The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

But all the same I want to add—astonishing, too, and even incredible. They are incredible while they are surrounded by legendary fiction, but they become still more incredible when you manage to take that patina from them and see them in all their holy simplicity. The perfect love that alone inspired them placed them above all fear and even subdued their nature, without inducing them to bury themselves in the ground or fight the visions that tormented St. Anthony.

* My schoolmate, now the well-known Russian mathematician K. D. Kraevich,²³ and I got to know this eccentric at the end of the forties, when we were in the third class of the Orel high school and roomed together in the Losevs’ house. “Anton the Astronomer” (then very old) actually had some sort of notion about the luminaries and the laws of their revolution, but the most interesting thing was that he made the lenses for his tubes himself, polishing them from the bases of thick crystal glasses with sand and stone, and he looked all over the heavens through them … He lived like a beggar, but he didn’t feel his poverty, because he was in constant ecstasy from his “zodiac.” Author.

† “To his fingertips.” Trans.

The White Eagle

A Fantastic Story

The dog dreams of bread, of fish the fisherman.

THEOCRITUS (Idyll)¹

I

There are more things in heaven and earth.”² That is how we usually begin such stories, so as to shield ourselves with Shakespeare from the sharp-witted arrows of those for whom there is nothing unknown. I, however, still think that “there are things” that are very strange and incomprehensible, which are sometimes called supernatural, and therefore I listen willingly to such stories. For the same reason, when, two or three years ago, reducing ourselves to childishness, we began to play at spiritualism,³ I willingly sat in on one such circle, the rules of which required that at our evening gatherings we not say a word about the authorities or about the principles of the earthly world, but talk only about incorporeal spirits—about their appearances and participation in the destinies of living people. Not even the “preservation and salvation of Russia” was permitted, because on such occasions many “begin with cheers and end with tears.”

For the same reason, all taking in vain of “great names” of whatever sort was strictly forbidden, with the sole exception of the name of God, which, as we know, is most often used for beauty of style. Breaches occurred, of course, but those, too, with great caution. Two impatient politicians might step over to the window or the fireplace and whisper a little, but even then they would warn each other: “Pas si haut!”

^* And the host already has his eye on them and jokingly threatens to fine them.

Each of us in turn had to tell something fantastic from his own life, and since a knack for storytelling is not given to everyone, the story was not picked on from the artistic side. Nor were proofs required. If the storyteller said that the event he told about had actually happened to him, we believed him, or at least pretended to believe. Such was the etiquette.

I was interested most of all in the subjective side of it. That “there are more things than are dreamt of in your philosophy” I do not doubt, but how such things present themselves to someone—that I found extraordinarily interesting. And in fact, the subjectivity here merited great attention. No matter how the storyteller tried to keep to the higher sphere of the incorporeal world, one could not fail to notice that the visitor from beyond the grave comes to earth in color, like a ray of light when it passes through stained glass. And here there is no sorting out lie from truth, and yet it is an interesting thing to follow, and I want to tell you of one such case.

II

The “martyr on duty,” that is, the next storyteller, was a rather highly placed and with that a very original person, Galaktion Ilyich, who was jokingly called an “ill-born dignitary.” This nickname concealed a pun: he was in fact something of a dignitary, and with that was sickly thin, and moreover was of quite undistinguished parentage. Galaktion Ilyich’s father had been a serf butler in a prominent house, then a tax farmer, and, finally, a benefactor and church builder, for which he received a decoration in this mortal life, and in the future life—a place in the kingdom of heaven. He gave his son a university education and set him up in the world, but the “memory eternal” which was sung over his grave in the Nevsky Lavra⁴ remained and weighed upon his heir. This son of a servant reached a certain rank and was admitted in society, but the joke of the title “ill-born” still dragged after him.