Artists

ARTISTS 

Today I feel as though a tremendous load had been taken off my mind. The good luck was so unexpected! To hell with my engineer's uniform, to hell with my instruments and estimates!

But is it not a shame to rejoice at the death of my poor aunt, just because she left me a legacy that enables me to give up the service? True, it was her dying wish that I should devote myself entirely to my favourite occupation, and I am glad now that I am able, among other things, to fulfil her ardent desire. That was yesterday. . . . How astonished our chief looked when he heard that I was giving up my post! And when I explained what I was doing it for he simply stared at me open-mouthed.

"For love of art? H'm! Hand in your application." And without a word more he turned and went away. But that was all I needed. I was free, I was an artist! Was not that the height of bliss?

I wanted to get away from people and from St. Petersburg, so I took a boat and went out for a run along the seashore. The water, the sky, the city gleaming in the sun from afar, the blue woods skirting the shores of the bay, the mast tops in the Kronstadt roads, the dozens of steamboats and gliding sailing vessels that flew past me-all appeared to me in a new light. All this was mine, all was within my power, I could snatch it all, fling it upon the canvas, and set it before the mob, fascinated by the spell of art. True, one ought not to sell the bearskin before one has caught the bear; so far I could hardly be called a great artist.

The boat swiftly cleaved the smooth sheet of water. The boatman, a tall, strong, handsome young man in a crimson shirt, steadily plied the oars, swinging his body backward and forward, and propelling the boat with powerful strokes. The sinking sun played upon his face and shirt with such striking effect that I was moved to make a sketch of him in colours. My little box containing canvases, paints and brushes was always with me.

"Stop rowing and sit still for a minute while I paint you," I said. ' He lay on the oars.

"Sit as though you were feathering the oars."

that nothing would tear me away from them as long as I lived.

The boatman quickly began to tire; the dashing expression of his face gave place to a dull apathetic look. He began to yawn, and once even wiped his face with his sleeve, to do which he had to bend his head down to the oar. The folds of his shirt were lost. What a nuisance! I hate when my model moves.

"Can't you sit still, old chap!"

He grinned.

"What are you laughing at?"

"It's so funny, sir!" he said with a sheepish smile.

"What's funny about it?"

"Painting me as if I was a rarity or something. Like a picture."

"That's what it's going to be, my friend-a picture."

"What do you want it for?"

"For practice. After I have painted small ones for a time, I shall start painting big ones."

"Big ones?"

"Yes, as big as three sagenes."

He was silent, then asked gravely:

"I daresay you can paint sacred images, too?"

"I can, but I'd rather paint pictures."

"I see."

He Jet that sink in, then asked again:

"What are they for?"

"What are what for?"

"These pictures. . . . "

Naturally, I did not start delivering him a lecture about the purpose of art, but merely said that these pictures sold for good money-as much as a thousand, two thousand and even more a piece. The boatman's curiosity was gratified and he asked no more questions. The sketch was an excellent one , (those warm tones of red calico illumined by the setting sun are lovely), and I returned home perfectly happy. 

Before me, in a strained attitude, stands old Taras, the model, whom Professor X- had told to put his "hant on der head," because it was supposed to be "a fery classical pose." I am in the midst of a crowd of classmates, all of whom are sitting, like me, before their easels, palette and brush in hand. Right in front sits Dedov, painting Taras with great zeal, although he is a landscape painter. A deep hush reigns in the class-room, which is filled with the odours of paint, oil and turpentine. Every half hour Taras is given a rest; he sits down on the edge of the packing case that serves him as a pedestal, and the "model" becomes just an ordinary naked old man, who stretches his limbs, which have grown stiff through long standing, dispenses with a handkerchief, and so on. The students press round the easels, examining each other's work. There is a crowd of them around mine; I am a very able student of the academy and hold out great promise of becoming one of "our coryphaei," to use an apt expression of V. S., the well-known art critic, who had long predicted that "Ryabinin will make good." That is why everyone is looking at my work.

And so every day.

Tiresome, is it not? I have long come to realize how very tiresome it is. But I am like a railway engine with an open steam port, which has but two alternatives: to roll along the rails until the steam is exhausted, or to jump them and reduce the shapely colossus of iron and brass into a shapeless wreckage. I am on the rails; they clasp my wheels, and if I run off them, what then? Come what may, I must roll down to the station even though that station appears to me a black hole in which you cannot make anything out. Others say that this will be artistic activity. That it is something artistic is undeniable, but that it is activity. . . .

When I walk round the exhibition and look at the pictures, what do I see in them? Canvases with paint laid on them in such a way that they produce effects similar to those produced by various objects. People go about marvelling-how cleverly the colours are arranged! And nothing more. Books, stacks of books have been written on the subject; many of them I have read. But the Taines, the Carrieres, the Kuglers, and all the others up to Proudhon who have written about art, prove nothing. They all talk about the meaning of art, but when I read them the thought always lurks in the back of my mind-is there a meaning? I have seen no good picture exercise any good influence on anyone, so why should I believe in it?

Why? I must believe, it is absolutely essential that I should, but how? on legs, who will saunter up to my picture-a picture born in the throes of experience, painted not with pigments and brush, but with my very nerves and heart's blood--mutter: "Mm. . . not bad," thrust his hand into his bulging pocket, toss me a few hundred rubles and take it away from me. Take it together with all the emotions and soul stirrings, the sleepless nights, the joys and the pain, the hopes and disappointments that went into its creation. And again you walk alone amidst the crowd. Mechanically you paint the model in the evening, mechanically you paint him in the morning, exciting the wonder of the professors and your classmates by your rapid progress. What are you doing this for, whither are you going?

Four months have already passed since I sold my last painting, but I have no ideas for a new one. I wish I could think of something. It would give me utter oblivion for a while, I would give myself up to the painting completely, like one sunk in the seclusion of a cloister. The thoughts-whither? why? vanish when you work; there is but a single thought in your head, a single purpose, and the fulfilment of it gives you pleasure. The picture is a world in which you live and to which you are answerable. Conventional standards vanish here-you create new ones for yourself in this new world of yours, and you feel in them your rightfulness, your worth or your worthlessness and falsehood in your own peculiar way, detached from life.

But you cannot paint all the time. In the evening, when dusk interrupts your work, you return to life and hear again that eternal question: "Why?", which keeps you awake, makes you toss about feverishly in your bed, and stare into the darkness as though the answer were written there somewhere. And you fall asleep towards morning to awaken again to another world of dreams peopled only by images that come from within yourself and take shape and substance upon the canvas before you.

"Why aren't you working, Ryabinin?" my neighbour asked me loudly.

I came out of my reveries with a start. My hand holding the palette hung limp; the skirt of my frock coat was smeared with paint; the brushes lay on the floor. I glanced at my sketch; it was finished, and finished well: Taras stood out on the canvas like real.

"I have finished," I answered.

The class was over, too. The model got off his box and began dressing; all began noisily collecting their things. A hum of conversation arose. The students came over to me and complimented me on my work.

"A medal. The best sketch," some said. Others were silent: artists do not like to praise one another. 

I believe I command the respect of my classmates. No doubt my more mellow age has something to do with it; the only man in the academy older than I is Volsky. Yes, art possesses an amazing power of attraction! Volsky is a retired officer, a gentleman of about forty-five with a completely grey head; to enter the academy at such an age and start studying all over again-isn't that heroic? But he works hard: in the summer, rain or shine, he paints sketches from morning till evening with a kind of religious fervour; in the winter, when it's light, he is always painting, and in the evening he draws. In two years he has made a great advance, although nature has not endowed him with any special gifts.

Now Ryabinin is another matter: a devilishly gifted nature, but terribly lazy. I don't think he will make good, although all the young artists are his admirers. What I can't make out is his odd predilection for so-called real subjects: he paints peasants' bast shoes, foot-wraps and sheepskin coats as if he had not seen enough of them in real life. The surprising thing is he hardly works at all. Sometimes he will sit down and complete a picture in a month, and everyone shouts about it as if it were a miracle, while at the same time admitting that the technique leaves much to be desired (in my opinion his technique is very poor indeed); and then he stops painting even sketches, goes about looking gloomy, doesn't speak to anyone, not even me, although he does not shun me, I think, as much as he does his other comrades. A strange young man! These people who cannot find complete satisfaction in art surprise me. They cannot understand that nothing is more ennobling than creative work.

once the price has been fixed. It makes people respect you. All the less reason is there for coming down now when the picture is sure to sell; the subject is a popular one and well-liked: winter, sunset; black trunks in the foreground stand out sharply against a glowing sky. K. paints that way, and what a sale he has! They say he made as much as twenty thousand in a single winter. Not bad! Pretty little sum! I can't understand how some artists manage to live so poorly. Take K. now-not one of his canvases is ever wasted; everything sells. You only have to take a common-sense view of things: while you are painting a picture you are an artist; when it's done, you are a dealer; and the shrewder you handle the business the better. People are always trying to cheat us artists. 

I live in the Fifteenth Line, Sredni Prospekt, and four times a day I take a walk along the quayside where foreign steamships put in. I love this place for its colourfulness, its noise and bustle, and for the wealth of material it provides me with. It was here, watching the day-labourers carrying sacks, winding windlasses and winches, and driving trucks with all kinds of loads, that I learned to draw the working man.

I walked home with Dedov, the landscapist. A man as kindly and innocent as the landscape itself and passionately in love with his art. Here is one who has no doubts whatever; he paints what he sees: if he sees a river, he paints a river, if he sees a tussocky marsh he paints a tussocky marsh. What he wants that river and that marsh for, he never stops to think. He is, I believe, an educated man; at any rate he has graduated as an engineer. He gave up his post in the civil service after coming into some property or other, which enables him to exist without working. Now he paints for all he is worth: in the summer he sits sketching in a field or in the woods from morning till evening, in the winter he never tires of composing sunsets, sunrises, noons, the beginning and ending of rain, winters, springs and so forth. 'He has forgotten his engineering and does not regret it. But when we pass the wharves he often explains to me the use of the huge iron and steel masses-machine parts, boilers and other odds and ends unloaded from the steamers.

"Look at that thumping boiler they've shipped over," he said to me one evening, giving the boiler a resounding whack with his stick.

"Do you mean to say we can't make them here at home?" I said.

"They make them here, too, but not enough. See what a lot they've brought over. Pretty poor workmanship, too; they'll have to be repaired here; see the joints coming undone? The rivets have come loose here, too. Do you know how it's done? A hellish job, I tell you. A man crawls inside the boiler and grips the rivet with pincers, pressing on it with his chest as hard as he can while a workman outside hammers the rivet until he has beaten a head on it like this."

He pointed to a long row of raised metallic disks running along the boiler seam.

"But, Dedov, that's as good as hammering at his chest!"

"So it is. I tried it once inside the boiler, and crawled out after the fourth rivet more dead than alive. My chest was all bruised. But these men somehow manage to get used to it. To be sure, they die like flies; after a year or two, if the man survives at all, he is hardly fit for anything. Nor would you be if you had to take terrific blows of a hammer on your chest all day long, and hunched up in a stuffy boiler at that. In winter the iron is freezing cold, and he has to sit or lie on it. That boiler over there, now-the narrow red one, see it?-you can't even sit in that: you have to lie on your side chest up. It's hard work for those Human Anvils."

"Human Anvils?"

"Yes, that's what the workmen call them. They often grow deaf from the din. And you think they receive much for this gruelling toil? A mere pittance! Because you don't need skill or art here, but just flesh. . . . You'd be surprised, Ryabinin, how many painful impressions you get at all these factories! I am so glad to be done with them for good. Life was simply a misery at first, with all that suffering around you. Having nature to deal with is quite a different thing. She does you no harm, and you don't have to cause her any harm in order to exploit her the way we artists do. Just look at that greyish tone!" He suddenly broke off, pointing to a patch of sky. "There, just below that little cloud-isn't it lovely! It has a greenish tinge. If you were to paint it exactly as it is, no one would believe you, I am sure. It's not bad really, is it?"

I expressed my approval, although, to tell the truth, I saw nothing beautiful in that dun patch of St. Petersburg sky, and interrupted Dedov, who was about to go off into raptures over another tone refinement elsewhere.

"Tell me, where can I see one of those Human Anvils?"

"Let us go down to the factory; I'll show you all kinds of things there. We can go tomorrow if you like. You don't intend to paint that Human Anvil, do you? It's not worth it. Can't you find something more cheerful? As for the factory we can go any time-tomorrow if you like."

an hour; during that half-hour the hammer rose and fell a hundred times. The man writhed. I am going to paint him. 

Ryabinin has taken such a stupid idea into his head that I don't know what to think about it. The other day I took him down to a metalworks; we spent the whole day there, inspecting everything, and I explained the different processes to him (to my surprise I had forgotten very little of what I had known professionally); finally, I took him into the boiler department. They happened to be working there on an enormous boiler. Ryabinin got inside it and for half an hour sat there watching the workman holding the rivets with a pincers. He came out looking pale and upset; he did not say a word all the way back. And today he announced that he had already begun to paint that Human Anvil. What an idea! Looking for the poetic in the mud! Here I can speak my mind freely, and say what I would never have said, of course, in public, namely, that all this muzhik trend in art, in my opinion, is sheer ugliness. Who wants those notorious "Volga Bargemen" of Repin's? They are excellently painted, I admit; but that's about all there is to it. Where is the beauty here, harmony, refinement? Is it not to reproduce the beautiful in nature that art exists?

Look at me now! Another day or two's work and my serene "Morning in May" will be finished. The water barely ripples in the pond, the drooping willows bend their boughs over it, the East bursts into flame, painting the fleecy cloudlets a rosy tint. The figure of a woman going for water with a bucket descends the steep bank, frightening away a flock of ducks. And that is all; it looks simple, yet I clearly feel that there is a world of poetry in the picture. Now that is art! It attunes a man's soul to a mood of gentle tranquil wistfulness, it softens his heart. But Ryabinin's Human Anvil will affect no one, if only because people will try to get away from it as quickly as they can in order to be rid of that squalid sight of filthy rags and ugly mug. It's a queer thing! Now in music, for instance, no harsh discordant sounds are permitted: then why should we, in painting, be allowed to depict positively ugly and repellent images? I must speak to L. about this; he will write an article and take Ryabinin down a peg or two while he is at it. He deserves it. 

It is a fortnight since I stopped going to the academy. I sit at home, painting. The work has worn me out completely, although it is going well. I should have said it is going well instead of although. The nearer it moves to completion the more frightening does this thing I have painted seem to me. I also have a feeling that this will be my last painting.

There he sits before me, crouching in the dark boiler, a man clothed in rags, panting with fatigue. He would not be visible at all but for the light that filters through the round holes drilled for the rivets. These disks of light spangle his clothes and face, throw patches of gleaming gold on his tatters, on his matted grimy beard and hair, his livid face, down which pours sweat mixed with dirt, on his knotted toil-worn hands, his broad, sunken, pain-racked chest. The terrible blows descend upon the boiler without a stop and make the unfortunate fellow exert every ounce of his strength to keep his body balanced in its unnatural pose. I have tried to express this strained effort of the man as best I could.

only trouble is this satisfaction/is torture to me instead of a pleasure. It is not a painted picture, it is a ripened disease. Where it is going to end I do not know, but I feel that after this picture I will have nothing more to paint. Fowlers, fishers, huntsmen with all kinds of expressions and typical faces, that whole "rich domain of genre"-of what use is it to me now? I shall never be as effectual as I am with this Human Anvil, if I am effectual at all. . . .

I made an experiment: I invited Dedov down and showed him my picture. All he said was, "Oh, I say," and spread his hands. He sat down, looked at it for half an hour, then silently took his leave and went away. I believe he was impressed. But then he is an artist after all.

I, too, sit in front of my picture, and it impresses me too. You look and cannot tear your eyes away from it; you feel for that pain-racked tortured figure. Sometimes I even seem to hear the blows of the hammer. It will drive me mad. I must cover it up.

The easel with the picture on it is covered with a cloth, but I still sit before it, the same dread unuttered thoughts preying on my mind. The sun goes down and throws a shaft of slanting yellow light upon the covered easel through the dusty window-panes. Exactly like a human figure. Like the Weltgeist in Faust,

. . . Wer ruft mich¹?

Who calls thee? I, I myself have created thee here. I have invoked thee, not from the "spheres," but from a dark and stuffy boiler in order that the sight of thee may appal that clean, that sleek and hateful rabble. Bound to canvas by the spell of my power, come forth, gaze down upon those dress coats and trains, and shout to them: I am a festering sore! Smite their hearts, give them no sleep, rise as a ghost before their eyes! Kill their peace of mind, as thou hast killed mine. . . .

Not likely! The picture has been finished, and put in a gilt frame, and two attendants will bear it off to the exhibition at the academy on their heads. And now there it stands among the Noons and Sunsets, next to a "Girl with a cat," not far from a seven-yard-long "Ivan Grozny piercing the foot of Vaska Shibanov with his staff." You cannot say that no one looked at it; people will look at it and even praise it. Artists will discuss the texture. Reviewers, taking their cue from them, will start scribbling in their notebooks. Mr. V. S. alone takes his cue from no one; he looks, approves, praises, and shakes my hand. L. the art critic will furiously attack the poor Human Anvil, and shout: "But where does beauty come in? Tell me, where is the beautiful?" And he will rail at me in good set "terms. The public. . . . The public pass by impassively or with a grimace of distaste; the ladies will merely say: "Ah, comme il est laid, ce Human Anvil," and sail along to the next picture, the "Girl with a cat," looking at which they will say: "Pretty, very pretty," or something like that. Solid-looking ox-eyed gentlemen will stare at it, lower their gaze to the catalogue, emit a sound that is half moo and half sniff, and proceed on their way. Only some youth, perhaps, or some young girl will stop attentively, and read with amazement in the anguish-filled eyes looking down at them from the canvas the cry of pain that I have put into them.

it be a mere stirring of emotion, after which will come relaxation and a quest of innocent subjects? Innocent subjects! I was suddenly reminded of a picture-gallery keeper of my acquaintance, who compiled a catalogue, and shouted to the clerk:

"Martynov, take it down! No. 112. First love scene: girl plucks a rose."

"Martynov, another one! No. 113. Second love scene: girl smells the rose."

Shall I be smelling the rose as before? Or will I go off the rails? 

Ryabinin has almost finished his Human Anvil and invited me today to have a look at it. I went there with a prejudiced mind, but I must say that what I saw made me change my opinion. Most impressive. The design is excellent. Plasticity of surface. Best of all is the lighting, at once eerie and perfectly true. The picture would undoubtedly have its merits were it not for that queer preposterous subject. L. quite agrees with me, and his article will appear in the newspaper next week. We'll see what Ryabinin will have to say then. L., of course, will have difficulty in criticizing the picture as far as technique is concerned, but then he will be able to deal with its significance as a work of art,

L. visited me today. He was full of praise. Made certain remarks on various minor points, but on the whole was very complimentary. If only the professors looked at my picture with his eyes! I wonder whether I will receive at long last what every student of the academy strives after -a gold medal? A medal, four years of life abroad with all expenses paid, and in prospect-a professorship. Yes, I did the right thing to drop that dreary humdrum work, that drudgery, where at every step you run into one or another of Ryabinin's human anvils. 

The picture has been sold and taken to Moscow. I received the money for it, and on the demand of my friends was obliged to entertain them at the Vienna. I don't know when that custom first arose, but practically all the celebrations among the young artists are held in the private corner room of that hotel. It is a large high room with a chandelier, and bronze candelabras, with carpets and furniture darkened by age and tobacco smoke, and a grand piano, which had done some hard work in its day under the blithe fingers of impromptu pianists; the huge looking-glass alone is new, because it is changed two or three times a year, whenever roistering merchants instead of artists are in possession of the corner room.

Quite a crowd had gathered: genrists, landscapists and sculptors, two reviewers from some small newspapers, and several strangers. They began drinking and talking. Within half an hour all were talking together, as everyone was a bit tight. I was too. I remember being tossed for a jolly good fellow and making a speech. Then I kissed one of the reviewers and drank fraternity with him. We drank, talked and kissed a good deal, and broke up at four in the morning. Two of our company, if I am not mistaken, spent the night right there in the corner room of the hotel Vienna.

lasted for a minute or two, and then I fell asleep.

I fell asleep, and woke up very late. My head aches; my body is weighted with lead. For a long time I cannot open my eyes, and when I do, I see the easel-the empty easel without the picture. It reminds me of past experiences, and the thing starts all over again. . . . My God, I must do something to end this!

My head aches worse and worse, and a mist enfolds me. I fall asleep, wake up, and fall asleep again. And I know not whether it is deathly silence that reigns around me or deafening noise, a hideous chaos of sound that is terrible to the ear. It may be silence, but there is something in it that clangs and knocks, spins and flies. It is like an enormous thousand-horsepower pump, pumping water from a bottomless abyss, pumping with a noise in which one can distinguish the dull thud of falling water and the pounding of the engine. And rising above it all a single note, an endless, drawn-out, agonizing note. I want to open my eyes, to get up, go over to the window, open it and hear living sounds, a human voice, the rattle of cab wheels, the barking of a dog-anything but that perpetual din. But I have no strength. I was drunk yesterday. And I must lie here and listen to it, listen without end'.

I wake up and fall asleep again. The clangour and clatter sound harsher, closer, more distinct. The pounding draws near, keeping time with my pulse. Is it within me, in my head, or outside of me? Harsh, clear, distinct. . , one-two, one-two. . . . A hammering upon metal or something else. I clearly hear the sound of blows upon iron; the iron booms and quivers. The hammer at first strikes with a muffled sound, as though falling into a viscid mass, and then grows more vibrant, until at last the huge boiler is ringing like a bell. Then a pause, then quietly again; louder and louder, and again that unbearable ear-splitting clang. Yes, that's what it is: at first they strike the soft red-hot iron, and afterwards it hardens. The boiler, too, makes that booming noise when the head of the rivet has hardened. I understand now. But those other sounds-what are they? I try to make them out, but a mist clouds my brain. It seems so easy to remember, it haunts my mind, so maddeningly near-but what it is I know not. I cannot grasp it. But let it be. I know what it is, only I cannot recollect it.

But the noise swells and diminishes, now growing to a hideous volume, now almost dying away altogether. And it seems to me as if it is not the noise that is dying away, but myself disappearing somewhere, and I cannot hear anything, I cannot stir a finger, open an eyelid, or cry out. Sheer terror grips me, and I awake in a cold sweat. Rather, I awake to another dream. I dream that I am at a factory again, but not the one I went to with Dedov. This one is larger and gloomier. On all sides stand gigantic furnaces of the queerest shapes. Flames shoot out of them, covering the already coal-black roof and walls of the building with soot. The machines joggle and screech, and I am barely able to pass between the revolving wheels and running quivering belts; not a soul anywhere. From somewhere comes a clang and clatter: that is where the work is going on. Wild shrieks, terrific blows can be heard there; I dread going in there, but I am borne along despite myself, and the blows sound ever louder, the screams more terrifying. Then everything merges into a roar, and I see. . . . I see a queer hideous creature on the ground squirming under the blows that rain down on him from all sides. A whole mob is beating him with whatever comes handy. Here are all my acquaintances with frenzied faces, striking this creature, for whom I have been able to find no name, with hammers, crowbars, sticks, and fists. I know that it is he, the same one. . . . I rush forward, want to shout out: "Stop! What are you doing?" and suddenly see a white, distorted, terrible face-terrible because that face is

Then the hammer descended upon my skull. Everything disappeared; for a time I was still aware of the darkness, the silence, the emptiness and my own immobility, but presently I disappeared myself. . . .

Ryabinin lay unconscious till the evening, when the landlady, a Finn, reminding herself that her lodger had not left his room all day, went in to him and found the poor youth tossing about and raving in a high fever. Frightened, she uttered an exclamation in an unintelligible native dialect, and sent her little girl for a doctor. The doctor came, looked at the patient, examined him, grunted, sat down at the table, wrote out a prescription and rode away, while Ryabinin continued to rave and toss about in his bed. 

Ryabinin, poor devil, fell ill after yesterday's carouse. I went to see him and found him lying insensible. His landlady is nursing him. I had to give her some money as there wasn't a kopek on Ryabinin's table; I don't know whether the confounded woman had stolen it, or whether he had spent it all at the Vienna. True, we had made a real night of it and had had a jolly good time; Ryabinin and I drank fraternity. I also drank with L. A fine chap, L., and how he understands art! I have never known anyone to show such a subtle understanding of what I wanted to say in my picture as he has done in his last article, and I am very grateful to him for it. I ought to paint a small thing, something a la Klever, and make him a present of it. By the way, his name is Alexander; isn't it his Saint's Day tomorrow?

I'm afraid it will go hard with poor Ryabinin, though; that big picture he's painting for the examination is far from finished, and he may be late with it. If he is ill for a month he will not get the medal. It will mean goodbye then to his foreign journey. One thing I am glad of-that, as a landscapist, I am not competing with him; but his comrades must be rubbing their hands. I don't blame them-it means one chance more.

After lying unconscious for many days I came to myself today and could not make out where I was. It was some time before I realized that the long white package lying before my eyes was my own body, tucked up in a blanket. With a great effort I turned my head to right and left-which caused a buzzing in my ears-and saw a long dimly lit ward with two rows of beds on which lay the wrapped up figures of patients, a knight in armour standing between large windows with white lowered blinds who proved to be simply a huge brass washstand. an icon of the Saviour in a corner with a glimmering little oil lamp before it, and two colossal tiled stoves. I heard the low laboured breathing of my neighbour, the gurgling sighs of a sick man lying a little way off, and the loud snores of an attendant, apparently hired to watch at the bedside of a dangerously sick man, who may have been alive, or may have been already dead and was lying here with us, the living.

Us, the living. . . . "Alive," I thought, and even whispered the word. And suddenly a curious feeling of joy and elation, such as I had not experienced since a child, swept over me together with the realization that I was out of death's teach, that I had a whole lifetime before me, a life which I would no doubt be able to shape after my own pattern (oh, you may be certain of that), and I turned over on my side, albeit with difficulty, drew my knees up, put my hand under my head and fell asleep, just as I used to do in childhood, when, waking up in the middle of the night beside your sleeping mother, you hear the window-panes rattling in the wind, and storm wailing plaintively in the chimney, and the logs of the house cracking like pistol shots from the severe frost outside, and you begin to cry softly, at once afraid and anxious to wake your mother, and she awakes, kisses you sleepily and makes the sign of the cross over you, and your fears allayed, you roll yourself up into a ball and fall asleep again, your little heart happily warm.

recovering faster than my body. When I came to myself I hardly remembered anything, and I had to make an effort to recollect even the names of my intimate acquaintances. Now it has all come back, but not as a reality of the past, but as a dream. It does not torment me any more, no. The past has gone beyond recall.

Dedov today brought me a heap of newspapers in which praise is lavished on my "Human Anvil" and his "Morning." L. alone did not praise me. But who cares now. It is all so far far away. I am very glad for Dedov's sake; he has received the grand gold medal and will soon be going abroad. He is delighted; his face shines like a buttered pancake. He asked whether I intended competing next year, seeing that my illness had prevented me from doing so now. The way he stared when I told him "no"!

"You don't mean it seriously?"

"Quite seriously," I answered.

"Then what are you going to do?"

"I don't know yet."

He went away a puzzled man. 

This last fortnight I had been living in a dazed state of excitement and impatience, and only now, when I am sitting in the coach of the Warsaw Railway, have I calmed down. I can scarcely believe it: I am now a pensioner of the academy, an artist going abroad for four years to perfect himself in art. Vivat Academia!

But Ryabinin, Ryabinin! I saw him in the street today as I was getting into the carriage that was to take me to the station. "I congratulate you," he said, "you may congratulate me too."

"On what?"

"I have just passed my examination at the teachers' seminary."

The teachers' seminary! An artist, a talent! Why, he will ruin himself, the village will be the end of him! The man must be mad!

Dedov was right for once; Ryabinin was indeed a failure. But of that another time.

1879