But Mr. Karmazinov, with an affected air and intonation, announced that "at first he had declined absolutely to read." (Much need there was to mention it!)
"There are some lines which come so deeply from the heart that it is impossible to utter them aloud, so that these holy things cannot be laid before, the public"—(Why lay them then?)—"but as he had been begged to do so, he was doing so, and as he was, moreover, laying down his pen forever, and had sworn to write no more, he had written this last farewell; and as he had sworn never, on any inducement, to read anything in public," and so on, and so on, all in that style.
But all that would not have mattered; every one knows what authors' prefaces are like, though, I may observe, that considering the lack of culture of our audience and the irritability of the back rows, all this may have had an influence.
Surely it would have been better to have read a little story, a short tale such as he had written in the past—over-elaborate, that is, and affected, but sometimes witty.
It would have saved the situation.
No, this was quite another story!
It was a regular oration!
Good heavens, what wasn't there in it!
I am positive that it would have reduced to rigidity even a Petersburg audience, let alone ours.
Imagine an article that would have filled some thirty pages of print of the most affected, aimless prattle; and to make matters worse, the gentleman read it with a sort of melancholy condescension as though it were a favour, so that it was almost insulting to the audience.
The subject.... Who could make it out?
It was a sort of description of certain impressions and reminiscences.
But of what?
And about what?
Though the leading intellects of the province did their utmost during the first half of the reading, they could make nothing of it, and they listened to the second part simply out of politeness.
A great deal was said about love, indeed, of the love of the genius for some person, but I must admit it made rather an awkward impression.
For the great writer to tell us about his first kiss seemed to my mind a little incongruous with his short and fat little figure... Another thing that was offensive; these kisses did not occur as they do with the rest of mankind.
There had to be a framework of gorse (it had to be gorse or some such plant that one must look up in a flora) and there had to be a tint of purple in the sky, such as no mortal had ever observed before, or if some people had seen it, they had never noticed it, but he seemed to say, "I have seen it and am describing it to you, fools, as if it were a most ordinary thing."
The tree under which the interesting couple sat had of course to be of an orange colour.
They were sitting somewhere in Germany.
Suddenly they see Pompey or Cassius on the eve of a battle, and both are penetrated by a thrill of ecstasy.
Some wood-nymph squeaked in the bushes.
Gluck played the violin among the reeds.
The title of the piece he was playing was given in full, but no one knew it, so that one would have had to look it up in a musical dictionary.
Meanwhile a fog came on, such a fog, such a fog, that it was more like a million pillows than a fog.
And suddenly everything disappears and the great genius is crossing the frozen Volga in a thaw.
Two and a half pages are filled with the crossing, and yet he falls through the ice.
The genius is drowning—you imagine he was drowned?
Not a bit of it; this was simply in order that when he was drowning and at his last gasp, he might catch sight of a bit of ice, the size of a pea, but pure and crystal "as a frozen tear," and in that tear was reflected Germany, or more accurately the sky of Germany, and its iridescent sparkle recalled to his mind the very tear which "dost thou remember, fell from thine eyes when we were sitting under that emerald tree, and thou didst cry out joyfully: 'There is no crime!' 'No,' I said through my tears, 'but if that is so, there are no righteous either.'
We sobbed and parted forever."
She went off somewhere to the sea coast, while he went to visit some caves, and then he descends and descends and descends for three years under Suharev Tower in Moscow, and suddenly in the very bowels of the earth, he finds in a cave a lamp, and before the lamp a hermit.
The hermit is praying.
The genius leans against a little barred window, and suddenly hears a sigh.
Do you suppose it was the hermit sighing?
Much he cares about the hermit!
Not a bit of it, this sigh simply reminds him of her first sigh, thirty-seven years before, "in Germany, when, dost thou remember, we sat under an agate tree and thou didst say to me, 'Why love?
See ochra is growing all around and I love thee; but the ochra will cease to grow, and I shall cease to love.'" Then the fog comes on again, Hoffman appears on the scene, the wood-nymph whistles a tune from Chopin, and suddenly out of the fog appears Ancus Marcius over the roofs of Rome, wearing a laurel wreath.
"A chill of ecstasy ran down our backs and we parted forever"—and so on and so on.
Perhaps I am not reporting it quite right and don't know how to report it, but the drift of the babble was something of that sort.
And after all, how disgraceful this passion of our great intellects for jesting in a superior way really is!
The great European philosopher, the great man of science, the inventor, the martyr—all these who labour and are heavy laden, are to the great Russian genius no more than so many cooks in his kitchen.
He is the master and they come to him, cap in hand, awaiting orders.
It is true he jeers superciliously at Russia too, and there is nothing he likes better than exhibiting the bankruptcy of Russia in every relation before the great minds of Europe, but as regards himself, no, he is at a higher level than all the great minds of Europe; they are only material for his jests.
He takes another man's idea, tacks on to it its antithesis, and the epigram is made.
There is such a thing as crime, there is no such thing as crime; there is no such thing as justice, there are no just men; atheism, Darwinism, the Moscow bells.... But alas, he no longer believes in the Moscow bells; Rome, laurels.... But he has no belief in laurels even.... We have a conventional attack of Byronic spleen, a grimace from Heine, something of Petchorin—and the machine goes on rolling, whistling, at full speed.
"But you may praise me, you may praise me, that I like extremely; it's only in a manner of speaking that I lay down the pen; I shall bore you three hundred times more, you'll grow weary of reading me...."
Of course it did not end without trouble; but the worst of it was that it was his own doing.
People had for some time begun shuffling their feet, blowing their noses, coughing, and doing everything that people do when a lecturer, whoever he may be, keeps an audience for longer than twenty minutes at a literary matinee.
But the genius noticed nothing of all this.
He went on lisping and mumbling, without giving a thought to the audience, so that every one began to wonder.