“And that girl,” she began, “I forget her name ... the one who ran away with Nejdanov—what became of her?”
“Mariana? She’s Solomin’s wife now. They married over a year ago. It was merely for the sake of formality at first, but now they say she really is his wife.”
Mashurina gave another impatient gesture. There was a time when she was jealous of Mariana, but now she was indignant with her for having been false to Nejdanov’s memory.
“I suppose they have a baby by now,” she said in an offhanded tone.
“I really don’t know. But where are you off to?” Paklin asked, seeing that she had taken up her hat. “Do stay a little longer; my sister will bring us some tea directly.”
It was not so much that he wanted Mashurina to stay, as that he could not let an opportunity slip by of giving utterance to what had accumulated and was boiling over in his breast. Since his return to St. Petersburg he had seen very little of people, especially of the younger generation. The Nejdanov affair had scared him; he grew more cautious, avoided society, and the young generation on their side looked upon him with suspicion. Once someone had even called him a traitor to his face.
As he was not fond of associating with the elder generation, it sometimes fell to his lot to be silent for weeks. To his sister he could not speak out freely, not because he considered her too stupid to understand him—oh, no! he had the highest opinion of her intelligence—but as soon as he began letting off some of his pet fireworks she would look at him with those sad reproachful eyes of hers, making him feel quite ashamed. And really, how is a man to go through life without letting off just a few squibs every now and again? So life in St. Petersburg became insupportable to Paklin and he longed to remove to Moscow. Speculations of all sorts—ideas, fancies, and sarcasms—were stored up in him like water in a closed mill. The floodgates could not be opened and the water grew stagnant. With the appearance of Mashurina the gates opened wide, and all his pent-up ideas came pouring out with a rush. He talked about St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg life, the whole of Russia. No one was spared! Mashurina was very little interested in all this, but she did not contradict or interrupt, and that was all he wanted of her.
“Yes,” he began, “a fine time we are living in, I can assure you! Society in a state of absolute stagnation; everyone bored to death! As for literature, it’s been reduced to a complete vacuum swept clean! Take criticism for example. If a promising young critic has to say, ‘It’s natural for a hen to lay eggs,’ it takes him at least twenty whole pages to expound this mighty truth, and even then he doesn’t quite manage it! They’re as puffed up as feather-beds, these fine gentlemen, as soft-soapy as can be, and are always in raptures over the merest commonplaces! As for science, ha, ha, ha! we too have our learned Kant!* on the collars of our engineers! And it’s no better in art! You go to a concert and listen to our national singer Agremantsky. Everyone is raving about him. But he has no more voice than a cat! Even Skoropikin, you know, our immortal Aristarchus, rings his praises. ‘Here is something,’ he declares, ‘quite unlike Western art!’ Then he raves about our insignificant painters too! ‘At one time, I bowed down before Europe and the Italians,’ he says, ‘but I’ve heard Rossini and seen Raphael and confess I was not at all impressed.’ And our young men just go about repeating what he says and feel quite satisfied with themselves. And meanwhile the people are dying of hunger, crushed down by taxes. The only reform that has been accomplished is that the men have taken to wearing caps and the women have left off their head-dresses! And the poverty! the drunkenness! the usury!”
* The word kant in Russian means a kind of braid or piping.
But at this point Mashurina yawned and Paklin saw that he must change the subject.