Short Fiction by Vsevolod Garshin (always you kirsty moseley TXT) 📕
Description
Vsevolod Garshin’s literary career followed a stint as a infantry soldier and later an officer, and he received both public and critical acclaim in the 1880s. Before his sadly early death at the age of thirty-three after a lifelong battle with mental illness he wrote and published nineteen short stories. He drew on his military career and life in St. Petersburg as initial source material, and his varied cast of characters includes soldiers, painters, architects, madmen, bears, frogs and even flowers and trees. All are written with a depth of feeling and sympathy that marks Garshin out from his contemporaries.
Collected here are the seventeen translations into English by Rowland Smith of Garshin’s short stories and novellas, in chronological order of the original Russian publication.
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- Author: Vsevolod Garshin
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“A second cousin,” I replied.
“Yes, a second cousin. She is your fiancée,” he said, in a positive tone.
“How do you know?” I exclaimed.
“I know. At first I guessed it, but now I know it. I found out from my mother. She wrote to me not long ago—and, besides, remember where she is. … Surely you know that in a provincial town everyone knows everything! Is it true that she is your fiancée?”
“Well, we will allow it is so.”
“And from childhood? Your parents decided on it?”
“Yes, my parents arranged it. At first I regarded it as a joke, but now I see that it will take place. I did not want anyone to know this, and I am very sorry that you have found it out.”
“I envy you for having a fiancée,” he said quietly, his eyes taking on a faraway look, and he sighed deeply.
“I did not expect sentimentality from you. Serge Vassilivich.”
“Yes, and I envy you because you have a fiancée,” he repeated, not listening to me. “I envy you your cleanness, your expectations, your future happiness, your stock of as yet untouched love.”
He took me by the arm, made me get up from the sofa, and led me up to a looking-glass.
“Look at me and at yourself,” he said. “What are you? ‘Hyperion before the goat-footed Satyr,’ I am the goat-footed Satyr, and I am stronger than you. My bones are bigger and my health is naturally better. But compare us. Do you see this?”—he lightly touched his hair, commencing to get thin about his temples. “Yes, my dear fellow, all this ardour of the soul wasted in the wilderness. Yes, and what ardour it is! Simply … filth.”
“Serge Vassilivich, let us get back to where we started. Why do you refuse to introduce me to the model?”
“Because she has taken part in this wasted ardour. I told you she is not an important person, and she most decidedly is not important—on the lowest rung of the human ladder. Below it is the abyss into which she perhaps will soon fall. The abyss is final ruin. Yes, and she has irrevocably perished.”
“I am beginning to understand you. Serge Vassilivich.”
“Ah! Well, you see what kind of a ‘but’ it is.”
“You may keep that kind of a ‘but’ for yourself. Why do you consider it your duty to act as my guardian and protector?”
“I have said—because I like you, because you are clean—not only you, but both of you. You represent such a rarity, something fragrant and redolent of freshness. I envy you, and prize what I can see, even though I am but an outsider. And you wish me to spoil all this! No, don’t expect it.”
“What, then, does all this amount to, Serge Vassilivich? You cannot have much hope for the cleanness you have discovered in me if you fear such terrible consequences from a simple acquaintanceship with this woman.”
“Listen! I can give you this woman or not. I shall act as I think fit. I do not want to give her to you, and I shall not. Dixi.”
He sat down, whilst I excitedly walked about the room.
“And you think she is like?”
“Very. But, no, not very”—he abruptly stopped—“not at all like. Enough about her.”
I begged him, stormed, showed him the utter idiocy of the task he had taken upon himself of guarding my morals, but all in vain. He absolutely refused, and in conclusion said: “I have never said dixi twice.”
“I congratulate you on the fact,” I replied bitterly.
We talked only of trivialities over our tea, and then we parted.
IVFor a whole fortnight I did nothing. I went to the Academy merely to paint the programme picture, a terrible Biblical study—the turning of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. Everything was ready—Lot and his family—but the pillar! I could not imagine it—whether to paint it as a sort of tombstone or a simple statue of Lot’s wife made of rock-salt.
Life dragged along wearily. I received two letters from Sonia. I read her pretty prattle about life in the Institute—how she read secretly, evading the Argus-eyed class mistress—and I added her letters to the others, bound up by a pink ribbon. I had kept this ribbon for fifteen years, and up to the present had not been able to make up my mind to throw it away. Why throw it away? With whom did it interfere? But what would Bezsonow have said had he seen this evidence of my sentimentality? Would he again have gone into raptures over my “cleanness,” or commenced to jeer?
However, it was no laughing matter which had vexed me. What was to be done? Give up the picture, or search again for a model?
An unexpected chance helped me. One day, as I was lying on my sofa, with a stupid translation of a French novel, and had lain there until my head ached and my brain reeled from stories of morgues, police detectives, and the resurrection of people who ought to have died twenty times over—the door opened, and in came Helfreich.
Imagine a pair of thin, rather bandy legs, a huge body crushed by two humps, a pair of skinny arms, high hunched-up shoulders, expressive of a sort of perpetual doubt, and a young, pale, slightly bloated, but kind-expressioned face on a head thrown well back. He was an artist. Amateurs know his pictures well. Painted for the most part on one subject. His heroes were cats. He has painted sleeping cats, cats with birds, cats arching their backs, even a tipsy cat, with merry eyes, behind a glass of wine. In cats he had reached the acme of perfection, but he never tried anything else. If in the picture there were certain accessories besides the cats—foliage, from out of which a pink-tipped nose with gold-coloured eyes and narrow pupils should appear, any drapery, a basket in which were a whole family of kittens with large
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