Fifty-Two Stories

“So you’ve had fun in your life,” said Miss Ilovaiskaya. “There’s a lot to remember.”

“Well, yes, it’s all fun, when you sit chattering over tea with a nice fellow talker, but if you ask what this fun cost me? What was the price of this diversity in my life? You see, madam, I did not believe like a German doctor of philosophy, zierlichmännerlich,

⁹ I didn’t live in the desert, no, each of my beliefs bowed me down, tore my life to pieces. Judge for yourself. I was as rich as my brothers, but now I’m a beggar. In the whirl of my passions, I ran through my own fortune and my wife’s as well—a huge amount of other people’s money. I’m now forty-two, old age is at the door, and I’m as homeless as a dog left behind by the baggage train at night. All my life I’ve known no peace. My soul was constantly pining, suffering even in its hopes…I wore myself out with hard, random tasks, I suffered privation, was in prison maybe five times, dragged myself around the provinces of Archangelsk and Tobolsk¹⁰…It’s painful to remember! I’ve lived, but in the whirl I’ve never felt the process of life itself. Would you believe it, I don’t remember a single spring, I never noticed my wife’s love, my children’s births. What else shall I tell you? I was a misfortune for all those who loved me…My mother has been in mourning for me for fifteen years now, and my proud brothers, who, on account of me, had to feel sick at heart, to blush, to bend their backs, to waste their money, in the end came to hate me like poison.”

Likharev stood up and sat down again.

“If I were merely unhappy, I’d give thanks to God,” he went on, not looking at Miss Ilovaiskaya. “My personal unhappiness falls into the background when I remember how often in my passions I was absurd, far from the truth, unfair, cruel, dangerous! How often I hated and despised with all my soul those I should have loved, and—vice versa. I’ve been unfaithful a thousand times. Today I believe, I fall on my knees, but tomorrow I already flee in cowardice from my gods and friends of today and silently swallow the ‘scoundrel’ they send after me. God alone saw how often I wept and chewed the pillow from shame at my passions. Never once in my life have I deliberately lied or done evil, but my conscience isn’t clean! I can’t even boast of having no one’s life on my conscience, madam, because my wife died before my eyes, worn out by my recklessness. Yes, my wife! Listen, in our everyday life there are now two prevailing attitudes towards women. Some measure women’s skulls so as to prove that women are inferior to men, seek out their shortcomings so as to deride them, play the original in their eyes and justify their own animality. Others try with all their might to raise women up to them, that is, to make them learn thirty-five thousand species, and speak and write the same stupidities that they themselves speak and write…”

Likharev’s face darkened.

“But I tell you that woman has always been and will always be man’s slave,” he began in a bass voice, pounding his fist on the table. “She is tender, soft wax from which man has always molded whatever he liked. Lord God, for two cents’ worth of masculine passion, she’ll cut her hair, abandon her family, die in a foreign land…Among the ideas for which she has sacrificed herself, not one is feminine…A selfless, devoted slave! I haven’t measured skulls, I’m speaking from hard, bitter experience. The most proud and independent women, once I managed to convey my inspiration to them, followed me without reasoning, without questioning, and did everything I wanted; I turned a nun into a nihilist, who, as I later learned, shot a policeman; my wife never left me for a moment in my wanderings and, like a weathercock, changed her beliefs parallel to how I changed my passions.”

Likharev jumped up and began to pace the room.

“Noble, sublime slavery!” he said, clasping his hands. “The lofty meaning of a woman’s life consists precisely in that! Of the terrible muddle that has accumulated in my head during all the time of my dealings with women, my memory, like a filter, has retained not the ideas, not the big words, not the philosophy, but this extraordinary obedience to fate, this extraordinary, all-forgiving mercy…”

Likharev clenched his fists, fixed his gaze on one point, and with a sort of passionate tension, as if sucking on each word, said through clenched teeth:

“This…this magnanimous endurance, faithfulness to the grave, poetry of the heart…The meaning of life is precisely in this uncomplaining martyrdom, in tears that can soften stone, in boundless, all-forgiving love, which brings light and warmth into the chaos of life…”