A Desperate Character | Page 3

The
mental attitude of the Russian peasant indeed implies that in blood he is
nearer akin to the Asiatics than Russian ethnologists have wished to
allow. Certainly in the inner life of thought, intellectually, morally, and
emotionally, he is a half-way house between the Western and Eastern
races, just as geographically he spreads over the two continents. By
natural law his destiny calls him towards the East. Should he one day
spread his rule further and further among the Asiatics and hold the keys
of an immense Asiatic empire, well! future English philosophers may
feel thereat a curious fatalistic satisfaction.
EDWARD GARNETT.
October 1899.

CONTENTS
A DESPERATE CHARACTER 1
A STRANGE STORY 40
PUNIN AND BABURIN 77
OLD PORTRAITS 172
THE BRIGADIER 210
PYETUSHKOV 248

A DESPERATE CHARACTER
I
... We were a party of eight in the room, and we were talking of
contemporary affairs and men.

'I don't understand these men!' observed A.: 'they're such desperate
fellows.... Really desperate.... There has never been anything like it
before.'
'Yes, there has,' put in P., a man getting on in years, with grey hair,
born some time in the twenties of this century: 'there were desperate
characters in former days too, only they were not like the desperate
fellows of to-day. Of the poet Yazikov some one has said that he had
enthusiasm, but not applied to anything--an enthusiasm without an
object. So it was with those people--their desperateness was without an
object. But there, if you'll allow me, I'll tell you the story of my nephew,
or rather cousin, Misha Poltyev. It may serve as an example of the
desperate characters of those days.
He came into God's world, I remember, in 1828, at his father's native
place and property, in one of the sleepiest corners of a sleepy province
of the steppes. Misha's father, Andrei Nikolaevitch Poltyev, I remember
well to this day. He was a genuine old-world landowner, a God-fearing,
sedate man, fairly--for those days--well educated, just a little cracked,
to tell the truth--and, moreover, he suffered from epilepsy.... That too is
an old-world, gentlemanly complaint.... Andrei Nikolaevitch's fits were,
however, slight, and generally ended in sleep and depression. He was
good-hearted, and of an affable demeanour, not without a certain
stateliness: I always pictured to myself the tsar Mihail Fedorovitch as
like him. The whole life of Andrei Nikolaevitch was passed in the
punctual fulfilment of every observance established from old days, in
strict conformity with all the usages of the old orthodox holy Russian
mode of life. He got up and went to bed, ate his meals, and went to his
bath, rejoiced or was wroth (both very rarely, it is true), even smoked
his pipe and played cards (two great innovations!), not after his own
fancy, not in a way of his own, but according to the custom and
ordinance of his fathers--with due decorum and formality. He was tall,
well built, and stout; his voice was soft and rather husky, as is so often
the case with virtuous people in Russia; he was scrupulously neat in his
dress and linen, and wore white cravats and full-skirted snuff-coloured
coats, but his noble blood was nevertheless evident; no one could have
taken him for a priest's son or a merchant! At all times, on all possible

occasions, and in all possible contingencies, Andrei Nikolaevitch knew
without fail what ought to be done, what was to be said, and precisely
what expressions were to be used; he knew when he ought to take
medicine, and just what he ought to take; what omens were to be
believed and what might be disregarded ... in fact, he knew everything
that ought to be done.... For as everything had been provided for and
laid down by one's elders, one had only to be sure not to imagine
anything of one's self.... And above all, without God's blessing not a
step to be taken!--It must be confessed that a deadly dulness reigned
supreme in his house, in those low-pitched, warm, dark rooms, that so
often resounded with the singing of liturgies and all-night services, and
had the smell of incense and Lenten dishes almost always hanging
about them!
Andrei Nikolaevitch--no longer in his first youth--married a young lady
of a neighbouring family, without fortune, a very nervous and sickly
person, who had had a boarding-school education. She played the piano
fairly, spoke boarding-school French, was easily moved to enthusiasm,
and still more easily to melancholy and even tears.... She was of
unbalanced character, in fact. She regarded her life as wasted, could not
care for her husband, who, 'of course,' did not understand her; but she
respected him, ... she put up with him; and being perfectly honest and
perfectly cold, she never even dreamed of another 'affection.' Besides,