Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,98

the divinity of the latter, and for him, to a certain degree, even takes the place of immortality, which does not exist. Hence, reason is the only possible source of pleasure. We, however, neither see nor hear any reason around us—which means we are deprived of pleasure. True, we have books, but that is not at all the same as live conversation and intercourse. If you will permit me a not entirely successful comparison, books are the scores, while conversation is the singing.”

“Quite right.”

Silence ensues. Daryushka comes from the kitchen and, with an expression of dumb grief, her face propped on her fist, stops in the doorway to listen.

“Ah!” sighs Mikhail Averyanych. “To ask reason of people nowadays!”

And he talks about how life used to be wholesome, gay, and interesting, what a smart intelligentsia there was in Russia and how highly it placed the notions of honor and friendship. Money was lent without receipt, and it was considered a disgrace not to offer a helping hand to a needy comrade. “And what campaigns, adventures, skirmishes there were, what comrades, what women! And the Caucasus—what an astonishing country! And the wife of one of the battalion commanders, a strange woman, used to dress up as an officer and ride off into the mountains in the evening alone, without an escort. They said she was having a romance with some princeling in a village there.”

“Saints alive …” Daryushka sighs.

“And how they drank! How they ate! What desperate liberals they were!”

Andrei Yefimych listens and hears nothing; he ponders something and sips his beer.

“I often dream about intelligent people and conversations with them,” he says unexpectedly, interrupting Mikhail Averyanych. “My father gave me an excellent education, but, influenced by the ideas of the sixties,6 he forced me to become a doctor. I think that if I hadn’t obeyed him, I would now be at the very center of the intellectual movement. I would probably be a member of some faculty. Of course, reason is not eternal and also passes, but you already know why I am well disposed towards it. Life is a vexing trap. When a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to adult consciousness, he involuntarily feels as if he is in a trap from which there is no escape. Indeed, against his will he is called by certain accidents from non-being into life … Why? He wants to learn the meaning and aim of his existence, and he is not told or else is told absurdities; he knocks—it is not opened; death comes to him—also against his will. And so, as people in prison, bound by a common misfortune, feel better when they come together, so also in life the trap can be disregarded when people inclined to analysis and generalization come together and spend time exchanging proud, free ideas. In this sense reason is an irreplaceable pleasure.”

“Quite right.”

Without looking his interlocutor in the eye, softly and with pauses, Andrei Yefimych goes on talking about intelligent people and his conversations with them, and Mikhail Averyanych listens to him attentively and agrees: “Quite right.”

“And you don’t believe in the immortality of the soul?” the postmaster suddenly asks.

“No, my esteemed Mikhail Averyanych, I do not believe in it and have no grounds for doing so.”

“I confess that I, too, have doubts. Though, incidentally, I have the feeling that I’ll never die. Hey, I think to myself, you old duffer, it’s time for you to die! And a little voice in my soul says: don’t believe it, you won’t die! …”

After nine, Mikhail Averyanych leaves. Putting his fur coat on in the front hall, he says with a sigh:

“But what a hole the fates have brought us to! The most vexing thing is that we’ll have to die here as well. Ah! …”

VII

After seeing his friend off, Andrei Yefimych sits down at the desk and again begins to read. The stillness of the evening and then the night is not broken by any sound, and time seems to stop, transfixed, with the doctor over the book, and it seems that nothing exists except for this book and the lamp with its green shade. The doctor’s coarse, peasant face gradually lights up with a smile of tenderness and delight at the movements of the human spirit. Oh, why is man not immortal? he thinks. Why brain centers and convolutions, why sight, speech, self-awareness, genius, if it is all doomed to sink into the ground and in the final end to cool down along with the