Finally he took off his frock coat and shoes, and whispered, “Farewell till tomorrow!” Then he lay down on the couch and drew a plush coverlet over himself.

“In the presence of a lady!” the reader shouts indignantly. “This is pure rubbish! It’s an outrage! Police! Censor!”

Wait a moment, wait a moment, my stern reader. The lady in the luxuriously furnished drawing room was painted in oils on a canvas that is hanging above the couch. So feel free to be as outraged as you like.

“But how can your magazine put up with this? If they are printing rubbish like ‘Maria Ivanovna,’ then it’s obviously because they don’t have anything better. That’s a plain and simple fact. Sit down immediately, expound your deepest and most exquisite thoughts, cover a good ream of paper with your writing, and send it off to an editorial. Sit down and write! Write everything down and send it out!”

And soon enough it will be sent right back.

TROUBLING THOUGHTS

Aclassics instructor of severe, inflexible, bilious aspect but a secret dreamer and freethinker, complained to me that whenever he oversaw student presentations or attended teachers’ meetings, he was tortured by troubling and unsolvable questions. Invariably, he complained, his mind was assailed by matters such as: What would happen if the floor were the ceiling, and the ceiling the floor? Are ancient languages profitable or unprofitable? How would instructors be called before the director if his office were located on the moon? These and similar questions, if they persistently preoccupy one’s mind, are referred to by psychiatrists as “obsessive thoughts.” It is a troubling, incurable ailment, but fascinating for the onlooker. The other day, the instructor approached me and said he was preoccupied by the issue of what would happen if men dressed like women. An incongruous, even uncouth question perhaps, though not one particularly difficult to answer. The classics instructor himself provided the following response. If men dressed like women, then:

Low-ranking members of the civil service, such as collegiate registrars, would appear in calico dresses, though on high feast days perhaps in muslin ones. They would wear one-ruble corsets and striped stockings made of paper. Décolletés would only be permitted when they were among themselves;

Postmen and reporters who raise their skirts to step over ditches and puddles would be called to account for outraging public decency;

Moscow’s great littérateur, Sergey Andreyevich Yuriev, would walk about in crinolines and a cotton bonnet;

School guards Mikhei and Makar would appear before the director every morning to lace him into his corset;

Officers on special assignments and secretaries of charitable societies would dress beyond their means;

Maikov the poet would wear his hair in ringlets, and appear in a green dress with red ribbons and a cap;

The ample frame of the Pan-Slavist leader Ivan Aksakov would be draped in the flowered smock of a village babushka;

The directors of the Lozovo-Sevastopol Railways would, on account of their poverty, strut about in petticoats.

And as for the conversations:

“Your bodice is above all criticism, Your Excellency, and the bustle is excellent. Your décolleté might, however, be a little low.”

“Nonsense, old boy, my décolleté follows the guidelines set by our table of ranks. It’s a Grade 4 décolleté. By the way, can you straighten my ruffle?”

LETTER TO A REPORTER

Sir:

I know everything! There were six big fires this week and four tiny ones. A young man shot himself in a conflagration of passion for a young lady, whose head, upon hearing of his death, went astray. Guskin, a house porter, hanged himself after excessive imbibification. A boat drowned yesterday, along with two passengers and a small child . . . poor child! At the Arkadia, someone burned a hole in the back of a merchant’s jacket, and in the ensuing rumpus he nearly had his neck broken. Four swindlers dressed to the nines were apprehended, and a train capsized. I know everything, my dear sir! As many exciting things have happened this week as you have rubles in your pocket, of which you haven’t given me a single kopeck of what you owe me!

A gentleman does not act this way!

Your tailor,

Smirnov

RUSSIAN COAL

A True Story

Count Tulupov was traveling down the Rhine on a boat one fine April morning and, having nothing better to do, struck up a conversation with a Kraut. The German—young and angular, bristling with haughty scholarliness and staunch self-esteem in his starched collar—introduced himself as Arthur Imbs, a mining specialist, and launched into an extensive discourse on Russian coal, a topic that, try as he might, the bored count could not divert him from.

“Indeed, the fate of our coal is most lamentable,” the count interrupted with the sigh of the knowledgeable expert. “Lamentable! St. Petersburg and Moscow are running on British coal, Russia is burning her virgin forests in its ovens, and all the while there are vast reserves of coal lying buried in the south!”

Imbs shook his head wistfully and, clicking his tongue in indignation, asked to see a map of Russia.

The count’s manservant brought a map and the count ran his finger along the shores of the Sea of Azov and then over Kharkov: “There . . . around here . . . you see? The whole south!”

Imbs wanted more precise information about the exact location of the coal fields, but could not induce the count to be more specific. The count’s finger darted randomly over the length and breadth of Russia, and, wanting to stress the coal riches of the Don region, skidded as far south as Stavropol. The Russian count, it seemed, was not overly familiar with his country’s geography.