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

of grownups; and even his father had himself presented him with a leather cigar case, with his monogram, and also, in the elevation of family joy, had assigned him a monthly allowance of fifteen roubles.

And it was just here⁠—at Anna Markovna’s⁠—that he had come to know woman for the first time⁠—the very same Jennka.

The fall of innocent souls in houses of ill-fame, or with street solitaries, is fulfilled far more frequently than it is usually thought. When not green youths only, but even honourable men of fifty, almost grandfathers, are interrogated about this ticklish matter, they will tell you, sure enough, the ancient stencilled lie of how they had been seduced by a chambermaid or a governess. But this is one of those lingering, queer lies, going back into the depth of past decades, which are almost never noticed by a single one of the professional observers, and in any case are not described by anyone.

If each one of us will try, to put it pompously, to put his hand on his heart, then everyone will catch himself in the fact, that having once in childhood said some sort of boastful or touching fiction, which met with success, and having repeated it for that reason two and five and ten times more⁠—one afterwards cannot get rid of it all his life, and repeats with entire firmness by now a history which had never taken place⁠—a firmness such that in the very end one believes the story. With time Kolya also narrated to his comrades how his aunt once removed, a young woman of the world had seduced him. It must be said, however, that the intimate proximity to this lady⁠—a large, dark-eyed, white faced, sweetly fragrant southern woman⁠—did really exist; but existed only in Kolya’s imagination, in those sad, tragic and timid minutes of solitary sexual enjoyments, through which pass if not a hundred percent of all men, then ninety-nine, in any case.

Having experienced mechanical sexual excitements very early, approximately since nine or nine years and a half, Kolya did not at all have the least understanding of the significance of that end of being in love, or of courtship, which is so horrible on the face of it, if it be looked at in cold blood, or if it be explained scientifically. Unfortunately, there was at that time near him not a one of the present-day progressive and learned ladies who, having turned away the neck of the classic stork, and torn up by the roots the cabbage underneath which children are found, recommend that the great mystery of love and generation be explained to children in lectures, through comparisons and assimilations, mercilessly and in a well-nigh graphic manner.

It must be said, that at that remote time of which we are speaking, the private institutions⁠—male pensions and institutes, as well as academies for cadets⁠—represented some sort of hothouse nurseries. The care of the mind and morality they tried to entrust as much as possible to educators who were bureaucrats-formalists; and in addition impatient, captious, capricious in their sympathies and hysterical, just like old maid lady teachers. Now it is otherwise. But at that time the boys were left to themselves. Barely snatched away, speaking figuratively, from the maternal breast; from the care of devoted nurses; from morning and evening caresses, quiet and sweet; even though they were ashamed of every manifestation of tenderness as “womanishness,” they were still irresistibly and sweetly drawn to kisses, contacts, conversations whispered in the ear.

Of course, attentive, solicitous treatment, bathing, exercises in the open air⁠—precisely not gymnastics, but voluntary exercises, each to his own taste⁠—could have always put off the coming of this climacteric period, or soften and make it understandable.

I repeat⁠—then there was nothing of this.

The longing for family endearment, the endearment of mother, sister, nurse, so roughly and unexpectedly cut short, turned into deformed forms of courting (every whit like the “crushes” in a female institute) good-looking boys, of “fairies”; they loved to whisper in corners and, walking arm in arm, or embracing in dark corridors, to tell in each other’s ears improbable histories of adventures with women. This was partly both childhood’s need of the fairytale element and partly awakening sensuality as well. Not infrequently some fifteen-year-old chubby, for whom it was just the proper time to be playing at ping-pong or to be greedily putting away buckwheat porridge with milk, would be telling, having read up, of course, on certain cheap novels, of how every Saturday, now, when it is leave, he goes to a certain handsome widow millionairess; and of how she is passionately enamored of him; and how near their couch always stand fruits and precious wine; and how furiously and passionately she makes love to him.

Here, by the by, came along the inevitable run of prolonged reading, like hard drinking, which, of course, every boy and girl has undergone. No matter how strict in this respect the class surveillance may be, the striplings did read, are reading, and will read just that which is not permitted them. Here is a special passion, chic, the allurement of the forbidden. Already in the third class went from hand to hand the manuscript transcripts of Barkov; of a spurious Pushkin; the youthful sins of Lermontov and others: “The First Night,” “The Cherry,” “Lucas,” “The Festival at Peterhof,” “The She Uhlan,” “Grief Through Wisdom” (a parody of the classic⁠—not the classic itself), “The Priest,” etc.

But no matter how strange, fictitious, or paradoxical this may seem, still, even these compositions, and drawings, and obscene photographic cards, did not arouse a delightful curiosity. They were looked upon as a prank, a lark, and the allurement of contraband risk. In the cadets’ library were chaste excerpts from Pushkin and Lermontov; all of Ostrovsky, who only made you laugh; and almost all of Turgenev, who was the very one that played a chief and cruel role in Kolya’s life. As it is known, love with the late great Turgenev is always surrounded with a tantalizing