Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A selection of the finest stories by this female ChekhovTeffi's genius with the short form made her a literary star in pre-revolutionary Russia, beloved by Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin alike. These stories, taken from the whole of her career, show the full range of her gifts. Extremely funny-a wry, scathing observer of society-she is also capable, as capable even as Chekhov, of miraculous subtlety and depth of character.There are stories here from her own life (as a child, going to meet Tolstoy to plead for the life of War and Peace's Prince Bolkonsky, or, much later, her strange, charged meetings with the already-legendary Rasputin). There are stories of émigré society, its members held together by mutual repulsion. There are stories of people misunderstanding each other or misrepresenting themselves. And throughout there is a sly, sardonic wit and a deep, compelling intelligence.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 330
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
TEFFI
SUBTLY WORDED
AND OTHER STORIES
Translated from the Russian by Anne Marie Jackson with Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Clare Kitson, Irina Steinberg and Natalia Wase
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
IN THE YEARS before the Revolution, Teffi was a literary star. People quoted lines from her work in conversation. Strangers recognized her on the streets of St Petersburg. So broad was her appeal that her fans included such disparate figures as Vladimir Lenin and Tsar Nicholas II.1 As well as being popular with the reading public, Teffi was greatly admired by fellow writers such as Ivan Bunin, Fyodor Sologub and Mikhail Zoshchenko, to name but a few.
Although she is still often seen primarily as a humorist, the scope of her work was, almost from the beginning, broader and deeper. As often as not, her stories are small tragedies. The greatest of Soviet humorists, Mikhail Zoshchenko, once wrote: “Just try retelling one of her stories, even the funniest, and it will no longer be funny. It will come out absurd, maybe even tragic.”2 Or, in the words of the Russian critic Lidiya Spiridonova, Teffi’s stories are “funny on the outside, tragic on the inside”.3
Teffi, or Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, was born in 1872 into a prominent St Petersburg family. Her father was an eminent criminologist and a gifted raconteur, her mother a cultured woman who loved literature and passed this love on to her children. Along with her sisters and brother, Teffi was immersed in books and writing from an early age. Teffi’s older sister was the well-known poet Mirra Lokhvitskaya, dubbed the “Russian Sappho” by Ivan Bunin. Her other sisters were also published writers. Around 1890 Teffi married and went to live with her husband in the provinces, where they had three children. A decade later, however, she left her family and returned to St Petersburg. As Teffi wrote to her elder daughter in 1946, if she had remained in the marriage it would have been the end of her.
Later, as an émigrée in Paris, Teffi explained the origin of her pseudonym. She had written a play, but people kept telling her that no one would even read it unless she had theatre contacts or a big name. She felt she needed to come up with an attention-grabbing pen name, a name that might belong to either a man or a woman. When she cast about for the name of a fool—because fools were believed to be lucky—a certain Stefan came to mind, called “Steffi” by his friends. Out of delicacy, she got rid of the initial S and arrived at “Teffi”. When the press first encountered this pen name, someone assumed it was an allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s character “Taffy”. The explanation stuck and Teffi did little to discourage it.
Teffi’s first publication—a poem—appeared in 1901, but it was not until 1904 that her work began appearing with any regularity. Her satirical articles were published in a broad range of periodicals, and in 1905 she even contributed briefly to a Bolshevik newspaper. Teffi was closely associated with the journal Satyricon (New Satyricon after 1913) and the daily newspaper The Russian Word.4The Russian Word usually published literature only in its holiday editions, but Teffi recalls in her memoirs that the editor Vlas Doroshevich interceded on her behalf, saying, “Let her write what she wants to write. You don’t use a pure-bred Arab to haul water.” Gradually articles gave way to fiction and, by 1911, Teffi was publishing mostly short stories.
The political reforms of 1905 had been followed by a conservative backlash; even schoolchildren were often arrested. Such absurdities furnished material for Teffi’s prose collection Humorous Stories, one volume of which was published in 1910, followed by another in 1911. Humorous Stories was so successful that it was reissued three times in quick succession. Similar success would accompany Teffi throughout her literary career.
In this, as in later collections, Teffi usually writes about ordinary people, whose folly she ridicules but for whom she retains a certain tenderness. ‘The Corsican’ is about a police agent trying to learn revolutionary songs so that he can become an agent provocateur and thus improve his career prospects. In ‘A Radiant Easter’, a parody of a recognized genre of sentimental and moralistic Easter stories, a petty official attempts to make a good impression on his boss, but the plan backfires. Teffi regarded marriage with a certain scepticism, and ‘Duty and Honour’, first published in the collection Carousel in 1913, pokes fun at the banality of a woman attempting to enforce a friend’s adherence to convention.
One day Teffi received a three-layered box of candies from an anonymous admirer. They were in colourful wrappers, each emblazoned with her pen name and portrait. Overjoyed, she telephoned her friends, inviting them round to sample the “Teffi” candies. She began sampling them herself and, before she realized it, had devoured nearly all three layers. “I had gorged on fame until I’d made myself ill. That’s when I understood its flip side. […] Instead of happily celebrating with my friends, I had to invite a doctor round.”5 From then on, she appears to have remained indifferent to the trappings of her celebrity.
The Lifeless Beast (1916) is generally seen as the most accomplished collection that Teffi published before emigrating. In the preface she warned readers expecting light-hearted humour that “this book contains a great deal that isn’t cheerful”. ‘The Quiet Backwater’ rivals Chekhov at his best in its evocation of the language and mindset of an elderly peasant couple. Many years before, while her husband was away fighting, the wife had borne an illegitimate child. Teffi’s evocation of the silences and evasions that enable them to cope with this threat to their marriage is extraordinarily subtle. The title story, ‘The Lifeless Beast’, is told from the perspective of a young child all but forgotten amid the collapse of her parents’ marriage. The child’s world is inhabited almost entirely by beasts of one kind or another—animate and inanimate, animal and human. In ‘Jealousy’ a little girl, distressed by the attention her nanny is paying to another little girl, first wishes this girl to die and then determines to die herself. Robert Chandler writes, “Like Andrei Platonov, Teffi has a remarkable ability to evoke the inner world of a child. And like Platonov, she knows how fluid the boundary between life and death can seem to a child”:
Liza went round the lime tree, scrambling over its stout roots. In among these roots was plenty to catch the eye. In one little corner lived a dead beetle. Its wings were like the dried husks inside a cedar nut. Liza flipped the beetle onto its back with a little stick, and then onto its front, but it wasn’t afraid and didn’t run away. It was completely dead and living a peaceful life.
In 1916 Teffi was invited to two dinners attended by Rasputin. Later, in Paris, she wrote a vivid account of these meetings, all the more remarkable for the way she manages—in spite of the horror Rasputin evoked in her—to release him from cliché.
Many of Teffi’s stories and articles from the period of the Revolution and the Civil War have only recently been published in book form. Several of these pieces are included here. In ‘Petrograd Monologue’, Teffi manages to write with humour about the terrible food shortage of these years. “Funny on the outside, tragic on the inside” indeed! Social class is central to ‘One of Us’, in which a promising acquaintance between two balletomanes is nipped in the bud; even in 1918 there was evidently no escape from snobbery. And in ‘One Day in the Future’ (written and published in the St Petersburg journal New Satyricon not long before it was closed down) class snobbery is turned on its head; the story portrays a world in which knowledge and ability are spurned in favour of membership in the ranks of the proletariat.
In 1919, following the closure of The Russian Word, Teffi left St Petersburg to go on tour in Ukraine. She never saw Russia again. As the Bolsheviks continued to advance, Teffi was evacuated first from Kiev, then from Odessa, then from Novorossiysk. After passing, like so many other émigrés, through Constantinople, she ended up in Paris, settling there in 1920.
Teffi quickly became a major figure in the émigré world. ‘Que Faire?’—her first feuilleton published in Paris—was a huge hit and still remains one of her best-known works. Teffi’s title alludes to Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done, a phrase later put to use by Lenin as a revolutionary slogan. Teffi reverses the implication by putting the words into the mouth of a White general. They quickly became a catchphrase among émigrés. Full of clever interlingual word play, ‘Que Faire?’ brilliantly portrays the squabbling Russian émigré community, unable to find any kind of internal solidarity:
We—les russes, as they call us—live the strangest of lives here, nothing like other people’s. We stick together, for example, not like planets, by mutual attraction, but by a force quite contrary to the laws of physics—mutual repulsion. Every lesrusse hates all the others—hates them just as fervently as the others hate him.
The blackly humorous ‘Subtly Worded’, from Teffi’s 1923 collection Lynx, captures the anxiety people were experiencing with regard to what was happening back in Russia. A comparison of ‘Subtly Worded’ with Teffi’s earlier letter-writing story, ‘Duty and Honour’, reveals a great deal about just how much both Teffi and Russia had changed over the intervening decade.
The collection Gorodok was published in 1927. A gorodok—or “little town”—is essentially what the émigré community had become: a little town within the confines of Paris that refused to integrate into its host society. Rather, it sought to “preserve the values and traditions of Russian culture”6 in anticipation of going home, and carried on doing so even after any such hopes had faded. In this little town we find Sashenka, a young mother who nightly appears as “Marquita”, performing Spanish songs in a café where all the waitresses are “daughters of provincial governors”. She ruins her chances of a good marriage when she mistakenly accepts a friend’s advice to pretend to be a femme fatale. As Robert Chandler remarks:
Many writers have written about people pretending to be better than they really are; Teffi, with characteristic originality, shows us a woman who inadvertently ruins her chance of a better life by consciously pretending to be worse than she really is.
Like the majority of the Russian émigrés in Paris, Teffi did not expect to remain in exile from her homeland. As hope gave way to resignation, a new theme entered Teffi’s work: nostalgia. She contemplated not only a world left behind, but a way of life that no longer existed. ‘Ernest with the Languages’ comes from a trio of stories about private tutors on Russian country estates. Other stories from these years are autobiographical: in ‘My First Tolstoy’ the young Teffi pays a visit to Leo Tolstoy to plead her case for saving the life of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.
When asked in 1943 which of her works she most valued, Teffi named her collection Witch. “This book,” she writes, “contains our ancient Slavic gods, the way they exist even now in the people’s psyche—in legends, superstitions, customs. It’s all as I found it, in the Russian provinces, as a child.”7 In ‘The Kind that Walk’ a Jewish carpenter who returns to a village after an absence of thirty years is viewed by the peasants as one of the living dead. ‘The Dog’ is set against the background of the First World War and, in the words of Robert Chandler:
it provides a fine example of a writer drawing on folklore not for ornament but as a source of psychological truth. Just as D.H. Lawrence sometimes draws on the paranormal, so Teffi draws on folklore to convey how, at moments of crisis, we can be overwhelmed by the most primitive aspects of the psyche.8
Teffi remained in occupied Paris throughout the war. When the émigré newspapers and journals were shut down she lost her only source of income; her difficulties were compounded by the tendency of Western critics—many of whom were at least to some degree pro-Soviet—to dismiss Russian émigré literature.9 While she was not exactly left to starve, the gifts that Teffi received from fans and supporters were often somewhat impractical. She once wrote to her daughter about a lady who wanted to send her a velvet dressing gown for her name day, and another who sent her 3,000 francs for a new umbrella, although she already had one that was perfectly serviceable.
Deteriorating health notwithstanding, Teffi continued to give occasional readings during these years. Ever-dwindling audiences, however, attested to the attrition of the Russian community in Paris. In 1945 Teffi’s own death was rumoured; one New York journal even published her obituary. Teffi laid these rumours to rest in a letter-feuilleton which eloquently summed up the state of émigré Paris at the time. After expressing her regret that there was not yet a recognized etiquette for such letters, she suggested that such an etiquette was sure to be established soon: one was, after all, only too often bumping into people whose departure from life had already been noted in prayers and obituaries. She went on to say that this was actually a most rational phenomenon, as:
it is now more normal to die than to live. Can someone who is weak, elderly and ailing really be expected to survive the winter—in an unheated building, on a hungry stomach, with the wail of sirens and the roar of bombs, and in a state of grief and despair? […] Of course not! Obviously he has died!10
Earthly Rainbow, Teffi’s final collection, was published in 1952, the year Teffi really did die. Shortly before her death she wrote, “An anecdote is funny when it’s being told, but when someone lives it, it’s a tragedy. And my life has been sheer anecdote, that is—a tragedy.”11 Parallels can be drawn between Teffi’s own suffering and that of her character Anna Brown, the pianist in ‘Thy Will’. Both Teffi and Anna seem to come to a recognition that there is no controlling the pain in the world. Only days, perhaps hours, before Teffi died, in great pain and no longer able to speak, she scrawled onto a sheet of paper: “There is no love greater than that of someone giving his own morphine to his brother.”12 Like a true friend, Teffi shares her morphine with Anna Brown. ‘The Blind One’, one of Teffi’s favourites in this collection,13 juxtaposes the self-inflicted misery of a well-to-do woman with the joy and buoyancy of a poor blind girl from the neighbouring orphanage. The blind girl’s ability to “see” the beauty around her—on a “wan […] tear-stained” day, beside a sea that is “utterly stagnant and dead”—seems to mirror Teffi’s own ability to see what is wonderful in the most unlikely of places. The present collection closes with the extraordinary ‘And Time Was No More’, narrated by a fictive Teffi. Following an injection of morphine, this Teffi opens her eyes to find herself in a little house that she used to draw as a child. This begins a sequence of memories, dreams and illuminations into the nature of death, the soul and eternity. It is a kind of summing up of Teffi’s spiritual life as she prepares to depart her earthly existence.
Teffi died on 6 October 1952. She was buried in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.
The poet and critic Georgy Ivanov described Teffi as “an inimitable presence in Russian literature, a genuine wonder” and predicted that she would still be “amazing readers a hundred years from now”.14 Unfortunately, following Teffi’s death, she fell off the literary map. There are several possible explanations: she was a woman; she had been typecast as a lightweight humorist; she was an émigrée. But beginning in the 1990s, nearly half a century after Teffi’s death, a new generation of Russian readers began to discover and appreciate Teffi’s special genius. Georgy Ivanov—now himself becoming recognized as one of the greatest Russian poets of the last century—was right. Teffi’s time has come—or rather, her time has come again.
ANNE MARIE JACKSON
Notes
1 When a literary anthology was being prepared to commemorate the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty, Tsar Nicholas II was consulted as to which contemporary writers should be included. His response was: “Teffi! Only Teffi!” See O.N. Mikhailov, ‘Nezhny talant’, in O.N. Mikhailov, D.D. Nikolayev and E.N. Trubilova (eds), Tvorchestvo N.A. Teffi i russky literaturny protsess pervoy poloviny XX veka (Moscow: Nasledie, 1999), p. 5.
2 M.M. Zoshchenko, ‘N. Teffi’, in Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1972 god (Leningrad: Nauka, 1974), p. 141.
3 L.A. Spiridonova, ‘Teffi’, in Russkaya satiricheskaya literatura nachala XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), p. 162.
4 Teffi worked for The Russian Word (Russkoye Slovo) until the Bolsheviks closed it down in 1918. By 1917 it had achieved a circulation in excess of 1 million, making it one of the world’s largest papers. See Louise McReynolds, ‘Newspapers and public opinion’, in Between Tsar and People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 241.
5 Quoted in I.V. Odoyevtseva, Na beregakh Seny (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1989), p. 73.
6 Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration 1919–1939 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 4.
7 From a letter by Teffi dated 14 December 1943, quoted in E.M. Trubilova, ‘V poiskakh strany nigde’, in A.T. Averchenko, N.A. Teffi: Rasskazy (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1990), pp. 221–22.
8 Robert Chandler, Russian Magic Tales (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 166.
9 The Soviet experiment enjoyed widespread sympathy among leading literary critics in the West. See W. Bruce Lincoln, ‘Émigrés against utopia’, in Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life in Russia (New York: Viking, 1998).
10 N.A. Teffi, ‘Tot svet’, Russkiye novosti, 3 August 1945, p. 4.
11 From a letter by Teffi quoted in L.A. Spiridonova, ‘Teffi’, in Russkaya satiricheskaya literature nachala XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), p. 169.
12 Stanislav Nikonenko, ‘Nesravnennaya Teffi’, in N.A. Teffi, Moya letopis’ (Moscow: Vagrius, 2004), p. 14.
13 See E.M. Trubilova’s essay ‘Rozhdyennaya v voskresen’ye’, in N.A. Teffi, Sobraniye sochineny, vol. 7 (Moscow: Lakom, 2001), p. 8.
14 Poet and critic Georgy Ivanov, quoted in V. Vereshchagin,‘Teffi’, Russkaya Mysl’, 21 November 1968, p. 8.
PART I
Before the Revolution
A RADIANT EASTER
Like a torch, they passed the good news one to another, and, as if from a torch, each lit from it his own flame.
— From Legends about the Lives of the First Christians
SAMOSOV STOOD there gloomily, watching the deacon with the incense and thinking, “Go on, swing that incense, swing that incense! Think you can swing yourself into a bishopric? Some hope!”
Wanting to move closer to his boss, who was also praying in the church, he slowly but surely elbowed away a small boy. He wanted his boss to know he was there—this was why he had come.
“He’s brought his wife along,” muttered Samosov, crossing himself. “A right bitch she is! Forty lovers—and off she goes to church with her pencilled eyebrows! Here at least, in the presence of God, you might think she’d show a little shame. The man’s a fool, too—he imagined she had a dowry. And she, of course, didn’t want to starve to death—she was only too ready to marry him.”
“Christ is risen!” proclaimed the priest.
“He is risen indeed!” Samosov responded with feeling. And then, in an undertone: “And he’s brought his mother-in-law along too! Of course! If he left her at home, she’d be either smashing the china or forcing the safe. All she cares about is getting those daughters of hers married off. They’re a gaggle of monsters—she’s trying to get them off her hands as cheap as she can. And they can’t even buy the old woman a decent hat! Their idea of fun is to stick an old galosh on her head. To make everyone laugh. A fine show of respect for an old woman… But like it or not, she did bring you monsters into the world! There’s no getting away from that… Go on, swing that incense! They’ll make you an archimandrite! A metropolitan!”
The service came to an end. With dignified deference Samosov approached his boss.
“Yes, risen indeed!”
They exchanged kisses.
He kissed the hand of the boss’s wife. He kissed the hand of the boss’s mother-in-law.
“Yes, yes! It brings me such joy to see this crowd of simple people professing their faith in the timelessness of ordinances… which… My wife? No, she’s stayed behind, you see, managing the household… A regular Martha from the New Testament.”
He left the church, continuing for a while to sense both an inner glow from this meeting with a superior and the scent of floral eau de Cologne on his moustache. But little by little he returned to his senses.
“He might have invited me back to his home—so we could all break our fast together! The women were glad to see me! They stuck their hands out for a kiss. I suppose there aren’t many people eager to kiss their manky paws.”
He went home.
His wife and daughter were already at table, about to eat their ham and paskha.1
His wife had the hurt and confused look of someone who is constantly being scolded.
His daughter’s large nose slanted slightly to the right, dragging along with it a squinting left eye that peered out at the world with suspicion.
Samosov thought for a moment: “Oh, I like that! They think I’ve got presents for them!”
He banged his fist on the table.
“Who the devil gave you permission to break fast without me?”
“What do you mean?” asked his wife in amazement. “We thought you were at your boss’s. You said yourself—”
“A man can’t even get any peace in his own home!” said Samosov, almost in tears. He very much wanted some ham, but it didn’t seem right to start eating in the middle of a family row. “Have some tea brought to my room!”
He slammed the door after him.
“Anyone else would have come back from church and said, ‘The Lord has blessed us’,” said the daughter, looking at her mother with one eye and at her plate with the other. “But we never do anything like normal people!”
“Who is it you’re referring to?” asked the mother. “Your father? How dare you speak like that! Day in, day out, without a moment’s rest, your father ploughs away with his pen like a real workhorse. Then he comes home to break his fast and his daughter won’t even exchange Easter greetings with him. Still thinking about Andrei Petrovich, are you? I’m sure you’re ever so important to him! And how is it you try to charm him? By being rude to your parents? A girl with any self-respect does what she can to make life easier for her parents. She tries to earn a little money herself. Yulia… What’s her name? You know the name, that bearded lady… Yulia Pastrana’s been supporting her parents since the age of two. She’s been helping her other relatives as well.”
“So am I to blame that I wasn’t given a brilliant education? It’s easy enough to find secretarial work if you’ve been brilliantly educated.”
The mother stood up in a dignified manner.
“I’ll have tea sent up to my room! Thank you! You’ve ruined the entire holiday.”
She walked out.
Looking around brightly, her face flushed and joyful, the cook came into the dining room with a red-painted egg in her hands.
“Christhasrisenmiss! The Lord grantyouonlythebest! And a good husband! A capital young husband!”
“The Devil take you! Cheeky creature! Slobbering all over my face like that!”
“The Lord have mercy!” said the cook, taking a step back. “Why on earth… How can you refuse a fellow Christian an Easter kiss? So what if my visage is somewhat flushed? I’m speechless for words… All day long I’ve done nothing but bake and boil—the mere exhaustion of it all’s enough to make a woman red in the visage. The stove’s been alight all day—there’s such an inflammation in there you can hardly breathe. And it’s hot outside, too, though it did mizzle a bit in the morning! Last year was a thousand times cooler! It snowed on our way to Mass.”
“Oh, leave me in peace!” squealed the young lady. “Or I’ll tell mother to give you the sack.”
She spun on her heels and left the room, strutting off in the manner of all mistresses who have just quarrelled with one of their servants.
“Oo-ooh, I’m terrible scared!” the cook sang out after her. “Oo-ooh, you’ve put the fear of God in me… Huh! Pay me my wages and you can do as you please! I don’t think I’ve sniffed five kopeks from you since Christmas. I’ll clear the table, but then I’m lying down and I’m not making no one no tea. If it’s slave labour you want, you can find yourselves a convict. He can make tea for you even in the middle of the night.”
She took a dirty plate from the table and then, keeping to the system followed by every maid-of-all-work, placed a spoon on the plate, another plate on top of the spoon, a glass on this second plate, and a dish of ham on the glass. She was about to place a tray of cups on top of the ham when everything crashed to the floor.
“Oh, to hell with it all!”
All she had left in her hand was the original plate.
The cook thought for a while, then tossed the plate into the pile too.
After scratching behind one ear, underneath her headscarf, she suddenly, as if remembering something, went back into the kitchen.
On a stool, lapping up milk and water from a little dish, was a scrawny cat. A little girl—an orphan, just to wash the dishes—was squatting down in front of this cat, looking at her and repeating, “Drink it up, my little darling, drink it up! Yes, you’ve fasted enough. Let’s hope some good food will plump you up quickly.”
The cook seized the girl by one ear.
“Who’s been smashing china in the dining room? Huh? Is that what they keep you here for? To smash up the china? Measly-faced little tyke! Huh? Who told you to go and clear up in the dining room? You little blockhead—tomorrow they’ll give you what for!”
The little girl gave a frightened whimper and blew her nose in her apron. She rubbed her ear, blew her nose in the hem of her skirt, let out a sob, blew her nose in the corner of her headscarf, then suddenly rushed at the cat, pushed her onto the floor and gave her a good kick.
“To hell with you, you scrounging beast! You don’t give us a moment’s peace, you heathen creature. Milk, milk, milk—that’s all you ever want! Well, I hope you snuff it before you die!”
Encouraged by the girl’s foot, the cat leapt out onto the staircase, barely managing to get away with her tail, which was almost chopped off by the door.
She took refuge behind the dustbin and sat there for a long time without stirring, afraid that a mighty enemy might be searching for her.
Then she began to pour out her grief and bewilderment to the dustbin. But what did the dustbin care? It said nothing.
“Oo-au!”
That was all the cat knew.
“Oo-au!”
But who could make any sense of that?
1910
Notes
1paskha: A sweet cream-cheese dish eaten at Easter (Russian).
THE CORSICAN
THE INTERROGATION had been dragging on, and the police officer felt exhausted; he declared a break and went off to his office for a rest.
With a sweet smile of satisfaction he was approaching the couch; suddenly he stopped, his face taking on a twisted look, as if he had seen something foul.
The other side of the wall, a loud bass voice was singing, clearly enunciating each word: “Forward, forward, O working class!”1
Not quite able to keep up with this, out of time and out of tune, a timid and hoarse little voice was singing: “Fowad, fowad!”
“What on earth’s going on?” the officer exclaimed, pointing to the wall.
The clerk straightened up a little in his chair.
“I have already had occasion to report to you on the matter of this agent.”
“What are you on about? Keep it simple.”
“Agent Fialkin has expressed a pressing and imperative wish to enter the ranks of our provocateurs. This is the second winter running that he has been on duty by the Mikhailov tramway. He’s a quiet chap. Only he’s ambitious beyond his station in life. Here I am, he says, wasting my youth and expending the best of my strength on the trams. He is concerned about the slow progress of his career on the trams and the impossibility of applying his exceptional abilities—that is, supposing he possesses such abilities.”
“For juthtith thake we thpill our blood,” went the thin voice behind the wall.
“Out of tune!” said the bass.
“And is he talented?” asked the officer.
“He’s ambitious—even excessively ambitious. He wants to become a provocateur, but he doesn’t know a single revolutionary song. He’s been moaning on and on about this. And so police constable No. 4711 has come to his rescue. No. 4711 knows every song perfectly—you’d think he had the music right there in front of him. Now, of course, most constables know the words well enough. You can hardly block your ears when you’re out on the streets. But this one has a fine feel for music as well. So he’s teaching Fialkin.”
“Well, well! And so now they’re belting out the ‘Warszawianka’,” the officer murmured dreamily. “Ambition’s no bad thing. It can help a man get on in the world. Take Napoleon. A simple Corsican, but he achieved… quite something…”
“The people’s flag is burning red. It’s sheltered oft our martyred dead,” growled constable No. 4711.
“They seem to be on another tune already,” said the officer, suddenly suspicious. “Is he teaching him all the revolutionary songs in one go?”
“Every last one of them. Fialkin’s in a hurry. He thinks there’s an important conspiracy being hatched.”
“Well, there’s certainly no lack of ambition round here!”
“The see-eed of the future,” Fialkin bleated from behind the wall.
“The energy of the Devil,” sighed the officer. “They say that when Napoleon was just a simple Corsican…”
From the staircase below came muffled thumps and a kind of roar.
“And what’s that?” asked the officer, raising his eyebrows.
“That’s our lot, on the ground floor. They eat there. They’re getting agitated.”
“What about?”
“Seems they can hear the singing. They don’t like it.”
“Damn it! This really is a bit awkward. People out on the street might hear, too. They’ll think there’s a protest meeting here in this building.”
“Damn you!” said the bass the other side of the wall. “Howling like a dog! Is that the way a revolutionary sings? A revolutionary sings with an open heart. He makes a clear sound. Every word can be heard. But you just whimper into your cheeks, and your eyes keep darting about. Keep your eyes still! I’m saying this for the last time. Or I’ll up and leave. If you’re really so keen to have lessons, you can go and find yourself a Maximalist!”2
“Now he’s losing his temper,” grinned the clerk. “A real Vera Figner.”3
“Ambition! Ambition!” the officer repeated. “And he’s taken it into his head to be a provocateur… No, brother, there’s no rose without thorns. Court martials don’t have time for long deliberations. Get yourself arrested, brother, and no one will bother to check whether you’re a revolutionary or whether you’re the purest of provocateurs. You’ll swing for it anyway.”
“Gluttons grow fat on workers’ sweat,” roared the bass, letting himself go.
“Ow! It’s even making my teeth ache! Can’t anyone find a way to talk him out of all this?”
“But how can they?” sighed the clerk. “He’s a man possessed. People are all such careerists nowadays.”
“There must be some way to convince him. Tell him the fatherland needs competent sleuths every bit as much as it needs provocateurs. My tooth’s really hurting…”
“You gave your life in sacrifice,” roared constable No. 4711.
“You gave your life in sacrifice,” the agent bleated pathetically.
“To hell with it all!” yelled the officer, and ran out of the room. “Get out of here!” he shouted down the corridor, his staccato voice hoarse with rage. “Scoundrels! Wanting to be provocateurs when they can’t even sing the ‘Marseillaise’! They’ll put our whole institution to shame! Corsicans! I’ll show you what happens to Corsicans!”
A door slammed. Everything went quiet. On the other side of the wall, someone let out a sob.
1910
Notes
1 From the ‘Warszawianka’ or ‘Warsaw song’, the Russian lyrics of which are traditionally attributed to Gleb Krzhizhanovsky (1872–1959). During the early twentieth century this song was one of the most popular revolutionary anthems in Russian-held Poland.
2 A Maximalist was a member of the extreme-left faction of the Social Revolutionary Party, known from 1906 as the Union of Social Revolutionary Maximalists.
3 Vera Figner (1852–1942), a notorious revolutionary figure, took part in an attempt to assassinate Alexander II.
WILL-POWER
LIPS PARTED FORLORNLY, Ivan Matveyich watched with glum resignation as the doctor’s little hammer bounced up and down his stout sides.
“I thought as much,” said the doctor, taking a step back. “You’ll have to give up the booze, that’s what. Drink much, do you?”
“A glass before breakfast and two before lunch. Cognac,” replied the patient, with a mixture of sorrow and sincerity.
“Aha. That will have to stop then. Think of your liver—look at the size of it now! How can you keep treating it like this?”
Ivan Matveyich looked where the doctor was pointing. He saw his bulging side, naked and defenceless. He sighed.
“Of course, you have nothing to worry about really,” continued the doctor. “With will-power like yours, you won’t have any trouble kicking the habit.”
“Yes, quite! Will-power I have in spades! That certainly isn’t something I need to work on!”
“Jolly good then. I’ll prescribe you some powders. Take them for a couple of weeks or so, then pop by and see me again. Thank you very much—you really don’t have anything to worry about.”
Ivan Matveyich mulled things over as he made his way down the street. “My liver’s not in the right place. That’s to say, it’s not where it should be. Things don’t look good… But as I have will-power, I can overcome anything, liver or no liver! And, it just so happens that I got to the end of a bottle today anyway, so fate is clearly on my side…”
On the corner right by his house, Ivan came to a halt, bewitched by the grocer’s window display.
“Well, well, what have we here then? Liqueurs? Who, I ask you, needs liqueur on an empty stomach? Yet they’ve stuck them in the window. Fools! And what’s that? Cognac? Well, I’m not going to be tempted! Those with will-power, my friend, have nothing to fear. I’ll even go one better! I’ll go in, buy a bottle and take it home with me. Yes I will! Just like that! Those who have will-power…”
On arriving home, he immediately locked the cognac away in the sideboard and sat down to lunch. He dished up his soup and fell into thought.
“I’ve put it away in the sideboard… But no, I can go one better than that, I’ll put it on the table. Yes, that’s what I’ll do: I’ll put it on the table… and even uncork it! Those who have will-power will never crack, my friend. No, not even if you pour out cognac right onto their noses!”
So he uncorked the bottle. He sat down, looked at it and began to think, moving his spoon around the bowl. Suddenly, he decided: “I can do better than that! I’ll take the bottle and pour out a glass. And why stop there? I’ll even drink one glassful. Yes! That’s what I’ll do. Why shouldn’t I? After all, those with will-power can stop whenever they want… and doing a little experiment on oneself can be fun!”
He drained the glass and, eyes bulging, looked around with surprise. He swallowed a couple of spoonfuls of soup and said with conviction: “No, I can do better still—I’ll drink a second glass!”
He drank the second glass, grinned and winked.
“No, even better—let me do something I have never done before: let me drink a third glass. Really, it would be silly not to! Firstly, it will be enjoyable, and secondly, if I have will-power and can always stop in time, what do I have to fear? Why, for example, shouldn’t I drink a fourth? Or better than that, a fourth and a fifth immediately after it! Yes, that’s what I’ll do. And then I’ll send someone to get some more cognac. So there. Those with will-power…”
That evening, a friend saw a light at the window and decided to drop in. He was dumbfounded by the scene before him: Ivan Matveyich sitting on the dining-room floor, wagging his finger knowingly and resolutely at the table leg, saying with great feeling, “Perhaps you can’t, my friend, but I can! I’m drunk. There, I admit it. And I’m going to go one better. I’m going to get drunk every day from now on. And why, you may ask? Well, because those with will-power… will-pow-er… can drink without anything to fear. And I have will-power aplenty, my friend, oh yes, I do. And because I have will-power, it means…”
1915
THE HAT
VARENKA ZVEZDOCHETOVA, a member of the chorus of the Private Opera,1 could have done with a bit more sleep, but she awoke in high spirits all the same.
