The Gift (37 page)

“His head thinks about the problems of humanity … while his hand carries out unskilled labor,” he wrote of his “socially conscious workman” (and we cannot help recalling those woodcuts in ancient anatomical atlases, where a pleasant-faced youth is depicted nonchalantly leaning against a column and showing the educated world all his viscera). But the political regime that was supposed to appear as the synthesis in the syllogism, where the thesis was the commune, resembled not so much Soviet Russia as the Utopias of his day. The world of Fourier, the harmony of the twelve passions, the bliss of collective living, the rose-garlanded workmen—all this could not fail to please Chernyshevski, who was always looking for “coherency.” Let us dream of the phalanstery living in a palace: 1,800 souls—and all happy! Music, flags, cakes. The world is run by mathematics and well run at that; the correspondence which Fourier established between our desires and Newton’s gravity was particularly captivating; it defined Chernyshevski’s attitude to Newton for all his life, and it is pleasant to compare the latter’s apple with Fourier’s apple costing the commercial traveler a whole fourteen sous in a Paris restaurant, a fact that led Fourier to ponder the basic disorder of the industrial mechanism, just as Marx was led to acquaint himself with economic problems by the question of the wine-making gnomes (“small peasants”) in the Moselle Valley: a graceful origination of grandiose ideas.

While defending communal ownership of the land because of its simplifying the organization of associations in Russia, Chernyshevski was prepared to agree to the emancipation of the peasants without land, the ownership of which would have led in the long run to new encumbrances. At this point sparks flash from our pen. The liberation of the serfs! The era of great reforms! No wonder that in a burst of vivid prescience the young Chernyshevski noted in his diary in 1848 (the year somebody dubbed “the vent of the century”): “What if we are indeed living in the times of Cicero and Caesar, when
seculorum novus nascitur ordo
, and there comes a new Messiah, and a new religion, and a new world? …”

The fifties are now in full fan. It is permitted to smoke on the streets. One may wear a beard. The overture to
William Tell
is thundered out on every musical occasion. Rumors spread that the capital is being moved to Moscow; that the old calendar is going to be replaced by the new. Under this cover Russia is busily gathering material for Saltikov’s primitive but juicy satire. “What is this talk of a new spirit in the air, I’d like to know,” said General Zubatov, “only the flunkeys have grown rude, otherwise everything has stayed the way it was.” Landowners and notably their wives began to dream terrible dreams not listed in dream books. A new heresy appeared: Nihilism. “A scandalous and immoral doctrine rejecting everything that cannot be palpated,” says Dahl with a shudder, in his definition of this strange word (in which “nihil,” nothing, corresponds as it were to “material”). Persons in holy orders had a vision: an enormous Chernyshevski strides along the Nevsky Prospect wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a cudgel.

And that first rescript in the name of the Vilno governor, Nazimov! And the Tsar’s signature, so handsome, so robust, with two full-blooded, mighty flourishes, which were to be later torn off by a bomb! And the ecstasy of Nikolay Gavrilovich: “The blessing promised to the meek and the peacemakers crowns Alexander the Second with a happiness which no other of Europe’s sovereigns has yet known.…”

But soon after the provincial committees were formed, Chernyshevski’s ardor cooled: he was incensed by the self-seeking of the nobles in most of them. His final disillusionment came in the second half of 1858. The size of the compensation! The smallness of the allotments! The tone of
The Contemporary
became sharp and frank; the expressions “infamous” and “infamy” began pleasantly to enliven the pages of this dullish magazine.

Its director’s life was not rich in events. For a long time the public did not know his face. Nowhere was he seen. Already famous, he remained as it were in the wings of his busy, talkative thought.

Always, as was the custom then, in a dressing gown (spotted even behind with candle grease) he sat all day long in his little study with its blue wallpaper—good for the eyes—and its window
overlooking the yard (a view of the log-pile covered with snow), at a large desk heaped with books, printer’s proofs and cuttings. He worked so feverishly, smoked so much and slept so little that the impression he produced was almost frightening: skinny, nervy, his gaze at once blear and piercing, his hands shaky, his speech jerky and distracted (on the other hand he never suffered from headache and naively boasted of this as a mark of a healthy mind). His capacity for work was monstrous, as was, for that matter, that of most Russian critics of the last century. To his secretary Studentski, a former seminarist from Saratov, he dictated a translation of Schlosser’s history and in between, while the latter was taking it down, he himself would go on writing an article for
The Contemporary
or would read something, making notes in the margins. He was pestered by callers. Not knowing how to escape from an importunate guest, he would, to his own chagrin, get more and more involved in a conversation. Leaning his elbow on the mantelpiece and fiddling with something, he would talk in a shrill, squeaky voice, but whenever his thoughts wandered, he would drawl and chew monotonously, with an abundance of “well’s.” He had a peculiar quiet chuckle (causing Leo Tolstoy to break into a sweat), but when he laughed out loud he went off into fits and roared deafeningly (at which Turgenev, hearing these roulades from afar, would take to his heels).

Such methods of knowledge as dialectical materialism curiously resemble the unscrupulous advertisements for patent medicines, which cure all illnesses at once. Still, such an expedient can occasionally help with a cold. There was quite definitively a smack of class arrogance about the attitudes of contemporary wellborn writers toward plebeian Chernyshevski. Turgenev, Grigorovich and Tolstoy called him “the bedbugstinking gentleman” and among themselves jeered at him in all kinds of ways. Once at Turgenev’s country place, the first two, together with Botkin and Druzhinin, composed and acted a domestic farce. In a scene where a couch was supposed to catch fire, Turgenev had to come out running with the cry … here the common efforts of his friends had persuaded him to utter the unfortunate words which in his youth he had allegedly addressed to a sailor during a fire on board ship: “Save me, save me,
I am my mother’s only son.” Out of this farce the utterly talentless Grigorovich subsequently concocted his completely mediocre
School of Hospitality
, where he endowed one of the characters, the splenetic writer Chernushin, with the features of Nikolay Gavrilovich: mole’s eyes looking oddly askance, thin lips, a flattened, crumpled face, gingery hair fluffed up on the left temple and a euphemistic stench of burnt rum. It is curious that the notorious wail (“Save me,” etc.) is attributed here to Chernushin, which gives color to Strannolyubski’s idea that there was a kind of mystic link between Turgenev and Chernyshevski. “I have read his disgusting book [the dissertation]” writes the former in a letter to his fellow mockers. “Raca! Raca! Raca! You know that there is nothing in the world more terrible than this Jewish curse.”

“This ‘raca’ or ‘raka,’ ” remarks the biographer superstitiously, “resulted seven years later in Rakeev (the police colonel who arrested the anathematized man), and the letter itself had been written by Turgenev on precisely the 12th of July, Chernyshevski’s
birthday
 …” (it seems to us that Strannolyubski is stretching it a bit).

That same year Turgenev’s
Rudin
appeared, but Chernyshevski attacked it (for its caricature of Bakunin) only in 1860, when Turgenev was no longer necessary to
The Contemporary
, which he had left as a result of Dobrolyubov’s directing a snake hiss at his “On the Eve.” Tolstoy could not tolerate our hero: “One keeps hearing him,” he wrote, “hearing that thin, nasty little voice of his saying obtuse, nasty things … as he keeps waxing indignant in his corner until someone says ‘shut up’ and looks him in the eye.” “The aristocrats turned into coarse ruffians,” remarks Steklov in this connection, “when they talked with inferiors or about people who were inferior to them socially.” “The inferior,” however, did not remain in debt; knowing how much Turgenev prized every word spoken against Tolstoy, Chernyshevski, in the fifties, freely enlarged upon Tolstoy’s
poshlost
(vulgarity) and
hvastovstvo
(bragging)—“the bragging of a thickheaded peacock about a tail which doesn’t even cover his vulgar bottom,” etc. “You are not some Ostrovski or some Tolstoy,” added Nikolay Gavrilovich, “you are
an honor to us” (and
Rudin
was already out—had been out for two years).

The other literary reviews picked at him as much as they could. The critic Dudyshkin (in
The National Commentator
) huffily aimed his dudeen at him: “Poetry for you is merely chapters of political economy transposed into verse.” His ill-wishers in the mystical camp spoke about Chernyshevski’s “evil lure,” about his physical resemblance to the Devil (for instance, Prof. Kostomarov). Other journalists, of a plainer cast, like Blagosvetlov (who considered himself a dandy and despite his radicalism had as footboy a real, undyed blackamoor) talked about Chernyshevski’s dirty rubbers and German-cum-sexton’s style of dress. Nekrasov stood up for the “sensible fellow” (whom he had got for
The Contemporary)
with a limp smile, admitting that he had managed to lay the stamp of monotony on the magazine by stuffing it with mediocre tales denouncing bribe-taking and policemen; but he praised his colleague for his fruitful labors: thanks to him the magazine had 4,700 subscribers in 1858 and three years later—7,000. Nikolay Gavrilovich’s relations with Nekrasov were friendly but no more; there is a hint concerning some financial arrangements which displeased him. In 1883, in order to divert the old man, his cousin Pypin suggested that he should write some “portraits of the past.” Chernyshevski depicted his first meeting with Nekrasov with the meticulousness and laboriousness already familiar to us (giving a complex plan of all their mutual movements about the room including practically the number of footsteps), a detailism sounding like an insult inflicted on Father Time and his honest work, if one remembers that thirty years had elapsed since these maneuvers took place. He placed Nekrasov the poet above all others (above Pushkin, above Lermontov and Koltsov).
La Traviata
made Lenin weep; similarly, Chernyshevski, who confessed that poetry of the heart was even dearer to him than poetry of ideas, used to burst into tears over those of Nekrasov’s verses (even iambic ones!) which expressed everything he himself had experienced, all the torments of his youth, all the phases of his love for his wife. And no wonder: Nekrasov’s iambic pentameter enchants us particularly by its hortatory,
supplicatory and prophetic force and by a very individual caesura after the second foot, a caesura which in Pushkin, say, is a rudimentary organ insofar as it controls the melody of the line, but which in Nekrasov becomes a genuine organ of breathing, as if it had turned from a partition into a pit, or as if the two-foot part of the line and the three-foot part had moved asunder, leaving after the second foot an interval full of music. As he listened to these hollow-chested verses, to this guttural, sobbing articulation—

—Chernyshevski could not help thinking that his wife should not hasten to deceive him; could not help identifying the nearness of the end with the shadow of the prison already stretching out toward him. And that was not all: evidently this connection was felt—not in the rational but in the Orphic sense—also by the poet who wrote these lines, for it is precisely their rhythm (“Oh, do not say”) that was echoed with a bizarre haunting quality in the poem he subsequently wrote about Chernyshevski:

Thus Nekrasov’s sounds were
pleasing
to Chernyshevski; i.e., they happened to satisfy that elementary aesthetic for which he mistook all along his own circumstantial sentimentality. Having described a large circle, having taken in many matters concerning Chernyshevski’s attitude to various branches of knowledge, and yet not having impaired for a moment our smooth curve, we have now
returned with new forces to his philosophy of art. Now it is time to sum it up.

Like all the rest of our radical critics having a weakness for easy gain, he eschewed courtly compliments to lady writers, and energetically demolished Evdokia Rastopchin or Avdotia Glinka. “An incorrect and careless patter” (as Pushkin puts it) left him unmoved. Both he and Dobrolyubov flayed literary coquettes with gusto—but in real life … Well, look what was done to them, look how they were twisted and tortured with peals of laughter (water nymphs laugh thus along streams flowing close to hermitages and other places of salvation) by the daughters of Doctor Vasiliev.

His tastes were eminently solid. He was
épaté
by Hugo. He was impressed by Swinburne (which is not at all strange, come to think of it). In the list of books which he read in the fortress the name of Flaubert is spelled with an “o”—and, indeed, he placed him below Zacher-Masoch and Spielhagen. He loved Béranger the way average Frenchmen loved him. “For goodness’ sake,” exclaims Steklov, “you say that this man was not poetic? Why, do you not know that he would declaim Béranger and Ryleyev with tears of rapture?!” His tastes only congealed in Siberia—and by a strange delicacy of historical fate, Russia did not produce during the twenty years of his banishment a single genuine writer (until Chekhov) whose beginning he had not seen for himself during the active period of his life. From conversations with him in the eighties in Astrakhan it becomes apparent that: “Yes, sir, it is the title of count that made one consider Tolstoy ‘a great writer of the Russian land’ “; and when bothersome visitors asked him whom he thought the best living writer he named a complete nonentity: Maxim Belinski.