Short Fiction Aleksandr Kuprin (free novel reading sites TXT) 📖

say just this: Here, wherever you turn, you’re confronted with the mug of some noble affronted nation. Liberty, Language, National Rights. And we go into ecstasies under their noses. Oh, poor cultured Finland! Oh, unhappy enslaved Poland! Ah, the great tormented Jewish race.⁠ ⁠… Beat us, my pigeons, despise us, trample us under your feet, sit on our backs and drive! B‑ut no⁠—” Zavalishine roared in a threatening voice, growing suddenly scarlet and rolling his eyes. “No,” he repeated, striking himself on the chest with all his force. “This scandal is going to end. Up till now, the Russian people has been only scratching himself, half asleep; but tomorrow, with God’s blessing, he will awake. And then he will shake off from himself the mischievous Radical in‑tel‑lec‑tuals as a dog would a flea, and will squeeze so tightly in his mighty palm all these innocents oppressed, all these dirty little Sheenies, Ukrainians, and Poles, that the sap will spurt out from them on all sides. And to Europe he will merely say: ‘Stand up, you dog.’ ”

“Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!” the doctor broke in with a voice like a gramophone.

The schoolboys, who had been frightened at first by the shouting, burst into a loud laugh at this, but Anna Georgievna said with a look of suffering:

“Paul, why do you go on like this in front of the children?”

Zavalishine drained a glass of wine at a gulp and poured out another hastily.

“Pardon, it slipped out. But I will say this, I was expressing my convictions just now, honestly and sincerely at least. Now let them⁠—that is, I meant to say, let Mr. Student here, let him refute what I say, let him convince me. I’m ready for him. It would be very much more honest than to evade it by wry little smiles.”

Voskresenski shrugged his shoulders slowly.

“I’m not smiling at all.”

“Ah! You don’t even give yourself the trouble of answering? Of course. That is the be‑s‑t of all. You stand so high above any discussion or proofs?”

“No, not in the least above. But it’s like this⁠—we’ll never understand each other. What’s the use of getting angry and spoiling one’s temper?”

“Quite so. I understand. You’re too high and mighty then?” Zavalishine was getting drunk and beginning to roar. “Ah, it’s a pity, a great pity, my precious youth. It would have been such a treat to enjoy the milk of your wisdom.”

At this instant Voskresenski raised his eyes towards Zavalishine for the first time. Suddenly he felt a wave of keen hatred for his round, light, protruding eyes, for his red nose, that seemed to be torn at the nostrils, for his white, bald, retreating forehead and his preposterous beard. And instinctively, as if against his will, he began to speak in a faint, stifled voice that was almost a stranger’s.

“You insist on dragging me into a discussion. But I assure you that it’s useless. Everything that you were good enough to express just now with such fire, I have heard and read hundreds of times. Hostility to everything European, a rancorous spite against kindred races, ecstacy before the might of the Russian fist, and so on, and soon⁠ ⁠… All this has been said, written, and preached on every doorstep. But what has the people here to do with it all, Pavel Arkadievitch?⁠—that’s what I don’t understand. That’s what I cannot understand. The people⁠—that is to say, not your valet or your porter or your workmen, but the people who composes the whole of Russia⁠—the obscure muzhik, the troglodyte, the cave man, why have you buttoned him up in your national dreams? He is silent because he is thriving. You had better not touch him. Leave him in peace. It is not for you or for me to guess at his silence⁠—”

“Allow me! My knowledge of the people is no worse than yours⁠—”

“No,” the student interrupted impertinently. “Allow me now, please. You were good enough, a few minutes ago, to reproach me for laughing at your verbiage. Well, I will tell you now that there is nothing funny in it, just as there is nothing terrible. Your ideal, the a‑all-Rus‑sian f‑ist squeezing the sap out of all the little peoples, is dangerous to no one, but is merely repulsive, like every symbol of violence. You’re not a malady, not an ulcer, you are simply an inevitable, annoying rash, a kind of measles. But your comedy of the large Russian nature, all these symbols of yours⁠—your Russian kaftan, your patriotic tears⁠—yes, all this is really funny.”

“Ah, excellent. Go on, young man, in the same spirit,” Zavalishine said caustically with a grimace on his lips. “It’s a delicious system of polemics, isn’t it. Doctor?”

For his part Voskresenski felt in his heart that he was speaking loosely, clumsily, and confusedly, but he could not stop now. In his brain there was the sensation of a strange, cold void. His feet had become slack and heavy and his heart seemed to have fallen somewhere deep down and to be quivering there and breaking from too frequent strokes.

“What does the system matter? To the devil with it!” he exclaimed, and this exclamation flew out unexpectedly in such a full, strong sound that he suddenly experienced a fierce and joyous pleasure. “I have been too silent during these two months to pick and choose a system. Yes. One is ashamed and pitiful and amused in turn at your comedy, Pavel Arkadievitch. You know the strolling minstrels who sing in the recreation gardens in summer? You know the sort of thing⁠—the hackneyed Russian song. It is something torturingly false, impudent, disgraceful. The same with you: ‘The Russian soup, the Russian kacha⁠—our mother Russia.’ Have you ever had a look at the people’s soups? Have you ever had a real taste of it? One day with something to eat, and the next day with nothing at all. Have you tasted the peasants’ bread? Have you seen their children with swollen stomachs and legs like wheels? And in your house your cook gets