The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ must impose upon the brain no exertion.”

      “But what about my plans for my estate? I am not a log, if you will pardon my saying so.”

      “Oh, very well. I have merely been warning you. Likewise, you must avoid emotion of every kind, for that sort of thing is sure to militate against a successful cure. Try, rather, to divert yourself with riding, with dancing, with moderate exercise in the open air, and with pleasant conversation—more especially conversation with the opposite sex. These things are designed to make your heart beat more lightly, and to experience none but agreeable emotions. Again, you must lay aside all reading and writing. Rent a villa which faces south and lies embowered in flowers, and surround yourself also with an atmosphere of music and women.”

      “And may I eat at all?”

      “Yes, certainly; but avoid all animal and farinaceous food, as well as anything which may be served cold. Eat only light soups and vegetables. Even in this great care will need to be exercised, for cholera, I may tell you, is about. Walk eight hours out of every twenty-four; go in for shooting.”

      “Good Lord!” groaned Oblomov.

      “Finally,” concluded the doctor, “go to Paris for the winter, where, surrounded by a whirlpool of gaiety, you will best be able to distract your mind from your habitual brooding. Cultivate, theatres, balls, masquerades, the streets, society friends, noise, and laughter.”

      “Anything else?” inquired Oblomov, with ill-concealed impatience. The doctor reflected a moment.

      “Yes; also get the benefit of sea air,” he said. “Cross over to England, or else go for a voyage to America.”

      With chat he rose to take his leave. “Should you carry out these instructions to the letter——” he began.

      “Yes, yes. Of course I shall carry them out!” said Oblomov bitterly as he accompanied the physician to the door.

      The doctor having departed, Oblomov threw himself back into an arm-chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and remained sitting in an almost unthinking heap. Roused by Zakhar to consider once more the question of changing his quarters, he engaged in a long and heated conversation with the valet. Eventually he dismissed the man to his den, but could not dismiss from his own mind certain comparisons which Zakhar had drawn between his master’s life and the life of ordinary people. How strange that suddenly there should have dawned in him thoughts concerning human fate and destiny! All at once he found his mind drawing a parallel between that destiny and his own existence; all at once questions of life arose before his vision, like owls in an ancient ruin flushed from sleep by a stray ray of sunlight. Somehow he felt pained and grieved at his arrested development, at the check which had taken place in his moral growth, at the weight which appeared to be pressing upon his every faculty. Also gnawing at his heart there was a sense of envy that others should be living a life so full and free, while all the time the narrow, pitiful little pathway of his own existence was being blocked by a great boulder. And in his hesitating soul there arose a torturing consciousness that many sides of his nature had never yet been stirred, that others had never even been touched, and that not one of them had attained complete formation. Yet with this there went an aching suspicion that, buried in his being, as in a tomb, there still remained a moribund element of sweetness and light, and that it was an element which, though hidden in his personality, as a nugget lies lurking in the bowels of the earth, might once have become minted into sterling coin. But the treasure was now overlaid with rubbish—was now thickly littered over with dust. ’Twas as though some one had stolen from him, and besmirched, the store of gifts with which life and the world had dowered him; so that always he would be prevented from entering life’s field and sailing across it with the aid of intellect and of will. Yes, at the very start a secret enemy had laid a heavy hand upon him and diverted him from the road of human destiny. And now he seemed to be powerless to leave the swamps and wilds in favour of that road. All around him was a forest, and ever the recesses ox his soul were growing dimmer and darker, and the path more and more tangled, while the consciousness of his condition kept awaking within him less and less frequently—to arouse only for a fleecing moment his slumbering faculties. Brain and volition alike had become paralysed, and, to all appearances, irrevocably—the events of his life had become whittled down to microscopical proportions. Yet even with them he was powerless to cope—he was powerless to pass from one of them to another. Consequently they bandied him to and fro like the waves of the ocean. Never was he able to oppose to any event elasticity of will; never was he able to conceive, as the result of any event, a reasoned-out impulse. Yet to confess this, even to himself, always cost him a bitter pang: his fruitless regrets for lost opportunities, coupled with burning reproaches of conscience, always pricked him like needles, and led him to strive to put away such reproaches and to discover a scapegoat....

      Once again Oblomov sank asleep; and as he slept he dreamed of a different period, of different people, of a different place from the present. Let us follow him thither.

V

       Table of Contents

      We find ourselves transported to a land where neither sea nor mountains nor crags nor precipices nor lonely forests exist—where, in short, there exists nothing grand or wild or immense.

      Of what advantage, indeed, is the grand, the immense? The ocean depresses the soul of man, and at the sight of its boundless expanse of billows—an expanse whereon the weary eye is allowed no resting-place from the uniformity of the picture—the heart of man grows troubled within him, and he derives no solace from the roaring and mad rolling of the waves. Ever since the world began, those waves have sung the same dim, enigmatical song. Ever since the world began, they have voiced but the querulous lament of a monster which, everlastingly doomed to torment, utters a chorus of shrill, malicious cries. On the shores of the sea no bird warbles; only the silent gulls, like lost spirits, fit wearily along its margin, or circle over its surface. In the presence of that turmoil of nature the roar even of the wildest beast sounds weak, and the voice of man becomes wholly overwhelmed. Yes, beside it man’s form looks so small and fragile that it is swallowed up amid the myriad details of the gigantic picture. That alone may be why contemplation of the ocean depresses man’s soul. During periods, also, of calm and immobility his spirit derives no comfort from the spectacle; for in the scarcely perceptible oscillation of the watery mass he sees ever the slumbering, incomprehensible force, which, until recently, has been mocking his proud will and, as it were, submerging his boldest schemes, his most dearly cherished labours and endeavours.

      In the same way, mountains and gorges were not created to afford man encouragement, inasmuch as, with their terrible, menacing aspect, they seem to him the fangs and talons of some gigantic wild beast—of a beast which is reaching forth in an effort to devour him. Too vividly they remind him of his own frail build; too painfully they cause him to go in fear for his life. And over the summits of those crags and precipices the heavens look so remote and unattainable that they seem to have become removed out of the ken of humanity.

      Not so that peaceful corner of the earth upon which our hero, in his slumber, opened his eyes. There, on the contrary, the heavens seemed to hug the earth—not in order that they might the better aim their thunderbolts, but in order that they might the closer enfold it in a loving embrace. In fact, they hovered low in order that, like a sheltering, paternal roof, they might guard this chosen corner of the earth from every adversity. Meanwhile the sun shone warm and bright during half the year, and, withdrawing, did so so slowly and reluctantly that it seemed ever to be turning back for one more look at the beloved spot, as though wishing to give it one more bright, warm day before the approaching weather of autumn. Also the hills of that spot were no more than reduced models of the terrible mountains which, in other СКАЧАТЬ