He long ago decided that doctors do not understand him. Faith healers and healeresses, quacks, drunken field medics, and sometimes midwives give him succor. He dons a heavy winter coat in September and only takes it off in May. He suspects rabies in every dog, and ever since a friend informed him that a cat is capable of suffocating a sleeping man, he sees in every feline an implacable enemy of mankind. He drew up his will long ago. He swears by God and the Holy Bible that he never touches alcohol, but from time to time will imbibe warm beer. He marries a destitute orphan. If he does have a mother-in-law, he idealizes her as the epitome of brilliance and wisdom, listening to her pontifications with rapture, his head tilted to the side. Kissing her plump, clammy hands, redolent of sour pickles, he considers to be the holiest of duties. He pursues an active correspondence with uncles, aunts, his godmother, and childhood friends. He doesn’t read newspapers: he used to read The Moscow Daily, but as he felt his stomach constricting, his heart racing, and his eyes glazing over, he gave it up. He secretly reads Auguste Debay and Jozan de Saint-André’s books on conjugal hygiene. When the plague descended on Vetlyansk he devoutly resolved to fast five times. He is beset by nightmares and fits of weeping. He is not particularly happy in the civil service, and never rises above the rank of a minor section chief. He likes singing the old folk song “Luchinushka.” In an orchestra, he is the flute or the violoncello. He sighs night and day, which is why I advise against sleeping in the same room with him. He foretells floods, earthquakes, wars, the moral decline of mankind, and his own death from some agonizing illness. He dies of heart disease, cures administered by faith healers, and often of hypochondria.

The melancholic woman is the most unbearable and fretful of creatures. As a wife, she drives her husband to desperation and suicide. The one good thing is that it is not difficult to get rid of her: give her some money and she will set off on a pilgrimage.

The Choleric-Melancholic Man. In his early years he is a sanguine youth, but the instant a black cat crosses his path or the devil clouts him on the head, he turns into a choleric-melancholic individual. I am speaking of my illustrious Moscow neighbor, the exalted editor of the Zritel magazine. Ninety-nine percent of our Slavophile nationalists are choleric-melancholics, as are all unacknowledged poets, pater patriae, Jupiters, unacknowledged Demosthenes, and cuckolded husbands. Choleric-melancholic men are all those who are weakest in body but strongest in voice.

8 Latin: “cure like with like.” [Translator]

9 “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” [Translator]

SALON DES VARIÉTÉS

“Cabbie! Are you asleep, dammit? Get me to the Salon des Variétés!”

“Um . . . ah . . . the saloon day very tea? That’ll be thirty kopecks, sir.”

Lit by lanterns: the entrance and a lone constable loitering outside. A ruble and twenty kopecks to get in and twenty kopecks to check your coat (the latter, however, is not mandatory).