The Gift (43 page)

Concerning the “light” scenes in
The Prologue
we had better keep silent. Through their morbidly circumstantial eroticism one
can make out such a throbbing tenderness for his wife that the least quotation from them might appear to be exaggerated derision. Instead let us listen to this pure sound—in his letters to her during those years: “My dearest darling, I thank you for being the light of my life.” … “I would be even here one of the happiest men in the world if it did not occur to me that this fate, which is very much to my personal advantage, is too hard in its effects on your life, my dear friend.” … “Will you forgive me the grief to which I have subjected you?”

Chernyshevski’s hopes for literary profits were not realized: the émigrés not only misused his name but also pirated his works. And entirely fatal for him were the attempts made to free him, attempts which were in themselves courageous but which seem senseless to us, who can see from the hilltop of time the disparity between the image of a “fettered giant” and the real Chernyshevski whom these efforts by his would-be saviors only enraged: “These gentlemen,” he said later, “didn’t even know that I can’t ride a horse.” This inner contradiction resulted in nonsense (a particular shade of nonsense already long known to us). It is said that Ippolit Myshkin, disguised as a gendarme officer, went to Vilyuisk where he demanded of the district police chief that the prisoner be handed over to him, but spoiled the whole business by putting his shoulder knot on the left side instead of the right. Before this, namely in 1871, there was Lopatin’s attempt in which everything was absurd: the way he suddenly abandoned the Russian translation of
Das Kapital
that he was making in London, in order to get for Marx, who had learned to read Russian, “
den grossen russischen Gelehrten”;
his journey to Irkutsk in the guise of a member of the Geographical Society (with the Siberian residents taking him for a government inspector incognito); his arrest following a tip-off from Switzerland; his flight and capture; and his letter to the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia in which he told him all about his project with inexplicable frankness. All this only worsened Chernyshevski’s situation. Legally his settlement was supposed to begin on August 10, 1870. But only on December 2nd was he moved to another place, to a place which turned out to be far worse than penal servitude—to Vilyuisk.

“Forsaken by God in a dead end of Asia,” says Strannolyubski,
“in the depths of the Yakutsk region, far to the northeast, Vilyuisk was nothing but a hamlet standing on a huge pile of sand heaped up by the river, and surrounded by a boundless bog overgrown by taiga scrub.” The inhabitants (500 people) were: Cossacks, half-wild Yakuts, and a small number of low middle-class citizens (whom Steklov describes very picturesquely: “The local society consisted of a pair of officials, a pair of clerics and a pair of merchants”—as if he were talking about the Ark). There Chernyshevski was lodged in the best house, and the best house turned out to be the jail. The door of his damp cell was lined with black oilcloth; the two windows which anyway were right up against the palisade were barred up. In the absence of any other exiles, he found himself in complete solitude. Despair, helplessness, the consciousness of having been deceived, a dizzy feeling of injustice, the ugly shortcomings of arctic life, all this almost drove him out of his mind. On the morning of July 10, 1872, he suddenly began to break the door lock with a pair of tongs, shaking all over, and mumbling, and crying out: “Has the sovereign or a minister come that the police sergeant dares to lock the door at night?” By winter he had calmed down a bit, but from time to time there were certain reports … and here we are granted one of those rare correlations that constitute the researcher’s pride.

Once (in 1853), his father had written him (regarding his
A Tentative Lexicon of the Hypatian Chronicle):
“You would do better to write some tale or other … tales are still in fashion in good society.” Many years afterwards Chernyshevski informs his wife that he has thought up in his prison and wants to set down in writing “an ingenious little tale” wherein he will portray her in the form of two girls: “It will be quite a good little tale [repeating his father’s rhythm]. If only you knew how much I have laughed to myself when depicting the various noisy frolics of the younger one, how much I cried with tenderness when depicting the pathetic meditations of the elder!” “At night Chernyshevski,” reported his jailers, “sometimes sings, sometimes dances and sometimes weeps and sobs.”

The mail went out of Yakutsk once a month. The January number of a St. Petersburg magazine was received only in May. He
tried to cure the illness he had developed (goiter) with the aid of a textbook. The exhausting catarrh of the stomach that he had known as a student now returned with new peculiarities. “I am nauseated by the subject of ‘peasants’ and ‘peasant ownership of the land,’ ” he wrote to his son, who had thought to interest him by sending him some books on economics. The food was repulsive. He ate almost nothing but cooked cereals: straight from the pot—with a silver tablespoon, of which almost a quarter was worn away on the pot’s earthenware sides during the twenty years that he himself was wearing away. On warm summer days he would stand for hours with his trousers rolled up in a shallow stream (which could hardly have been beneficial); or, with his head wrapped in a towel against the mosquitoes, which made him look like a Russian peasant woman, he would stroll along forest paths with his plaited mushroom basket, never plunging into the denser wildwood. He would forget his cigarette case under a larch, which he was some time in learning to distinguish from a pine. The flowers which he gathered (whose names he did not know) he wrapped in cigarette paper and sent to his son Misha, who acquired that way “a small herbarium of the Vilyuisk flora”: thus did Princess Volkonski in Nekrasov’s poem about the Decembrists’ wives bequeath her grandchildren “a collection of butterflies, plants of Chita.” Once an eagle appeared in his yard … “it had come to peck at his liver,” remarks Strannolyubski, “but did not recognize Prometheus in him.”

The pleasure which he had experienced in his youth from the orderly disposition of the St. Petersburg waters now received a late echo: from nothing to do he dug out canals—and almost flooded one of the Vilyuisk residents’ favorite roads. He quenched his thirst for spreading culture by teaching manners to Yakuts, but just as before, the native would remove his cap at a distance of twenty paces and in that position would meekly freeze. The practicality and good sense he used to advocate now dwindled to his advising the water-carrier to substitute a regular yoke of wood for the crook made of hair, which cut his palms; but the Yakut did not change his routine. In the little town where all they did was play cards and have passionate discussions about the price of Chinese cotton, his yearning for activity in public affairs led him to the
Old-Believers, about whose plight Chernyshevski wrote an extraordinarily long and detailed memoir (including even Vilyuisk gossip) and coolly sent it off addressed to the Tsar, with the friendly suggestion he pardon them because they “esteem him as a saint.”

He wrote a lot but burned almost everything. He informed his relatives that the results of his “learned work” would undoubtedly be accepted sympathetically; this work was ashes and a mirage. Out of the whole heap of writings which he produced in Siberia, besides
The Prologue
, only two or three stories and a “cycle” of unfinished “novellas” have been preserved.… He also wrote poems. In texture they are no different from those versificatory tasks which he had once been given in the seminary, when he had reset a psalm of David in the following manner:

In 1875 (to Pypin) and again in 1888 (to Lavrov) he sends “an ancient Persian poem”: a ghastly thing! In one of the strophes the pronoun “their” is repeated
seven
times (“Their country is barren, Their bodies are fleshless, And through their torn garments their ribs one can tell. Their faces are broad, and their features are flattened; Upon their flat features the soul does not dwell”) while in the monstrous chains of the genitive case (“Of howls of the ache of their craving for blood”) now, at the parting with literature, under a very low sun, there is evidence of the author’s familiar leaning toward congruity, toward links. To Pypin he writes heartrending letters expressing his stubborn desire to thwart the administration and occupy himself with literature: “This thing
[The Academy of Azure Mountains
, signed Denzil Elliot—purporting to be from the English] is of high literary merit.… I am patient, but—I hope no one intends to prevent me from working for my family.… I am famous in Russian literature for the carelessness of my style.… When I want to I can also write in all sorts of good styles.”

“What is [this] hymn to the Maid of the Skies? An episode from the prose story of Empedocles’ grandson … And what is the story of Empedocles’ grandson? One of the innumerable stories in
The Academy of Azure Mountains
. The Duchess of Cantershire has set off with a company of fashionable friends on a yacht through the Suez Canal to the East Indies in order to visit her tiny kingdom at the foot of the Azure Mountains, near Golconda. There they do what intelligent and good people of fashion do: They tell stories—stories that will follow in the next packages from Denzil Elliot to the editor of
The Messenger of Europe”
(Stasyulevich—who did not print any of this).

One feels dizzy, the letters swim and fade in one’s eyes—and here we again pick up the theme of Chernyshevski’s spectacles. He asked his relatives to send him new ones, but in spite of his efforts to explain it particularly graphically, he nonetheless made a mess of it, and six months later he received from them number “four and a half instead of five or five and a quarter.”

He gave an outlet to his passion for instruction by writing to Sasha about the mathematician Fermat, to Misha about the struggle between Popes and Emperors, and to his wife about medicine, Carlsbad, and Italy.… It ended the way it was bound to end: the authorities requested him to stop writing “learned letters.” This so offended and shook him that for over six months he did not write any letters at all (the authorities never saw the day when they would get from him those humble petitions which, for instance, Dostoevski used to dispatch from Semipalatinsk to the strong of this world). “There is no news from Papa,” wrote Olga Sokratovna to her son in 1879. “I wonder if he, my dear one, is still alive,” and she can be forgiven much for this intonation.

Yet one more jackanapes with a name ending in “ski” suddenly pops up as an extra: on March 15, 1881, “your unknown pupil Vitevski,” as he recommends himself, but according to police information
a tippling doctor at the Stavropol district hospital, sends him a wire to Vilyuisk protesting with completely superfluous heat against an anonymous opinion that Chernyshevski was responsible for the assassination of the Tsar: “Your works are filled with peace and love. You never desired this (i.e., the assassination).” Whether because of these artless words or because of something else, the government softened and in the middle of June it showed its jail tenant a bit of thoughtful kindness: it had the walls of his domicile papered in “gris
perle
with a border,” and the ceiling covered with calico, which in toto cost the exchequer 40 rubles and 88 kopecks; i.e., somewhat more than Yakovlev’s overcoat and Musa’s coffee. And already the following year the haggling over Chernyshevski’s ghost was concluded, after negotiations between the Volunteer Security Guards (the secret police) and the executive committee of the underground People’s Freedom concerning the preservation of law and order during Alexander the Third’s coronation, with the decision that if the latter went off smoothly, Chernyshevski would be freed: thus he was bartered in exchange for tsars—and vice versa (a process that subsequently found its material expression when the Soviet authorities substituted in Saratov his statue for that of Alexander the Second). A year later, in May, a petition was submitted in his sons’ names (he, of course, knew nothing of this), in the most florid and tear-jerking style imaginable. The Minister of Justice, Nabokov, made the appropriate report and “His Majesty deigned to permit the transfer of Chernyshevski to Astrakhan.”

At the end of February, 1883 (overburdened time was already having difficulty in dragging his destiny), the gendarmes, without a word of the resolution, suddenly took him to Irkutsk. No matter—leaving Vilyuisk was in itself a happy event, and more than once during the summer voyage up the long Lena (revealing such kinship with the Volga in its meanders) the old man broke into a dance, chanting dactylic hexameters. But in September the voyage ended and with it the sensation of freedom. On the very first night Irkutsk appeared as the same kind of casemate in the deepest of provincial backwoods. In the morning he was visited by the chief of the gendarmerie, Keller. Nikolay Gavrilovich sat leaning his elbow on the table and did not respond at once. “The Emperor has
pardoned you,” said Keller, and repeated it even louder, seeing that the other was apparently half-asleep or beclouded. “Me?” said the old man suddenly, then stood up, placed his hands on the herald’s shoulders and, shaking his head, burst into tears. In the evening, feeling as if convalescent after a long illness, but still weak, with a delicious mist permeating his being, he had tea at the Kellers’, talking incessantly and telling the latters’ children “more or less Persian fairy tales—about asses, roses, robbers …” as one of his hearers recalled. Five days later he was taken to Krasnoyarsk, from there to Orenburg—and in the late autumn at between six and seven in the evening he drove with post-horses through Saratov; there, in the yard of an inn by the gendarmery, in the mobile darkness, a wretched little lamp swayed so much in the wind that one simply could not distinguish properly Olga Sokratovna’s changeable, young, old, young face wrapped in a woolen kerchief—she had rushed headlong to this unhoped-for meeting; and that same night Chernyshevski (who could tell his thoughts?) was dispatched further.