Unpublished. Unfinished [draft of] "The Beauties"

THE BEAUTIES

(From a Doctor’s Notes)

One morning, on one of those foul autumn days, a boy came to me from the confectionery factory of the Z. brothers and, in the name of the factory office, invited me to see a patient.

“Who is the patient?” I asked.

“The bookkeeper, Mikhail Platonych,” answered the boy.

I set off. At the factory gates a caretaker met me and led me to the bookkeeper. First we walked across the paved yard, past the factory buildings, from which came a strong smell of burnt sugar, then across the unpaved, muddy part of the yard, along dirty planks that squelched underfoot, past big casks covered with matting... The patient lived in a small, single-storey outbuilding attached to a long, gloomy shed, on which something black, like tar, had been written in large letters: “Smoking in the yard and warehouse strictly forbidden.” The little porch of the outbuilding was filthy, the door creaky, on a pulley, covered in torn oilcloth; the hallway was dark and cramped, and the patient himself, the bookkeeper Mikhail Pl., struck me as extraordinarily sour and just as gloomy as the whole factory yard. He was in a print dressing gown and slippers, with the tapes of his drawers hanging loose about them; when I came in to him, he lay curled up like a ball on a short sofa, face to the back of it, not moving, as if asleep; hearing my footsteps, he started, jumped up from the sofa and looked at me very sternly, then, evidently guessing that I was the doctor, screwed his face into a smile and said, pointing me to a chair:

“Very glad to make your acquaintance. Ptitsyn... Please...”

The expression of his face, especially of his eyes, was such as though he had lost his spectacles and could now see poorly. His eyes looked out from under his brows, somewhat dazed, his red hair stood up on his head like bristles, his chin, overgrown with reddish, bristly little hairs, jutted forward, his pressed lips likewise jutted forward, his forehead wrinkled into folds – and all this seemed to come from his seeing poorly and straining to make things out... In reality, though, this expression meant that my arrival had troubled him and was unwelcome to him.

Questioning him about his illness, I learned that he was thirty-one years old (he looked older), that he worked every day from morning to night, dined in a cheap eating-house, and had fallen ill because he had drunk half a bottle of red wine with his dinner, which afterward, once he had drunk it, turned out in his opinion to be simple “egg dye.” He was not badly built, but his nourishment was so poor that even a layman, looking at his flabby skin and protruding ribs, might have suspected in him some ailment graver than a bowel catarrh. A whole day’s work, eating-house dinners, poor tobacco, and the constant petty debts unavoidable for an educated man living on forty roubles a month, had worn him out and aged him by some ten years.

To my questions he answered briefly and only what was necessary, expressed himself in a literary manner, and, describing his illness, used the words “predisposition” and “contributing causes,” from which I had to conclude that I was dealing with an educated man. He listened to my advice in silence and nodded his head in agreement. When I had laid out for him the rules of diet and regimen possible on a salary of forty roubles, eating-house dinners, and a damp lodging, he thought a moment and said:

“Yes, that is, of course, good. But the main thing is to breathe clean air and to marry.”

“And to marry is good too,” I agreed. “He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”

Our conversation ended with his giving me a rouble and apologizing that he could not pay more. Putting on my galoshes in the hallway, I saw him go back to the sofa, wrap the skirts of his dressing gown about him, lie down face to the back of it, and curl up again like a ball.

I. AT THE ZELENINS’

Masha Zelenina was reading a letter just received from the post, while Lyubov Mikhailovna, an old woman in black, was brewing tea.

It was the eighth hour of the evening. Beyond the dark windows there was an unceasing, dry, howling noise, the kind made by frost-bound trees; outside there was a glaze of ice on the ground and fine snow was sifting from the sky. The night watchman Flor, having grown bored in the servants’ quarters, was already pacing the garden, loudly making up to the dogs. And Flor’s footsteps, and the light crackle of the snow, and the steam from the samovar mingling with its own shadow on the ceiling, and the stillness of the candle flames – all this said that the evening had already begun, that it would be a long one, quiet, a little dull, a little sad, and would be neither better nor worse than yesterday’s; it would be lived through, by tomorrow forgotten, and in people’s memory it would blur together with other evenings, like smoke with smoke...

“What does Mama write?” asked L. Mikh.

“Nothing special...” answered Masha, and read aloud: “God bless you, my dear, precious little daughter, my treasure. Yesterday Vasya and I arrived in Yalta and are staying for the time being at a hotel, so we don’t have a real address yet. We shall probably live in Alupka or in Semiiz. The weather is cold, the sea looks unfriendly, and it rained. We were wrong to hurry to the Crimea. They say the weather here is always like this in March, we ought to have waited until April, but I am afraid for Vasya’s sake. My heart is heavy and I don’t want to look at anything, I could just sit and cry all day. Christ be with you, my child, take care of yourself. When I send you the address, write to me at once, even send a telegram, for I am pining and sleep badly. I dreamed of your father, as though he were coming up to me and handing me a big flag, and on the flag a blue cross. That means patience. Today we sent for a doctor. He said that the Moscow doctors caught the illness late, but that for now there is nothing dangerous. Vasya shows signs of pleurisy and the apex of the left lung is affected, but that with a good regimen and careful treatment it may pass. He ordered him to leave the university, with which I entirely agree. His temperature yesterday was 38.2. He slept well and did not sweat, but coughed.

The whole way I tormented myself that you were angry with me, my little one. You did not want me to go with Vasya, but there was no other way. Vasya, though a student, is still a child, he cannot be without supervision. He does not understand his own illness and does not take care of himself. He sings all day, goes out without a hat, and smokes. And he drank wine too. He is a grief to me. He is asking me to hire a piano, I promised. Don’t be angry with me, it isn’t expensive. This morning in the corridor I met Nadenka Pol, the daughter of Colonel Pol, who was a battery commander in your father’s brigade. She recognized me and was overjoyed to tears. Her father is dead, God rest his soul – you don’t remember, you were small. I kiss you hard, hard, I bless you and miss you, my angel. Kiss Vanya and L. M. for me. Live in peace and don’t quarrel. Farewell, my dear one, my little daughter, I have just started crying, I miss you so, your loving mother Natalya Zelenina. Forgive the poor handwriting.”

P.S. Don’t forget to send 200 roubles to Moscow on the 20th of March.”

III. A LETTER

“Dear Maria Sergeyevna! I am sending you the book I wrote to you about on Wednesday. Read it. I draw your attention to pages 17–42, 92, 93, and 112, especially the passages I underlined in pencil. What power! The form, it seems, is clumsy, but what breadth of freedom, what a terrible, immense artist one feels in that very clumsiness! In one sentence ’which’ occurs three times and ’evidently’ twice, the sentence is badly made, not with a brush but as if with a dishrag, but what a fountain gushes up from beneath these ’whiches,’ what a supple, shapely, deep thought hides beneath them, what a crying truth! You read and see, between the lines, an eagle soaring in the heavens and caring little, all the while, for the beauty of its feathers. Thought and beauty, like a hurricane and the waves, ought not to know the customary, fixed forms. Their form is freedom, unconstrained by any concern for ’whiches’ and ’evidentlys.’ When I write to you, I am hindered and irritated every time by my slightest errors of style, and that means I am no artist, that in me the word predominates over image and mood.

Please, read the book. I read it all day yesterday, my breath caught, and I felt new elements of life, such as I had not known before, entering into the very substance of my heart. With every new page I grew richer, stronger, higher! I marveled, I wept with rapture, I was proud, and at the same time I believed, deeply, mystically, in the divine origin of true talent, and it seemed to me that each of these mighty, elemental pages had not been created in vain, that by its very existence it must call forth in nature something answering to its power, something like a rumbling underground, a change of climate, a storm at sea... I do not believe, a thousand times I do not believe, that nature, in which everything is purposeful, could remain indifferent to that which constitutes the most beautiful and the most rational, powerful, invincible part of herself – namely that part which is created, apart from her own will, by the genius of man. I feel that I am, it seems, writing nonsense, laugh if you like, but do not stop me from raving, dreaming, telling fairy tales. You cannot imagine how joyful and merry it is to write even empty raving, when one knows that these lines will be looked at by your kind eyes.

Yesterday I got so carried away with the book that I did not even rejoice at the arrival of Travnikov, whom I love. He came to me with a headache and out of sorts. After major operations his head always aches – he is poisoned by the fumes of carbolic acid. He began asking me about my leg, and I, in answer, read him those twenty lines I had underlined on page 92, and we fell into a literary argument. Travnikov said:

“The time I have spent reading philosophy, poetry, and belles-lettres I count as lost. They have great pretensions, but they have not explained or illuminated for me a single phenomenon, and for that I do not love them. Everything in them is subjective, and so half of them is falsehood, and half neither one thing nor another, something between falsehood and truth. The opinion that one cannot do without them is a prejudice; like the theater and the circus, they serve only for amusement, and I read them now only for amusement. I give preference to those authors who have the fewest pretensions, and in that respect the most convenient books are French novels.”

“And who, may I ask, teaches us to think?” I said.

“He who tells the truth, and poetry and novels do not tell the truth.”

And so on, all in that vein. Just try arguing with that! A stubborn, prejudiced man. We fell to talking about beauty.

“Beauty is pleasant,” he said, “and serves only for pleasure, and that is just why it is hard to do without it. But whoever seeks in it not pleasure but truth or knowledge, that man it bribes, deceives, and leads astray, like a mirage. When I had the imprudence to learn to think from beauty, it made of me a drunken and a blind man. Thus, reading Faust, I did not notice that Margarita is the murderer of her own child; in Byron’s Cain both Cain himself and the devil were endlessly sympathetic to me... And is that the only case?”

He pressed his aching head with his hands, leaned it against the table, and said listlessly:

“Beauty, talent, the lofty, the beautiful, the artistic – all this is very nice, but conditional, does not submit to logical definition, and from all of it one cannot extract a single immutable law. As someone said before the flood, that the nightingale is the lover of the rose, that the oak is mighty and the bindweed tender, well, and we believe it... But why do we believe it?”

I began, as usual, to grow heated and to say things I ought not.

“I don’t understand why you are angry,” he said, raising his head. “What is offensive in the fact that the arts serve only for amusement? My dear fellow, I should like even to be a bad writer, if only to be able to amuse the sick and the imprisoned with my little books. Is it such a small merit in a writer that you are cheerful all day today? Still, my soul, my head aches unbearably. Perhaps you are right.”

I know nothing.

Poetry and belles-lettres have not explained a single phenomenon! But does lightning, when it flashes, explain anything? It is not for it to explain to us, but for us to explain it. A fine state we should be in if, instead of explaining electricity, we were to deny it merely on the ground that it does not explain much to us. And yet poetry and all the so-called fine arts are those same grand, wondrous phenomena of nature which we must learn to explain, without waiting for them to explain something to us of their own accord. How sad and vexing it is that even clever, good people look upon every phenomenon from a special, prejudiced, all too personal point of view. Travnikov, for instance, is tormented by the special question of God and the purpose of life; the arts do not resolve this question, do not explain what lies beyond the grave, and Travnikov counts that against them as a prejudice, reduces them to the level of a simple amusement one could easily do without, and once, even in your mother’s presence, said, half in jest, that they constitute one of the forms of “original sin.” Does he not, in this respect, remind you of a certain lady of our acquaintance who denies medicine and the sciences generally only because doctors dance the mazurka badly? Wine is sweet, tasty, and gladdens the heart, but that is not enough: no doubt some tailor will be found to deny it on the ground that it does not remove stains and cannot serve instead of turpentine.

But enough philosophizing. My leg remains in the same condition. Travnikov insists on an operation, but I do not agree. Nature herself strives toward healing, and I am counting heavily on that property of hers. Perhaps the matter will resolve itself without an operation. The tedium is dreadful, and if it were not for books, I think I should weep from boredom the whole day long. To live eight versts from you and have no right to come to you – why, that is the Inquisition!

Yesterday your mother was at the Zelenins’ and called on us too. She scolded me, together with Father, for having left the theological academy. Everyone assures me with one voice that I acted unwisely. Perhaps that is so. I myself do not know why I left the academy, but neither do I know why I should have gone on remaining there. I am tormented by a thirst for life and I run from wherever it is absent, or cut to a pattern not to my taste. My life is all of you, whom I love without limit. I cannot go without seeing your beautiful, gentle, kindness-radiant face, and without hearing your voice at least once a month; I cannot go without seeing your generous mother and your whole joyful, merciful, God-blessed family, which is as close to my soul as my brothers and my father. I need to see my old, long-suffering father beside me every day and to hear him, every night, lying awake and thinking aloud about my convict brother. I need my mad monk brother to come to us from the monastery once every two or three months, if only to curse civilization in my presence, his eyes flashing, and go back again. My life is not complete if I do not see Travnikov at least once a week, whom I love the more, the deeper he sinks into the bog into which his greedy, relentless, tormenting thought draws him. He wants faith, come what may. He wants and seeks God, seeks Him day and night and finds only an abyss, which seems the deeper and darker the longer one looks into it. And what a lofty delight it is for me to walk about the village and drop in at the peasants’ huts and talk with them. What a variety of faces, voices, minds, tastes, beliefs! And how charming is our old deacon Pavel Denisovich, who has been dying every day now for two years and somehow cannot manage to die, and laughs himself at his own persistence: “Dying, dying, and can never quite die!” Life is good, Maria Sergeyevna! True, it is hard, it is brief, but for all that how rich, how wise, how varied, how interesting, how wonderful it is! Travnikov poisons himself with longing for immortality and eternal bliss; but I am not so greedy, and for me this short, small, but beautiful life is entirely enough.

As soon as I am able to walk, I shall set at once to work. I shall take up my duties and lay down my life for art. I shall write. But what to write? The story will not come out right for me. I handle the technique badly, I smooth things over too much. My head is crowded with images and pictures – in that stock I am rich, but for some reason my characters do not resolve into true characters and all resemble one another like drops of water. They move too little with me and reason too much, and it should be the other way about. I have now taken up criticism. I shall study on my own and, as best I can, explain to people that which I love so much and in which I see the one sure remedy against prejudice, ignorance, and slavery.

Yesterday Father stumbled in the street and fell. He explains it by fatigue: it is Holy Week, and he serves nearly the whole day. Thank God, it passed off without harm.

My heartfelt greetings to all of yours. My regards to everyone, everyone! I hear that outside it is already real spring, but I do not see it. How good it would be to be with you now! If only I could take one little walk with you up the hill, and I should want nothing more. Are the cherry trees in bloom? Though it is early yet. Farewell, be happy, be well, be merry, and do not forget your cripple, who loves you with his whole heart and is sincerely devoted to you, Ignaty Bashtanov.”

Having finished this letter, Ignasha put it in an envelope and wrote the address: “To Her High Nobility Maria Sergeyevna Volchaninova.” At that moment Father Aleksei came into his room with a tray bearing a glass of tea. Ignasha grew confused and thrust the letter under the pillow.

Chekhov, A. P.

Complete Collected Works and Letters in Thirty Volumes. Works in Eighteen Volumes. Volume Seven (1888–1891). – Moscow: Nauka, 1985.