Yama by Aleksandr Kuprin (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📕

me in peace, Likhonin. As I see it, gentlemen, this is downright and plain swinishness⁠—that which you are about to do. We have passed the time so wonderfully, amiably and simply, it seems⁠—but no, you needs must, like drunken cattle, clamber into a cesspool. I won’t go.”

“Still, if my memory does not play me false,” said Likhonin, with calm causticity, “I recollect that no further back than past autumn we, with a certain future Professor Mommsen were pouring in some place or other a jug of ice into a pianoforte, delineating a Bouratian god, dancing the belly-dance, and all that sort of thing?”

Likhonin spoke the truth. In his student days, and later, being retained at the university, Yarchenko had led the most wanton and crackbrained life. In all the taverns, cabarets, and other places of amusement his small, fat, roundish little figure, his rosy cheeks, puffed out like those of a painted cupid, and the shining, humid kindly eyes were well known, his hurried, spluttering speech and shrill laughter remembered.

His comrades could never fathom where he found the time to employ in study, but nevertheless he went through all examinations and prescribed work with distinction and from the first course the professors had him in view. Now Yarchenko was beginning little by little to quit his former comrades and bottle companions. He had just established the indispensable connections with the professorial circle; the reading of lectures in Roman history for the coming year had been offered him, and not infrequently in conversation he would use the expression current among the sub-professors: “We, the learned ones!” The student familiarity, the compulsory companionship, the obligatory participation in all meetings, protests and demonstrations, were becoming disadvantageous to him, embarrassing, and even simply tedious. But he knew the value of popularity among the younger element, and for that reason could not decide to sever relations abruptly with his former circle. Likhonin’s words, however, provoked him.

“Oh, my God, what does it matter what we did when we were youngsters? We stole sugar, soiled our panties, tore the wings off beetles,” Yarchenko began to speak, growing heated, and spluttering. “But there is a limit and a mean to all this. I, gentlemen, do not presume, of course, to give you counsels and to teach you, but one must be consistent. We are all agreed that prostitution is one of the greatest calamities of humanity, and are also agreed, that in this evil not the women are guilty, but we, men, because the demand gives birth to the offer. And therefore if, having drunk a glass of wine too much, I still, notwithstanding my convictions, go to the prostitutes, I am committing a triple vileness: before the unfortunate, foolish woman, whom I subject to the most degrading form of slavery for my filthy rouble; before humanity, because, hiring a public woman for an hour or two for my abominable lust, I through this justify and uphold prostitution; and finally, this is a vileness before one’s own conscience and mind. And before logic.”

“Phew-ew!” Likhonin let out a long-drawn whistle and chanted in a thin, dismal voice, nodding in time with his head hanging down to one side: “The philosopher is off on the usual bosh: ‘A rope⁠—is a common cord.’ ”

“Of course, there’s nothing easier than to play the tomfool,” responded Yarchenko. “But in my opinion there is not in the sorrowful life of Russia a more mournful phenomenon than this lackadaisicalness and vitiation of thought. Today we will say to ourselves: Eh! It’s all the same, whether I go to a brothel or whether I do not go, from this one time things will get neither worse nor better. And after five years we will be saying: Undoubtedly a bribe is a horribly nasty bit of business, but you know⁠—children⁠ ⁠… the family⁠ ⁠… And just the same way after ten years we, having remained fortuitous Russian liberals, will be sighing about personal freedom and bowing low before worthless scoundrels, whom we despise, and will be cooling our heels in their anterooms. ‘Because, don’t you know,’ we will say, tittering, ‘when you live with wolves, you must howl like a wolf.’ By God, it wasn’t in vain that some minister called the Russian students future head-clerks!”

“Or professors,” Likhonin put in.

“But most important of all,” continued Yarchenko, letting this pointed remark pass by, “most important of all is this, that I have seen all of you today on the river and afterwards there⁠ ⁠… on the other shore⁠ ⁠… with these charming, fine girls. How attentive, well-bred, obliging you all were⁠—but scarcely have you taken leave of them, when you are drawn to public women. Let each one of you imagine for a moment, that we all had been visiting his sisters and straight from them had driven to Yama⁠ ⁠… What? Is such a supposition pleasant?”

“Yes, but there must exist some valves for the passions of society,” pompously remarked Boris Sobashnikov, a tall, somewhat supercilious and affected young man, upon whom the short, white summer uniform jacket, which scarcely covered his fat posteriors, the modish trousers, of a military cut, the pince-nez on a broad, black ribbon, and a cap after a Prussian model, with a diminutive brim, all bestowed the air of a coxcomb. “Surely, it isn’t more respectable to enjoy the caresses of your chambermaid, or to carry on an intrigue on the side with another man’s wife? What am I to do if woman is indispensable to me!”

“Eh, very indispensable indeed!” said Yarchenko with vexation and feebly made a despondent gesture. “For, after all, one must have the courage to confess that we Russian intelligents, made round-shouldered and prematurely decrepit while yet upon the benches of the gymnasia, are not at all capable either of savage passions or of tempestuous desires! Ours is not sexual hunger, but a mere whim, an indulgence, a feeble diversion. But here’s what an eyewitness was telling me about a certain Ingush⁠—or was it an Ossetian⁠—in short, about some fiery Caucasian mountaineer. He had come