching sorrows.

She began in the melancholy moments of waking to examine her soul, and all her life would pass before her; she saw its emptiness, its futility, and its aimlessness. It seemed but a senseless glimmer of shadows, which merged in the denser twilight.

“Why have I lived?” she asked herself. “Was it for my son? But why? That he too shall become a prey to shadows, a maniac with a narrow horizon, chained to his illusions, to restless appearances upon a lifeless wall? And he too will enter upon life, and he will make of life a chain of impressions, phantasmic and futile, like a dream.”

She sat down in the armchair by the window, and she thought and thought. Her thoughts were bitter, oppressive. She began, in her despair, to wring her beautiful white hands.

Then her thoughts wandered. She looked at her outstretched hands, and began to imagine what sort of shapes they would cast on the wall in their present attitude. She suddenly paused and jumped up from her chair in fright.

“My God!” she exclaimed. “This is madness.”

XXII

She watched Volodya at dinner.

“How pale and thin he has grown,” she said to herself, “since the unfortunate little book fell into his hands. He’s changed entirely—in character and in everything else. It is said that character changes before death. What if he dies? But no, no. God forbid!”

The spoon trembled in her hand. She looked up at the ikon with timid eyes.

“Volodya, why don’t you finish your soup?” she asked, looking frightened.

“I don’t feel like it, mamma.”

“Volodya, darling, do as I tell you; it is bad for you not to eat your soup.”

Volodya gave a tired smile and slowly finished his soup. His mother had filled his plate fuller than usual. He leant back in his chair and was on the point of saying that the soup was not good. But his mother’s worried look restrained him, and he merely smiled weakly.

“And now I’ve had enough,” he said.

“Oh no, Volodya, I have all your favourite dishes to-day.”

Volodya sighed sadly. He knew that when his mother spoke of his favourite dishes it meant that she would coax him to eat. He guessed that even after tea his mother would prevail upon him, as she did the day before, to eat meat.

XXIII

In the evening Volodya’s mother said to him: “Volodya dear, you’ll waste your time again; perhaps you’d better keep the door open!”

Volodya began his lessons. But he felt vexed because the door had been left open at his back, and because his mother went past it now and then.

“I cannot go on like this,” he shouted, moving his chair noisily. “I cannot do anything when the door is wide open.”

“Volodya, is there any need to shout so?” his mother reproached him softly.

Volodya already felt repentant, and he began to cry.

“Don’t you see, Volodenka, that I’m worried about you, and that I want to save you from your thoughts.”

“Mamma, sit here with me,” said Volodya.

His mother took a book and sat down at Volodya’s table. For a few minutes Volodya worked calmly. But gradually the presence of his mother began to annoy him.

“I’m being watched just like a sick man,” he thought spitefully.

His thoughts were constantly interrupted, and he was biting his lips. His mother remarked this at last, and she left the room.

But Volodya felt no relief. He was tormented with regret at showing his impatience. He tried to go on with his work but he could not. Then he went to his mother.

“Mamma, why did you leave me?” he asked timidly.

XXIV

It was the eve of a holiday. The little image-lamps burned before the ikons.

It was late and it was quiet. Volodya’s mother was not asleep. In the mysterious dark of her bedroom she fell on her knees, she prayed and she wept, sobbing out now and then like a child.

Her braids of hair trailed upon her white dress; her shoulders trembled. She raised her hands to her breast in a praying posture, and she looked with tearful eyes at the ikon. The image-lamp moved almost imperceptibly on its chains with her passionate breathing. The shadows rocked, they crowded in the corners, they stirred behind the reliquary, and they murmured mysteriously. There was a hopeless yearning in their murmurings and an incomprehensible sadness in their wavering movements.

At last she rose, looking pale, with strange, widely dilated eyes, and she reeled slightly on her benumbed legs.

She went quietly to Volodya. The shadows surrounded her, they rustled softly behind her back, they crept at her feet, and some of them, as fine as the threads of a spider’s web, fell upon her shoulders and, looking into her large eyes, murmured incomprehensibly.

She approached her son’s bed cautiously. His face was pale in the light of the image-lamp. Strange, sharp shadows lay upon him. His breathing was inaudible; he slept so tranquilly that his mother was frightened.

She stood there in the midst of the vague shadows, and she felt upon her the breath of vague fears.

XXV

The high vaults of the church were dark and mysterious. The evening chants rose toward these vaults and resounded there with an exultant sadness. The dark images, lit up by the yellow flickers of wax candles, looked stern and mysterious. The warm breathing of the wax and of the incense filled the air with lofty sorrow.

Eugenia Stepanovna placed a candle before the ikon of the Mother of God. Then she knelt down. But her prayer was distraught.

She looked at her candle. Its flame wavered. The shadows from the candles fell on Eugenia Stepanovna’s black dress and on the floor, and rocked unsteadily. The shadows hovered on the walls of the church and lost themselves in the heights between the dark vaults, where the exultant, sad songs resounded.

XXVI

It was another night.

Volodya awoke suddenly. The darkness enveloped him, and it stirred without sound. He freed his hands, then raised them, and followed their movements with his eyes. He did not see his hands in the darkness, but he imagined that he saw them wanly stirring before him. They were dark and mysterious, and they held in them the affliction and the murmur of lonely yearning.

His mother also did not sleep; her grief tormented her. She lit a candle and went quietly toward her son’s room to see how he slept. She opened the door noiselessly and looked timidly at Volodya’s bed.

A streak of yellow light trembled on the wall and intersected Volodya’s red bed-cover. The lad stretched his arms toward the light and, with a beating heart, followed the shadows. He did not even ask himself where the light came from. He was wholly obsessed by the shadows. His eyes were fixed on the wall, and there was a gleam of madness in them.

The streak of light broadened, the shadows moved in a startled way; they were morose and hunch-backed, like homeless, roaming women who were hurrying to reach somewhere with old burdens that dragged them down.

Volodya’s mother, trembling with fright, approached the bed and quietly aroused her son.

“Volodya!”

Volodya came to himself. For some seconds he glanced at his mother with large eyes, then he shivered from head to foot and, springing out of bed, fell at his mother’s feet, embraced her knees, and wept.

“What dreams you do dream, Volodya!” exclaimed his mother sorrowfully.

XXVII

“Volodya,” said his mother to him at breakfast, “you must stop it, darling; you will become a wreck if you spend your nights also with the shadows.”

The pale lad lowered his head in dejection. His lips quivered nervously.

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” continued his mother. “Perhaps we had better play a little while together with the shadows each evening, and then we will study your lessons. What do you say?”

Volodya grew somewhat animated.

“Mamma, you’re a darling!” he said shyly.

XXVIII

In the street Volodya felt drowsy and timid. The fog was spreading; it was cold and dismal. The outlines of the houses looked strange in the mist. The morose, human silhouettes moved through the filmy atmosphere like ominous, unkindly shadows. Everything seemed so intensely unreal. The cab-horse, which stood drowsily at the street-crossing, appeared like a huge fabulous beast.

The policeman gave Volodya a hostile look. The crow on the low roof foreboded sorrow in Volodya’s ear. But sorrow was already in his heart; it made him sad to note how everything was hostile to him.

A small dog with an unhealthy coat barked at him from behind a gate and Volodya felt a strange depression. And the urchins of the street seemed ready to laugh at him and to humiliate him.

In the past he would have settled scores with them as they deserved, but now fear lived in his breast; it robbed his arms of their strength and caused them to hang by his sides.

When Volodya returned home Praskovya opened the door to him, and she looked at him with moroseness and hostility. Volodya felt uneasy. He quickly went into the house, and refrained from looking at Praskovya’s depressing face again.

XXIX

His mother was sitting alone. It was twilight, and she felt sad.

A light suddenly glimmered somewhere.

Volodya ran in, animated, cheerful, and with large, somewhat wild eyes.

“Mamma, the lamp has been lit; let’s play a little.”

She smiled and followed Volodya.

“Mamma, I’ve thought of a new figure,” said Volodya excitedly, as he placed the lamp in the desired position. “Look.... Do you see? This is the steppe, covered with snow, and the snow falls—a regular storm.”

Volodya raised his hands and arranged them.

“Now look, here is an old man, a wayfarer. He is up to his knees in snow. It is difficult to walk. He is alone. It is an open field. The village is far away. He is tired, he is cold; it is terrible. He is all bent—he’s such an old man.”

Volodya’s mother helped him with his fingers.

“Oh!” exclaimed Volodya in great joy. “The wind is tearing his cap off, it is blowing his hair loose, it has thrown him in the snow. The drifts are getting higher. Mamma, mamma, do you hear?”

“It’s a blinding storm.”

“And he?”

“The old man?”

“Do you hear, he is moaning?”

“Help!”

Both of them, pale, were looking at the wall. Volodya’s hands shook, the old man fell.

His mother was the first to arouse herself.

“And now it’s time to work,” she said.

XXX

It was morning. Volodya’s mother was alone. Rapt in her confused, dismal thoughts, she was walking from one room to another. Her shadow outlined itself vaguely on the white door in the light of the mist-dimmed sun. She stopped at the door and lifted her arm with a large, curious movement. The shadow on the door wavered and began to murmur something familiar and sad. A strange feeling of comfort came over Eugenia Stepanovna as she stood, a wild smile on her face, before the door and moved both her hands, watching the trembling shadows.

Then she heard Praskovya coming, and she realized that she was doing an absurd thing. Once more she felt afraid and sad.

“We ought to make a change,” she thought, “and go elsewhere, somewhere farther away, to a new atmosphere. We must run away from here, simply run away!”

And suddenly she remembered Volodya’s words: “There is a wall there also. The walls are everywhere.”

“There is nowhere to run!”

In her despair she wrung her pale, beautiful hands.

XXXI

It was evening.

A lighted lamp stood on the floor in Volodya’s room. Just behind it, near the wall, sat Volodya and his mother. They were looking at the wall and were making strange movements with their hands.

Shadows stirred and trembled upon the wall.

Volodya and his mother understood them. Both were smiling sadly and were saying weird and impossible things to each other. Their faces were peaceful and their eyes looked clear; their joyousness was hopelessly sorrowful and their sorrow was wildly joyous.

In their eyes was a glimmer of madness, blessed madness.

The night was descending upon them.

from : The Old House and Other Tales. Translated by John Cournos. Gutenberg

The White Dog

Everything grew irksome for Alexandra Ivanovna in the workshop of this out-of-the-way town — the patterns, the clatter of machines, the complaints of the managers; it was the shop in which she had served as apprentice and now for several years as seamstress. Everything irritated Alexandra Ivanovna; she quarrelled with every one and abused the innocent apprentices. Among others to suffer from her outbursts of temper was Tanechka, the youngest of the seamstresses, who had only recently become an apprentice. In the beginning Tanechka submitted to her abuse in silence. In the end she revolted, and, addressing herself to her assailant, said, quite calmly and affably, so that every one laughed:

“You, Alexandra Ivanovna, are a downright dog!”

Alexandra Ivanovna felt humiliated.

“You are a dog yourself!” she exclaimed.

Tanechka was sitting sewing. She paused now and then from her work and said in a calm, deliberate manner:

“You always whine . . . Certainly, you are a dog . . . You have a dog’s snout . . . And a dog’s ears . . . And a wagging tail . . . The mistress will soon drive you out of doors, because you are the most detestable of dogs, a poodle.”

Tanechka was a young, plump, rosy-cheeked girl with an innocent, good-natured face, which revealed, however, a trace of cunning. She sat there so demurely, barefooted, still dressed in her apprentice clothes; her eyes were clear, and her brows were highly arched on her fine curved white forehead, framed by straight, dark chestnut hair, which in the distance looked black. Tanechka’s voice was clear, even, sweet, insinuating, and if one could have heard its sound only, and not given heed to the words, it would have given the impression that she was paying Alexandra Ivanovna compliments.

The other seamstresses laughed, the apprentices chuckled, they covered their faces with their black aprons and cast side glances at Alexandra Ivanovna. As for Alexandra Ivanovna, she was livid with rage.

“Wretch!” she exclaimed. “I will pull your ears for you! I won’t leave a hair on your head.”

Tanechka replied in a gentle voice:

“The paws are a trifle short . . . The poodle bites as well as barks . . . It may be necessary to buy a muzzle.”

Alexandra Ivanovna made a movement toward Tanechka. But before Tanechka had time to lay aside her work and get up, the mistress of the establishment, a large, serious-looking woman, entered, rustling her dress.

She said sternly: “Alexandra Ivanovna, what do you mean by making such a fuss?”

Alexandra Ivanovna, much agitated, replied: “Irina Petrovna, I wish you would forbid her to call me a dog!”

Tanechka in her turn complained: “She is always snarling at something or other. Always quibbling at the smallest trifles.”

But the mistress looked at her sternly and said: “Tanechka, I can see through you. Are you sure you didn’t begin? You needn’t think that because you are a seamstress now you are an important person. If it weren’t for your mother’s sake—”

Tanechka grew red, but preserved her innocent and affable manner. She addressed her mistress in a subdued voice: “Forgive me, Irina Petrovna, I will not do it again. But it wasn’t altogether my fault . . .”

Alexandra Ivanovna returned home almost ill with rage. Tanechka had guessed her weakness.

“A dog! Well, then I am a dog,” thought Alexandra Ivanovna, “but it is none of her affair! Have I looked to see whether she is a serpent or a fox? It is easy to find one out, but why make a fuss about it? Is a dog worse than any other animal?”

The clear summer night languished and sighed, a soft breeze from the adjacent fields occasionally blew down the peaceful streets. The moon rose clear and full, that very same moon which rose long ago at another place, over the broad desolate steppe, the home of the wild, of those who ran free, and whined in their ancient earthly travail. The very same, as then and in that region.

And now, as then, glowed eyes sick with longing; and her heart, still wild, not forgetting in town the great spaciousness of the steppe, felt oppressed; her throat was troubled with a tormenting desire to howl like a wild thing.

She was about to undress, but what was the use? She could not sleep, anyway.

She went into the passage. The warm planks of the floor bent and creaked under her, and small shavings and sand which covered them tickled her feet not unpleasantly.

She went out on the doorstep. There sat the babushka Stepanida, a black figure in her black shawl, gaunt and shrivelled. She sat with her head bent, and it seemed as though she were warming herself in the rays of the cold moon.

Alexandra Ivanovna sat down beside her. She kept looking at the old woman sideways. The large curved nose of her companion seemed to her like the beak of an old bird.

“A crow?” Alexandra Ivanovna asked herself.

She smiled, forgetting for the moment her longing and her fears. Shrewd as the eyes of a dog her own lighted up with the joy of her discovery. In the pale green light of the moon the wrinkles of her faded face became altogether invisible, and she seemed once more young and merry and light-hearted, just as she was ten years ago, when the moon had not yet called upon her to bark and bay of nights before the windows of the dark bathhouse.

She moved closer to the old woman, and said affably: “Babushka Stepanida, there is something I have been wanting to ask you.”

The old woman turned to her, her dark face furrowed with wrinkles, and asked in a sharp, oldish voice that sounded like a caw: “Well, my dear? Go ahead and ask?”

Alexandra Ivanovna gave a repressed laugh; her thin shoulders suddenly trembled from a chill that ran down her spine.

She spoke very quietly: “Babushka Stepanida, it seems to me — tell me is it true? — I don’t know exactly how to put it — but you, babushka, please don’t take offence — it is not from malice that I — ”

“Go on, my dear, never fear, say it,” said the old woman.

She looked at Alexandra Ivanovna with glowing, penetrating eyes.

“It seems to me, babushka — please, now, don’t take offence — as though you, babushka, were a crow.”

The old woman turned away. She was silent and merely nodded her head. She had the appearance of one who had recalled something. Her head, with its sharply outlined nose, bowed and nodded, and at last it seemed to Alexandra Ivanovna that the old woman was dozing. Dozing, and mumbling something under her nose. Nodding her head and mumbling some old forgotten words — old magic words.

An intense quiet reigned out of doors. It was neither light nor dark, and everything seemed bewitched with the inarticulate mumbling of old forgotten words. Everything languished and seemed lost in apathy. Again a longing oppressed her heart. And it was neither a dream nor an illusion. A thousand perfumes, imperceptible by day, became subtly distinguishable, and they recalled something ancient and primitive, something forgotten in the long ages.

In a barely audible voice the old woman mumbled: “Yes, I am a crow. Only I have no wings. But there are times when I caw, and I caw, and tell of woe. And I am given to forebodings, my dear; each time I have one I simply must caw. People are not particularly anxious to hear me. And when I see a doomed person I have such a strong desire to caw.”

The old woman suddenly made a sweeping movement with her arms, and in a shrill voice cried out twice: “Kar-r, Kar-r!”

Alexandra Ivanovna shuddered, and asked:

“Babushka, at whom are you cawing?”

The old woman answered: “At you, my dear — at you.”

It had become too painful to sit with the old woman any longer. Alexandra Ivanovna went to her own room. She sat down before the open window and listened to two voices at the gate.

“It simply won’t stop whining!” said a low and harsh voice.

“And uncle, did you see—?” asked an agreeable young voice.

Alexandra Ivanovna recognized in this last the voice of the curly-headed, somewhat red, freckled-faced lad who lived in the same court.

A brief and depressing silence followed. Then she heard a hoarse and harsh voice say suddenly: “Yes, I saw. It’s very large — and white. Lies near the bathhouse, and bays at the moon.”

The voice gave her an image of the man, of his shovel-shaped beard, his low, furrowed forehead, his small, piggish eyes, and his spread-out fat legs.

“And why does it bay, uncle?” asked the agreeable voice.

And again the hoarse voice did not reply at once.

“Certainly to no good purpose — and where it came from is more than I can say.”

“Do you think, uncle, it may be a were-wolf?” asked the agreeable voice.

“I should not advise you to investigate,” replied the hoarse voice.

She could not quite understand what these words implied, nor did she wish to think of them. She did not feel inclined to listen further. What was the sound and significance of human words to her?

The moon looked straight into her face and persistently called her and tormented her. Her heart was restless with a dark longing, and she could not sit still.

Alexandra Ivanovna quickly undressed herself. Naked, all white, she silently stole through the passage; she then opened the outer door — there was no one on the step or outside — and ran quickly across the court and the vegetable garden, and reached the bathhouse. The sharp contact of her body with the cold air and her feet with the cold ground gave her pleasure. But soon her body was warm.

She lay down in the grass, on her stomach. Then, raising herself on her elbows, she lifted her face toward the pale, brooding moon, and gave a long-drawn-out whine.

“Listen, uncle, it is whining,” said the curly-haired lad at the gate.

The agreeable voice trembled perceptibly.

“Whining again, the accursed one,” said the hoarse, harsh voice slowly.

They rose from the bench. The gate latch clicked.

They went silently across the courtyard and the vegetable garden, the two of them. The older man, black-bearded and powerful, walked in front, a gun in his hand. The curly-headed lad followed tremblingly, and looked constantly behind.

Near the bathhouse, in the grass, lay a huge white dog, whining piteously. Its head, black on the crown, was raised to the moon, which pursued its way in the cold sky; its hind legs were strangely thrown backward, while the front ones, firm and straight, pressed hard against the ground.

In the pale green and unreal light of the moon it seemed enormous, so huge a dog was surely never seen on earth. It was thick and fat. The black spot, which began at the head and stretched in uneven strands down the entire spine, seemed like a woman’s loosened hair. No tail was visible, presumably it was turned under. The fur on the body was so short that in the distance the dog seemed wholly naked, and its hide shone dimly in the moonlight, so that altogether it resembled the body of a nude woman, who lay in the grass and bayed at the moon.

The man with the black beard took aim. The curly-haired lad crossed himself and mumbled something.

The discharge of a rifle sounded in the night air. The dog gave a groan, jumped up on its hind legs, became a naked woman, who, her body covered with blood, started to run, all the while groaning, weeping and raising cries of distress.

The black-bearded one and the curly-haired one threw themselves in the grass, and began to moan in wild terror.

Translated by John Cournos

The Voice Before The Void

Hide and Seek

Everything  in Lelechka's nursery was bright, pretty, and cheerful. Lelechka's sweet voice charmed her mother. Lelechka was a delightful child. There was no other such child, there never had been, and there never would be. Lelechka's mother, Serafima Aleksandrovna, was sure of that. Lelechka's eyes were dark and large, her cheeks were rosy, her lips were made for kisses and for laughter. But it was not these charms in Lelechka that gave her mother the keenest joy. Lelechka was her mother's only child. That was why every movement of Lelechka's bewitched her mother. It was great bliss to hold Lelechka on her knees and to fondle her; to feel the little girl in her arms—a thing as lively and as bright as a little bird.

To tell the truth, Serafima Aleksandrovna felt happy only in the nursery. She felt cold with her husband.

Perhaps it was because he himself loved the cold—he loved to drink cold water, and to breathe cold air. He was always fresh and cool, with a frigid smile, and wherever he passed cold currents seemed to move in the air.

The Nesletyevs, Sergey Modestovich and Serafima Aleksandrovna, had married without love or calculation, because it was the accepted thing. He was a young man of thirty-five, she a young woman of twenty-five; both were of the same circle and well brought up; he was expected to take a wife, and the time had come for her to take a husband.

It even seemed to Serafima Aleksandrovna that she was in love with her future husband, and this made her happy. He looked handsome and well-bred; his intelligent grey eyes always preserved a dignified expression; and he fulfilled his obligations of a fiancé with irreproachable gentleness.

The bride was also good-looking; she was a tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired girl, somewhat timid but very tactful. He was not after her dowry, though it pleased him to know that she had something. He had connexions, and his wife came of good, influential people. This might, at the proper opportunity, prove useful. Always irreproachable and tactful, Nesletyev got on in his position not so fast that any one should envy him, nor yet so slow that he should envy any one else—everything came in the proper measure and at the proper time.

After their marriage there was nothing in the manner of Sergey Modestovich to suggest anything wrong to his wife. Later, however, when his wife was about to have a child, Sergey Modestovich established connexions elsewhere of a light and temporary nature. Serafima Aleksandrovna found this out, and, to her own astonishment, was not particularly hurt; she awaited her infant with a restless anticipation that swallowed every other feeling.

A little girl was born; Serafima Aleksandrovna gave herself up to her. At the beginning she used to tell her husband, with rapture, of all the joyous details of Lelechka's existence. But she soon found that he listened to her without the slightest interest, and only from the habit of politeness. Serafima Aleksandrovna drifted farther and farther away from him. She loved her little girl with the ungratified passion that other women, deceived in their husbands, show their chance young lovers.

"Mamochka, let's play priatki" (hide and seek), cried Lelechka, pronouncing the r like the l, so that the word sounded "pliatki."

This charming inability to speak always made Serafima Aleksandrovna smile with tender rapture. Lelechka then ran away, stamping with her plump little legs over the carpets, and hid herself behind the curtains near her bed.

"Tiu-tiu, mamochka!." she cried out in her sweet, laughing voice, as she looked out with a single roguish eye.

"Where is my baby girl?" the mother asked, as she looked for Lelechka and made believe that she did not see her.

And Lelechka poured out her rippling laughter in her hiding place. Then she came out a little farther, and her mother, as though she had only just caught sight of her, seized her by her little shoulders and exclaimed joyously: "Here she is, my Lelechka!"

Lelechka laughed long and merrily, her head close to her mother's knees, and all of her cuddled up between her mother's white hands. Her mother's eyes glowed with passionate emotion.

"Now, mamochka, you hide," said Lelechka, as she ceased laughing.

Her mother went to hide. Lelechka turned away as though not to see, but watched her mamochka stealthily all the time. Mamma hid behind the cupboard, and exclaimed: "Tiu-tiu, baby girl!"

Lelechka ran round the room and looked into all the corners, making believe, as her mother had done before, that she was seeking—though she really knew all the time where her mamochka was standing.

"Where's my mamochka? asked Lelechka. "She's not here, and she's not here," she kept on repeating, as she ran from corner to corner.

Her mother stood, with suppressed breathing, her head pressed against the wall, her hair somewhat disarranged. A smile of absolute bliss played on her red lips.

The nurse, Fedosya, a good-natured and fine-looking, if somewhat stupid woman, smiled as she looked at her mistress with her characteristic expression, which seemed to say that it was not for her to object to gentlewomen's caprices. She thought to herself: "The mother is like a little child herself—look how excited she is."

Lelechka was getting nearer her mother's corner. Her mother was growing more absorbed every moment by her interest in the game; her heart beat with short quick strokes, and she pressed even closer to the wall, disarranging her hair still more. Lelechka suddenly glanced toward her mother's corner and screamed with joy.

"I've found 'oo." she cried out loudly and joyously, mispronouncing her words in a way that again made her mother happy.

She pulled her mother, by her hands to the middle of the room, they were merry and they laughed; and Lelechka again hid her head against her mother's knees, and went on lisping and lisping, without end, her sweet little words, so fascinating yet so awkward.

Sergey Modestovich was coming at this moment toward the nursery. Through the half-closed doors he heard the laughter, the joyous outcries, the sound of romping. He entered the nursery, smiling his genial cold smile; he was irreproachably dressed, and he looked fresh and erect, and he spread round him an atmosphere of cleanliness, freshness and coldness. He entered in the midst of the lively game, and he confused them all by his radiant coldness. Even Fedosya felt abashed, now for her mistress, now for herself. Serafima Aleksandrovna at once became calm and apparently cold—and this mood communicated itself to the little girl, who ceased to laugh, but looked instead, silently and intently, at her father.

Sergey Modestovich gave a swift glance round the room. He liked coming here, where everything was beautifully arranged; this was done by Serafima Aleksandrovna, who wished to surround her little girl, from her very infancy only with the loveliest things. Serafima Aleksandrovna dressed herself tastefully; this, too, she did for Lelechka, with the same end in view. One thing Sergey Modestovich had not become reconciled to, and this was his wife's almost continuous presence in the nursery.

"It's just as I thought. . . . I knew that I'd find you here," he said with a derisive and condescending smile.

They left the nursery together. As he followed his wife through the door Sergey Modestovich said rather indifferently, in an incidental way, laying no stress on his words: "Don't you think that it would be well for the little girl if she were sometimes without your company? Merely, you see, that the child should feel its own individuality," he explained in answer to Serafima Aleksandrovna's puzzled glance.

"She's still so little," said Serafima Aleksandrovna.

"In any case, this is but my humble opinion. I don't insist. It's your kingdom there."

"I'll think it over," his wife answered, smiling, as he did, coldly but genially.

Then they began to talk of something else.

II

Nurse Fedosya, sitting in the kitchen that evening, was telling the silent housemaid Darya and the talkative old cook Agathya about the young lady of the house, and how the child loved to play priatki with her mother—"She hides her little face, and cries 'tiutiu'!"

"And the mistress herself is like a little one," added Fedosya, smiling.

Agathya listened and shook her head ominously; while her face became grave and reproachful.

"That the mistress does it, well, that's one thing; but that the young lady does it, that's bad."

"Why?" asked Fedosya with curiosity.

This expression of curiosity gave her face the look of a wooden, roughly-painted doll.

"Yes, that's bad," repeated Agathya with conviction. "Terribly bad!"

"Well?" said Fedosya, the ludicrous expression of curiosity on her face becoming more emphatic.

"She'll hide, and hide, and hide away," said Agathya, in a mysterious whisper, as she looked cautiously toward the door.

"What are you saying?" exclaimed Fedosya, frightened.

"It's the truth I'm saying, remember my words," Agathya went on with the same assurance and secrecy. "It's the surest sign."

The old woman had invented this sign, quite suddenly, herself; and she was evidently very proud of it.

III

Lelechka was asleep, and Serafima Aleksandrovna was sitting in her own room, thinking with joy and tenderness of Lelechka. Lelechka was in her thoughts, first a sweet, tiny girl, then a sweet, big girl, then again a delightful little girl; and so until the end she remained mamma's little Lelechka.

Serafima Aleksandrovna did not even notice that Fedosya came up to her and paused before her. Fedosya had a worried, frightened look.

"Madam, madam," she said quietly, in a trembling voice.

Serafima Aleksandrovna gave a start. Fedosya's face made her anxious.

"What is it, Fedosya?" she asked with great concern. "Is there anything wrong with Lelechka?"

"No, madam," said Fedosya, as she gesticulated with her hands to reassure her mistress and to make her sit down. "Lelechka is asleep, may God be with her! Only I'd like to say something—you see—Lelechka is always hiding herself—that's not good."

Fedosya looked at her mistress with fixed eyes, which had grown round from fright.

"Why not good?" asked Serafima Aleksandrovna, with vexation, succumbing involuntarily to vague fears.

"I can't tell you how bad it is," said Fedosya, and her face expressed the most decided confidence.

"Please speak in a sensible way," observed Serafima Aleksandrovna dryly. "I understand nothing of what you are saying."

"You see, madam, it's a kind of omen," explained Fedosya abruptly, in a shamefaced way.

"Nonsense!" said Serafima Aleksandrovna.

She did not wish to hear any further as to the sort of omen it was, and what it foreboded. But, somehow, a sense of fear and of sadness crept into her mood, and it was humiliating to feel that an absurd tale should disturb her beloved fancies, and should agitate her so deeply.

"Of course I know that gentlefolk don't believe in omens, but it's a bad omen, madam," Fedosya went on in a doleful voice, "the young lady will hide, and hide. . . ."

Suddenly she burst into tears, sobbing out loudly: "She'll hide, and hide, and hide away, angelic little soul, in a damp grave," she continued, as she wiped her tears with her apron and blew her nose.

"Who told you all this?" asked Serafima Aleksandrovna in an austere low voice.

"Agathya says so, madam," answered Fedosya; "it's she that knows."

"Knows!" exclaimed Serafima Aleksandrovna in irritation, as though she wished to protect herself somehow from this sudden anxiety. "What nonsense! Please don't come to me with any such notions in the future. Now you may go."

Fedosya, dejected, her feelings hurt, left her mistress.

"What nonsense! As though Lelechka could die!" thought Serafima Aleksandrovna to herself, trying to conquer the feeling of coldness and fear which took possession of her at the thought of the possible death of Lelechka. Serafima Aleksandrovna, upon reflection, attributed these women's beliefs in omens to ignorance. She saw clearly that there could be no possible connexion between a child's quite ordinary diversion and the continuation of the child's life. She made a special effort that evening to occupy her mind with other matters, but her thoughts returned involuntarily to the fact that Lelechka loved to hide herself.

When Lelechka was still quite small, and had learned to distinguish between her mother and her nurse, she sometimes, sitting in her nurse's arms, made a sudden roguish grimace, and hid her laughing face in the nurse's shoulder. Then she would look out with a sly glance.

Of late, in those rare moments of the mistress' absence from the nursery, Fedosya had again taught Lelechka to hide; and when Lelechka's mother, on coming in, saw how lovely the child looked when she was hiding, she herself began to play hide and seek with her tiny daughter.

IV

The next day Serafima Aleksandrovna, absorbed in her joyous cares for Lelechka, had forgotten Fedosya's words of the day before.

But when she returned to the nursery, after having ordered the dinner, and she heard Lelechka suddenly cry "Tiu-tiu!" from under the table, a feeling of fear suddenly took hold of her. Though she reproached herself at once for this unfounded, superstitious dread, nevertheless she could not enter wholeheartedly into the spirit of Lelechka's favourite game, and she tried to divert Lelechka's attention to something else.

Lelechka was a lovely and obedient child. She eagerly complied with her mother's new wishes. But as she had got into the habit of hiding from her mother in some corner, and of crying out "Tiu-tiu!" so even that day she returned more than once to the game.

Serafima Aleksandrovna tried desperately to amuse Lelechka. This was not so easy because restless, threatening thoughts obtruded themselves constantly.

"Why does Lelechka keep on recalling the tiu-tiu? Why does she not get tired of the same thing—of eternally closing her eyes, and of hiding her face? Perhaps," thought Serafima Aleksandrovna, "she is not as strongly drawn to the world as other children, who are attracted by many things. If this is so, is it not a sign of organic weakness? Is it not a germ of the unconscious non-desire to live?"

Serafima Aleksandrovna was tormented by presentiments. She felt ashamed of herself for ceasing to play hide and seek with Lelechka before Fedosya. But this game had become agonising to her, all the more agonising because she had a real desire to play it, and because something drew her very strongly to hide herself from Lelechka and to seek out the hiding child. Serafima Aleksandrovna herself began the game once or twice, though she played it with a heavy heart. She suffered as though committing an evil deed with full consciousness.

It was a sad day for Serafima Aleksandrovna.

V

Lelechka was about to fall asleep. No sooner had she climbed into her little bed, protected by a network on all sides, than her eyes began to close from fatigue. Her mother covered her with a blue blanket. Lelechka drew her sweet little hands from under the blanket and stretched them out to embrace her mother. Her mother bent down. Lelechka, with a tender expression on her sleepy face, kissed her mother and let her head fall on the pillow. As her hands hid themselves under the blanket Lelechka whispered: "The hands tiu-tiu!"

The mother's heart seemed to stop—Lelechka lay there so small, so frail, so quiet. Lelechka smiled gently, closed her eyes and said quietly: "The eyes tiu-tiu!"

Then even more quietly: "Lelechka tiu-tiu!"

With these words she fell asleep, her face pressing the pillow. She seemed so small and so frail under the blanket that covered her. Her mother looked at her with sad eyes.

Serafima Aleksandrovna remained standing over Lelechka's bed a long while, and she kept looking at Lelechka with tenderness and fear.

"I'm a mother: is it possible that I shouldn't be able to protect her?" she thought, as she imagined the various ills that might befall Lelechka.

She prayed long that night, but the prayer did not relieve her sadness.

VI

Several days passed. Lelechka caught cold. The fever came upon her at night. When Serafima Aleksandrovna, awakened by Fedosya, came to Lelechka and saw her looking so hot, so restless, and so tormented, she instantly recalled the evil omen, and a hopeless despair took possession of her from the first moments.

A doctor was called, and everything was done that is usual on such occasions—but the inevitable happened. Serafima Aleksandrovna tried to console herself with the hope that Lelechka would get well, and would again laugh and play—yet this seemed to her an unthinkable happiness! And Lelechka grew feebler from hour to hour.

All simulated tranquillity, so as not to frighten Serafima Aleksandrovna, but their masked faces only made her sad.

Nothing made her so unhappy as the reiterations of Fedosya, uttered between sobs: "She hid herself and hid herself, our Lelechka!"

But the thoughts of Serafima Aleksandrovna were confused, and she could not quite grasp what was happening.

Fever was consuming Lelechka, and there were times when she lost consciousness and spoke in delirium. But when she returned to herself she bore her pain and her fatigue with gentle good nature; she smiled feebly at her mamochka, so that her mamochka should not see how much she suffered. Three days passed, torturing like a nightmare. Lelechka grew quite feeble. She did not know that she was dying.

She glanced at her mother with her dimmed eyes, and lisped in a scarcely audible, hoarse voice: "Tiu-tiu, mamochka! Make tiu-tiu, mamochka!"

Serafima Aleksandrovna hid her face behind the curtains near Lelechka's bed. How tragic!

"Mamochka!" called Lelechka in an almost inaudible voice.

Lelechka's mother bent over her, and Lelechka, her vision grown still more dim, saw her mother's pale, despairing face for the last time.

"A white mamochka!" whispered Lelechka.

Mamochka's white face became blurred, and everything grew dark before Lelechka. She caught the edge of the bed-cover feebly with her hands and whispered: "Tiu-tiu!"

Something rattled in her throat; Lelechka opened and again closed her rapidly paling lips, and died.

Serafima Aleksandrovna was in dumb despair as she left Lelechka, and went out of the room. She met her husband.

"Lelechka is dead," she said in a quiet, dull voice.

Sergey Modestovich looked anxiously at her pale face. He was struck by the strange stupor in her formerly animated handsome features.

 VII

Lelechka was dressed, placed in a little coffin, and carried into the parlour. Serafima Aleksandrovna was standing by the coffin and looking dully at her dead child. Sergey Modestovich went to his wife and, consoling her with cold, empty words, tried to draw her away from the coffin. Serafima Aleksandrovna smiled.

"Go away," she said quietly. "Lelechka is playing. She'll be up in a minute."

"Sima, my dear, don't agitate yourself," said Sergey Modestovich in a whisper. "You must resign yourself to your fate."

"She'll be up in a minute," persisted Serafima Aleksandrovna, her eyes fixed on the dead little girl.

Sergey Modestovich looked round him cautiously: he was afraid of the unseemly and of the ridiculous.

"Sima, don't agitate yourself," he repeated. "This would be a miracle, and miracles do not happen in the nineteenth century."

No sooner had he said these words than Sergey Modestovich felt their irrelevance to what had happened. He was confused and annoyed.

He took his wife by the arm, and cautiously led her away from the coffin. She did not oppose him.

Her face seemed tranquil and her eyes were dry. She went into the nursery and began to walk round the room, looking into those places where Lelechka used to hide herself. She walked all about the room, and bent now and then to look under the table or under the bed, and kept on repeating cheerfully: "Where is my little one? Where is my Lelechka?"

After she had walked round the room once she began to make her quest anew. Fedosya, motionless, with dejected face, sat in a corner, and looked frightened at her mistress; then she suddenly burst out sobbing, and she wailed loudly:

"She hid herself, and hid herself, our Lelechka, our angelic little soul!"

Serafima Aleksandrovna trembled, paused, cast a perplexed look at Fedosya, began to weep, and left the nursery quietly.

VIII

Sergey Modestovich hurried the funeral. He saw that Serafima Aleksandrovna was terribly shocked by her sudden misfortune, and as he feared for her reason he thought she would more readily be diverted and consoled when Lelechka was buried.

Next morning Serafima Aleksandrovna dressed with particular care—for Lelechka. When she entered the parlour there were several people between her and Lelechka. The priest and deacon paced up and down the room; clouds of blue smoke drifted in the air, and there was a smell of incense. There was an oppressive feeling of heaviness in Serafima Aleksandrovna's head as she approached Lelechka. Lelechka lay there still and pale, and smiled pathetically. Serafima Aleksandrovna laid her cheek upon the edge of Lelechka's coffin, and whispered: "Tiu-tiu, little one!"

The little one did not reply. Then there was some kind of stir and confusion around Serafima Aleksandrovna; strange, unnecessary faces bent over her, some one held her—and Lelechka was carried away somewhere.

Serafima Aleksandrovna stood up erect, sighed in a lost way, smiled, and called loudly: "Lelechka!"

Lelechka was being carried out. The mother threw herself after the coffin with despairing sobs, but she was held back. She sprang behind the door, through which Lelechka had passed, sat down there on the floor, and as she looked through the crevice, she cried out: "Lelechka, tiu-tiu!"

Then she put her head out from behind the door, and began to laugh.

Lelechka was quickly carried away from her mother, and chose who carried her seemed to run rather than to walk.

translated by John Cournos

Wikisource

Tiny Man

I.

Yakov Alexeyevitch Saranin scarcely reached medium size; his wife, Aglaya Nikiforovna, who came of tradesfolk, was tall and capacious. Even now, in the first year after their marriage, the twenty-year-old woman was so corpulent that beside her tiny and lean husband, she seemed a very giantess.

"What if she gets still bigger?" thought Yakov Alexeyevitch. He thought this, although he had married for love—of her and of the dowry.

The difference in the size of husband and wife not seldom evoked derisive remarks from their acquaintances. These frivolous jests poisoned Saranin's peace of mind and embarrassed Aglaya Nikiforovna.

Once, after an evening spent with his colleagues, when he had to bear no small amount of banter, Saranin returned home thoroughly out of temper.

Lying in bed beside Aglaya, he growled and began wrangling with his wife. Aglaya lazily and unwillingly replied in a drowsy voice: "What am I to do? It's not my fault."

She was of a very placid and peaceful temper.

Saranin growled: "Don't gorge yourself with meat, and don't gobble up so much floury food; the whole day you're stuffing yourself with sweets."

"Then I can't eat anything, if I've got a good appetite," said Aglaya. "When I was single, I had a better appetite still!"

"So I should think! Why, you ate up an ox at one go, didn't you?"

"It's impossible to eat up an ox at one go," replied Aglaya, placidly.

She quickly fell asleep, but Saranin could not get to sleep in this strange autumn night.

For a long time he tossed about from side to side.

When a Russian cannot eleep, he thinks about things. Saranin, too, devoted himself to that activity, which was so little peculiar to him at any other time. For he was an official,—and so had little reason to think about this and that.

"There must be some means or other," pondered Saranin. "Science makes marvellous discoveries every day; in America they make people noses of any shape they like, and put a new skin on their faces. That's the kind of operations they perform,—they bore holes in the skull, they cut into the bowels and the heart, and sew them up again. Can't there be a way of making me grow, or else of reducing Aglaya's size? Some secret way or other? But how to find it? How? You won't find it by lying here. Even water won't flow under a stone at rest. But to look for this secret remedy. . . . It may be that the inventor is actually walking the streets and looking for a purchaser. Yes, of course. He can't advertise in the papers. . . . But in the streets hawking things round, selling what he likes from under his coat,—that's quite possible. He goes round and offers it on the quiet. If anyone wants a secret remedy, he doesn't stay tossing about in bed."

Having arrived at this conclusion, Saranin began to dress quickly, mumbling to himself:

"Twelve o'clock at night. . ."

He was not afraid that he would wake his wife. He knew that Aglaya slept soundly.

"Just like a buxter," he said aloud.—"Just like a clod-hopper," he thought to himself.

He finished dressing and went into the street. He had not the slightest wish for slumber. His spirits were light, and he was in the mood peculiar to a seeker of adventure when he has Some new and interesting experience before him.

The law-abiding official, who had lived quietly and colourlessly for the third of a century, suddenly felt within him the spirit of a venturesome and untrammelled hunter in wild deserts,—a hero of Cooper or Mayne-Reid.

But when he had gone a few steps along his accustomed road,—towards his office, he stopped and reflected. Wherever was he to go? All was still and peaceful, so peaceful that the street seemed to be the corridor of a huge building, ordinary, free from danger, shut off from all that was external and abrupt. The house-porters were dozing by the doors. At the cross-roads, a constable made his appearance. The street lamps glimmered. The paving-stones and the cobbles in the road shone faintly with the dampness of rain that had recently fallen.

Saranin considered, and in his unruffled hesitance he turned to the right and walked straight ahead.

II.

At a point where two streets crossed, in the lamp-light, he saw a man walking towards him, and his heart throbbed with a joyful foreboding.

It was an odd figure. A gown of bright colours, with a broad girdle. A large speckled cap, with a pointed tip. A saffron-coloured tuft of beard, long and narrow. White, glittering teeth. Dark, piercing eyes. Slippered feet.

"An Armenian?" thought Saranin at once.

The Armenian came up to him and said:

"My dear man, what are you looking for at this hour of the night? You should go and sleep, or else visit the fair ladies. If you like, I will guide you there."

"No, my own fair lady is ample enough for me," said Saranin.

And confidingly he acquainted the Armenian with his trouble.

The Armenian showed his teeth and made a neighing sound.

"Big wife, tiny husband,—to kiss, put up a ladder. Phew, not good!"

"What would be good for it, then?"

"Come with me. I will help a good man."

For a long time they went through the quiet, corridor-like streets, the Armenian in front, Saranin behind.

From lamp to lamp the Armenian underwent an odd change. In the darkness he grew, and the farther he went from the lamp, the hugher did he become. Sometimes it seemed aa if the sharp tip of his cap rose up higher than the houses into the cloudy sky. Then, as he approached the light, he became smaller, and by the lamp he assumed his former dimensions, and seemed a simple and ordinary hawker of gowns. And, strange to say, Saranin felt no astonishment at this phenomenon. He was in such a trustful mood that the gaudy wonders of the Arabian Nights themselves would have seemed ordinary to him, even as the tedious passage of workaday drabness.

At the door of a house, quite an ordinary fivestoried yellow building, they stopped. The lamp at the door clearly outlined its unpretentious sign. Saranin noticed:

"No. 41."

They entered the courtyard. To the staircase of the back wing. The staircase was in semidarkness. But on the door before which the Armenian stopped, fell the light of a small dim lamp, and Saranin distinguished the figures:

"No. 43."

The Armenian thrust his hand into his pocket, drew from thence tiny bell, of the kind that is used in country-houses to summon the servants, and rang it. Clear and silvery was the sound of the little bell.

The door opened immediately. Behind the door stood a bare-footed lad, well-favoured, brown-skinned, with very full-coloured lips. His white teeth glistened because he kept smiling, now joyfully, now mockingly. And it seemed that he was smiling the whole time. The comely lad's eyes gleamed with a greeny lustre. He was all lithe as a cat and blurred as the phantom of a peaceful nightmare. He looked at Saranin and smiled. Saranin felt uneasy.

They entered. The lad closed the door, bending forward lithely and adroitly, and went before them into the passage, bearing a lamp in his hand. He opened a door, and again that blurred movement and mirth.

An uncanny, dark narrow room, Along the walls of which were arranged cupboards with certain alembics and phials. There was a strangely irritating and perplexing odour.

The Armenian lit the lamp, opened a cupboard, fumbled about there and fetched down an alembic with a greenish liquid.

"Good droplets," he said ; "you give one drop in a glass of water, go to sleep quietly, and not wake up."

"No, I don't want that," said Saranin, vexedly. "You don't think I've come for that!"

"My dear man," said the Armenian in a wheedling voice, "you will take another wife, after your own size, very simple matter."

"I don't want to," cried Saranin.

"Well, don't shout," the Armenian cut him short. "Why are you getting angry, dear man? You are spoiling your temper for nothing. You don't want it, then don't take it. I'll give you other things. But they are dear, ah, ah, dear."

The Armenian, squatting down on his haunches, which gave his long figure a comical appearance, fetched out a square-shaped bottle. In it glittered a transparent liquid. The Armenian said softly, with a mysterious look:

"You drink one drop, you lose a pound; you drink forty drops, you lose forty pounds' weight. A drop, a pound. A drop, a rouble. Count the drops, give the roubles."

Saranin was inflamed with joy.

"How much shall I want, now?" pondered Saranin. "She must be about two hundred pounds, for certain. If she loses a hundred and twenty pounds, she'll be quite a tiny little woman. That will be fine!"

"Give me a hundred and twenty drops."

The Armenian shook his head.

"You want a lot, that will be bad!"

Saranin flared up.

"Well, that's my business."

The Armenian looked at him searchingly.

"Count out the money."

Saranin took out his pocket-book.

"All to-day's winnings, and you've got to add some of your own as well," he reflected.

The Armenian in the meantime took out a cut-glass phial, and began to count out the drops.

A sudden doubt was enkindled in Saranin's mind.

A hundred and twenty roubles, a tidy sum of money. And supposing he cheats.

"They really will work?" he asked, undecidedly.

"We don't sell a pig in a poke," said the master of the house. "I'll show you now how it works. Gaspar—" he shouted.

The same bare-footed lad entered. He had on a red jacket and short blue trousers. His brown legs were bare to above the knees. They were shapely, handsome, and moved adroitly and swiftly.

The Armenian beckoned with his hand. Gaspar speedily threw aside his garments. He went up to the table.

The lights dimly shone upon his yellow body, shapely, powerful, beautiful. His smile was subservient, depraved. His eyes were dark, with blue marks under them.

The Armenian said:

"Drink the pure drops, and it will work at once. Mix with water or wine, and then slowly, you will not notice it with your eyes. Mix it badly, and it will act in jerks, not nicely."

He took a narrow glass with indentations, poured out some of the liquid and gave it to Gaspar. Gaspar, with the gesture of a spoilt child who is being given sweets, drank the liquid to the dregs, threw his head backwards, licked out the last sweet drops with his long, pointed tongue which was like a serpent's fangs, and immediately, before Saranin's eyes, he began to get smaller. He stood erect, looked at Saranin, laughed, and changed in size like a puppet bought at a fair, which shrivels up when they remove the wind from it.

The Armenian took him by the elbow and placed him on the table. The lad was about the size of a candle. He danced and performed antics.

"What will happen to him now?" asked Saranin.

"My dear man, we will make him grow again," replied the Armenian.

He opened a cupboard and from the top shelf he took another vessel likewise of strange shape. The liquid in it was green. Into a tiny goblet, the size of a thimble, the Armenian poured a little of the liquid. He gave it to Gaspar.

Again Gaspar drank it, just as the first time.

With the unwavering slowness of water filling a bath, the naked lad became bigger and bigger. Finally, he reached his previous dimensions.

The Armenian said:

"Drink with wine, with water, with milk, drink it with whatever you please, only do not drink it with Russian kvas, or you will begin to moult badly."

III.

A few days elapsed.

Saranin beamed with joy. He smiled mysteriously.

He was waiting for an opportunity.

He was biding his time.

Aglaya complained of a headache.

"I have a remedy," said Saranin. "It acts wonderfully."

"No remedies are any good," said Aglaya, with a sour grimace.

"No, but this one will be. I got it from an Armenian."

He spoke go confidently that Aglaya had faith in the efficacy of the Armenian's medicine.

"Oh, all right then; give it me."

He produced the phial.

"Is it nasty?" asked Aglaya.

"it's delightful stuff to taste, and it acts wonderfully. Only it will cause you a little inconvenience."

Aglaya made a wry face.

"Drink, drink."

"Can it be taken in Madeira?"

"Yes."

"Then you drink the Madeira with me," said Aglaya, prompted by caprice.

Saranin poured out two glasses of Madeira, and into his wife's glass he poured the admixture.

"I feel a bit cold," said Aglaya softly and sluggishly. "I should like my wrap."

Saranin ran to fetch the wrap. When he returned, the glasses stood as before. Aglaya sat down and smiled.

He laid the wrap round her.

"I feel as if I were better," said she. "Am I to drink?"

"Drink, drink," cried Saranin. "Your health!"

He seized his glass. They drank.

She burst out laughing.

"What is it?" asked Saranin.

"I changed the glasses. You'll have the inconvenience, not me."

He shuddered. He grew pale.

"What have you done?" he shouted in desperation.

Aglaya laughed. To Saranin her laughter seemed loathsome and cruel.

Suddenly he remembered that the Armenian had an antidote.

He ran to find the Armenian.

"He'll make me pay dearly for it," he thought, gingerly. "But what of the money! Let him take all, if only he saves me from the horrible effects of this nostrum."

IV.

But obviously an evil destiny was flinging itself upon Saranin.

On the door of the lodging where the Armenian lived, there hung a lock. In desperation Saranin seized the bell. A wild hope inspirited him. He rang desperately.

Behind the door the bell tinkled loudly, distinctly, clearly, with that inexorable clearness peculiar to the ringing of bells in empty lodgings.

Saranin ran to the house-porter. He was pallid. Smail drops of sweat, exceedingly small, like dew on a cold stone, broke out on his face and specially on his nose.

He dashed hastily into the porter's lodge and cried:

"Where is Khalatyantz?"

The porter in charge, a listless, black-bearded bumpkin, was drinking tea from a saucer. He eyed Saranin askance. He asked with unruffled calm:

"And what do you want of him?"

Saranin looked blankly at the porter and did not know what to say.

"If you've got any business with him," said the porter, looking at Saranin suspiciously, "then, sir, you had better go away. For as he's an Armenian, keep out of the way of the police."

"Yes, but where iS the cursed Armenian?" cried Saranin, in desperation. "From number 43?"

VThere is no Armenian," replied the porter. "There was, it's true, I won't deny it, but there isn't now."

"Where is he, then?"

"He's gone away."

"Where to?" shouted Saranin.

"Who can say?" replied the porter, placidly. "He got a foreign passport and went abroad."

Saranin turned pale.

"Understand," he said in a trembling voice, "I must get hold of him, come what may."

He burst out crying.

The porter looked at him sympathetically. He said:

"Why, don't upset yourself, sir. If you do want the cursed Armenian so badly, why then, take a trip abroad yourself, go to the registration office there, and you'll find him by the address."

Saranin did not consider the absurdity of what the porter said. He became cheerful.

He at once rushed home, flew like a hurricane into the local office, and requested the man in charge to make him out a foreign passport without delay. But suddenly he remembered:

"But where am I to go?"

V.

The cursed nostrum did its evil work with fateful slowness, but inexorably. Saranin became smaller and smaller every day. His clothes dangled round him like a sack.

His acquaintances marvelled. They said: "How is it that you seem a bit smaller. Have you stopped wearing heels?"

"Yes, and a bit thinner."

"You're working too hard."

"Fancy taking it out of yourself like that!"

Finally, on meeting him, they would sigh:

"Whatever is the matter with you?"

Behind his back, Saranin's acquaintances began to make fun of him.

"He's growing downwards."

"He's trying to break the record for smallness."

His wife noticed it somewhat later. Being always in her sight, he grew smaller too gradually for her to see anything. She noticed it by the baggy look of his clothes.

At first she laughed at the queer diminution in size of her husband. Then she began to lose her temper.

"This is going from bad to worse," she said. "And to think that I actually married such a midget."

Soon all his clothes had to be re-made,—all the old ones were dropping off him; his trousers reached his ears, and his hat fell on to his shoulder.

The head porter happened to go into the kitchen.

"What's up here?" he asked the cook, sternly.

"Is that any business of mine?" the plump and comely Matrena was on the point of shouting irascibly, but she remembered just in time and said:

Gougle "There's nothing up here at all. Everything's ag usual."

"Why, your master's beginning to carry on like anything. By rights he ought to report himself to the police," said the porter very sternly.

The watch-chain on his paunch heaved indignantly.

Matrena suddenly sat down on a box and burst out crying.

"Don't talk about it, Sidor Pavlovitch," she began. "We've really been wondering what's the matter with him,—we can't make it out."

"What's the reason? What's the cause?" exclaimed the porter, indignantly. "Can such things be?"

"The only comfort about it," said the cook, sobbing, "is, that he eats less."

The longer he lived, the smaller he got.

And the servants, and the tailors, and all with whom Saranin had to come in contact, treated him with unconcealed contempt. He would race along to business, tiny, hardly managing to lug his huge portfolio with both hands, and behind him he heard the malicious laughter of the hall-porter, the door-keeper, cabmen, urchins.

"Little shrimp," the head porter would remark.

Saranin had to swallow many a bitter draught. He lost his wedding ring. His wife made a fuss about it. She wrote to her parents in Moscow. "Curse that Armenian!" thought Saranin.

Often he called to mind the Armenian counting the drops, pouring them out.

"Whew!"? exclaimed Saranin.

"Never mind, my dear, it was my mistake, I won't do anything for it."

Saranin also went to the doctor, who examined him with jocular remarks. He found nothing wrong.

Saranin would go to visit somebody or other,—the porter did not let him in at once.

"Who may you be?"

Saranin told him.

"I don't know,” said the porter. "Mr. So-and-so don't receive such people."

VI.

At business, in his department, they began by eyeing him askance and jeering. Especially the younger men.

Then they started murmuring, expressing disapproval.

The hall-porter began to remove Saranin's overcoat with open repugnance.

"There's a weedy little official for you," he muttered. "What sort of Christmas box are you likely to get from him?"

And to keep up his prestige, Saranin was compelled to give bigger and more frequent tips than before. But that availed little. The porters took the money, but they looked at Saranin suspiciously.

Saranin explained to someone among his colleagues that an Armenian had landed him in this mess. The rumour of the Armenian affair rapidly spread throughout the department. It found its way into other departments as well. . .

On one occasion the manager of the department ran up against the tiny official in the passage. He looked at him in amazement. He said nothing. He went into his room.

Then they considered that they had better inform him. The manager asked:

"Has this been going on long?"

The assistant manager wavered.

"It's a pity you didn't draw attention to it at the time," said the manager, sourly, without waiting for an answer. "Strange that I knew nothing about it. I'm greatly put out."

He sent for Saranin.

When Saranin reached the manager's room, all the officials looked at him in severe condemnation.

With a beating heart Saranin entered the superintendent's room. He still clung to a faint hope, the hope that His Excellence intended to give him a particularly flattering order, availing himself of his small size. He might detail him for the Universal Exhibition, or some secret duty or other. But at the very first sound of the departmental manager's voice, this hope dispersed like smoke.

"Sit down here," said His Excellency, pointing to a chair.

Saranin clambered up as best he could. The manager irately gazed at the official's legs dangling in the air. He asked:

"Mr. Saranin, are you acquainted with the Civil Service regulations as defined by the Government?"

"Your Excellency," stammered Saranin, laying, as in prayer, his little hands upon his breast.

"Why have you done this?" asked the manager.

"Believe me, Your Excellency. . ."

"Why have you done this?" repeated the Manager.

But Saranin could not say another word. He burst into tears. He had become very lachrymose latterly.

The manager looked at him. He shook his head. He began very sternly:

"Mr. Saranin, I have summoned you in order to inform you that your inexplicable conduct is to be regarded as thoroughly insufferable."

"But, Your Excellency, I think I've always properly. . . stammered Saranin, "and as for my stature. . ."

"Yes, that's just it."

"But I am not responsible for this misfortune."

"I cannot judge to what extent this strange and unseemly occurrence has come upon you through misfortune, and to what extent you are not responsible for it, but I am bound to tell you, that as far as the department in my charge is concerned, your extraordinary diminution in size bas become positively scandalous. The most equivocal rumours are already circulating in the town. I cannot judge of their accuracy, but I know that these rumours explain your conduct by associating it with agitations for Armenian independence. You will admit that the department cannot be turned into a headquarters for developing Armenian intrigues, directed towards the diminution of the Russian Empire. We cannot keep officials who conduct themselves so strangely."

Saranin leaped up from his chair, and tremblingly whimpered:

"A freak of nature, Your Excellency."

"It is peculiar, but the interests of the service. . ."

And again he repeated the same question:

"Why have you done this?"

"Your Excellency, I myself do not know how it has come to pass."

"What instincts! You are flaunting the smallness of your stature, when you could easily hide it under any lady's skirt, if I may be allowed to say so. This cannot be tolerated."

"I never did this," wailed Saranin.

But the manager did not hear. He went on:

"I even heard that you are doing this out of sympathy for the Japanese. But a limit must be recognised in all things."

"How could I ever do that, Your Excellency?"

"I do not know. But I beg of you to desist. You can be retained in the service, but only in the provinces, and this will be immediately cancelled, if you do not resume your customary dimensions. For the purpose of recruiting your health, you are granted four months' leave. I must request you not to make your appearance in the department any more. Any papers that are indispensable to you will be sent to your house. Good morning."

"Your Excellency, I am capable of working. Why this leave?"

"You will take it because of illness."

"But, Your Excellency, I am quite well."

"No more, if you please."

They gave Saranin leave for four months.

VII.

Before long, Aglaya's parents arrived. It was after lunch. During luch, Aglaya had waxed very merry at her husband's expense. Then she went off to her room.

He went timidly into his study,—it seemed huge to him now,—scrambled up on to the ottoman, curled himself up in a corner and began crying. Burdensome perplexities tormented him.

Why should just he be overwhelmed bv such a misfortune? It was dreadful, unheard of.

What utter folly.

He sobbed and whispered despairingly:

"Why, oh, why did I do it?"

Suddenly he heard familiar voices in the front room. He shook with horror. On tiptoe he crept to the washing-atand,—they should not see his tear-stained eyes. Even to wash himself was difficult,—he had to stand on a chair.

The guests had already entered the drawing-room. Saranin received them. He bowed, and in a piping voice made some unintelligible remark. Aglaya's father looked at him blankly with wide-open eyes. He was big, stout, bull-necked and red-faced. Aglaya was at his heels.

He stood still before his son-in-law, and with legs wide apart, he eyed him attentively; he took Saranin's Hand cautiously, bent forward and said, lowering his voice:

"We have come to see you."

It was obvious that his intention was to behave himself tactfully. He fidgeted with his feet on the floor.

From behind his back, Aglaya's mother, a lean and malicious person, pushed forward. She exclaimed shrilly:

"Where is he, where? Show him to me, Aglaya, show me this Pygmalion."

She looked over Saranin's head. She purposely did not notice him. The flowers on her hat waggled strangely. She went straight up to Saranin. He squeaked and hopped on one side.

Aglaya began to cry and said:

"There he is, mama."

"I'm here, mama," squeaked Saranin, and shuffled his feet.

"You villain, what have you done to yourself? Why have you shrivelled up so?"

The servant-girl giggled.

"Don't you giggle at your master, my good girl."

Aglaya reddened.

"Mama, let's go into the drawing-room."

"No; tell me, you villain, for what purpose you've got so small?"

"Now then, mother, wait a bit," the father interrupted her.

She turned on her husband as well.

"Didn't I tell you not to let her marry a man without a beard. See, it's turned out just as I said."

The father looked cautiously at Saranin and did his utmost to change the conversation to politics.

"The Japanese," he said, "are of no great size to speak of, but to all appearance they are a brainy race, and even, you might almost say, enterprising."

VIII.

And Saranin grew tinier and tinier. He could now walk freely under the table. And each day he became smaller still. He had not yet taken complete advantage of his leave, but he did not go to the office. They had not yet made preparations to travel anywhere.

Aglaya sometimes made fun of him, sometimes she cried and said:

"Where shall I take you in that state? The shame and disgrace of it!"

To pass from the study to the dining-room had become a journey of quite respectable proportions. And to climb up on a chair in the bargain. . .

Still, weariness was in itself agreeable. It resulted in a good appetite and the hope of growing. Saranin now pinned all his faith upon food. The amount he consumed was out of all proportion to his diminutive dimensions. But he did not grow. On the contrary,—he decreased and decreased in size. The worst of it was that this decrease in size sometimes proceeded in jerks and at the most inopportune times. As if he were performing tricks.

Aglaya thought of passing him off as a boy, and entering him at a school. She made her way to the nearest one. But the conversation she had with the Headmaster discouraged her.

They demanded documents. It turned out that the plan was impracticable.

With an expression of extreme perplexity the Headmaster said to Aglaya:

"We cannot take a court councillor as pupil. What could we do with him? Suppose the teacher told him to stand in the corner, and he said: I am a Knight of St. Anne. It would be very awkward."

Aglaya assumed a pleading expression and began to implore.

The Headmaster remained inexorable.

"No," he said stubbornly, "we cannot take an official into the school. There is nowhere a single clause in which such a case is provided for. And it would be extremely awkward to approach the authorities with such a proposition. They wouldn't hear of it. It might lead to considerable unpleasantness. No, it can't be done at all. Apply to the controller, if you so desire."

But Aglaya could not make up her mind to go to the authorities.

IX.

One day Aglaya received a visit from a young man, whose hair was combed back with very shiny smoothness. He made an extremely galiant curtsey. He introduced himself thus:

"I represent the firm of Strigal and Co. A first-class store at the very smartest centre of aristocratic shopping in the West End. We have a huge quantity of clients in the best and highest society."

With a view to all emergencies, Aglaya made eyes at the representative of the illustrious firm. With a languid gesture of her plump arm she invited him to take a chair. She sat with her back to the light. Leaning her head on one side, she made ready to listen.

The young man with the shinily combed hair continued:

"We have been informed that your husband has vouchsafed to display originality in his choice of a diminutive size for himself. For this reason, the firm, anticipating the very latest movements in ladies' and gentlemen's fashions, has the honour, madam, of proposing, as an advertisement, to provide the gentleman free of charge with suits cut according to the very finest Parisian model."

"For nothing?" asked Aglaya, listlessly.

"Not only for nothing, madam, but even with payment to your own advantage, only under one trifling condition which can easily be fulfilled."

In the meantime, Saranin, hearing that he was the subject of the discussion, betook himself into the drawing-room. He strolled round the young man with the shinily arranged hair. He coughed and clattered with his heels. He was very annoyed that the representative of the firm of Strigal and Co. paid not the slightest attention to him.

At last he darted up to the young man and squeaked loudly:

"I suppose they didn't tell you I was at home?"

The representative of the illustrious firm stood up. He gave a gallant curtsey. He sat down again, and, turning to Aglaya, said:

"Only one trifling condition."

Saranin snorted contemptuously. Aglays burst out laughing. Her eyes sparkled inquisitively, and she said:

"Well, tell me, what is the condition?"

"Our condition is that the gentleman would consent to sit in the window of our store in the capacity of a living advertisement."

Aglaya gave a malicious laugh.

"Splendid! At any rate, he'll be out of my sight."

"I won't consent," squeaked Saranin, in a piercing voice. ‘"I cannot agree to such a thing. I,—a court councillor and a knight, sitting in a shop-window as an advertisement,—why, I think it's absolutely ridiculous."

"Be quiet," shouted Aglaya, "it's not you they're asking."

"What, not asking me?" wailed Saranin. "How much longer am I to put up with strangers?"

"Oh no, sir, you're making a mistake!" chimed in the young man amiably. "Our firm has no connection with aliens. Our employees are all either orthodox or Lutherans from Riga. And we have no Jews."

"I don't want to sit in the window" screamed Saranin.

He stamped his feet. Aglaya seized him by the arm. She pulled him towards the bed-room.

"Where are you dragging me?" screamed Saranin. "I don't want to, leave go."

"I'll quieten you," shouted Aglaya.

She locked the door.

"I'll give you a sound beating" she said through her teeth.

She started striking him. He wriggled powerlessly in her mighty arms.

"I've got you in my power, you pigmy. What I want I'll do. I can shove you into my pocket,—how dare you oppose me! I don't care for your rank, I'll thrash you within an inch of your life."

"I'll complain about it," squeaked Saranin.

But he soon realised the uselessness of resistance. He was so very small, and Aglaya had clearly resolved to put her whole strength into it.

"All right then, all right," he wailed, "I'll go into Strigal's window. I'll sit there,—and bring disgrace on you. I'll put on all my decorations."

Aglaya laughed.

"You'll put on what Strigal gives you," she shouted.

She lugged her husband into the drawing-room. She threw him before the young man and shouted:

"Take him! Carry him off this very moment. And the money in advance. Every month!"

Her words were hysterical outcries.

The young man produced a pocket-book. He counted out two hundred roubles.

"Not enough!" shouted Aglaya.

The young man smiled. He took out a hundred rouble note in addition.

"More than this I am not authorised to give," he remarked, amiably. ‘"At the end of a month, pray receive the next instalment."

Saranin ran about the room.

"In the window! In the window!" he kept screaming. "Cursed Armenian, what did you do to me?"

And suddenly at that very moment he shrank by about three inches.

X.

Useless were Saranin's tears and hig lamentations?—what did Strigal and his associates care about them?

They paid. They effectuated their rights. The ruthless rights of capital.

The power of capital provides even the court councillor and knight with a position completely in accordance with his precise dimensions, but not in the least harmonising with his pride. Dressed up in the latest fashion, the pigmy runs to and fro in the window of the fashion emporium,—now feasting his gaze on the fair ladies of such colossal size!—now spitefully threatening the gleeful children with his fists.

There was a mob round the windows of Strigal and Co.

The assistants in Strigal and Co.'s store trod on each other's toes.

Strigal and Co.'s workshop was flooded with orders.

Strigal and Co. attain renown.

Strigal and Co. extend their workshops.

Strigal and Co. are rich.

Strigal and Co. buy up houses.

Strigal and Co. are magnanimous; they feed Saranin right royally, they do not stint his wife for money.

Aglaya is already receiving a thousand a month.

More income still has fallen to Aglaya's share.

And acquaintances.

And lovers.

And brilliants.

And carriages.

And a mansion.

Aglaya is merry and contented. She has grown still larger. She wears high-heeled shoes. She selects hats of gigantic proportions.

When she visits her husband, she fondles him and feeds him from her hand like a bird. Saranin in a stumpy-tailed dress-suit trots about with tiny steps on the table in front of her and squeaks something. His voice is as penetrating as the squeak of a gnat. But the words are not audible.

Tiny little folk can speak, but their squeaking is not audible to people of large proportions,—neither to Aglaya, nor to Strigal, nor to any of the company. Aglaya, surrounded by shop-assistants, hears the mannikin's whining and squeaking. She laughs and goes away.

They carry Saranin into the window, where, in a nest of soft materials, a whole lodging is arranged for him, with the open side turned towards the public.

The street urchins see the mannikin sitting down at the table and preparing to write his petitions. His tiny little petitions for his rights, which have been violated by Aglaya, Strigal and Co.

He writes. He knocks against the envelope. The urchins laugh.

In the meanwhile, Aglaya is sitting in her splendid carriage. She is going for a jaunt before lunch.

XI.

Neither Aglaya, nor Strigal and Co. thought how it would all end. They were satisfied with the present. It seemed as if there would be no end to the golden shower which flowed down upon them. But the end came. Of the most ordinary kind. Such as might have been expected.

Saranin diminished continually. Every day they dressed him in new suits,—always smaller.

And suddenly, in the eyes of the marvelling shop-assistants, just as he was putting on some new trousers, he became excessively minute. He tumbled out of the trousers. And he had already become like a pin's head.

A slight draught was blowing. Saranin, minute as a grain of dust, was lifted up in the air. He was twirled round. He mingled with the cloudlets of dust gamboling in the sunbeams. He disappeared.

All search was in vain. Saranin could nowhere be found.

Aglaya, Strigal and Co., the police, the clergy, the authoritics,—all were in the greatest perplexity.

How was the disappearance of Saranin to be formulated?

At last, after communication with the Academy of Sciences, they decided to reckon him as dispatched on a special mission for scientific purposes.

Then they forgot about him.

Saranin was finished with.

Wikisource

Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1 March, 1863, in Saint Petersburg. Accounts of his father’s life evoke Gogol’s The Overcoat and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, for Kuzma Afanasyevich Teternikov was a shoemaker and tailor, and apparently the illegitimate son of a local landowner. When Kuzma Afanasyevich died in 1867, Fyodor’s mother became a domestic servant, and Fyodor and his sister grew up in the house of their mother’s employer.

After discussing Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, and Zinaida Gippius in his chapter on Russian Symbolism, D. S. Mirsky writes of Sologub, ‘All the writers hitherto mentioned in this chapter came from civilized upper-middle-class families of one of the two capitals. But the greatest and most refined poet of the first generation of symbolists rose from the lower orders, and his strange genius grew under the most unpropitious circumstances’. Despite his difficult childhood, Sologub graduated from a teachers’ institute in Petersburg in 1882, and spent the next decade as a schoolteacher in small towns across the Novgorod, Pskov and Olonets governorates. His first published work was a poem called ‘The Fox and the Hedgehog’, which appeared under the pseudonym ‘Ternikov’ in a children’s magazine in 1884.

In 1892, Sologub returned to take up a teaching position in Petersburg. Back in the capital, he began associating with the leading literary figures of the day, and started writing for Severny Vestnik (‘The Northern Messenger‘). It was as part of this milieu that, in 1893, upon the suggestion of Nikolai Minsky, Fyodor Kuzmich took the pen name ‘Sologub’. In 1894, he published his first short story in Illustrirovanny Mir (‘The Illustrated World‘), entitled ‘Ninochkina oshibka’ (‘Ninochka’s Mistake’). Then in 1896, he published his first three books: a volume of poetry; a collection of his short stories; and a novel entitled Tyazhelye Sny (‘Bad Dreams‘), which he had been working on since 1883.

His novel Melky Bes – translated variously into English as The Little Demon and The Petty Demon – was finished in 1902, but not published in book form until 1907. Drawn from his years teaching in rural Russia, the novel brought Sologub wide literary acclaim and a small measure of celebrity. At this time his small Petersburg apartment – in which Sologub lived with his sister – served as a regular meeting place for authors and artists including Alexander Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Léon Bakst, and Teffi. But in 1907, shortly after the publication of Melky Bes, Sologub’s sister died from tuberculosis. The following year he married Anastasia Chebotarevskaya, a translator by profession, and the couple soon moved into a larger apartment and began throwing lavish receptions.

Sologub continued to publish short stories, plays, essays, and translations, and between 1909-1911, the Petersburg publishing house Shipovnki published a twelve-volume edition of his complete works. This was followed between 1913-1914 by a twenty-volume edition of his works, by the publishing house Sirin. The eighteenth-twentieth volumes of this edition contained The Created Legend, a novel in three parts which had been serialised in periodicals since 1908. The Created Legend received only a muted response. Earlier in 1913, Sologub had given a lecture in Petersburg on ‘The Art of These Days’, which was attended by leading intellectuals and met with such praise that Sologub embarked over the next few years on a lecturing tour across Russia.

In 1914, Sologub briefly published and edited his own literary journal, and the following year he began seeing his stories translated into English, courtesy of the translator John Cournos. Despite supporting revolutionary politics for much of the 1900s and 1910s, he proved ill-disposed to the Bolsheviks. Finding his avenues for publication increasingly limited following the October Revolution of 1917, at the beginning of 1919 Sologub applied for permission to leave Russia. Permission finally came in the autumn of 1921; but Sologub’s wife Anastasia committed suicide, jumping from Tuchkov bridge just days before the couple were scheduled to depart.

Sologub would not leave Petersburg without Anastasia, and he published five volumes of original poetry over the following year, then spent the remainder of his life working on translations. He was elected to several honorary positions; and in 1924 the fortieth anniversary of his literary career was celebrated with toasts at the Alexandrinsky Theatre from Kuzmin, Andrei Bely, and Osip Mandelstam. Sologub died after an illness at the end of 1927, and was buried in Smolensky cemetery.

Mirsky posits Sologub’s body of work between a Manichean idealism – with its typical dichotomy of the beautiful and the good set against the ugly and the evil, and in Sologub’s version God equated with the demiurge-creator – and a perverse sensuality centred around the feet. He writes that ‘A heroine who walks barefoot is like his sign manual in almost every one of Sologub’s novels and short stories’. Formally, he identifies Sologub’s poetry as ‘Victorian’ in its small but precise vocabulary, and refined use of metre; but states also that his language can become ‘cruder and richer and more racy’ in his darker pieces. Mirsky considers Sologub’s ‘idealistic lyrics […] his greatest achievement’, and called these – at the time of his writing in 1926 – the ‘most refined and most delicate of all modern Russian poetry’.

The following poem is from early in Sologub’s career, written in 1898, and first collected in 1904. It captures something of the earthy pessimism, abutting against a mysterious malevolence, which is characteristic of Sologub’s early poetry. As per a previous piece on Alexander Blok, I will provide the poem in the Russian; in my own transliteration for the sake of the sound patterns; and in English translation.

Порой повеет запах странный,-

Его причины не понять,-

Давно померкший, день туманный

Переживается опять.

–

Как встарь, опять печально всходишь

На обветшалое крыльцо,

Засов скрипучий вновь отводишь,

Вращая ржавое кольцо,-

–

И видишь тесные покои,

Где половицы чуть скрипят,

Где отсырелые обои

В углах тихонько шелестят,

–

Где скучный маятник маячит,

Внимая скучным, злым речам,

Где кто-то молится да плачет,

Так долго плачет по ночам.

__

5 октября 1898

At times there comes a strange smell wafting;

From whence its source I cannot say.

But I relive what’s been dark often,

A kind of smoldering foggy day.

–

Like then, once more I climb up sadly

The run-down porch at evening

And once again unlatch the creaking

Bolt turning on the rusty ring.

–

And see the narrow rooms before me,

Where every floorboard squeaks and purrs,

Where the mildewed, damp wallpaper

In the corners slightly stirs,

–

The dull pendulum dimly swinging

Listens as evil speeches bite,

And for so long someone’s been praying

And crying hard throughout the night.

______

Translated by Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks

Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’ 

Culturedarm

In 1899, as Fyodor Sologub progressed in the teaching profession while continuing to elaborate his literary career, Sologub was appointed principal of the Andreevskoe municipal school in Saint Petersburg. With the position came an apartment on Vasilievsky Island, which Sologub shared with his sister Olga. In the late 1890s and at the beginning of the 1900s, the art world of Petersburg saw Konstantin Sluchevsky’s ‘Fridays’, and Sergei Diaghilev’s ‘Wednesdays’: literary salons which were attended by the leading poets and artists of the day. Sologub had been a participant of both groups; and between 1905 and 1907, his apartment on Vasilievsky Island became the home of ‘Sundays’, a regular meeting place for Petersburg’s nascent intellectuals.

Alexander Blok was a routine visitor. These years were some of the young Blok’s most prolific, marked by bursts of creative energy as he worked on two lyrical dramas – Balaganchik (‘The Puppet Show‘), featuring the ‘grotesquely luckless’ Pierrot, which was staged in 1906 by Vsevolod Meyerhold at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre; and The Stranger – and the poetry cycle The Snow Mask, which he completed in little over a week at the beginning of 1907. The actress Valentina Verigina often accompanied Blok, and recounted of these visits to and from Sologub’s apartment:

                    ‘How often we wandered through the streets of the snowy city… All of the theatrical events that seemed so important in their time have grown dim in my memory. Acting at the theatre, which I loved so much, now seems to me far less exciting and bright than that game of masks in Blok’s circle. It is true that even at that time I did not look upon our meetings, gatherings, and strolls as mere entertainment. There is no doubt that others too felt the significance and creative value of it all, yet nonetheless we did not realize that the charms of Blok’s poetry almost deprived us all of our real existence, turning us into Venetian masqueraders of the north.’

In the month after Olga’s death from tuberculosis in June 1907, Sologub retired following twenty-five years as a teacher, and moved in Petersburg from the school-owned apartment to a private flat. The following year he married Anastasia Chebotarevskaya, a translator and author of children’s books who he had first met in the autumn of 1905. In the summer of 1909, Sologub and Chebotarevskaya holidayed in France. Though he had travelled to Finland with his sister in a final attempt to improve her condition, Finland was at the time part of the Russian Empire, so this trip to France was Sologub’s first proper visit abroad.

In August 1910, Sologub and his wife moved to a larger apartment, at Razyezzhaya ulitsa in the centre of Petersburg. The short and brisk sentences of Anastasia Chebotarevskaya’s writing have been viewed as a potential influence on Sologub’s own work; and she encouraged his acquaintance with the young writers of Russian Futurism, a distinctive literary movement which was then just beginning to flower. Yet the influence of Anastasia on her husband has not been unanimously well received. The humourist Teffi – who was one of the group who frequented the ‘Sundays’ gatherings at Sologub’s Vasilievsky Island home – wrote that Sologub’s marriage:

                          ‘reshaped his daily life in a new and unnecessary way. A big new apartment was rented, small gilt chairs were bought. The walls of the large cold office for some reason were decorated with paintings of Leda by various painters […] The quiet talks were replaced by noisy gatherings with dances and masks. Sologub shaved his mustache and beard, and everyone started to say that he resembled a Roman of the period of decline.’

One of these ‘noisy gatherings with dances and masks’ proved the occasion of a notable scandal within the world of Russian letters. On 3 January, 1911, Sologub and his wife hosted a masquerade to celebrate the new year. Among the attendees were the writers Aleksei Remizov and Aleksei Tolstoy. Remizov was well known within the world of Russian letters for his mischievous sense of humour. He founded a ‘Great and Free House of Apes’, declaring himself Chancellor, and sent out missives to writers and publishers decreeing them positions in this ironic organisation; and Andrei Bely dubbed him a ‘petty demon’ – the title of Sologub’s most celebrated work – owing to his appearance.

For the new year’s masquerade, Anastasia lent Remizov an animal hide for use as a costume. Remizov apparently cut the tail from this hide, and attached it to his rear so that it poked out of the vent of his evening jacket. Anastasia failed to see the funny side, for she had borrowed the hide herself in order to lend it to Remizov. She complained in a letter:

                       ‘To my great dismay, today I discovered that your tail came from my animal hide (actually not mine, someone else’s – that’s the problem!). Moreover, I cannot find the rear paws. Have they really been cut off? Where shall I look for them? I await your reply. I’ve taken the skin to be fixed – but how ever can I return it with patches?’

In response, Remizov claimed that the tail had been shorn from the rest of the hide during a party hosted the previous day by Aleksei Tolstoy. The result was that both he and Remizov were precluded from subsequent parties at the Sologub household.

Fyodor and Anastasia would stay at the apartment on Razyezzhaya ulitsa until 1916, when – after several years of constant touring for the sake of a series of lectures – Sologub settled again and returned with his wife to Vasilievsky Island. The final move of his life would come in the weeks after his wife’s suicide in 1921, upon which Sologub took an apartment on the Zhdanovskaya Embankment, close to Tuchkov bridge from which his wife had jumped and drowned.

Masquerades are as prominent in Sologub’s literature as they were in his life. In Melky Bes – finally published in 1907, just a few months before his sister’s death, and translated into English as The Little Demon or The Petty Demon – in a plot which runs alongside the adventures of the protagonist Peredonov, a boy named Sasha Pylnikov becomes involved in a curious relationship with a young woman, Lyudmila Rutilova.

Peredonov labours as a provincial schoolteacher and aspires to be promoted to an inspectorship. His wife, Varvara, secures his hand in marriage by asserting her connection to a patron with the power to provide such a promotion. Varvara has lied, however, and Peredonov, spiteful by nature, paranoid, frustrated, and increasingly beset by deceptions and hallucinations, abuses Sasha most out of all his students.

As the relationship between Sasha and Lyudmila is established, Sasha is warned by his school’s headmaster that it is inappropriate, and he is told to curtail his visits to the Rutilova house. When the local theatre organises a masked ball, with prizes for the best male and female costumes – the prizes being, at least according to local rumour, a bicycle and cow respectively – Lyudmila and her sister, Darya, seize upon the idea to enter Sasha as a girl:

                    ‘The amount of the prize did not interest either Darya or Liudmilla. Much they wanted a cow! What a rarity a fan was! And who was going to award the prizes? We know what taste these judges have! But both sisters were captivated by the idea of sending Sasha to the masked ball in a woman’s dress, to fool the whole town and to arrange so that the lady’s prize should go to him.

[…]

And when the sisters told Sasha about their project and Liudmillotchka said to him: “We will dress you up as a girl,” Sasha jumped up and down and shouted with joy. He was delighted with the idea, especially as no one would know – it would be fine to fool everyone.

They decided at once that they would dress Sasha as a Geisha. The sisters kept their idea in the strictest secrecy and did not even tell Larissa or their brother. Liudmilla herself made the costume from the design on the label of Korilopsis: it was a long full dress of yellow silk on red velvet; she sewed a bright pattern on the dress, consisting of large flowers of fantastic shape. The girls made a fan out of thin Japanese paper, with figures, on bamboo sticks, and a parasol out of thin rose silk with a bamboo handle. They bought rose coloured stockings and wooden slippers with little ridges underneath. The artist Liudmilla painted a Geisha mask: it was a yellowish but agreeable thin face, with a slight motionless smile, oblique eyes and a small, narrow mouth. They had only to get the wig from Petersburg – black, with smooth, arranged hair.’

Sologub’s novel has been cited as a Russian instance of Decadent literature, and it shows some of the contemporaneous Russian interest in paganism and ‘orientalism’. The fact of a boy adopting the role of a woman calls back to ancient Greek theatre, English Renaissance theatre, and kabuki: Japanese dance-drama with its beginnings in the seventeenth century, in which the term for male actors who impersonate women is ‘onnagata’ or ‘oyama’. In The Little Demon, there is a perversely sexual element to Sasha’s fluctuations between boyhood and womanhood. When Sasha first appears in the novel, he is kneeling, and Peredonov seems darkly attracted to his femininity:

                  ‘After he had stood behind the boys for some time and gathered enough of depressing reflections, Peredonov moved forward toward the middle rows. There, on the very edge, to the right, stood Sasha Pilnikov; he was praying earnestly and often went down on his knees. Peredonov watched him, and it gave him pleasure to see Sasha on his knees like one chastised, and looking before him at the resplendent altar with a concerned and appealing expression on his face; with entreaty and sadness in his black eyes shaded by long intensely black eyelashes. Smooth-faced and graceful, his chest standing out broad and high as he rested there, calm and erect on his knees, as if under some sternly observing eye, he appeared at that moment to Peredonov altogether like a girl.

Peredonov now decided to go directly after Vespers to Pilnikov’s rooms.’

When Peredonov visits Sasha’s home late that evening, he puts his arm around the boy, pretends to mistake him for a girl, and threatens to whip him with a birch when Sasha refuses to tell which of his fellow pupils have been speaking coarsely.

Sasha ultimately sustains the courage to attend the masquerade as a geisha; and in the following chapter, in disguise at the ball, he wins many male admirers:

                    ‘Sasha, intoxicated by his new situation, coquetted furiously. The more they stuck their cards into the Geisha’s little hand, the more gaily and provokingly gleamed the eyes of the coquettish Geisha through the narrow slits of the mask.’

Taken for a famous actress, Sasha wins the prize for best female costume: a fan, rather than the rumoured cow. But all the attention the geisha has received upsets many of the females present, and a violent scuffle ensues through the rooms of the venue, with embittered women, drunkards, and young men scratching and pulling and tearing at the geisha’s clothes. Sasha is only rescued by the actor Bengalsky. As he and Bengalsky take a cab to the Rutilovas, Peredonov burns the ballrooms down, impelled by his ‘nedotykomka’: the small grey demon of the novel’s title, which only Peredonov can see.

The Masquerades of Fyodor Sologub.  

Culturedarm  

More stories, poems and tales : 

Wikisource

The Sweet-scented Name and other Fairy Tales, Fables and Stories . 1915. Translated by StephenGraham and Rosa Savory

Two stories : The Poisonous Garden  (1908),The Way To Damascus (1910)

Four Tales by Fyodor Sologub

Biography of  Fyodor Sologub