e reduced to rigidity even a Petersburg audience, let
alone ours. Imagine an article that would have filled some thirty pages
of print of the most affected, aimless prattle; and to make matters
worse, the gentleman read it with a sort of melancholy condescension
as though it were a favour, so that it was almost insulting to the
audience. The subject.... Who could make it out? It was a sort of
description of certain impressions and reminiscences. But of what? And
about what? Though the leading intellects of the province did their
utmost during the first half of the reading, they could make nothing
of it, and they listened to the second part simply out of politeness.
A great deal was said about love, indeed, of the love of the genius for
some person, but I must admit it made rather an awkward impression. For
the great writer to tell us about his first kiss seemed to my mind a
little incongruous with his short and fat little figure... Another thing
that was offensive; these kisses did not occur as they do with the rest
of mankind. There had to be a framework of gorse (it had to be gorse or
some such plant that one must look up in a flora) and there had to be a
tint of purple in the sky, such as no mortal had ever observed before,
or if some people had seen it, they had never noticed it, but he seemed
to say, "I have seen it and am describing it to you, fools, as if it
were a most ordinary thing." The tree under which the interesting couple
sat had of course to be of an orange colour. They were sitting somewhere
in Germany. Suddenly they see Pompey or Cassius on the eve of a battle,
and both are penetrated by a thrill of ecstasy. Some wood-nymph squeaked
in the bushes. Gluck played the violin among the reeds. The title of the
piece he was playing was given in full, but no one knew it, so that one
would have had to look it up in a musical dictionary. Meanwhile a fog
came on, such a fog, such a fog, that it was more like a million pillows
than a fog. And suddenly everything disappears and the great genius is
crossing the frozen Volga in a thaw. Two and a half pages are filled
with the crossing, and yet he falls through the ice. The genius is
drowning--you imagine he was drowned? Not a bit of it; this was simply
in order that when he was drowning and at his last gasp, he might catch
sight of a bit of ice, the size of a pea, but pure and crystal "as a
frozen tear," and in that tear was reflected Germany, or more accurately
the sk