Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2 полностью

An hour later on the steps of this same house all four companions were taking leave of one another. Seriozha, making no reply to N.N.’s ‘Adieu’, sat down in his carriage and burst out crying like a child. He was remembering the emotion of innocent love which had filled his breast with elation and vague longings, and realizing that for him the time of such love was now irrevocably past. And why was the General so full of cheer as he drove N.N. home in his carriage, and the latter jokingly remarked ‘Le jeune a perdu son pucelage?²⁹ Yes, I do so enjoy bringing attractive young people together.’

Who is to blame? Surely not Seriozha, for having given himself up to the influence of men whom he liked, and to a natural desire? Certainly he is to blame; but who will cast the first stone at him? Is N.N. to blame, then, and the General too? Is it actually the essential function of men like these to do evil, to serve as tempters, that thereby goodness may take on a greater value? But you too are to blame, for tolerating such men, and not merely for tolerating them, but for choosing them as your leaders.—

Why? Who is to blame?

And how sad it is that two such excellent human beings, so wonderfully suited to one another and having only just become aware that this is so, should have their love ruined. They may perhaps still encounter someone else in times to come, and even fall in love, but what sort of a love will it be? Better that they should spend their whole life repenting, than that they should stifle this memory which they hold within themselves, and supplant with a guilty love, this true love which they have tasted, if only for one moment.

¹ A pair of gloves, please.

² Your size?

³ Six and a half.

⁴ Give this most distinguished of his clients a touch of the comb.

⁵ Pay court to.

⁶Débardeur. Literally ‘a longshoreman’ – a popular fancy-dress costume in the nineteenth century.

⁷ Shop girl.

⁸ Vicious circle.

⁹ He is an excellent match, my dear.

¹⁰ How absurd young Ivin is.

¹¹ From a bird’s eye view.

¹² Just one more turn, please.

¹³ Would you consent to a little waltz, Countess?

¹⁴ Not for myself, Countess; I feel that I am too ugly and too old to claim that honour.

¹⁵ We will have a chat.

¹⁶ The bottom of the bottle.

¹⁷ Let’s take his cork out once and for all.

¹⁸ Let’s go to the b … [brothel].

¹⁹ Let’s go in.

²⁰ Street idler, beggar.

²¹The Tomb of Askold, A Life for the Tsar: popular Russian operas by Verstovsky (1799–1862) and Glinka (1804–57).

²² Charming, delightful!

²³ No, it’s no good without Mashka, this choir is quite useless, isn’t it?

²⁴ Let us be going.

²⁵ Let’s go to the b[rothel].

²⁶ I’ll do whatever you are doing.

²⁷ If wife did but know that I was out on the spree with you …

²⁸ La Dame aux Camelias (1848), by Dumas fih.

²⁹ The lad has lost his maidenhead, eh?

APPENDIX II

FOUR LATE STORIESnot included in the Centenary Edition

PREFACE

TOLSTOY’s late stories have had a troubled critical history. In July 1883 Turgenev, then on his deathbed, sent Tolstoy the last letter he ever wrote, begging him to ‘return to literary work’. Tolstoy’s first published fictions after Anna Karenina and the moral and religious crisis which seemed to have ended his literary career were the cluster of ‘popular tales’, including Where Love is, God is, which appeared in 1885. It is doubtful whether Turgenev would have felt that this was ‘literature’ as he understood the word. The following year, with the appearance of The Death of Ivan Ilych, many of Tolstoy’s admirers felt, in the words of one critic, that ‘his train had come out of the tunnel’, and this story was not the last to be greeted as a masterpiece on the level of the two great novels: Hadji Murad (ten drafts, 1896–1904) has long enjoyed a similarly high valuation. Yet Hadji Murad was written with a guilty conscience by a man who felt that it was a betrayal of his new-found moral principles, and of the new aesthetic which he was to state at length in What is Art?