The Duel quotes

He was always looking after other people’s affairs and trying to interest someone on their behalf, and was always delighted about something. The general opinion about him was that he was without faults of character.

He had only two weaknesses: he was ashamed of his own good nature, and tried to disguise it by a surly expression and an assumed gruffness; and he liked his assistants and his soldiers to call him “Your Excellency,” although he was only a civil councillor.

“Answer one question for me, Alexandr Daviditch,” Laevsky began, when both he and Samoylenko were in the water up to their shoulders.

“I know very well you can’t help me,” he said. “

But I tell you, because unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in talking.

I have to generalise about everything I do. I’m bound to look for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody else’s theories, in literary types—in the idea that we, upper-class Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on.

Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: ‘Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!’ And that did me good. Yes, really, brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!”

Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every day of his life, was a little embarrassed

, and said:

“I will tell you directly,” said Samoylenko. “Eight years ago there was an old fellow, an agent, here—a man of very great intelligence. Well, he used to say that the great thing in married life was patience. Do you hear, Vanya?

Not love, but patience. Love cannot last long.

You have lived two years in love, and now evidently your married life has reached the period when, in order to preserve equilibrium, so to speak, you ought to exercise all your patience. …”

Your old man could be a hypocrite; he could exercise himself in the virtue of patience, and, as he did so, look upon a person he did not love as an object indispensable for his moral exercises; but I have not yet fallen so low.

If I want to exercise myself in patience, I will buy dumbbells or a frisky horse, but I’ll leave human beings alone.

”

“Yes, she loves me in so far as at her age and with her temperament she wants a man. It would be as difficult for her to do without me as to do without her powder or her curl-papers.

I am for her an indispensable, integral part of her boudoir.

”

“Vereshchagin has a picture in which some men condemned to death are languishing at the bottom of a very deep well. Your magnificent Caucasus strikes me as just like that well.

If I were offered the choice of a chimney-sweep in Petersburg or a prince in the Caucasus, I should choose the job of chimney-sweep.

”

“But do understand, you queer fellow, that it is impossible.

To marry without love is as base and unworthy of a man as to perform mass without believing in it.

”

On this occasion what displeased Laevsky most in Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was her white open neck and the little curls at the back of her head.

And he remembered that when Anna Karenin got tired of her husband, what she disliked most of all was his ears, and thought: “How true it is, how true!”

Feeling weak and as though his head were perfectly empty, he went into his study, lay down on his sofa, and covered his face with a handkerchief that he might not be bothered by the flies.

Who knows? If so, was it not stupid to argue whether it were honest or dishonest when a gifted and useful man—an artist or musician, for instance—to escape from prison, breaks a wall and deceives his jailers?

Anything is honest when a man is in such a position.

At two o’clock Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner. When the cook gave them rice and tomato soup, Laevsky said:

He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult even to a dog, but he was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, for arousing such a feeling, and he understood why lovers sometimes murder their mistresses.

He would not murder her, of course, but if he had been on a jury now, he would have acquitted the murderer.

“Merci, darling,” he said after dinner, and kissed Nadyezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead.

Then he got up, and finding his cap, set off to the lodgings of his colleague, Sheshkovsky, where the government clerks met every day to play Vint and drink beer.

“My indecision reminds me of Hamlet,” thought Laevsky on the way. “How truly Shakespeare describes it! Ah, how truly!”

“Why not?

Work is not like a bear; it doesn’t run off into the woods

,” said the deacon, smiling and thrusting his hands into the very deep pockets of his white cassock.

“Well, that is a person I am not sorry for,” said Von Koren. “

If that charming individual were drowning, I would push him under with a stick and say, ‘Drown, brother, drown away.’

…”

… understand that it was not his fault that government envelopes lay unopened in his office for weeks together, and that he drank and taught others to drink, but Onyegin, Petchorin, and Turgenev, who had invented the failure and the superfluous man, were responsible for it.

The cause of his extreme dissoluteness and unseemliness lies, do you see, not in himself, but somewhere outside in space.

And so—an ingenious idea!—it is not only he who is dissolute, false, and disgusting, but we … ‘we men of the eighties,’ ‘we the spiritless, nervous offspring of the serf-owning class’;

then till dinnertime, slippers, a constitutional, and conversation; at two o’clock slippers, dinner, and wine; at five o’clock a bathe, tea and wine, then Vint and lying; at ten o’clock supper and wine; and after midnight sleep and la femme.

His existence is confined within this narrow programme like an egg within its shell.

Whether he walks or sits, is angry, writes, rejoices, it may all be reduced to wine, cards, slippers, and women. Woman plays a fatal, overwhelming part in his life. He tells us himself that at thirteen he was in love;

He is a charming fellow, a regular good sort, he is so genuinely indulgent to human weaknesses; he is compliant, accommodating, easy and not proud; one can drink with him and gossip and talk evil of people. …

The masses, always inclined to anthropomorphism in religion and morals, like best of all the little gods who have the same weaknesses as themselves.

Only think what a wide field he has for contamination! Besides, he is not a bad actor and is a clever hypocrite, and knows very well how to twist things round. Only take his little shifts and dodges, his attitude to civilisation, for instance.

It was very hot, thirty degrees Réaumur in the shade.

The sultry air was stagnant and motionless, and a long spiderweb, stretching from the chestnut tree to the ground, hung limply and did not stir.

The deacon took up the guitar, which was constantly lying on the ground near the table, tuned it, and began singing softly in a thin voice:

She had been a governess until she was thirty-two, and then had married Bityugov, a government official—a bald little man with his hair combed on to his temples and with a very meek disposition.

She was still in love with him, was jealous, blushed at the word “love,” and told everyone she was very happy.

“My dear,” she cried enthusiastically, on seeing Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, assuming an expression which all her acquaintances called “almond-oily.” “My dear, how delightful that you have come! We’ll bathe together—that’s enchanting!”

and again she felt a sudden thrill of joy, and had a vague memory of some big hall in which she had once danced, or of which, perhaps, she had once dreamed.

And something at the bottom of her soul dimly and obscurely whispered to her that she was a pretty, common, miserable, worthless woman.

…

a little ladder sloped from its door.

The first impression in all was a feeling that they would never get out of that place again.

On all sides wherever they looked, the mountains rose up and towered above them, and the shadows of evening were stealing rapidly, rapidly from the duhan and dark cypress, making the narrow winding valley of the Black River narrower and the mountains higher.

“Why?” asked Laevsky. “

The impression is better than any description.

The wealth of sights and sounds which everyone receives from nature by direct impression is ranted about by authors in a hideous and unrecognisable way.”

“Perhaps,” said Laevsky, who was too lazy to think and oppose him. “Though what is Romeo and Juliet after all?” he added after a short pause. “

The beauty of poetry and holiness of love are simply the roses under which they try to hide its rottenness.

Romeo is just the same sort of animal as all the rest of us.”

“

One tells you, for instance, how beautiful a bunch of grapes is, and you answer: ‘Yes, but how ugly it is when it is chewed and digested in one’s stomach!’

Why say that? It’s not new, and … altogether it is a queer habit.”

They were ladling it out by platefuls, and eating it with the religious solemnity with which this is only done at a picnic; and everyone thought the fish soup very good, and thought that at home they had never eaten anything so nice.

As is always the case at picnics, in the mass of dinner napkins, parcels, useless greasy papers fluttering in the wind, no one knew where was his glass or where his bread.

They poured the wine on the carpet and on their own knees, spilt the salt, while it was dark all round them and the fire burnt more dimly, and everyone was too lazy to get up and put wood on.

“Not flatter vice.

We curse vice only behind its back, and that’s like making a long nose at it round a corner.

I am a zoologist or a sociologist, which is the same thing; you are a doctor; society believes in us; we ought to point out the terrible harm which threatens it and the next generation from the existence of ladies like Nadyezhda Ivanovna.”

He is already dreaming that when he comes back from his expedition he will purify our universities from intrigue and mediocrity, and will make the scientific men mind their p’s and q’s. Despotism is just as strong in science as in the army.

And he is spending his second summer in this stinking little town because he would rather be first in a village than second in a town.

Here he is a king and an eagle; he keeps all the inhabitants under his thumb and oppresses them with his authority. He has appropriated everyone, he meddles in other people’s affairs; everything is of use to him, and everyone is afraid of him.

Till now I have deceived myself and other people; I have been miserable about it, and my misery was cheap and common.

I bow my back humbly before Von Koren’s hatred because at times I hate and despise myself.

”

“Thank you,” he muttered, sighing. “Thank you. …

Kind and friendly words are better than charity.

You have given me new life.”

“ ‘Settle down.’ How do you mean?

I have not lived yet, and you tell me to settle down.

”

And, my dear, the table’s not cleared till this time in the day. And one’s ashamed to go into your bedroom: underclothes flung about everywhere, india-rubber tubes hanging on the walls, pails and basins standing about. … My dear!

A husband ought to know nothing, and his wife ought to be as neat as a little angel in his presence.

I wake up every morning before it is light, and wash my face with cold water that my Nikodim Alexandritch may not see me looking drowsy.”

“

What of that? Thieves and incendiaries are unhappy too!

”

“What it is to have to live and do with people like this,” said the zoologist, and he kicked a paper into the corner with indignation. “You must understand that this is not kindness, it is not love, but cowardice, slackness, poison!

What’s gained by reason is lost by your flabby good-for-nothing hearts!

When I was ill with typhoid as a schoolboy, my aunt in her sympathy gave me pickled mushrooms to eat, and I very nearly died.

he would tell a lie only once, and then a completely new life would begin.

And that was right: at the price of a small lie he would win so much truth.

Now when by his blunt refusal the doctor had crudely hinted at his deception, he began to understand that he would need deception not only in the remote future, but today, and tomorrow, and in a month’s time, and perhaps up to the very end …

and again there would be tears, boredom, a disgusting existence, remorse, and so there would be no new life. Deception and nothing more.

A whole mountain of lies rose before Laevsky’s imagination.

To leap over it at one bound and not to do his lying piecemeal, he would have to bring himself to stern, uncompromising action;

“I beg you not to trouble yourself about me,” Laevsky went on. “Don’t pay any attention to me, and whose business is it what I do and how I live?

Yes, I want to go away. Yes, I get into debt, I drink, I am living with another man’s wife, I’m hysterical, I’m ordinary.

I am not so profound as some people, but whose business is that? Respect other people’s privacy.”

… to that insignificant man, and how he could care for the opinion of wretched petty people whom nobody knew, living in a miserable little town which was not, it seemed, even on the map, and of which not one decent person in Petersburg had heard.

If this wretched little town suddenly fell into ruins or caught fire, the telegram with the news would be read in Russia with no more interest than an advertisement of the sale of secondhand furniture.

Whether he killed Von Koren next day or left him alive, it would be just the same, equally useless and uninteresting.

“

Yes, but it’s no use to be afraid of getting your feet wet when you are threatened with the deluge!

”

You are so corrupted by your seminary philosophy that you want to see nothing but fog in everything. The abstract studies with which your youthful head is stuffed are called abstract just because they abstract your minds from what is obvious.

Look the devil straight in the eye, and if he’s the devil, tell him he’s the devil, and don’t go calling to Kant or Hegel for explanations.

”

“

Twice two’s four, and a stone’s a stone.

Here tomorrow we have a duel.

“You say you have faith,” said the deacon. “What sort of faith is it?

Why, I have an uncle, a priest, and he believes so that when in time of drought he goes out into the fields to pray for rain, he takes his umbrella and leather overcoat for fear of getting wet through on his way home. That’s faith!

When he speaks of Christ, his face is full of radiance, and all the peasants, men and women, weep floods of tears. He would stop that cloud and put all those forces you talk about to flight. Yes … faith moves mountains.”

He had no fear of the storm, no love of nature now; he had no God. All the confiding girls he had ever known had by now been ruined by him and those like him.

All his life he had not planted one tree in his own garden, nor grown one blade of grass; and living among the living, he had not saved one fly; he had done nothing but destroy and ruin, and lie, lie.

…

“Go to Petersburg?” Laevsky asked himself. But that would mean beginning over again the old life which he cursed.

And the man who seeks salvation in change of place like a migrating bird would find nothing anywhere, for all the world is alike to him.

Seek salvation in men? In whom and how? Samoylenko’s kindness and generosity could no more save him than the deacon’s laughter or Von Koren’s hatred. He must look for salvation in himself alone, and if there were no finding it, why waste time?

and how slowly! One wave broke—the deacon had time to count eight steps; then another broke, and six steps; later a third. As before, nothing could be seen, and in the darkness one could hear the languid, drowsy drone of the sea.

One could hear the infinitely faraway, inconceivable time when God moved above chaos.

The deacon felt uncanny. He hoped God would not punish him for keeping company with infidels, and even going to look at their duels.

“Your God and my God are the same,” said Kerbalay, not understanding him. “

God is the same for all men, only men are different.

Some are Russian, some are Turks, some are English—there are many sorts of men, but God is one.”

“Why are you angry?” said Kerbalay, laying both hands on his stomach. “You are a priest; I am a Mussulman: you say, ‘I want to eat’—I give it you. …

Only the rich man distinguishes your God from my God; for the poor man it is all the same.

If you please, it is ready.”