Oblomov / Обломов. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Иван Гончаров

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СКАЧАТЬ know why – I am like that!» His eyelids closed tightly. «Yes – why? Perhaps it’s – because» – He tried to utter the words but could not.

      So he never arrived at the cause, after all; his tongue and lips stopped in the middle of the sentence and remained half open. Instead of a word, another sigh was heard, followed by the sound of the even snoring of a man who was peacefully asleep.

      Sleep stopped the slow and lazy flow of his thoughts and instantly transferred him to another age and other people, to another place, where we, too, gentle reader, will follow him in the next chapter.

      9

OBLOMOV’S DREAM

      WHERE ARE WE? In what blessed little corner of the earth has Oblomov’s dream transferred us? What a lovely spot!

      It is true there is no sea there, no high mountains, cliffs or precipices, no virgin forests – nothing grand, gloomy, and wild. But what is the good of the grand and the wild? The sea, for instance? Let it stay where it is! It merely makes you melancholy: looking at it, you feel like crying. The heart quails at the sight of the boundless expanse of water, and the eyes grow tired of the endless monotony of the scene. The roaring and the wild pounding of the waves do not caress your feeble ears; they go on repeating their old, old song, gloomy and mysterious, the same since the world began; and the same old moaning is heard in it, the same complaints as though of a monster condemned to torture, and piercing, sinister voices. No birds twitter around; only silent sea-gulls like doomed creatures, mournfully fly to and fro near the coast and circle over the water.

      The roar of a beast is powerless beside these lamentations of nature, the human voice, too, is insignificant, and man himself is so little and weak, so lost among the small details of the vast picture! Perhaps it is because of this that he feels so depressed when he looks at the sea. Yes, the sea can stay where it is! Its very calm and stillness bring no comfort to a man’s heart; in the barely perceptible swell of the mass of waters man still sees the same boundless, though slumbering, force which can so cruelly mock his proud will and bury so deeply his brave schemes, and all his labour and toil.

      Mountains and precipices, too, have not been created for man’s enjoyment. They are as terrifying and menacing as the teeth and claws of a wild beast rushing upon him; they remind us too vividly of our frailty and keep us continually in fear of our lives. And the sky over the peaks and the precipices seems so far and unattainable, as though it had recoiled from men.

      The peaceful spot where our hero suddenly found himself was not like that. The sky there seems to hug the earth, not in order to fling its thunderbolts at it, but to embrace it more tightly and lovingly; it hangs as low overhead as the trustworthy roof of the parental house, to preserve, it would seem, the chosen spot from all calamities. The sun there shines brightly and warmly for about six months of the year and withdraws gradually, as though reluctantly, as though turning back to take another look at the place it loves and to give it a warm, clear day in the autumn, amid the rain and slush.

      The mountains there seem to be only small-scale models of the terrifying mountains far away that frighten the imagination. They form a chain of gently sloping hillocks, down which it is pleasant to slide on one’s back in play, or to sit on watching the sunset dreamily.

      The river runs gaily, sporting and playing; sometimes it spreads into a wide pond, and sometimes it rushes along in a swift stream, or grows quiet, as though lost in meditation, and creeps slowly along the pebbles, breaking up into lively streams on all sides, whose rippling lulls you pleasantly to sleep.

      The whole place, for ten or fifteen miles around, consists of a series of picturesque, smiling, gay landscapes. The sandy, sloping banks of the clear stream, the small bushes that steal down to the water from the hills, the twisting ravine with a brook running at the bottom, and the birch copse – all seem to have been carefully chosen and composed with the hand of a master.

      A heart worn out by tribulations or wholly unacquainted with them cries out to hide itself in that secluded spot and live there happily and undisturbed. Everything there promises a calm, long life, till the hair turns white with age and death comes unawares, like sleep.

      The year follows a regular and imperturbable course there. Spring arrives in March, according to the calendar, muddy streams run down the hills, the ground thaws, and a warm mist rises from it; the peasant throws off his sheepskin, comes out into the open only in his shirt and, shielding his eyes with a hand, stands there enjoying the sunshine and shakes his shoulders with pleasure; then he pulls the overturned cart first by one shaft, then by the other, or examines and kicks with his foot at the plough that lies idle in the shed, getting ready for his usual labours. No sudden blizzards return in the spring, covering the fields or breaking down the trees with snow. Like a cold and unapproachable beauty, winter remains true to its character till the lawfully appointed time for warmth; it does not tease with sudden thaws or bend one double with unheard of frosts; everything goes on in the usual way prescribed by nature. In November snow and frost begin, and by Twelfth- day it grows so cold that a peasant leaving his cottage for a minute returns with hoar-frost on his beard; and in February a sensitive nose already feels the soft breath of approaching spring in the air. But the summer – the summer is especially enchanting in that part of the country. The air there is fresh and dry; it is not filled with the fragrance of lemons and laurels, but only with the scent of wormwood, pine, and wild cherry; the days are bright with slightly burning but not scorching sunshine, and for almost three months there is not a cloud in the sky. As soon as clear days come, they go on for three or four weeks; the evenings are warm and the nights are close. The stars twinkle in such a kindly and friendly way from the sky. If rain comes, it is such a beneficent summer rain! It falls briskly, abundantly, splashing along merrily like the big, warm tears of a man overcome with sudden joy; and as soon as it stops the sun once more looks down with a bright smile of love on the hills and fields and dries them; and the whole countryside responds to the sun with a happy smile. The peasant welcomes the rain joyfully. «The rain will wet me and the sun will dry me», he says, holding up delightedly his face, shoulders, and back to the warm shower. Thunderstorms are not a menace but a blessing there; they always occur at the appointed tunes, hardly ever missing St Elijah’s day on the second of August, as though to confirm the well-known legend among the people. The strength and number of thunder-claps also seem to be the same each year, as though a definite amount of electricity had been allotted annually for the whole place. Terrible storms, bringing devastation in their wake, are unheard-of in those parts, and no report of them has ever appeared in the newspapers. And nothing would ever have been published about that thrice-blessed spot had not a twenty- eight-year-old peasant widow, Marina Kulkov, given birth to quadruplets, an event the Press could not possibly have ignored.

      The Lord has never visited those parts either by Egyptian or ordinary plagues. No one of the inhabitants has ever seen or remembered any terrible heavenly signs, fiery balls, or sudden darkness; there are no poisonous snakes there; locusts do not come; there are no roaring lions, nor growling tigers, nor even bears nor wolves, because there are no forests. Only ruminating cows, bleating sheep, and cackling hens walk about the villages and fields in vast numbers.

      It is hard to say whether a poet or a dreamer would have been pleased with nature in this peaceful spot. These gentlemen, as everyone knows, love to gaze at the moon and listen to the song of the nightingale. They love the coquette-moon when she dresses up in amber clouds and peeps mysteriously through the branches or flings sheaves of silvery beams into the eyes of her admirers. But in that country no one has even heard of the moon being anything but an ordinary moon. It stares very good- naturedly at the villages and the fields, looking very like a polished brass basin. The poet would have looked at her in vain with eyes of rapture; she gazes as good-naturedly at a poet as does a round-faced village beauty in response to the eloquent and passionate glances of a city philanderer.

      There are no nightingales in those parts, either – perhaps because there are no shady nooks and roses there. But what an abundance of quail! At harvest time in the summer СКАЧАТЬ