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Swiftly he approached the writing table and snatched up … a paperweight, which for a long time he twiddled in deep reflectiveness, before he realized that it was a paperweight he was holding, not a pencil.

The absent-mindedness proceeded from the fact that he was at this moment visited by a profound thought: and at once, at this inopportune time, it unfolded into a runaway sequence of thought (Apollon Apollonovich was in a hurry to get to the Institution). To the Diary, which was to appear in periodical publications in the year of his death, a page was added.

Apollon Apollonovich quickly noted down the sequence of thought that had unfolded: having noted down this sequence, he thought: ‘It’s time to go to work.’ And went into the dining-room to have his coffee.

As a preliminary he began to question the old valet with a kind of unpleasant insistency:

‘Is Nikolai Apollonovich up?’

‘On no account: his honour is not up yet, sir.’

Apollon Apollonovich gave the bridge of his nose a rub of displeasure:

‘Er … tell me, then: when does Nikolai Apollonovich, tell me, so to speak …’

‘Oh, his honour gets up rather latish, sir …’

‘What does that mean, rather latish?’

And at once, not waiting for an answer, stalked in to coffee, having glanced at the clock.

It was exactly half past nine.

At ten o’clock he, an old man, left for the Institution. Nikolai Apollonovich, a young man, rose from his bed – two hours later. Every morning the senator inquired about the hour of his awakening. And every morning he frowned.

Nikolai Apollonovich was the senator’s son.

In a Word, He Was the Head of an Institution

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was notable for acts of valour; more than one were the stars that had fallen on his gold-embroidered chest: the star of Stanislav and Anna, and even: even the White Eagle.

The sash he wore was the blue sash.8

And recently from a small red lacquered box the beams of diamond insignia, or in other words, the decoration of the Order of Alexander Nevsky, had begun to shine on the abode of patriotic feelings.

What then was the social position of the person who had arisen here out of non-existence?

I think that the question is rather misplaced: Russia knew Ableukhov by the excellent expansiveness of the speeches he gave: these speeches did not explode, but flashing without thunder spurted a kind of poison on the opposing party, as a result of which the party’s proposal was rejected in the appropriate quarters.9 When Ableukhov was established in a senior post the Ninth Department10 became inactive. With this department Apollon Apollonovich waged a constant battle both in documents and, where necessary, speeches, in support of the importation of American sheafing machines into Russia (the Ninth Department was against their importation). The senator’s speeches flew around all the districts and provinces, some of which are not, in a spatial respect, the inferior of Germany.

Apollon Apollonovich was the head of an Institution: oh, that one … what is it called, again?

In a word, was the head of an Institution which is, of course, familiar to you.

If one were to compare the cachectic, utterly unprepossessing little figure of my respected man of state with the immeasurable vastness of the mechanisms he controlled, one might, perhaps, for a long time give oneself up to naïve astonishment; but after all, decidedly everyone was astonished at the explosion of intellectual energy shed by this cranium in defiance of all Russia, in defiance of the majority of departments, with the exception of one: but the head of that department11 had, for what would now soon be two years, fallen silent at the will of the Fates beneath a gravestone.

My senator12 had just passed his sixty-eighth birthday; and his face, a pale one, recalled both a grey paperweight (in solemn moments) and a piece of papier mâché (in hours of leisure); the senator’s stony eyes, each surrounded by a black-green concavity, seemed in moments of tiredness both more blue and more enormous.

For our own part, let us also say: Apollon Apollonovich was not in the slightest agitated upon surveying his completely green ears, enlarged to massive dimensions, against the blood-red background of a burning Russia. Thus had he recently been depicted: on the front page of a humorous little street journal,13 one of those little Yid journals, the blood-red covers of which multiplied in those days with shocking speed on the prospects that seethed with humanity …

North-East

In the oak dining-room the wheezing of a clock was heard; bobbing and hissing, a small grey cuckoo was cuckooing; at the signal from the time-honoured cuckoo Apollon Apollonovich sat down in front of a porcelain cup and broke off warm crusts of white bread. And over his coffee Apollon Apollonovich would remember his former years; and over his coffee – even, even – he would joke:

‘Who is more respected than anyone else, Semyonych?’

‘I suppose, Apollon Apollonovich, that a real privy councillor14 is more respected than anyone else.’

Apollon Apollonovich smiled with his lips alone:

‘Well, you suppose wrongly: a chimney sweep is more respected than anyone else …’

The valet already knew the answer to the riddle: but of this, out of respect, he said – not a word.

‘But why, barin, may I be so bold as to ask, such honour to a chimney sweep?’

‘In the presence of a real privy councillor, Semyonych, people stand aside …’

‘I suppose that is so, your excellency …’

‘A chimney sweep … Before him even a real privy councillor will stand aside, because: a chimney sweep makes people dirty.’

‘Precisely so, sir,’ the valet interjected deferentially …

‘Yes indeed: only there is a post that is even more respected …’

And at once added:

‘That of lavatory attendant …’

‘Pff! …’

‘The chimney sweep himself will stand aside before him, and not only the real privy councillor …’

And – a mouthful of coffee. But let us observe: Apollon Apollonovich was after all himself a real privy councillor.

‘Oh, Apollon Apollonovich, sir, there was another thing: Anna Petrovna was telling me …’

At the words ‘Anna Petrovna’, however, the grey-haired valet stopped short.

‘The grey coat, sir?’

‘Yes, the grey one …’

‘I suppose it will be the grey gloves, too, sir?’

‘No, I want suede gloves …’

‘Try to wait a moment, your excellency, sir: you see, we keep the gloves in the wardrobe: Shelf B – North-West.’

Apollon Apollonovich had entered into life’s trivia only once: one day he had made an inspection of his inventory; the inventory was registered in order and the nomenclature of all the shelves established; the shelves were arranged by letters: A, B, C; while the four sides of the shelves assumed the designations of the four corners of the globe.

When he had put his spectacles away, Apollon Apollonovich would mark the register in fine, minute handwriting: spectacles, Shelf B, NE – North-East, in other words; while the valet received a copy of the register, and learned the directions of the appurtenances of the precious toilet by heart; at times during bouts of insomnia he would flawlessly scan these directions from memory.

In the lacquered house the storms of life passed noiselessly; but ruinously did the storms of life pass here none the less: not with events did they thunder; they did not shine purifyingly into hearts like arrows of lightning; but like a stream of poisonous fluids from a hoarse gullet did they rend the air: and some kind of cerebral games whirled in the consciousness of the inhabitants like dense vapours in hermetically sealed boilers.

The Baron, the Harrow

From the table rose a cold, long-legged bronze: the lampshade did not flash with a violet-pink tone, subtly painted: the secret of this paint had been lost by the nineteenth century; the glass had grown dark with time; the delicate pattern had also grown dark with time.

The golden pier-glasses in the window-piers devoured the drawing-room from all sides with the green surfaces of mirrors; and over there – a golden-cheeked little cupid crowned them with his little wing; and over there – a golden wreath’s laurels and roses were perforated by the heavy flames of torches. Between the pier-glasses a small mother-of-pearl table gleamed from everywhere.

Apollon Apollonovich quickly threw open the door, leaning on the cut-crystal handle; his steps rang out over the radiant tiles of the parquetry; from all sides rushed heaps of porcelain trinkets; they had brought these trinkets from Venice, he and Anna Petrovna – some thirty years ago. Memories of a misty lagoon, a gondola and an aria sobbing in the distance flashed inopportunely through the senator’s head …

Instantly he transferred his eyes to the grand piano.

From the yellow lacquered lid the minute leaves of a bronze incrustation shone resplendently; and again (tiresome memory!) Apollon Apollonovich remembered: a white Petersburg night; in the windows a broad river flowed; and the moon was out; and a roulade of Chopin thundered: he remembered – Anna Petrovna had played Chopin (not Schumann) …

The minute leaves of the incrustation – of mother-of-pearl and bronze – shone resplendently on the boxes and shelves that came out of the walls. Apollon Apollonovich settled down in an Empire-style armchair, on the pale azure satin seat of which garlands wound, and with his hand he reached for a bundle of letters from a small Chinese tray: his bald head inclined towards the envelopes. As he waited for the lackey with his invariable ‘The horses are ready’ he absorbed himself here, before leaving for work, in the reading of his morning correspondence.

Thus did he act on this day, too.

And the small envelopes were torn open: envelope after envelope; an ordinary, postal one – the stamp affixed lopsidedly, the handwriting illegible.

‘Mm … Yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir: very well, sir …’

And the envelope was carefully put away.

‘Mm … A petition …’

‘A petition, and another petition …’

The envelopes were torn open carelessly; these were things to be dealt with in time, later: this way or that …

An envelope made of thick grey paper – sealed, with a monogram, no stamp and the seal done in sealing-wax.

‘Mm … Count Doublevé15 … What’s this? … He wants to see me at the Institution … A personal matter …’

‘Mm … Aha! …’

Count Doublevé, the head of the Ninth Department, was the senator’s adversary and an enemy of separated farming.

Next … A pale pink, miniature envelope; the senator’s hand gave a start; he recognized this handwriting – the handwriting of Anna Petrovna; he studied the Spanish stamp, but did not unseal the envelope:

‘Mm … money …’

‘But the money was sent, wasn’t it?’

‘The money will be sent!! …’

‘Hm … I must make a note …’

Apollon Apollonovich, thinking he had got his pencil, pulled an ivory nailbrush from his waistcoat and was preparing to make a note to ‘Return to address of sender’, when …

‘? …’

‘The horses are ready, sir …’

Apollon Apollonovich raised his bald head and walked out of the room.

On the walls hung pictures, suffused with an oily lustre; and with difficulty through the lustre one could see French women who looked like Greek women, in the narrow tunics of the Directoire of former times and with the tallest of coiffures.

Above the grand piano hung a small reproduction of David’s painting Distribution des aigles par Napoléon Premier. The painting depicted the great Emperor wearing a wreath and an ermine purple mantle; the Emperor Napoleon was extending one hand to a plumed assembly of marshals; his other hand clutched a metal sceptre; on top of the sceptre sat a heavy eagle.

Cold was the magnificence of the drawing-room on account of the complete absence of rugs: the parquet tiles shone; if the sun illumined them for a moment, one’s eyes screwed up involuntarily. Cold was the drawing-room’s hospitality.

But with Senator Ableukhov it had been exalted into a principle.

It impressed itself: in the master, in the statues, in the servants, even in the dark, tiger-striped bulldog that lived somewhere near the kitchen; in this house everyone became disconcerted, giving way to the parquetry, the paintings and the statues, smiling, being disconcerted and swallowing their words: obliging and bowing, and rushing to one another – on these noisy parquets; and wringing their cold fingers in an access of fruitless obsequiousness.

Since Anna Petrovna’s departure: the drawing-room had been silent, the lid of the grand piano closed: the roulade had not thundered.

Yes – with regard to Anna Petrovna, or (to put it more simply) with regard to the letter from Spain: hardly had Apollon Apollonovich stalked past than two nimble lackeys quickly began to jabber.

‘He didn’t read the letter …’

‘Oh well: he will read it.’

‘Will he send it?’

‘ ’Course he will …’

‘Such a stone, the Lord forgive …’

‘I’ll say this to you, as well: you ought to observe the verbal niceties.’

When Apollon Apollonovich came down to the hallway, his grey-haired valet, who was also coming down to the hallway, looked at the respected ears, clutching a snuffbox in his hand – a gift from the minister.

Apollon Apollonovich stopped on the stairs and searched for a word.

‘Mm … Listen …’

‘Your excellency?’

Apollon Apollonovich looked for the right word.

‘How, as a matter of fact, – yes – is he getting on … getting on …’

‘? …’

‘Nikolai Apollonovich.’

‘Passably, Apollon Apollonovich, his honour is well …’

‘And what else?’

‘It’s as before: his honour is pleased to shut himself up and read books.’

‘Books, too?’

‘Then his honour also paces about the rooms, sir …’

‘Paces about – yes, yes … And … And? How?’

‘Paces about … In a dressing-gown, sir!’

‘Reading, pacing … I see … Go on.’

‘Yesterday his honour was waiting for a visit from someone …’

‘Waiting? For whom?’

‘A costumier, sir …’

‘What costumier?’

‘A costumier, sir …’

‘Hm-hm … What was that for?’

‘I suppose that his honour is going to a ball …’

‘Aha – so: he’s going to a ball …’

Apollon Apollonovich gave the bridge of his nose a rub: his face lit up with a smile and became suddenly senile:

‘Are you from the peasantry?’

‘That’s right, sir!’

‘Well, so you – do you know – are a baron.’

‘?’

‘Do you have a borona,16 a harrow?’

‘My father had one, sir.’

‘Well, there you are, you see, and yet you say …’

Apollon Apollonovich, taking his top hat, walked out through the open door.

A Carriage Flew into the Fog

A sleety drizzle was pouring down on the streets and prospects, the pavements and the roofs; it hurled itself down in cold jets from tinplated gutters.

A sleety drizzle was pouring down on the passers-by: rewarding them with grippes; together with the fine dust of rain the influenzas and grippes crawled under the raised collar: of gymnasiast, student, civil servant, officer, ordinary chap; and the ordinary chap (the man in the street, so to speak) looked around him in melancholy fashion; and looked at the prospect with a grey, washed-out face; he was circulating into the infinity of the prospects, crossing infinity, without the slightest murmur – in the infinite stream of others like himself – among the flight, the hubbub, the trembling, the droshkys, hearing from afar the melodic voice of the motor cars’ roulades and the increasing rumble of the yellow-and-red tramcars (a rumble that decreased again), and the incessant cry of the loud-voiced newspaper sellers.

From one infinity he fled into another; and then stumbled against the embankment; here everything came to an end: the melodic voice of the motor car roulade, the yellow-and-red tramcar and the man-in-the-street of every kind; here were both the end of the earth and the end of infinity.

And over there, over there: the depths, the greenish dregs; from far, far away, seemingly further than ought to have been the case, the islands17 frightenedly sank and cowered; the estates cowered; and the buildings cowered; it seemed that the waters were going to descend, and that at that moment over them would rush: the depths, the greenish dregs; while in the fog above these greenish dregs rumbled and trembled, fleeing away over there, the black, black Nikolayevsky Bridge.

On this sullen Petersburg morning the heavy doors of a well-appointed yellow house18 flew open: the windows of the yellow house looked on to the Neva. A clean-shaven lackey with gold braid on his lapels rushed out from the entrance porch to give signals to the coachman. The dappled horses started with a jerk towards the entrance; they drew up a carriage on which an old aristocratic coat of arms was depicted: a unicorn goring a knight.

A dashing non-commissioned officer of the police who was walking past the porchway looked foolish and stood to attention when Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, in a grey coat and a tall black top hat, with a face of stone that recalled a paperweight, swiftly ran out of the entrance porch and even more swiftly ran on to the footboard of the carriage, putting on a black suede glove as he did so.

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov threw a momentary, confused glance at the police inspector, at the carriage, at the coachman, at the large black bridge, at the expanse of the Neva, where the foggy, many-chimneyed distances were drawn so fadedly, and from where Vasily Island looked in fright.

The lackey in grey hurriedly slammed the carriage door. The carriage flew swiftly into the fog; and the chance officer of the police, shaken by all he had seen, looked for a long, long time over his shoulder into the grimy fog – there, where the carriage had impetuously flown; and sighed, and walked on; soon this policeman’s shoulder, too, was concealed in the fog, as was every shoulder, every back, every grey face and every black, wet umbrella. In that direction, too, did the respected lackey look, looked to the right, to the left, at the bridge, at the expanse of the Neva, where the foggy, many-chimneyed distances were drawn so fadedly, and from where Vasily Island looked in fright.

Here, right at the outset, I must break the thread of my narrative in order to present to the reader the place of action of a certain drama. As a preliminary, an inaccuracy that has crept in ought to be corrected; the blame for it belongs not to the author, but to the author’s pen: at this time tramcars were not yet running in the city: this was 1905.19

Squares, Parallelepipeds, Cubes

‘Hey! Hey! …’

That was the coachman shouting.

And the carriage sprayed mud to every side.

There, where only a foggy dampness hung suspended, first lustrelessly appeared in outline, then descended from heaven to earth – the grimy, blackish-grey St Isaac’s; appeared in outline and then completely took shape: the equestrian monument of the Emperor Nicholas;20 the metal emperor was dressed in the uniform of the Leib Guards; by its pedestal a Nicholas grenadier peeped out and withdrew back into the fog like a shaggy fur hat.

The carriage, meanwhile, was flying to Nevsky Prospect.

Apollon Apollonovich swayed on the satin cushions of the seat; he was separated from the street scum by four perpendicular walls; thus was he detached from the crowds of people flowing past, from the drearily sodden red wrappers of the cheap journals that were being sold at that crossroads over there.

Planned regularity and symmetry calmed the senator’s nerves, which were stimulated both by the roughness of domestic life and by the helpless circle of the revolution of our wheel of state.

By a harmonic simplicity were his tastes distinguished.

Most of all did he love the rectilinear prospect; this prospect reminded him of the flow of time between the two points of life; and of one other thing, too: all other cities are a wooden pile of wretched little cottages, and Petersburg is strikingly different from them all.

The wet, slippery prospect: there the houses fused like cubes into a line of life in only one respect: this row had neither an end nor a beginning; here what for the wearer of diamond insignia was only the middle of life’s wanderings turned out for so many high officials to be the ending of life’s way.21

The senator’s soul was seized by inspiration every time his lacquered cube cut across the line of the Nevsky like an arrow; there, outside the windows, the numeration of the houses was visible; and the traffic moved; there, from there – on clear days from far, far away, flashed blindingly: the gold needle,22 the clouds, the crimson ray of the sunset; there, from there, on foggy days – nothing, no one.

And there there were – the lines: the Neva, the islands. Probably in those far-off days, when from the mossy marshes rose the high roofs and the masts and the spires that pierced with their merlons the dank, greenish fog –

– on his shadowy sails the Flying Dutchman23 flew towards St Petersburg from there, from the leaden expanses of the Baltic and German24 Seas, in order here to erect by illusion his misty estates and to give the wave of amassing clouds the name of islands; from here the Dutchman lit the hellish lights of the drinking dens for two hundred years, and the Orthodox folk flocked and flocked into these hellish drinking dens, carrying a foul infection …

The dark shadows floated off a little. But the hellish drinking dens remained. For long years the Orthodox folk caroused here with a ghost: a mongrel race arrived from the islands – neither human beings nor shadows, – settling on the boundary between two worlds that were alien to each other.

Apollon Apollonovich did not like the islands: the population there was industrial, coarse; a human swarm of many thousands plodded its way in the mornings to the many-chimneyed factories; and now he knew that the Browning circulated there; and a few other things as well. Apollon Apollonovich thought: the inhabitants of the islands are numbered among the population of the Russian Empire; the general census has been introduced among them, too; they have numbered houses, police stations, fiscal institutions; the island resident is a lawyer, a writer, a worker, a police clerk; he considers himself a citizen of Petersburg, but he, a denizen of chaos, threatens the capital of the Empire in a gathering cloud …

Apollon Apollonovich did not want to reflect any further: the restless islands must be crushed, crushed! They must be riveted to the ground with the iron of the enormous bridge and transfixed in every direction by the arrows of the prospects …

And now, as he looked pensively into that boundlessness of mists, the man of state suddenly expanded out of the black cube in all directions and soared above it; and he desired that the carriage should fly forward, that the prospects should fly towards him – prospect after prospect, that the whole spherical surface of the planet should be gripped by the blackish-grey cubes of the houses as by serpentine coils; that the whole of the earth squeezed by prospects should intersect the immensity in linear cosmic flight with a rectilinear law; that the mesh of parallel prospects, intersected by a mesh of prospects, should expand into the abysses of outer space with the planes of squares and cubes: one square per man-in-the-street, that, that …

After the line of all the symmetries it was the figure of the square that brought him the most calm.

He was in the habit of giving himself up for long periods of time to the insouciant contemplation of: pyramids, triangles, parallelepipeds, cubes, trapezoids. He was seized by anxiety only when he contemplated the truncated cone.

As for the zigzag line, he could not endure it.

Here, in the carriage, Apollon Apollonovich took pleasure for a long time without thought in the quadrangular walls, residing at the centre of the black, perfect and satin-covered cube: Apollon Apollonovich had been born for solitary confinement; only a love for the planimetry of state clothed him in the polyhedrality of a responsible post.

The wet, slippery prospect was intersected by a wet prospect at a right angle of ninety degrees; at the point where the lines intersected, a policeman stood …

And exactly the same houses loomed there, and the same grey human streams moved past there, and there was the same green-yellow fog. Concentratedly did the faces move there; the pavements whispered and shuffled; were rubbed briskly by galoshes; the nose of the man in the street sailed solemnly on. Noses25 flowed past in large numbers: aquiline, duck-like, cockerel-like, greenish, white: here also flowed the absence of any nose at all. Here flowed ones, and twos, and threes-and-fours; and bowler hat after bowler hat: bowlers, feathers, service caps; service caps, service caps, feathers; a cocked hat, a top hat, a service cap; a kerchief, an umbrella, a feather.

But parallel with the racing prospect was a fleeting prospect with the same row of boxes, numeration, clouds; and the same civil servant.

There is an infinity of prospects racing in infinity with an infinity of intersecting shadows racing into infinity. All Petersburg is the infinity of a prospect raised to the power of n.

While beyond Petersburg there is – nothing.

The Inhabitants of the Islands Strike You

The inhabitants of the islands strike you with the vaguely thievish ways they have; their faces are greener and paler than those of any earth-born beings; the islander will get through the keyhole – some kind of raznochinets:26 he will have a small moustache, perhaps; and I fear he will try to get some money out of you – for the arming of the factory and mill workers; your room will begin to mutter, to whisper, to giggle: you will give; and then you will be unable to sleep at nights any more: he, the inhabitant of the island, will be a stranger with a small black moustache, elusive, invisible, there will be no trace of him; he will already be out in the province; and if you look – the rural distances will be muttering, whispering there, in the expanse; there, booming and muttering in the rural distances will be – Russia.

It was the last day of September.

On Vasily Island, in the depths of the Seventeenth Line, out of the fog looked a house enormous and grey; from the small courtyard a black, rather dirty staircase led away into the house: there were doors and doors; one of them opened.

The stranger with the small black moustache appeared on its threshold.

Then, having closed the door, the stranger slowly began to descend; he came down from a height of five storeys, cautiously treading the staircase; in his hand there evenly swung a not exactly small, yet not very large little bundle tied up with a dirty napkin with red borders that showed discoloured pheasants.

My stranger behaved with exemplary caution in his treatment of the little bundle.

The staircase was, needless to say, black, strewn with cucumber rinds and a cabbage leaf that had been repeatedly crushed by a foot.