Works of Ivan Turgenev (Illustrated) (91 page)

“After what you have just said,” observed Litvinov with a smile, “I need not even inquire to which party you belong, and what is your opinion about Europe. But let me make one observation to you. You say that we ought to borrow from our elder brothers: but how can we borrow without consideration of the conditions of climate and of soil, the local and national peculiarities? My father, I recollect, ordered
 
from Butenop a cast - iron thrashing machine highly recommended; the machine was very good, certainly -
 
- but what happened? For five long years it remained useless in the barn, till it was replaced by a wooden American one -
 
- far more suitable to our ways and habits, as the American machines are as a rule. One cannot borrow at random, Sozont Ivanitch.”

Potugin lifted his head.

“I did not expect such a criticism as that from you, excellent Grigory Mihalovitch,” he began, after a moment’s pause. “Who wants to make you borrow at random? Of course you steal what belongs to another man, not because it is some one else’s, but because it suits you; so it follows that you consider, you make a selection.. And as for results, pray don’t let us be unjust to ourselves; there will be originality enough in them by virtue of those very local, climatic, and other conditions which you mention. Only lay good food before it, and the natural stomach will digest it in its own way; and in time, as the organism gains in vigor, it will give it a sauce of its own. Take our language even as an instance. Peter the Great deluged it with thousands of foreign words, Dutch, French, and German; those words expressed ideas with which the Russian people had to be familiarized; without scruple or ceremony Peter poured them wholesale by bucketsful into us. At first, of course, the result was something of a monstrous product; but later there began precisely that process of digestion to which I have alluded. The ideas had been introduced and assimilated; the foreign forms evaporated gradually, and the language found substitutes for them from within itself; and now your humble servant, the most mediocre stylist, will undertake to translate any page you like out of Hegel -
 
- yes, indeed, out of Hegel -
 
- without making use of a single word not Slavonic. What has happened with the language, one must hope will happen in other departments. It all turns on the question: is it a nature of strong vitality? and our nature -
 
- well, it will stand the test; it has gone through greater trials than that. Only nations in a state of nervous debility, feeble nations, need fear for their health and their independence, just as it is only weakminded people who are capable of falling into triumphant rhapsodies over the fact that we are Russians. I am very careful over my health, but I don’t go into ecstasies over it: I should be ashamed.”

“That is all very true, Sozont Ivanitch,” observed Litvinov in his turn; “but why inevitably expose ourselves to such tests? You say yourself that at first the result was monstrous! Well, what if that monstrous product had persisted? Indeed it has persisted, as you know yourself.”

“Only not in the language -
 
- and that means a great deal! And it is our people, not I, who have done it; I am not to blame because they are destined to go through a discipline of this kind. ‘The Germans. have developed in a normal way,’ cry the Slavophils, ‘let us too have a normal development!’ But how are you to get it when the very first historical step taken by our race -
 
- the summoning of a prince from over the sea to rule over them -
 
- is an irregularity, an abnormality, which is repeated in every one of us down to the present day? Each of us, at least once in his life, has certainly said to something foreign, not Russian: ‘Come, rule and reign over me!’ I am ready, of course, to agree that when we put a foreign substance into our own body we cannot tell for. certain what it is we are putting there, bread or poison; yet it is a well - known thing that you can never get
 
from bad to good through what is better, but always through a worse state of transition, and poison, too, is useful in medicine. It is only fit for fools or knaves to point with triumph to the poverty of the peasants after the emancipation, and the increase of drunkenness since the abolition of the farming of the spirit - tax. . . . Through worse to better!”

Potugin passed his hand over his face. “You asked me what was my opinion of Europe,” he began again: “I admire her, and am devoted to her principles to the last degree, and don’t in the least think it necessary to conceal the fact. I have long -
 
- no, not long -
 
- for some time ceased to be afraid to give full expression to my convictions -
 
- and I saw that you, too, had no hesitation in informing Mr. Gubaryov of your own way of thinking. Thank God I have given up paying attention to the ideas and points of view and habits of the man I am conversing with. Really, I know of nothing worse than that quite superfluous cowardice, that cringing desire to be agreeable, by virtue of which you may see an important dignitary among us trying to ingratiate himself with some little student who is quite insignificant in his eyes, positively playing down to him, with all sorts of tricks and devices. Even if we admit that the dignitary may do it out of desire for popularity, what induces us common folk to shuffle and degrade ourselves. Yes, yes, I am a Westerner, I am devoted to Europe: that’s to say, speaking more accurately, I am devoted to culture -
 
- the culture at which they make fun so wittily among us just now -
 
- and to civilization -
 
- yes, yes, that is a better word -
 
- and I love it with my whole heart and believe in it, and I have no other belief, and never shall have. That word, ci - vi - li - za - tion (Potugin pronounced each syllable with full stress and emphasis), is intelligible, and
 
pure, and holy, and all the other ideals, nationality, glory, or what you like -
 
- they smell of blood. . . . Away with them!”

“Well, but Russia, Sozont Ivanitch, your country -
 
- you love it?”

Potugin passed his hand over his face. “I love her passionately and passionately hate her.”

Litvinov shrugged his shoulders. “That’s stale, Sozont Ivanitch, that’s a commonplace.”

“And what of it? So that’s what you’re afraid of! A commonplace! I know many excellent commonplaces. Here, for example, Law and Liberty is a well - known commonplace. Why, do you consider it’s better as it is with us, lawlessness and bureaucratic tyranny? And, besides, all those phrases by which so many young heads are turned: vile bourgeoisie,
souveraineté du peuple
, right to labor, aren’t they commonplaces too? And as for love, inseparable from hate. . .. .”

“Byronism,” interposed Litvinov, “the romanticism of the thirties.”

“Excuse me, you’re mistaken; such a mingling of emotions was first mentioned by Catullus, the Roman poet Catullus,
[note]
two thousand years ago. I have read that, for I know a little Latin, thanks to my clerical origin, if so I may venture to express myself. Yes, indeed, I both love and hate my Russia, my strange, sweet, nasty, precious country. I have left her just now. I want a little fresh air after sitting for twenty years on a clerk’s high stool in a government office; I have left Russia, and I am happy and contented here; but I shall soon go back again: I feel that. It’s a beautiful
 
land of gardens -
 
- but our wild berries will not grow here.”

[Author’s note:]
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasce requiris. Nescio: sed fieri sentio, et excrucior. -
 
- CATULL.. lxxxvi.

“You are happy and contented, and I, too, like the place,” said Litvinov, “and I came here to study; but that does not prevent me from seeing things like that.”

He pointed to two
cocottes
who passed by, attended by a little group of members of the Jockey Club, grimacing and lisping, and to the gambling saloon, full to overflowing in spite of the lateness of the hour.

“And who told you I am blind to that?” Potugin broke in. “But pardon my saying it, your remark reminds me of the triumphant allusions made by our unhappy journalists at the time of the Crimean war, to the defects in the English War Department, exposed in the
Times
. I am not an optimist myself, and all humanity, all our life, all this comedy with tragic issues presents itself to me in no roseate colors: but why fasten upon the West what is perhaps ingrained in our very human nature? That gambling hall is disgusting, certainly; but is our home - bred card - sharping any lovelier, think you? No, my dear Grigory Mihalovitch, let us be more humble, more retiring. A good pupil sees his master’s faults, but he keeps a respectful silence about them; these very faults are of use to him, and set him on the right path. But if nothing will satisfy you but sharpening your teeth on the unlucky West, there goes Prince Kokó at a gallop, he will most likely lose in a quarter of an hour over the green table the hardly earned rent wrung from a hundred and fifty families; his nerves are upset, for I saw him at Marx’s to - day turning over a pamphlet of Vaillot. . . . He will be a capital person for you to talk to!”

“But, please, please,” said Litvinov hurriedly, seeing that Potugin was getting up from his place, “I know
 
Prince Kokó very little, and besides, of course, I greatly prefer talking to you.” “Thanks very much,” Potugin interrupted him, getting up and making a bow; “but I have already had a good deal of conversation with you; that’s to say, really, I have talked alone, and you have probably noticed yourself that a man is always as it were ashamed and awkward when he has done all the talking, especially so on a first meeting, as if to show what a fine fellow one is. Good - by for the present. And I repeat I am very glad to have made your acquaintance.”

“But wait a minute, Sozont Ivanitch, tell me at least where you live, and whether you intend to remain here long.”

Potugin seemed a little put out.

“I shall remain about a week in Baden. We can meet here though, at Weber’s or at Marx’s, or else I will come to you.”

“Still I must know your address.”

“Yes. But you see I am not alone.”

“You are married?” asked Litvinov suddenly.

“No, good heavens! . . . what an absurd idea! But I have a girl with me. . . .”

“Oh!” articulated Litvinov, with a face of studied politeness, as though he would ask pardon, and he dropped his eyes.

“She is only six years old,” pursued Potugin. “She’s an orphan . . . the daughter of a lady . . . a good friend of mine. So we had better meet here. Good - by.” He pulled his hat over his curly head, and disappeared quickly. Twice there was a glimpse of him under the gas - lamps in the rather meanly lighted road that leads into the Lichtenthaler Allee.

VI

“A STRANGE man!” thought Litvinov, as he turned into the hotel where he was staying; “a strange man! I must see more of him!” He went into his room; a letter on the table caught his eye. “Ah! from Tanya!” he thought, and was overjoyed at once; but the letter was from his country place, from his father. Litvinov broke the thick heraldic seal, and was just setting to work to read it . . . when he was struck by a strong, very agreeable, and familiar fragrance, and saw in the window a great bunch of fresh heliotrope in a glass of water. Litvinov bent over them not without amazement, touched them, and smelt them. . . . Something seemed to stir in his memory, something very remote . . . but what, precisely, he could not discover. He rang for the servant and asked him where these flowers had come from. The man replied that they had been brought by a lady who would not give her name, but said that “Herr Zlitenhov” would be sure to guess who she was by the flowers. Again something stirred in Litvinov’s memory. He asked the man what the lady looked like, and the servant informed him that she was tall and grandly dressed and had a veil over her face. “A Russian countess most likely,” he added.

“What makes you think that?” asked Litvinov.

“She gave me two guldens,” responded the servant with a grin.

Litvinov dismissed him, and for a long while after lie stood in deep thought before the window; at last,
 
however, with a wave of his hand, he began again upon the letter from the country. His father poured out to him his usual complaints, asserting that no one would take their corn, even for nothing, that the people had got quite out of all habits of obedience, and that probably the end of the world was coming soon. “Fancy,” he wrote, among other things, “my last coachman, the Kalmuck boy, do you remember him? has been bewitched, and the fellow would certainly have died, and I should have had none to drive me, but, thank goodness, some kind folks suggested and advised to send the sick man to Ryazan, to a priest, well - known as a master against witchcraft: and his cure has actually succeeded as well as possible, in confirmation of which I lay before you the letter of the good father as a document.” Litvinov ran through this document with curiosity. In it was set forth: “that the serving - man Nicanor Dmitriev was beset with a malady which could not be touched by the medical faculty; and this malady was the work of wicked people; but he himself, Nicanor, was the cause of it, since he had not fulfilled his promise to a certain girl, and therefore by the aid of others she had made him unfit for anything, and if I had not appeared to aid him in these circumstances, he would surely have perished utterly, like a worm; but I, trusting in the All - seeing Eye, have become a stay to him in his life; and how I accomplished it, that is a mystery; I beg your excellency not to countenance a girl who has such wicked arts, and even to chide her would be no harm, or she may again work him a mischief.”

Litvinov fell to musing over this document; it brought him a whiff of the desert, of the steppes, of the blind darkness of the life moldering there, and it seemed a marvelous thing that he should be reading
 
such a letter in Baden, of all places. Meanwhile it had long struck midnight; Litvinov went to bed and put out his light. But he could not get to sleep; the faces he had seen, the talk he had heard, kept coming back and revolving, strangely interwoven and entangled in his burning head, which ached from the fumes of tobacco. Now he seemed to hear Gubaryov’s muttering, and fancied his eyes with their dull, persistent stare fastened on the floor; then suddenly those eyes began to glow and leap, and he recognized Madame Suhantchikov, and listened to her shrill voice, and involuntarily repeated after her in a whisper, “she did, she did, slap his face.” Then the clumsy figure of Potugin passed before him; and for the tenth, and the twentieth time he went over every word he had uttered; then, like a jack in the box, Voroshilov jumped up in his trim coat, which fitted him like a new uniform; and Pishtchalkin gravely and sagaciously nodded his well - cut and truly well - intentioned head; and then Bindasov bawled and swore, and Bambaev fell into tearful transports. . . . And above all -
 
- this scent, this persistent, sweet, heavy scent gave him no rest, and grew more and more powerful in the darkness, and more and more importunately it reminded him of something which still eluded his grasp. . . . The idea occurred to Litvinov that the scent of flowers at night in a bedroom was injurious, and he got up, and groping his way to the nosegay, carried it into the next room; hut even from there the oppressive fragrance penetrated to him on his pillow and under the counterpane, and he tossed in misery from side to side. A slight delirium had already begun to creep over him; already the priest, “the master against witchcraft” had twice run across his road in the guise of a very playful hare with a beard and a pig - tail, and Voroshilov was trilling
 
before him, sitting in a huge general’s plumed cock - hat like a nightingale in a bush.. . . When suddenly he jumped up in bed, and clasping, his hands, cried, “Can it be she? it can’t be!”

But to explain this exclamation of Litvinov’s we must beg the indulgent reader to go back a few years with us.