“Shall I speak on?” continued Platonov undecidedly. “Are you bored?”
“No, no, I beg of you, speak on.”
“They also lie, and lie especially innocently, to those who preen themselves before them on political hobby horses.
Here they agree with anything you want.
I shall tell her to-day: Away with the modern bourgeois order!
Let us destroy with bombs and daggers the capitalists, landed proprietors, and the bureaucracy!
She’ll warmly agree with me.
But to-morrow the hanger-on Nozdrunov will yell that it’s necessary to string up all the socialists, to beat up all the students and massacre all the sheenies, who partake of communion in Christian blood.
And she’ll gleefully agree with him as well.
But if in addition to that you’ll also inflame her imagination, make her fall in love with yourself, then she’ll go with you everywhere you may wish— on a pogrom, on a barricade, on a theft, on a murder.
But then, children also are yielding.
And they, by God, are children, my dear Lichonin…
“At fourteen years she was seduced, and at sixteen she became a patent prostitute, with a yellow ticket and a venereal disease.
And here is all her life, surrounded and fenced off from the universe with a sort of a bizarre, impenetrable and dead wall.
Turn your attention to her everyday vocabulary— thirty or forty words, no more— altogether as with a baby or a savage: to eat, to drink, to sleep, man, bed, the madam, rouble, lover, doctor, hospital, linen, policeman— and that’s all.
And so her mental development, her experience, her interests, remain on an infantile plane until her very death, exactly as in the case of a gray and naive lady teacher who has not crossed over the threshold of a female institute since she was ten, as in the case of a nun given as a child into a convent.
In a word, picture to yourself a tree of a genuinely great species, but raised in a glass bell, in a jar from jam.
And precisely to this childish phase of their existence do I attribute their compulsory lying—so innocent, purposeless and habitual … But then, how fearful, stark, unadorned with anything the frank truth in this business-like dickering about the price of a night; in these ten men in an evening; in these printed rules, issued by the city fathers, about the use of a solution of boric acid and about maintaining one’s self in cleanliness; in the weekly doctors’ inspections; in the nasty diseases, which are looked upon as lightly and facetiously, just as simply and without suffering, as a cold would be; in the deep revulsion of these women to men— so deep, that they all, without conception, compensate for it in the Lesbian manner and do not even in the least conceal it.
All their incongruous life is here, on the palm of my hand, with all its cynicism, monstrous and coarse injustice; but there is in it none of that falsehood and that hypocrisy before people and before one’s self, which enmesh all humanity from top to bottom.
Consider, my dear Lichonin, how much nagging, drawn out, disgusting deception, how much hate, there is in any marital cohabitation in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred.
How much blind, merciless cruelty— precisely not animal, but human, reasoned, far-sighted, calculated cruelty— there is in the sacred maternal instinct— and behold, with what tender colours this instinct is adorned!
Then what about all these unnecessary, tom-fool professions, invented by cultured man for the safeguarding of my nest, my bit of meat, my woman, my child, these different overseers, controllers, inspectors, judges, attorneys, jailers, advocates, chiefs, bureaucrats, generals, soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of titles more.
They all subserve human greed, cowardice, viciousness, servility, legitimised sensuality, laziness-beggarliness!— yes, that is the real word!— human beggarliness.
But what magnificent words we have!
The altar of the fatherland, Christian compassion for our neighbor, progress, sacred duty, sacred property, holy love.
Ugh!
I do not believe in a single fine word now, and I am nauseated to infinity with these petty liars, these cowards and gluttons!
Beggar women! … Man is born for great joy, for ceaseless creation, in which he is God; for a broad, free love, unhindered by anything,— love for everything: for a tree, for the sky, for man, for a dog, for the dear, benign, beautiful earth,— oh, especially for the earth with its beatific motherhood, with its mornings and nights, with its magnificent everyday miracles.
But man has lied himself out so, has become such an importunate beggar, and has sunk so low! … Ah, Lichonin, but I am weary!”
“I, as an anarchist, partly understand you,” said Lichonin thoughtfully.
It was as though he heard and yet did not hear the reporter.
Some thought was with difficulty, for the first time, being born in his mind. “But one thing I can not comprehend.
If humanity has become so malodorous to you, then how do you stand— and for so long, too,— all this,— ” Lichonin took in the whole table with a circular motion of his hand,— “the basest thing that mankind could invent?”
“Well, I don’t even know myself,” said Platonov with artlessness. “You see, I am a vagabond, and am passionately in love with life.
I have been a turner, a compositor; I have sown and sold tobacco— the cheap Silver Makhorka kind— have sailed as a stoker on the Azov Sea, have been a fisherman on the Black— on the Dubinin fisheries; I have loaded watermelons and bricks on the Dnieper, have ridden with a circus, have been an actor— I can’t even recall everything.
And never did need drive me.
No, only an immeasurable thirst for life and an insupportable curiosity.
By God, I would like for a few days to become a horse, a plant, or a fish, or to be a woman and experience childbirth; I would like to live with the inner life, and to look upon the universe with the eyes of every human being I meet.
And so I wander care-free over towns and hamlets, bound by nothing; know and love tens of trades and joyously float wherever it suits fate to set my sail… And so it was that I came upon the brothel, and the more I look at it, the more there grows within me alarm, incomprehension, and very great anger.
But even this will soon be at an end.
When things get well into autumn— away again!
I’ll get into a rail-rolling mill.
I’ve a certain friend, he’ll manage it … Wait, wait, Lichonin … Listen to the actor … That’s the third act.”
Egmont-Lavretzki, who until this had been very successfully imitating now a shoat which is being put into a bag, now the altercation of a cat with a dog, was beginning little by little to wilt and droop.
Upon him was already advancing the stage of self-revelation, next in order, in the paroxysm of which he several times attempted to kiss Yarchenko’s hand.
His lids had become red; around the shaven, prickly lips had deepened the tearful wrinkles that gave him an appearance of weeping; and it could be heard by his voice that his nose and throat were already overflowing with tears.
“I serve in a farce!” he was saying, smiting himself on the breast with his fist. “I disport myself in striped trunks for the sport of the sated mob!
I have put out my torch, have hid my talent in the earth, like the slothful servant!
But fo-ormerly!” he began to bray tragically, “Fo-ormerly-y-y!
Ask in Novocherkassk, ask in Tvier, in Ustejne, in Zvenigorodok, in Krijopole.[10] What a Zhadov and Belugin I was! How I played Max! What a figure I created of Veltishchev— that was my crowning ro-ole … Nadin-Perekopski was beginning with me at Sumbekov’s!