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Discovering Diverse Content Through
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once he made me an offer... like snow upon my head.... I lay awake
all night, crying, and fell hellishly in love myself. And here, as you
see, I am his wife. There really is something strong, powerful,
bearlike about him, isn’t there? Now his face is turned three-quarters
towards us in a bad light, but when he turns round look at his
forehead. Ryabovsky, what do you say to that forehead? Dymov, we
are talking about you!” she called to her husband. “Come here; hold
out your honest hand to Ryabovsky.... That’s right, be friends.”
Dymov, with a naive and good-natured smile, held out his hand to
Ryabovsky, and said:
“Very glad to meet you. There was a Ryabovsky in my year at the
medical school. Was he a relation of yours?”
II
Olga Ivanovna was twenty-two, Dymov was thirty-one. They got
on splendidly together when they were married. Olga Ivanovna hung
all her drawing-room walls with her own and other people’s
sketches, in frames and without frames, and near the piano and
furniture arranged picturesque corners with Japanese parasols,
easels, daggers, busts, photographs, and rags of many colours.... In
the dining-room she papered the walls with peasant woodcuts, hung
up bark shoes and sickles, stood in a corner a scythe and a rake,
and so achieved a dining-room in the Russian style. In her bedroom
she draped the ceiling and the walls with dark cloths to make it like
a cavern, hung a Venetian lantern over the beds, and at the door set
a figure with a halberd. And every one thought that the young
people had a very charming little home.
When she got up at eleven o’clock every morning, Olga Ivanovna
played the piano or, if it were sunny, painted something in oils. Then
between twelve and one she drove to her dressmaker’s. As Dymov
and she had very little money, only just enough, she and her
dressmaker were often put to clever shifts to enable her to appear
constantly in new dresses and make a sensation with them. Very
often out of an old dyed dress, out of bits of tulle, lace, plush, and
silk, costing nothing, perfect marvels were created, something
bewitching—not a dress, but a dream. From the dressmaker’s Olga
Ivanovna usually drove to some actress of her acquaintance to hear
the latest theatrical gossip, and incidentally to try and get hold of
tickets for the first night of some new play or for a benefit
performance. From the actress’s she had to go to some artist’s
studio or to some exhibition or to see some celebrity—either to pay
a visit or to give an invitation or simply to have a chat. And
everywhere she met with a gay and friendly welcome, and was
assured that she was good, that she was sweet, that she was rare....
Those whom she called great and famous received her as one of
themselves, as an equal, and predicted with one voice that, with her
talents, her taste, and her intelligence, she would do great things if
she concentrated herself. She sang, she played the piano, she
painted in oils, she carved, she took part in amateur performances;
and all this not just anyhow, but all with talent, whether she made
lanterns for an illumination or dressed up or tied somebody’s cravat
—everything she did was exceptionally graceful, artistic, and
charming. But her talents showed themselves in nothing so clearly
as in her faculty for quickly becoming acquainted and on intimate
terms with celebrated people. No sooner did any one become ever
so little celebrated, and set people talking about him, than she made
his acquaintance, got on friendly terms the same day, and invited
him to her house. Every new acquaintance she made was a veritable
fete for her. She adored celebrated people, was proud of them,
dreamed of them every night. She craved for them, and never could
satisfy her craving. The old ones departed and were forgotten, new
ones came to replace them, but to these, too, she soon grew
accustomed or was disappointed in them, and began eagerly seeking
for fresh great men, finding them and seeking for them again. What
for?
Between four and five she dined at home with her husband. His
simplicity, good sense, and kind-heartedness touched her and moved
her up to enthusiasm. She was constantly jumping up, impulsively
hugging his head and showering kisses on it.
“You are a clever, generous man, Dymov,” she used to say, “but
you have one very serious defect. You take absolutely no interest in
art. You don’t believe in music or painting.”
“I don’t understand them,” he would say mildly. “I have spent all
my life in working at natural science and medicine, and I have never
had time to take an interest in the arts.”
“But, you know, that’s awful, Dymov!”
“Why so? Your friends don’t know anything of science or medicine,
but you don’t reproach them with it. Every one has his own line. I
don’t understand landscapes and operas, but the way I look at it is
that if one set of sensible people devote their whole lives to them,
and other sensible people pay immense sums for them, they must
be of use. I don’t understand them, but not understanding does not
imply disbelieving in them.”
“Let me shake your honest hand!”
After dinner Olga Ivanovna would drive off to see her friends, then
to a theatre or to a concert, and she returned home after midnight.
So it was every day.
On Wednesdays she had “At Homes.” At these “At Homes” the
hostess and her guests did not play cards and did not dance, but
entertained themselves with various arts. An actor from the Dramatic
Theatre recited, a singer sang, artists sketched in the albums of
which Olga Ivanovna had a great number, the violoncellist played,
and the hostess herself sketched, carved, sang, and played
accompaniments. In the intervals between the recitations, music,
and singing, they talked and argued about literature, the theatre,
and painting. There were no ladies, for Olga Ivanovna considered all
ladies wearisome and vulgar except actresses and her dressmaker.
Not one of these entertainments passed without the hostess starting
at every ring at the bell, and saying, with a triumphant expression,
“It is he,” meaning by “he,” of course, some new celebrity. Dymov
was not in the drawing-room, and no one remembered his existence.
But exactly at half-past eleven the door leading into the dining-room
opened, and Dymov would appear with his good-natured, gentle
smile and say, rubbing his hands:
“Come to supper, gentlemen.”
They all went into the dining-room, and every time found on the
table exactly the same things: a dish of oysters, a piece of ham or
veal, sardines, cheese, caviare, mushrooms, vodka, and two
decanters of wine.
“My dear maitre d’ hotel!” Olga Ivanovna would say, clasping her
hands with enthusiasm, “you are simply fascinating! My friends, look
at his forehead! Dymov, turn your profile. Look! he has the face of a
Bengal tiger and an expression as kind and sweet as a gazelle. Ah,
the darling!”
The visitors ate, and, looking at Dymov, thought, “He really is a
nice fellow”; but they soon forgot about him, and went on talking
about the theatre, music, and painting.
The young people were happy, and their life flowed on without a
hitch.
The third week of their honeymoon was spent, however, not quite
happily—sadly, indeed. Dymov caught erysipelas in the hospital, was
in bed for six days, and had to have his beautiful black hair cropped.
Olga Ivanovna sat beside him and wept bitterly, but when he was
better she put a white handkerchief on his shaven head and began
to paint him as a Bedouin. And they were both in good spirits. Three
days after he had begun to go back to the hospital he had another
mischance.
“I have no luck, little mother,” he said one day at dinner. “I had
four dissections to do today, and I cut two of my fingers at one. And
I did not notice it till I got home.”
Olga Ivanovna was alarmed. He smiled, and told her that it did not
matter, and that he often cut his hands when he was dissecting.
“I get absorbed, little mother, and grow careless.”
Olga Ivanovna dreaded symptoms of blood-poisoning, and prayed
about it every night, but all went well. And again life flowed on
peaceful and happy, free from grief and anxiety. The present was
happy, and to follow it spring was at hand, already smiling in the
distance, and promising a thousand delights. There would be no end
to their happiness. In April, May and June a summer villa a good
distance out of town; walks, sketching, fishing, nightingales; and
then from July right on to autumn an artist’s tour on the Volga, and
in this tour Olga Ivanovna would take part as an indispensable
member of the society. She had already had made for her two
travelling dresses of linen, had bought paints, brushes, canvases,
and a new palette for the journey. Almost every day Ryabovsky
visited her to see what progress she was making in her painting;
when she showed him her painting, he used to thrust his hands
deep into his pockets, compress his lips, sniff, and say:
“Ye—es...! That cloud of yours is screaming: it’s not in the evening
light. The foreground is somehow chewed up, and there is
something, you know, not the thing.... And your cottage is weighed
down and whines pitifully. That corner ought to have been taken
more in shadow, but on the whole it is not bad; I like it.”
And the more incomprehensible he talked, the more readily Olga
Ivanovna understood him.
III
After dinner on the second day of Trinity week, Dymov bought
some sweets and some savouries and went down to the villa to see
his wife. He had not seen her for a fortnight, and missed her terribly.
As he sat in the train and afterwards as he looked for his villa in a
big wood, he felt all the while hungry and weary, and dreamed of
how he would have supper in freedom with his wife, then tumble
into bed and to sleep. And he was delighted as he looked at his
parcel, in which there was caviare, cheese, and white salmon.
The sun was setting by the time he found his villa and recognized
it. The old servant told him that her mistress was not at home, but
that most likely she would soon be in. The villa, very uninviting in
appearance, with low ceilings papered with writing-paper and with
uneven floors full of crevices, consisted only of three rooms. In one
there was a bed, in the second there were canvases, brushes,
greasy papers, and men’s overcoats and hats lying about on the
chairs and in the windows, while in the third Dymov found three
unknown men; two were dark-haired and had beards, the other was
clean-shaven and fat, apparently an actor. There was a samovar
boiling on the table.
“What do you want?” asked the actor in a bass voice, looking at
Dymov ungraciously. “Do you want Olga Ivanovna? Wait a minute;
she will be here directly.”
Dymov sat down and waited. One of the dark-haired men, looking
sleepily and listlessly at him, poured himself out a glass of tea, and
asked:
“Perhaps you would like some tea?”
Dymov was both hungry and thirsty, but he refused tea for fear of
spoiling his supper. Soon he heard footsteps and a familiar laugh; a
door slammed, and Olga Ivanovna ran into the room, wearing a
wide-brimmed hat and carrying a box in her hand; she was followed
by Ryabovsky, rosy and good-humoured, carrying a big umbrella and
a camp-stool.
“Dymov!” cried Olga Ivanovna, and she flushed crimson with
pleasure. “Dymov!” she repeated, laying her head and both arms on
his bosom. “Is that you? Why haven’t you come for so long? Why?
Why?”
 “When could I, little mother? I am always busy, and whenever I
am free it always happens somehow that the train does not fit.”
“But how glad I am to see you! I have been dreaming about you
the whole night, the whole night, and I was afraid you must be ill.
Ah! if you only knew how sweet you are! You have come in the nick
of time! You will be my salvation! You are the only person who can
save me! There is to be a most original wedding here tomorrow,”
she went on, laughing, and tying her husband’s cravat. “A young
telegraph clerk at the station, called Tchikeldyeev, is going to be
married. He is a handsome young man and—well, not stupid, and
you know there is something strong, bearlike in his face... you might
paint him as a young Norman. We summer visitors take a great
interest in him, and have promised to be at his wedding.... He is a
lonely, timid man, not well off, and of course it would be a shame
not to be sympathetic to him. Fancy! the wedding will be after the
service; then we shall all walk from the church to the bride’s
lodgings... you see the wood, the birds singing, patches of sunlight
on the grass, and all of us spots of different colours against the
bright green background—very original, in the style of the French
impressionists. But, Dymov, what am I to go to the church in?” said
Olga Ivanovna, and she looked as though she were going to cry. “I
have nothing here, literally nothing! no dress, no flowers, no
gloves... you must save me. Since you have come, fate itself bids
you save me. Take the keys, my precious, go home and get my pink
dress from the wardrobe. You remember it; it hangs in front....
Then, in the storeroom, on the floor, on the right side, you will see
two cardboard boxes. When you open the top one you will see tulle,
heaps of tulle and rags of all sorts, and under them flowers. Take
out all the flowers carefully, try not to crush them, darling; I will
choose among them later.... And buy me some gloves.”
“Very well,” said Dymov; “I will go tomorrow and send them to
you.”
“Tomorrow?” asked Olga Ivanovna, and she looked at him
surprised. “You won’t have time tomorrow. The first train goes
tomorrow at nine, and the wedding’s at eleven. No, darling, it must
be today; it absolutely must be today. If you won’t be able to come
tomorrow, send them by a messenger. Come, you must run along....
The passenger train will be in directly; don’t miss it, darling.”
“Very well.”
“Oh, how sorry I am to let you go!” said Olga Ivanovna, and tears
came into her eyes. “And why did I promise that telegraph clerk, like
a silly?”
Dymov hurriedly drank a glass of tea, took a cracknel, and, smiling
gently, went to the station. And the caviare, the cheese, and the
white salmon were eaten by the two dark gentlemen and the fat
actor.
IV
On a still moonlight night in July Olga Ivanovna was standing on
the deck of a Volga steamer and looking alternately at the water and
at the picturesque banks. Beside her was standing Ryabovsky, telling
her the black shadows on the water were not shadows, but a dream,
that it would be sweet to sink into forgetfulness, to die, to become a
memory in the sight of that enchanted water with the fantastic
glimmer, in sight of the fathomless sky and the mournful, dreamy
shores that told of the vanity of our life and of the existence of
something higher, blessed, and eternal. The past was vulgar and
uninteresting, the future was trivial, and that marvellous night,
unique in a lifetime, would soon be over, would blend with eternity;
then, why live?
And Olga Ivanovna listened alternately to Ryabovsky’s voice and
the silence of the night, and thought of her being immortal and
never dying. The turquoise colour of the water, such as she had
never seen before, the sky, the river-banks, the black shadows, and
the unaccountable joy that flooded her soul, all told her that she
would make a great artist, and that somewhere in the distance, in
the infinite space beyond the moonlight, success, glory, the love of
the people, lay awaiting her.... When she gazed steadily without
blinking into the distance, she seemed to see crowds of people,
lights, triumphant strains of music, cries of enthusiasm, she herself
in a white dress, and flowers showered upon her from all sides. She
thought, too, that beside her, leaning with his elbows on the rail of
the steamer, there was standing a real great man, a genius, one of
God’s elect.... All that he had created up to the present was fine,
new, and extraordinary, but what he would create in time, when
with maturity his rare talent reached its full development, would be
astounding, immeasurably sublime; and that could be seen by his
face, by his manner of expressing himself and his attitude to nature.
He talked of shadows, of the tones of evening, of the moonlight, in a
special way, in a language of his own, so that one could not help
feeling the fascination of his power over nature. He was very
handsome, original, and his life, free, independent, aloof from all
common cares, was like the life of a bird.
“It’s growing cooler,” said Olga Ivanovna, and she gave a shudder.
Ryabovsky wrapped her in his cloak, and said mournfully:
“I feel that I am in your power; I am a slave. Why are you so
enchanting today?”
He kept staring intently at her, and his eyes were terrible. And she
was afraid to look at him.
“I love you madly,” he whispered, breathing on her cheek. “Say
one word to me and I will not go on living; I will give up art...” he
muttered in violent emotion. “Love me, love....”
“Don’t talk like that,” said Olga Ivanovna, covering her eyes. “It’s
dreadful! How about Dymov?”
“What of Dymov? Why Dymov? What have I to do with Dymov?
The Volga, the moon, beauty, my love, ecstasy, and there is no such
thing as Dymov.... Ah! I don’t know... I don’t care about the past;
give me one moment, one instant!”
 Olga Ivanovna’s heart began to throb. She tried to think about her
husband, but all her past, with her wedding, with Dymov, and with
her “At Homes,” seemed to her petty, trivial, dingy, unnecessary, and
far, far away.... Yes, really, what of Dymov? Why Dymov? What had
she to do with Dymov? Had he any existence in nature, or was he
only a dream?
“For him, a simple and ordinary man the happiness he has had
already is enough,” she thought, covering her face with her hands.
“Let them condemn me, let them curse me, but in spite of them all I
will go to my ruin; I will go to my ruin!... One must experience
everything in life. My God! how terrible and how glorious!”
“Well? Well?” muttered the artist, embracing her, and greedily
kissing the hands with which she feebly tried to thrust him from her.
“You love me? Yes? Yes? Oh, what a night! marvellous night!”
“Yes, what a night!” she whispered, looking into his eyes, which
were bright with tears.
Then she looked round quickly, put her arms round him, and
kissed him on the lips.
“We are nearing Kineshmo!” said some one on the other side of
the deck.
They heard heavy footsteps; it was a waiter from the refreshment-
bar.
“Waiter,” said Olga Ivanovna, laughing and crying with happiness,
“bring us some wine.”
The artist, pale with emotion, sat on the seat, looking at Olga
Ivanovna with adoring, grateful eyes; then he closed his eyes, and
said, smiling languidly:
“I am tired.”
And he leaned his head against the rail.
 V
On the second of September the day was warm and still, but
overcast. In the early morning a light mist had hung over the Volga,
and after nine o’clock it had begun to spout with rain. And there
seemed no hope of the sky clearing. Over their morning tea
Ryabovsky told Olga Ivanovna that painting was the most ungrateful
and boring art, that he was not an artist, that none but fools thought
that he had any talent, and all at once, for no rhyme or reason, he
snatched up a knife and with it scraped over his very best sketch.
After his tea he sat plunged in gloom at the window and gazed at
the Volga. And now the Volga was dingy, all of one even colour
without a gleam of light, cold-looking. Everything, everything
recalled the approach of dreary, gloomy autumn. And it seemed as
though nature had removed now from the Volga the sumptuous
green covers from the banks, the brilliant reflections of the
sunbeams, the transparent blue distance, and all its smart gala
array, and had packed it away in boxes till the coming spring, and
the crows were flying above the Volga and crying tauntingly, “Bare,
bare!”
Ryabovsky heard their cawing, and thought he had already gone
off and lost his talent, that everything in this world was relative,
conditional, and stupid, and that he ought not to have taken up with
this woman.... In short, he was out of humour and depressed.
Olga Ivanovna sat behind the screen on the bed, and, passing her
fingers through her lovely flaxen hair, pictured herself first in the
drawing-room, then in the bedroom, then in her husband’s study;
her imagination carried her to the theatre, to the dress-maker, to her
distinguished friends. Were they getting something up now? Did they
think of her? The season had begun by now, and it would be time to
think about her “At Homes.” And Dymov? Dear Dymov! with what
gentleness and childlike pathos he kept begging her in his letters to
make haste and come home! Every month he sent her seventy-five
roubles, and when she wrote him that she had lent the artists a
hundred roubles, he sent that hundred too. What a kind, generous-
hearted man! The travelling wearied Olga Ivanovna; she was bored;
and she longed to get away from the peasants, from the damp smell
of the river, and to cast off the feeling of physical uncleanliness of
which she was conscious all the time, living in the peasants’ huts
and wandering from village to village. If Ryabovsky had not given his
word to the artists that he would stay with them till the twentieth of
September, they might have gone away that very day. And how nice
that would have been!
“My God!” moaned Ryabovsky. “Will the sun ever come out? I
can’t go on with a sunny landscape without the sun....”
“But you have a sketch with a cloudy sky,” said Olga Ivanovna,
coming from behind the screen. “Do you remember, in the right
foreground forest trees, on the left a herd of cows and geese? You
might finish it now.”
“Aie!” the artist scowled. “Finish it! Can you imagine I am such a
fool that I don’t know what I want to do?”
“How you have changed to me!” sighed Olga Ivanovna.
“Well, a good thing too!”
Olga Ivanovna’s face quivered; she moved away to the stove and
began to cry.
“Well, that’s the last straw—crying! Give over! I have a thousand
reasons for tears, but I am not crying.”
“A thousand reasons!” cried Olga Ivanovna. “The chief one is that
you are weary of me. Yes!” she said, and broke into sobs. “If one is
to tell the truth, you are ashamed of our love. You keep trying to
prevent the artists from noticing it, though it is impossible to conceal
it, and they have known all about it for ever so long.”
“Olga, one thing I beg you,” said the artist in an imploring voice,
laying his hand on his heart—“one thing; don’t worry me! I want
nothing else from you!”
 “But swear that you love me still!”
“This is agony!” the artist hissed through his teeth, and he jumped
up. “It will end by my throwing myself in the Volga or going out of
my mind! Let me alone!”
“Come, kill me, kill me!” cried Olga Ivanovna. “Kill me!”
She sobbed again, and went behind the screen. There was a swish
of rain on the straw thatch of the hut. Ryabovsky clutched his head
and strode up and down the hut; then with a resolute face, as
though bent on proving something to somebody, put on his cap,
slung his gun over his shoulder, and went out of the hut.
After he had gone, Olga Ivanovna lay a long time on the bed,
crying. At first she thought it would be a good thing to poison
herself, so that when Ryabovsky came back he would find her dead;
then her imagination carried her to her drawing-room, to her
husband’s study, and she imagined herself sitting motionless beside
Dymov and enjoying the physical peace and cleanliness, and in the
evening sitting in the theatre, listening to Mazini. And a yearning for
civilization, for the noise and bustle of the town, for celebrated
people sent a pang to her heart. A peasant woman came into the
hut and began in a leisurely way lighting the stove to get the dinner.
There was a smell of charcoal fumes, and the air was filled with
bluish smoke. The artists came in, in muddy high boots and with
faces wet with rain, examined their sketches, and comforted
themselves by saying that the Volga had its charms even in bad
weather. On the wall the cheap clock went “tic-tic-tic.”... The flies,
feeling chilled, crowded round the ikon in the corner, buzzing, and
one could hear the cockroaches scurrying about among the thick
portfolios under the seats....
Ryabovsky came home as the sun was setting. He flung his cap on
the table, and, without removing his muddy boots, sank pale and
exhausted on the bench and closed his eyes.
 “I am tired...” he said, and twitched his eyebrows, trying to raise
his eyelids.
To be nice to him and to show she was not cross, Olga Ivanovna
went up to him, gave him a silent kiss, and passed the comb
through his fair hair. She meant to comb it for him.
“What’s that?” he said, starting as though something cold had
touched him, and he opened his eyes. “What is it? Please let me
alone.”
He thrust her off, and moved away. And it seemed to her that
there was a look of aversion and annoyance on his face.
At that time the peasant woman cautiously carried him, in both
hands, a plate of cabbage-soup. And Olga Ivanovna saw how she
wetted her fat fingers in it. And the dirty peasant woman, standing
with her body thrust forward, and the cabbage-soup which
Ryabovsky began eating greedily, and the hut, and their whole way
of life, which she at first had so loved for its simplicity and artistic
disorder, seemed horrible to her now. She suddenly felt insulted, and
said coldly:
“We must part for a time, or else from boredom we shall quarrel in
earnest. I am sick of this; I am going today.”
“Going how? Astride on a broomstick?”
“Today is Thursday, so the steamer will be here at half-past nine.”
“Eh? Yes, yes.... Well, go, then...” Ryabovsky said softly, wiping his
mouth with a towel instead of a dinner napkin. “You are dull and
have nothing to do here, and one would have to be a great egoist to
try and keep you. Go home, and we shall meet again after the
twentieth.”
Olga Ivanovna packed in good spirits. Her cheeks positively
glowed with pleasure. Could it really be true, she asked herself, that
she would soon be writing in her drawing-room and sleeping in her
bedroom, and dining with a cloth on the table? A weight was lifted
from her heart, and she no longer felt angry with the artist.
“My paints and brushes I will leave with you, Ryabovsky,” she said.
“You can bring what’s left.... Mind, now, don’t be lazy here when I
am gone; don’t mope, but work. You are such a splendid fellow,
Ryabovsky!”
At ten o’clock Ryabovsky gave her a farewell kiss, in order, as she
thought, to avoid kissing her on the steamer before the artists, and
went with her to the landing-stage. The steamer soon came up and
carried her away.
She arrived home two and a half days later. Breathless with
excitement, she went, without taking off her hat or waterproof, into
the drawing-room and thence into the dining-room. Dymov, with his
waistcoat unbuttoned and no coat, was sitting at the table
sharpening a knife on a fork; before him lay a grouse on a plate. As
Olga Ivanovna went into the flat she was convinced that it was
essential to hide everything from her husband, and that she would
have the strength and skill to do so; but now, when she saw his
broad, mild, happy smile, and shining, joyful eyes, she felt that to
deceive this man was as vile, as revolting, and as impossible and out
of her power as to bear false witness, to steal, or to kill, and in a
flash she resolved to tell him all that had happened. Letting him kiss
and embrace her, she sank down on her knees before him and hid
her face.
“What is it, what is it, little mother?” he asked tenderly. “Were you
homesick?”
She raised her face, red with shame, and gazed at him with a
guilty and imploring look, but fear and shame prevented her from
telling him the truth.
“Nothing,” she said; “it’s just nothing....”
 “Let us sit down,” he said, raising her and seating her at the table.
“That’s right, eat the grouse. You are starving, poor darling.”
She eagerly breathed in the atmosphere of home and ate the
grouse, while he watched her with tenderness and laughed with
delight.
VI
Apparently, by the middle of the winter Dymov began to suspect
that he was being deceived. As though his conscience was not clear,
he could not look his wife straight in the face, did not smile with
delight when he met her, and to avoid being left alone with her, he
often brought in to dinner his colleague, Korostelev, a little close-
cropped man with a wrinkled face, who kept buttoning and
unbuttoning his reefer jacket with embarrassment when he talked
with Olga Ivanovna, and then with his right hand nipped his left
moustache. At dinner the two doctors talked about the fact that a
displacement of the diaphragm was sometimes accompanied by
irregularities of the heart, or that a great number of neurotic
complaints were met with of late, or that Dymov had the day before
found a cancer of the lower abdomen while dissecting a corpse with
the diagnosis of pernicious anaemia. And it seemed as though they
were talking of medicine to give Olga Ivanovna a chance of being
silent—that is, of not lying. After dinner Korostelev sat down to the
piano, while Dymov sighed and said to him:
“Ech, brother—well, well! Play something melancholy.”
Hunching up his shoulders and stretching his fingers wide apart,
Korostelev played some chords and began singing in a tenor voice,
“Show me the abode where the Russian peasant would not groan,”
while Dymov sighed once more, propped his head on his fist, and
sank into thought.
Olga Ivanovna had been extremely imprudent in her conduct of
late. Every morning she woke up in a very bad humour and with the
thought that she no longer cared for Ryabovsky, and that, thank
God, it was all over now. But as she drank her coffee she reflected
that Ryabovsky had robbed her of her husband, and that now she
was left with neither her husband nor Ryabovsky; then she
remembered talks she had heard among her acquaintances of a
picture Ryabovsky was preparing for the exhibition, something
striking, a mixture of genre and landscape, in the style of Polyenov,
about which every one who had been into his studio went into
raptures; and this, of course, she mused, he had created under her
influence, and altogether, thanks to her influence, he had greatly
changed for the better. Her influence was so beneficent and
essential that if she were to leave him he might perhaps go to ruin.
And she remembered, too, that the last time he had come to see her
in a great-coat with flecks on it and a new tie, he had asked her
languidly:
“Am I beautiful?”
And with his elegance, his long curls, and his blue eyes, he really
was very beautiful (or perhaps it only seemed so), and he had been
affectionate to her.
Considering and remembering many things Olga Ivanovna dressed
and in great agitation drove to Ryabovsky’s studio. She found him in
high spirits, and enchanted with his really magnificent picture. He
was dancing about and playing the fool and answering serious
questions with jokes. Olga Ivanovna was jealous of the picture and
hated it, but from politeness she stood before the picture for five
minutes in silence, and, heaving a sigh, as though before a holy
shrine, said softly:
“Yes, you have never painted anything like it before. Do you know,
it is positively awe-inspiring?”
And then she began beseeching him to love her and not to cast
her off, to have pity on her in her misery and her wretchedness. She
shed tears, kissed his hands, insisted on his swearing that he loved
her, told him that without her good influence he would go astray and
be ruined. And, when she had spoilt his good-humour, feeling herself
humiliated, she would drive off to her dressmaker or to an actress of
her acquaintance to try and get theatre tickets.
If she did not find him at his studio she left a letter in which she
swore that if he did not come to see her that day she would poison
herself. He was scared, came to see her, and stayed to dinner.
Regardless of her husband’s presence, he would say rude things to
her, and she would answer him in the same way. Both felt they were
a burden to each other, that they were tyrants and enemies, and
were wrathful, and in their wrath did not notice that their behaviour
was unseemly, and that even Korostelev, with his close-cropped
head, saw it all. After dinner Ryabovsky made haste to say good-bye
and get away.
“Where are you off to?” Olga Ivanovna would ask him in the hall,
looking at him with hatred.
Scowling and screwing up his eyes, he mentioned some lady of
their acquaintance, and it was evident that he was laughing at her
jealousy and wanted to annoy her. She went to her bedroom and lay
down on her bed; from jealousy, anger, a sense of humiliation and
shame, she bit the pillow and began sobbing aloud. Dymov left
Korostelev in the drawing-room, went into the bedroom, and with a
desperate and embarrassed face said softly:
“Don’t cry so loud, little mother; there’s no need. You must be
quiet about it. You must not let people see.... You know what is
done is done, and can’t be mended.”
Not knowing how to ease the burden of her jealousy, which
actually set her temples throbbing with pain, and thinking still that
things might be set right, she would wash, powder her tear-stained
face, and fly off to the lady mentioned.
Not finding Ryabovsky with her, she would drive off to a second,
then to a third. At first she was ashamed to go about like this, but
afterwards she got used to it, and it would happen that in one
evening she would make the round of all her female acquaintances
in search of Ryabovsky, and they all understood it.
One day she said to Ryabovsky of her husband:
“That man crushes me with his magnanimity.”
This phrase pleased her so much that when she met the artists
who knew of her affair with Ryabovsky she said every time of her
husband, with a vigorous movement of her arm:
“That man crushes me with his magnanimity.”
Their manner of life was the same as it had been the year before.
On Wednesdays they were “At Home”; an actor recited, the artists
sketched. The violoncellist played, a singer sang, and invariably at
half-past eleven the door leading to the dining-room opened and
Dymov, smiling, said:
“Come to supper, gentlemen.”
As before, Olga Ivanovna hunted celebrities, found them, was not
satisfied, and went in pursuit of fresh ones. As before, she came
back late every night; but now Dymov was not, as last year, asleep,
but sitting in his study at work of some sort. He went to bed at three
o’clock and got up at eight.
One evening when she was getting ready to go to the theatre and
standing before the pier glass, Dymov came into her bedroom,
wearing his dress-coat and a white tie. He was smiling gently and
looked into his wife’s face joyfully, as in old days; his face was
radiant.
“I have just been defending my thesis,” he said, sitting down and
smoothing his knees.
“Defending?” asked Olga Ivanovna.
“Oh, oh!” he laughed, and he craned his neck to see his wife’s face
in the mirror, for she was still standing with her back to him, doing
up her hair. “Oh, oh,” he repeated, “do you know it’s very possible
they may offer me the Readership in General Pathology? It seems
like it.”
It was evident from his beaming, blissful face that if Olga
Ivanovna had shared with him his joy and triumph he would have
forgiven her everything, both the present and the future, and would
have forgotten everything, but she did not understand what was
meant by a “readership” or by “general pathology”; besides, she was
afraid of being late for the theatre, and she said nothing.
He sat there another two minutes, and with a guilty smile went
away.
VII
It had been a very troubled day.
Dymov had a very bad headache; he had no breakfast, and did
not go to the hospital, but spent the whole time lying on his sofa in
the study. Olga Ivanovna went as usual at midday to see Ryabovsky,
to show him her still-life sketch, and to ask him why he had not
been to see her the evening before. The sketch seemed to her
worthless, and she had painted it only in order to have an additional
reason for going to the artist.
She went in to him without ringing, and as she was taking off her
goloshes in the entry she heard a sound as of something running
softly in the studio, with a feminine rustle of skirts; and as she
hastened to peep in she caught a momentary glimpse of a bit of
brown petticoat, which vanished behind a big picture draped,
together with the easel, with black calico, to the floor. There could
be no doubt that a woman was hiding there. How often Olga
Ivanovna herself had taken refuge behind that picture!
Ryabovsky, evidently much embarrassed, held out both hands to
her, as though surprised at her arrival, and said with a forced smile:
“Aha! Very glad to see you! Anything nice to tell me?”
 Olga Ivanovna’s eyes filled with tears. She felt ashamed and bitter,
and would not for a million roubles have consented to speak in the
presence of the outsider, the rival, the deceitful woman who was
standing now behind the picture, and probably giggling malignantly.
“I have brought you a sketch,” she said timidly in a thin voice, and
her lips quivered. “Nature morte.”
“Ah—ah!... A sketch?”
The artist took the sketch in his hands, and as he examined it
walked, as it were mechanically, into the other room.
Olga Ivanovna followed him humbly.
“Nature morte... first-rate sort,” he muttered, falling into rhyme.
“Kurort... sport... port...”
From the studio came the sound of hurried footsteps and the
rustle of a skirt.
So she had gone. Olga Ivanovna wanted to scream aloud, to hit
the artist on the head with something heavy, but she could see
nothing through her tears, was crushed by her shame, and felt
herself, not Olga Ivanovna, not an artist, but a little insect.
“I am tired...” said the artist languidly, looking at the sketch and
tossing his head as though struggling with drowsiness. “It’s very
nice, of course, but here a sketch today, a sketch last year, another
sketch in a month... I wonder you are not bored with them. If I were
you I should give up painting and work seriously at music or
something. You’re not an artist, you know, but a musician. But you
can’t think how tired I am! I’ll tell them to bring us some tea, shall
I?”
He went out of the room, and Olga Ivanovna heard him give some
order to his footman. To avoid farewells and explanations, and above
all to avoid bursting into sobs, she ran as fast as she could, before
Ryabovsky came back, to the entry, put on her goloshes, and went
out into the street; then she breathed easily, and felt she was free
for ever from Ryabovsky and from painting and from the burden of
shame which had so crushed her in the studio. It was all over!
She drove to her dressmaker’s; then to see Barnay, who had only
arrived the day before; from Barnay to a music-shop, and all the
time she was thinking how she would write Ryabovsky a cold, cruel
letter full of personal dignity, and how in the spring or the summer
she would go with Dymov to the Crimea, free herself finally from the
past there, and begin a new life.
On getting home late in the evening she sat down in the drawing-
room, without taking off her things, to begin the letter. Ryabovsky
had told her she was not an artist, and to pay him out she wrote to
him now that he painted the same thing every year, and said exactly
the same thing every day; that he was at a standstill, and that
nothing more would come of him than had come already. She
wanted to write, too, that he owed a great deal to her good
influence, and that if he was going wrong it was only because her
influence was paralysed by various dubious persons like the one who
had been hiding behind the picture that day.
“Little mother!” Dymov called from the study, without opening the
door.
“What is it?”
“Don’t come in to me, but only come to the door—that’s right....
The day before yesterday I must have caught diphtheria at the
hospital, and now... I am ill. Make haste and send for Korostelev.”
Olga Ivanovna always called her husband by his surname, as she
did all the men of her acquaintance; she disliked his Christian name,
Osip, because it reminded her of the Osip in Gogol and the silly pun
on his name. But now she cried:
“Osip, it cannot be!”
 “Send for him; I feel ill,” Dymov said behind the door, and she
could hear him go back to the sofa and lie down. “Send!” she heard
his voice faintly.
“Good Heavens!” thought Olga Ivanovna, turning chill with horror.
“Why, it’s dangerous!”
For no reason she took the candle and went into the bedroom,
and there, reflecting what she must do, glanced casually at herself in
the pier glass. With her pale, frightened face, in a jacket with
sleeves high on the shoulders, with yellow ruches on her bosom, and
with stripes running in unusual directions on her skirt, she seemed
to herself horrible and disgusting. She suddenly felt poignantly sorry
for Dymov, for his boundless love for her, for his young life, and even
for the desolate little bed in which he had not slept for so long; and
she remembered his habitual, gentle, submissive smile. She wept
bitterly, and wrote an imploring letter to Korostelev. It was two
o’clock in the night.
VIII
When towards eight o’clock in the morning Olga Ivanovna, her
head heavy from want of sleep and her hair unbrushed, came out of
her bedroom, looking unattractive and with a guilty expression on
her face, a gentleman with a black beard, apparently the doctor,
passed by her into the entry. There was a smell of drugs. Korostelev
was standing near the study door, twisting his left moustache with
his right hand.
“Excuse me, I can’t let you go in,” he said surlily to Olga Ivanovna;
“it’s catching. Besides, it’s no use, really; he is delirious, anyway.”
“Has he really got diphtheria?” Olga Ivanovna asked in a whisper.
“People who wantonly risk infection ought to be hauled up and
punished for it,” muttered Korostelev, not answering Olga Ivanovna’s
question. “Do you know why he caught it? On Tuesday he was
sucking up the mucus through a pipette from a boy with diphtheria.
And what for? It was stupid.... Just from folly....”
“Is it dangerous, very?” asked Olga Ivanovna.
“Yes; they say it is the malignant form. We ought to send for
Shrek really.”
A little red-haired man with a long nose and a Jewish accent
arrived; then a tall, stooping, shaggy individual, who looked like a
head deacon; then a stout young man with a red face and
spectacles. These were doctors who came to watch by turns beside
their colleague. Korostelev did not go home when his turn was over,
but remained and wandered about the rooms like an uneasy spirit.
The maid kept getting tea for the various doctors, and was
constantly running to the chemist, and there was no one to do the
rooms. There was a dismal stillness in the flat.
Olga Ivanovna sat in her bedroom and thought that God was
punishing her for having deceived her husband. That silent,
unrepining, uncomprehended creature, robbed by his mildness of all
personality and will, weak from excessive kindness, had been
suffering in obscurity somewhere on his sofa, and had not
complained. And if he were to complain even in delirium, the doctors
watching by his bedside would learn that diphtheria was not the only
cause of his sufferings. They would ask Korostelev. He knew all
about it, and it was not for nothing that he looked at his friend’s wife
with eyes that seemed to say that she was the real chief criminal
and diphtheria was only her accomplice. She did not think now of
the moonlight evening on the Volga, nor the words of love, nor their
poetical life in the peasant’s hut. She thought only that from an idle
whim, from self-indulgence, she had sullied herself all over from
head to foot in something filthy, sticky, which one could never wash
off....
“Oh, how fearfully false I’ve been!” she thought, recalling the
troubled passion she had known with Ryabovsky. “Curse it all!...”
 At four o’clock she dined with Korostelev. He did nothing but scowl
and drink red wine, and did not eat a morsel. She ate nothing,
either. At one minute she was praying inwardly and vowing to God
that if Dymov recovered she would love him again and be a faithful
wife to him. Then, forgetting herself for a minute, she would look at
Korostelev, and think: “Surely it must be dull to be a humble,
obscure person, not remarkable in any way, especially with such a
wrinkled face and bad manners!”
Then it seemed to her that God would strike her dead that minute
for not having once been in her husband’s study, for fear of
infection. And altogether she had a dull, despondent feeling and a
conviction that her life was spoilt, and that there was no setting it
right anyhow....
After dinner darkness came on. When Olga Ivanovna went into
the drawing-room Korostelev was asleep on the sofa, with a gold-
embroidered silk cushion under his head.
“Khee-poo-ah,” he snored—“khee-poo-ah.”
And the doctors as they came to sit up and went away again did
not notice this disorder. The fact that a strange man was asleep and
snoring in the drawing-room, and the sketches on the walls and the
exquisite decoration of the room, and the fact that the lady of the
house was dishevelled and untidy—all that aroused not the slightest
interest now. One of the doctors chanced to laugh at something, and
the laugh had a strange and timid sound that made one’s heart
ache.
When Olga Ivanovna went into the drawing-room next time,
Korostelev was not asleep, but sitting up and smoking.
“He has diphtheria of the nasal cavity,” he said in a low voice, “and
the heart is not working properly now. Things are in a bad way,
really.”
“But you will send for Shrek?” said Olga Ivanovna.
 “He has been already. It was he noticed that the diphtheria had
passed into the nose. What’s the use of Shrek! Shrek’s no use at all,
really. He is Shrek, I am Korostelev, and nothing more.”
The time dragged on fearfully slowly. Olga Ivanovna lay down in
her clothes on her bed, that had not been made all day, and sank
into a doze. She dreamed that the whole flat was filled up from floor
to ceiling with a huge piece of iron, and that if they could only get
the iron out they would all be light-hearted and happy. Waking, she
realized that it was not the iron but Dymov’s illness that was
weighing on her.
“Nature morte, port...” she thought, sinking into forgetfulness
again. “Sport... Kurort... and what of Shrek? Shrek... trek... wreck....
And where are my friends now? Do they know that we are in
trouble? Lord, save... spare! Shrek... trek...”
And again the iron was there.... The time dragged on slowly,
though the clock on the lower storey struck frequently. And bells
were continually ringing as the doctors arrived.... The house-maid
came in with an empty glass on a tray, and asked, “Shall I make the
bed, madam?” and getting no answer, went away.
The clock below struck the hour. She dreamed of the rain on the
Volga; and again some one came into her bedroom, she thought a
stranger. Olga Ivanovna jumped up, and recognized Korostelev.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“About three.”
“Well, what is it?”
“What, indeed!... I’ve come to tell you he is passing....”
He gave a sob, sat down on the bed beside her, and wiped away
the tears with his sleeve. She could not grasp it at once, but turned
cold all over and began slowly crossing herself.
 “He is passing,” he repeated in a shrill voice, and again he gave a
sob. “He is dying because he sacrificed himself. What a loss for
science!” he said bitterly. “Compare him with all of us. He was a
great man, an extraordinary man! What gifts! What hopes we all had
of him!” Korostelev went on, wringing his hands: “Merciful God, he
was a man of science; we shall never look on his like again. Osip
Dymov, what have you done—aie, aie, my God!”
Korostelev covered his face with both hands in despair, and shook
his head.
“And his moral force,” he went on, seeming to grow more and
more exasperated against some one. “Not a man, but a pure, good,
loving soul, and clean as crystal. He served science and died for
science. And he worked like an ox night and day—no one spared him
—and with his youth and his learning he had to take a private
practice and work at translations at night to pay for these... vile
rags!”
Korostelev looked with hatred at Olga Ivanovna, snatched at the
sheet with both hands and angrily tore it, as though it were to
blame.
“He did not spare himself, and others did not spare him. Oh,
what’s the use of talking!”
“Yes, he was a rare man,” said a bass voice in the drawing-room.
Olga Ivanovna remembered her whole life with him from the
beginning to the end, with all its details, and suddenly she
understood that he really was an extraordinary, rare, and, compared
with every one else she knew, a great man. And remembering how
her father, now dead, and all the other doctors had behaved to him,
she realized that they really had seen in him a future celebrity. The
walls, the ceiling, the lamp, and the carpet on the floor, seemed to
be winking at her sarcastically, as though they would say, “You were
blind! you were blind!” With a wail she flung herself out of the
bedroom, dashed by some unknown man in the drawing-room, and
ran into her husband’s study. He was lying motionless on the sofa,
covered to the waist with a quilt. His face was fearfully thin and
sunken, and was of a greyish-yellow colour such as is never seen in
the living; only from the forehead, from the black eyebrows and
from the familiar smile, could he be recognized as Dymov. Olga
Ivanovna hurriedly felt his chest, his forehead, and his hands. The
chest was still warm, but the forehead and hands were unpleasantly
cold, and the half-open eyes looked, not at Olga Ivanovna, but at
the quilt.
“Dymov!” she called aloud, “Dymov!” She wanted to explain to
him that it had been a mistake, that all was not lost, that life might
still be beautiful and happy, that he was an extraordinary, rare, great
man, and that she would all her life worship him and bow down in
homage and holy awe before him....
“Dymov!” she called him, patting him on the shoulder, unable to
believe that he would never wake again. “Dymov! Dymov!”
In the drawing-room Korostelev was saying to the housemaid:
“Why keep asking? Go to the church beadle and enquire where
they live. They’ll wash the body and lay it out, and do everything
that is necessary.”
 A DREARY STORY
FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN OLD MAN

T
HERE is in Russia an emeritus Professor Nikolay Stepanovitch,
a chevalier and privy councillor; he has so many Russian and
foreign decorations that when he has occasion to put them on
the students nickname him “The Ikonstand.” His acquaintances are
of the most aristocratic; for the last twenty-five or thirty years, at
any rate, there has not been one single distinguished man of
learning in Russia with whom he has not been intimately acquainted.
There is no one for him to make friends with nowadays; but if we
turn to the past, the long list of his famous friends winds up with
such names as Pirogov, Kavelin, and the poet Nekrasov, all of whom
bestowed upon him a warm and sincere affection. He is a member
of all the Russian and of three foreign universities. And so on, and so
on. All that and a great deal more that might be said makes up what
is called my “name.”
That is my name as known to the public. In Russia it is known to
every educated man, and abroad it is mentioned in the lecture-room
with the addition “honoured and distinguished.” It is one of those
fortunate names to abuse which or to take which in vain, in public or
in print, is considered a sign of bad taste. And that is as it should be.
You see, my name is closely associated with the conception of a
highly distinguished man of great gifts and unquestionable
usefulness. I have the industry and power of endurance of a camel,
and that is important, and I have talent, which is even more
important. Moreover, while I am on this subject, I am a well-
educated, modest, and honest fellow. I have never poked my nose
into literature or politics; I have never sought popularity in polemics
with the ignorant; I have never made speeches either at public
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