Translated from the Russian
1897
| THE TORRENTS OF SPRING |
| FIRST LOVE |
| MUMU |
“Years of gladness,
Days of joy,
Like the torrents of spring
They hurried away.”
—From an Old Ballad.
… At two o’clock in the night he had gone back to his study. He haddismissed the servant after the candles were lighted, and throwing himself intoa low chair by the hearth, he hid his face in both hands.
Never had he felt such weariness of body and of spirit. He had passed the wholeevening in the company of charming ladies and cultivated men; some of theladies were beautiful, almost all the men were distinguished by intellect ortalent; he himself had talked with great success, even with brilliance … and,for all that, never yet had the taedium vitae of which the Romans talkedof old, the “disgust for life,” taken hold of him with suchirresistible, such suffocating force. Had he been a little younger, he wouldhave cried with misery, weariness, and exasperation: a biting, burningbitterness, like the bitter of wormwood, filled his whole soul. A sort ofclinging repugnance, a weight of loathing closed in upon him on all sides likea dark night of autumn; and he did not know how to get free from this darkness,this bitterness. Sleep it was useless to reckon upon; he knew he should notsleep.
He fell to thinking … slowly, listlessly, wrathfully. He thought of the vanity,the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human. All the stages ofman’s life passed in order before his mental gaze (he had himself latelyreached his fifty-second year), and not one found grace in his eyes. Everywherethe same ever-lasting pouring of water into a sieve, the ever-lasting beatingof the air, everywhere the same self-deception—half in good faith, halfconscious—any toy to amuse the child, so long as it keeps him fromcrying. And then, all of a sudden, old age drops down like snow on the head,and with it the ever-growing, ever-gnawing, and devouring dread of death … andthe plunge into the abyss! Lucky indeed if life works out so to the end! Maybe, before the end, like rust on iron, sufferings, infirmities come…. He didnot picture life’s sea, as the poets depict it, covered with tempestuouswaves; no, he thought of that sea as a smooth, untroubled surface, stagnant andtransparent to its darkest depths. He himself sits in a little tottering boat,and down below in those dark oozy depths, like prodigious fishes, he can justmake out the shapes of hideous monsters: all the ills of life, diseases,sorrows, madness, poverty, blindness…. He gazes, and behold, one of thesemonsters separates itself off from the darkness, rises higher and higher,stands out more and more distinct, more and more loathsomely distinct…. Aninstant yet, and the boat that bears him will be overturned! But behold, itgrows dim again, it withdraws, sinks down to the bottom, and there it lies,faintly stirring in the slime…. But the fated day will come, and it willoverturn the boat.
He shook his head, jumped up from his low chair, took two turns up and down theroom, sat down to the writing-table, and opening one drawer after another,began to rummage among his papers, among old letters, mostly from women. Hecould not have said why he was doing it; h