The Greatest Novellas & Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. Anton Chekhov
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Название: The Greatest Novellas & Short Stories of Anton Chekhov
Автор: Anton Chekhov
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9788027200122
isbn:
“ ‘Look, look!’ my neighbor nudged me. ‘Do you see that dark man getting into that cab? That’s the famous runner, King!’
“And the whole tram began talking breathlessly of the runner who was then absorbing the brains of Moscow.
“I could give you ever so many other examples, but I think that is enough. Now let us assume that I am mistaken about myself, that I am a wretchedly boastful and incompetent person; but apart from myself I might point to many of my contemporaries, men remarkable for their talent and industry, who have nevertheless died unrecognized. Are Russian navigators, chemists, physicists, mechanicians, and agriculturists popular with the public? Do our cultivated masses know anything of Russian artists, sculptors, and literary men? Some old literary hack, hardworking and talented, will wear away the doorstep of the publishers’ offices for thirty-three years, cover reams of paper, be had up for libel twenty times, and yet not step beyond his ant-heap. Can you mention to me a single representative of our literature who would have become celebrated if the rumor had not been spread over the earth that he had been killed in a duel, gone out of his mind, been sent into exile, or had cheated at cards?”
The first-class passenger was so excited that he dropped his cigar out of his mouth and got up.
“Yes,” he went on fiercely, “and side by side with these people I can quote you hundreds of all sorts of singers, acrobats, buffoons, whose names are known to every baby. Yes!”
The door creaked, there was a draught, and an individual of forbidding aspect, wearing an Inverness coat, a top-hat, and blue spectacles, walked into the carriage. The individual looked round at the seats, frowned, and went on further.
“Do you know who that is?” there came a timid whisper from the furthest corner of the compartment.
That is N. N., the famous Tula cardsharper who was had up in connection with the Y. bank affair.”
“There you are!” laughed the first-class passenger. He knows a Tula cardsharper, but ask him whether he knows Semiradsky, Tchaykovsky, or Solovyov the philosopher — he’ll shake his head…. It swinish!”
Three minutes passed in silence.
“Allow me in my turn to ask you a question,” said the vis-à-vis timidly, clearing his throat. Do you know the name of Pushkov?”
“Pushkov? H’m! Pushkov…. No, I don’t know it!”
“That is my name,…” said the vis-à-vis,, overcome with embarrassment. “Then you don’t know it? And yet I have been a professor at one of the Russian universities for thirty-five years,… a member of the Academy of Sciences,… have published more than one work… .”
The first-class passenger and the vis-à-vis looked at each other and burst out laughing.
TALENT
Translation By Constance Garnett
AN artist called Yegor Savvitch, who was spending his summer holidays at the house of an officer’s widow, was sitting on his bed, given up to the depression of morning. It was beginning to look like autumn out of doors. Heavy, clumsy clouds covered the sky in thick layers; there was a cold, piercing wind, and with a plaintive wail the trees were all bending on one side. He could see the yellow leaves whirling round in the air and on the earth. Farewell, summer! This melancholy of nature is beautiful and poetical in its own way, when it is looked at with the eyes of an artist, but Yegor Savvitch was in no humour to see beauty. He was devoured by ennui and his only consolation was the thought that by tomorrow he would not be there. The bed, the chairs, the tables, the floor, were all heaped up with cushions, crumpled bedclothes, boxes. The floor had not been swept, the cotton curtains had been taken down from the windows. Next day he was moving, to town.
His landlady, the widow, was out. She had gone off somewhere to hire horses and carts to move next day to town. Profiting by the absence of her severe mamma, her daughter Katya, aged twenty, had for a long time been sitting in the young man’s room. Next day the painter was going away, and she had a great deal to say to him. She kept talking, talking, and yet she felt that she had not said a tenth of what she wanted to say. With her eyes full of tears, she gazed at his shaggy head, gazed at it with rapture and sadness. And Yegor Savvitch was shaggy to a hideous extent, so that he looked like a wild animal. His hair hung down to his shoulder-blades, his beard grew from his neck, from his nostrils, from his ears; his eyes were lost under his thick overhanging brows. It was all so thick, so matted, that if a fly or a beetle had been caught in his hair, it would never have found its way out of this enchanted thicket. Yegor Savvitch listened to Katya, yawning. He was tired. When Katya began whimpering, he looked severely at her from his overhanging eyebrows, frowned, and said in a heavy, deep bass:
“I cannot marry.”
“Why not?” Katya asked softly.
“Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art, marriage is out of the question. An artist must be free.”
“But in what way should I hinder you, Yegor Savvitch?”
“I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general…. Famous authors and painters have never married.”
“And you, too, will be famous — I understand that perfectly. But put yourself in my place. I am afraid of my mother. She is stern and irritable. When she knows that you won’t marry me, and that it’s all nothing… she’ll begin to give it to me. Oh, how wretched I am! And you haven’t paid for your rooms, either!… .”
“Damn her! I’ll pay.”
Yegor Savvitch got up and began walking to and fro.
“I ought to be abroad!” he said. And the artist told her that nothing was easier than to go abroad. One need do nothing but paint a picture and sell it.
“Of course!” Katya assented. “Why haven’t you painted one in the summer?”
“Do you suppose I can work in a barn like this?” the artist said ill-humouredly. “And where should I get models?”
Some one banged the door viciously in the storey below. Katya, who was expecting her mother’s return from minute to minute, jumped up and ran away. The artist was left alone. For a long time he walked to and fro, threading his way between the chairs and the piles of untidy objects of all sorts. He heard the widow rattling the crockery and loudly abusing the peasants who had asked her two roubles for each cart. In his disgust Yegor Savvitch stopped before the cupboard and stared for a long while, frowning at the decanter of vodka.
“Ah, blast you!” he heard the widow railing at Katya. “Damnation take you!”
The artist drank a glass of vodka, and the dark cloud in his soul gradually disappeared, and he felt as though all his inside was smiling within him. He began dreaming…. His fancy pictured how he would become great. He could not imagine his future works but he could see distinctly how the papers would talk of him, how the shops would sell his photographs, with what envy his friends would look СКАЧАТЬ