Fifty-Two Stories

“I’ll tell you about myself. Nature put into my soul an extraordinary ability to believe. For half my life (don’t let me spook you!) I’ve belonged to the ranks of the atheists and nihilists, but there hasn’t been a single hour of my life when I haven’t believed. Usually all talents reveal themselves in early childhood, and so my ability already made itself known when I was still knee-high. My mother liked her children to eat a lot, and when she fed me, she used to say: ‘Eat! The main thing in life is soup!’ I believed, I ate that soup, ate it ten times a day, ate like a shark, to the point of loathing and passing out. My nanny told fairy tales, and I believed in house goblins, in wood demons, in all sorts of devilry. I used to steal rat poison from my father, pour it on gingerbread, and carry it up to the attic, so that the house goblins would eat it and drop dead. And when I learned to read and understand what I read, then things really took off! I fled to America, I became a highway robber, I asked to be taken to a monastery, I hired other boys to torture me for the sake of Christ. And notice, my belief was always active, not dead. If I ran away to America, I didn’t go alone, I seduced another fool like myself to go with me, and I was glad when I was freezing outside the city gate and when they flogged me; and when I became a highway robber, I never failed to come back with a bloodied mug. A most troubled childhood, I assure you! And when I was sent to school and showered there with all sorts of truths, like that the earth moves around the sun, and that the color white is not white, but consists of seven colors, my poor little head was in a whirl! Everything went topsy-turvy in me: Joshua, who stopped the sun, and my mother, who rejected lightning rods on behalf of the prophet Elijah,⁵ and my father, who was indifferent to the truths I learned. My enlightenment inspired me. I went around the house and stables like a lunatic, preaching my truths, horrified by ignorance, burning with hatred for anyone who saw white as merely white…However, this is all nonsense and childishness. My serious, so to speak, masculine passions began at the university. Did you study anywhere, madam?”

“In Novocherkassk, at the Donskoy boarding school.”

“So you have no higher education? That means you don’t know what science is. All the sciences, however many there are in the world, have one and the same passport, without which they consider themselves unthinkable: striving for the truth! Each of them, even some sort of pharmacognosis, has as its aim not usefulness, not the comforts of life, but truth. Remarkable! When you set about the study of some science, you’re struck first of all by its beginnings. I’ll tell you, there is nothing more fascinating and grandiose, nothing that so astonishes and captivates the human spirit, as the beginnings of some science. After the first five or six lectures, you’re already inspired by the brightest hopes, you already fancy yourself the master of truth. And I gave myself to science selflessly, passionately, as to a beloved woman. I was its slave and didn’t want to know any other sun. Day and night I studied, never straightening my back, I went broke on books, I wept when before my eyes people exploited science for their personal ends. But I was not passionate for long. The thing is that each science has a beginning, but no end, like a recurrent decimal. Zoology has discovered thirty-five thousand kinds of insects, chemistry numbers sixty elements. If in time ten zeroes are added to the right of these numbers, zoology and chemistry will be as far from their ends as they are now, and all contemporary scientific work consists precisely in increasing the numbers. I caught on to this trick when I discovered the thirty-five-thousand-and-first species and did not feel any satisfaction. Well, ma’am, I had no time to be disappointed, because soon a new faith took hold of me. I threw myself into nihilism with its leaflets, black repartitions, and the like.⁶

I went to the people, worked in factories, was an oiler, a hauler. Later, wandering around Russia, I got a taste of Russian life, and turned into an ardent admirer of that life. I loved the Russian people to the point of suffering, loved and believed in their God, their language, their creativity…And so on, and so forth…For some time I was a Slavophile, pestered Aksakov with letters,⁷ was a Ukrainophile, an archaeologist, collected specimens of folk art…I was fascinated by ideas, people, events, places…endlessly fascinated! Five years ago I served the repudiation of private property; my last belief was in non-resistance to evil.”

⁸

Sasha sighed fitfully and stirred. Likharev got up and went over to her.

“Would you like some tea, sweetie?” he asked tenderly.

“Drink it yourself!” the girl replied rudely.

Likharev became embarrassed and with a guilty step went back to the table.