7_n^C>llllllmSmSmSmg mq"mm<mxmSnG ngn}*nl The Study By the windows: a wiped worn, professorial desk with a very discolored gray-green cloth, sit upon by bundles of books; here a big inkpot had settled down potbellied; here had fallen: pencils, pencil stubs, compasses, protractors, erasers; a lamp: the green metal had blackened, and the lampshadehad blossomed; scattered about were little leaves of paper and letters with French, Russian, Swedish, American stamps, packets of notices, torn wrappers, unsealed and unslit brochures, booklets and little books from Lang, Gauthier and others; they constituted enormous piles, threatening frequent collapse, which were transferred to the floor, under the desk and onto the window sills, from where they were rising ever higher, extinguishing the light of day and throwing a sullen dusk onto the floor, in order to give themselves up to shelves and little shelves, or jump up onto the bookcase, very tightly stuffed with brown bookcovers and to sow densely with dust the wiped off chocolate colored wallpaper, andgray Papochka; he would sit in his gray flappy mantle, squeaking his chair and dropping his calculating nose into the cloth,where with a strain he would blurt out in a whisper: En, em, es! starting to sharpen a pencil stub; from where in the dust, in a cobweb and in little leaves of paper he sent out little whispers and his letters to Mittag-Lefler, Poincar or Klein and others, growing fiercer and entreating Dunyasha and Mama to leave the papers in peace: Dont mess me up, you know But the dust, sir,you see No, leave it be: dont you know, each little paper isa document: put it somewhere else,youll never find anything From here he would stand up; and scatterbrainedly walk through the corridor, the dining room; and he ended up in the drawing room; stopping before the mirror, as if not seeing himself, he would stand and trace with a finger signs in the air; by chance having glimpsed the self before himself, he would imbibe himself rather bestially, placing two fingers under his spectacles; and he could not tear himself away, he could not tear himself away from the ridiculously constructed head, fullweighted, crushing and flattening Papa (seemed to be square, did he) and which contemplated from under the glasses of the spectacles with deeply squatting, small, very slanted little eyes, an obtusely arranged nose; he would then smooth this fullcheeked face with a fullbodied hand; having turned, he would try to glimpse his own personal profile (and the profile was Scythian), stern, curlybearded, seeming bestial; he is so laughable: yes his house jacket had been shortened; it ends above the waistcoat; the jacket is puffed out ever so widely; the pantaloons are pulled out of shape; he moves his shoulders, correcting and pulling up the suspenders; he pulls them upthey fall down; in this jacket of his, like in a sack, he can easily turn around and around to the right, to the left; and it seems that the jacket has been put on aslant; and because of thisthere is something of a slant to Papochka; he was slanted by the jacket; very often he would slant his arms; and he would put his foot on the floor more heavily than he should have. I remember, it used to be, he stands such a bigheaded one, thrust into the hard beardthe fingers of one hand, and his tin spectacles raised to his brow, the brow bent to one side with savagery, a brow slit through with a crease, as if resolving on some terrible act; he would drum with his hand on the door; and the torso had been turned over by the stomach somehow slanting down from the shoulders; the legs are also placed aslant; he is so heavy and bulky from this displacement of the axles; he stands: banging his fin-gers against the door, he grows savage; andhe whispers to himself, whispers, whispers; I am terrified, terrified: there is something here of ones own. Ah, now what have you doneMama cries out to him as she passes by with the keys; she is going to the wardrobefor a corsage, the raspberry, plush one, andfor the matching skirt. Papochka here undergoes a change; he thrusts out his head and winks at Mamochka with timid little eyes, as if he had been uncovered in the act: Its just me! Nothing much So! He drums his feet to the study, such a slanteyed one: Yes, go to your room! Do some calculating! He stumbles over the words, scatterbrainedly having turned his goodspirited-scatterbrained somehow doggy countenance, and he looks over the eyes of the raised glasses (of the spectacles). Yes Im already doing so, my Lizok calculating And Mama indicates with a smile: Eccentric. And bustlingly jangling the keys, she goes for the raspberry, plush, ball corsage, for the plush skirt; the lace is black; no sleeves; on the breasta big slit; she is bare-armed and barebreasted, having densely powdered her little head and placed in her hair an egret,somehow grayhairedshe is going out to dance and whirl about in the enormous grande-ronde. And Papa again falls over the long discolored gray-green cloth to calculate, drinking up the ink of the inkpotin little leaves of paper, pencils, pencil stubs, protractors and booklets: he calculates all about, waves his arms about, leaps up, begins to run about in the little cobwebs, shaking all over; he jumps up blurting out a whisper En, em, es: ah! knocking into a pile of books: Ive smashed it: ugh, what a diabolical mess! Deep in concentration he suddenly starts to sharpen a pencil stub, trying to turn its tip into a mere point: then silence sets in; afterwards the ohs and ahs rise again on the properties of some sort of world, of another one, not of ours; I observed, how he would pace boomingly back and forth, his shaggy head hung somehow bitterly and tartly, hanging down to the right and staring at the even shelves of brown bookspines from under his brow, as though he were doing an inspection of them; he always pressed to his breast his right hand with a pencil stub, throwing into the air his waving left hand and he stuck out two fingers against the background of chocolate-colored wallpaper; and suddenly he began to shine so gently with goodness, when the contours of a new calculation ef, ex arose before him; they had reported on it at the Sorbonne; the French mathematician Darboux had exchanged impressions about it with Papochka, and Chebyshevhad trembled. I know that scorpions bred herenot malicious ones, but bookish ones; Papa once showed me a scorpion, having grabbed me as I was passing by; he pressed me up against the bookcase; and opening an enormous and smelly folio: a volume of Lagrange, he placed it up under my nose; he showed me a little scorpion, rather satisfied with this event. Hee-hee Hee-hee-hee! he passed sentence upon it, catching it on a page of Lagrange with his big index finger. Hee-heeand his face began to wrinkle up with wrinkleshumoristically, almost sarcastically, but goodspirited and joyfully: Ah you, look here: you know its crawling, the rascal is crawling! And having winked at me with his little Tatar eyes, he pronounced in a respectful whisper. Do you know, Kotenka, he eats microbes: a useful beast. Yes! I make out the little scorpion on the page of Lagrange; it istiny, it crawls, it destroys microbes; a useful rascal! And Papa, having slammed shut the useful rascal, takes it away to the bookcase; andthere came the smell of antonovka (he used to buy these antonovka apples, and bestow on us gifts of antonovka at dinner). Once a year, donning a dressing gown, he raised pillars of dust with a filthy rag, sneezing and coughing; here he bore out what was unnecessary to coffee-colored bookcases, filling even the width of the corridor (between the nursery), attempting with the bookcases to burst into the nursery upon us and block up the exit all together: to cork us up with books; and now and then he would set out with Dunyasha and the yardman for the pantry, bearing all of the excess of this accumulated mass; but Anton, our yardman, having taken the keys to the pantry, and having entered into an agreement with a swindler, would drag the books out; Papas books were still being traded after his death by second-hand booksellers in Moscow. Yes, yes. On the bookcases rose multihumped book piles, draped with green material,dusty, like everything else; amid them was situated a little bed, which squeaked, with a hard little mattress and little blanket of the same chocolate color as everything else; two slippers stuck out as did a multitude of boots gray from the dust, which struck me by the rustyish-uncleaned look of their topsamid the barbells,raised by Papa with a strain: One! Two!.. . . . . . . Sixteen! (he suffered from constipation) the bookcases mul-tiplied; andnew ones were set up, in the sad years overgrowing the bed (at the head, and at the sides, and at the foot!), imaging a room within a room with a narrow passage, to which our Papa would retire: to lie down with a book: it used to be: you go,and you glimpse: in a gradation of soft tones of chocolate, gray-coffee, gray, gray-green color he lies on the bed with his spectacles on his brow, closing his eyes, his weary hand (with a turned open little volume) dropped to his breast; the other hand hangs somehow forcelessly from the bed; he lies grown gray and pale, in wrinkles; and here he seems older than he should (in general he looks younger than he should: he will be fifty!) And you think: Papochka Or: you glimpse: he lies undressed on his side, tucked up, his knees pressed in and his bent body drawn in detail; the head has withdrawn under the blanket; only the nose sticks out and a piece of beard (this was he resting, having dined); andyou say: Tea is served, Papa! He leaps up; sits on the bed, forcefully he wipes his eyes with his fist, fussing, trembling under his spectacles: Ah, ah! . . . . . . . Yes, the brazen book threatened the drawing room; as if it were all together an afterthought; oppressed by the collapses of books, Papa came up with the thought to erect a bookshelf: straight into the drawing room. Ai, what happened then! Having glimpsed the shelf, Mama clasped her hands; and her little face grew thin all over from the tedium; andit tossed itself straight into ones eyes; and her face stood up in one sheer stare, nagging: Out! This junk? In here? Out-out-out! Papa whispered something of ones own relative to the shelf, methodically slicing his own phrases in the air with a paperknife, which he bore everywhere with him, just like a book, so that his opinion relative to the shelf would lay down before us as obviously as an open book: Well then But at this how Mama would begin to stamp her foot: Out! Disorder! Youre spreading the dust. If you want to spread dust, then hold onto it in your own room! Yes I knew, that well then, like all of Papas revelations, would be quickly sent off by Mama: to the pantryto gather dust, from where they withdrew to the second-hand booksellers! The unfortunate bookshelf flew impetuously back into the study: we feared a movement of little volumes from the north-west corner, where the study cooled off,to the south-east, where the receiving rooms were resplendent in arrogant booklessness; a stretched out book row, multivolumed, elbowshaped, long, like a tentacle, was trying, having opened the door, to spill over everywhere with volumes, to curl around everything else; often it seemed, that Papa, like an octopus, had thrown out from himself his multilegs from the book rows and he catches us, clutching for an arm, for a leg with a voluminous little volume, trying to force everything to become bookish: it used to be, he is always walking after Mama and always collecting himself to give rational counsel, to convince her of the means, flowing out of Papas point of view; but the rational counsel of his seems to Mamochka, Granny, Dotya, Dunyasha and me merely a verbal kite, let into the heavens like a page of a little volume: I saw paper kites jerking in the heavens a tail of bast; We jerk back our necks: we dont understand anything; where does all this of Papas live and flyin the heavens? But all this is called: giving rational counsel. Or the means: means were always being pro-posed by him for everything; and it seemed to Mamochka, Granny, Dotya, Dunyasha and me: if we would start to apply these means to life, The Society for the Propagation of Technical Accomplishments would have immediately opened at our place, with Papa being made the founder of the society; and the secretary would sit in the dining room and write down the minutes, and we would have died of tedium. Points of view: how he could develop points of view, so that his little eyes would become imperceptible points of view; what would come of them? He would begin to speak at the table about his own points of view; he begins to speak and he doesnt eat: he slices his cutlets with thoughts, chews words; thus he spends the main course dinner after dinner; and all this is called intellectuality; and this intellectuality towers on high, like a brow (an enormous brow: Mamochka when things were tedious called him bigbrow); thisabstract opinion, no,she could not endure it: Mikhail Vasilich, you should go to your room: you should set off to the club. And the abstract opinion, having stood up from the table, banging his chair, trying to be quiet, exits and asks Dunyasha to brush off his frock coat (the floor boards have already screeched with cruel squeaks; Papa, trying to be quiet, collects himself to go to the club). He puts on the frock coat which isnt a frock coatits a lapserdak (he dresses not as one should, but according to his own personal means); the lapserdak trails almost to the floor, it doesnt fit right on the breast; he fastened itbang, it burst open: threads dangle, a handkerchief hangs out like a coattail, and the collar is rolled up and twisted in the impatience of quickly putting it on his shoulders; on the other hand: the little jacket had been shortened, ending above the waistcoat and puffed out horribly. And nonetheless Papochka walks after Mamochka with a little volume, andhe preaches the means, thought of by him,there, in the study from where he exits anew and anewto give us counsel, on how to live and what to do: his word strikes like a ton of bricks; Mamas eyes widened from the horror of the tedium, and she grabs with her hand for the guttapercha sphere; and "pss"she wants to spray the pine stream of the atomizer; butthe atomizer does not work; and mathematics hangs densely in the air; our Papa isa Scythian; he does not like perfumy spirits, saying of perfume: I dont need it: I dont reek of anything, but all the same he smells: of antonovka, halfdamped stearin candle and dust; now and then of all of them at once; nor does he hear music; it is with music that Mamochka struggles with Papochka; he is always attempting to facet the means of life; and to limit us, to cut us down to size into facets, but not like those clear bright facets on Mamas luminous earrings: but with abstract facets or limits (we do not understand them: Mama, Granny, Dotya, Dunyasha and I); Mama immediately sits down to play the piano; and Papa, having brought out for us a little volume of French thinkers, immediately bears off the voluminous little volume in which is laid out for us the rational clarity, which he once attempted to thrust into the drawing room: there is no bookshelf; andthere wont be one! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We struggled with the elbowshaped row of volumes, spread by enormous rapidly rusting masses. There is nothing to be done; having pulled on his dressing gown, sneezing, coughing, Papa grunting and groaning would stand up on the squeaking, longtime rocky chair: to conduct the sorting of the volumes destined to enter the storeroom; it seemed: the pressure of the little volumes would burst the study apart; Papa in a white shirt, with a candle in hand and with a turned open volume of Sophus Lie would fall from the brokenthrough wall onto the bed toward Henrietta Martynovna, in order to continue his reading. But the study still held out; andstrange to say: Mama placed a washstand there; she would exit splashing and spraying soap and water on the books: but nothing disturbed Papa from blurting out in a whisper exes and wyes thunderously passing by the nursery with a lighted candle and a little volume of Sophus Lie through the corridorinto that dark little room, where quite often the sounds of water flushing burst forth stormily, where I had not been, from where they brought me a bedpan, where quite often Papa used to sit with a lighted candle and a little volume of Sophus Lie; quite often the pipes were clogged up; and Papa went to pour a dark-red liquid and halt the undignified smells: such a means succeeded; and black little sticks, it seems, of potassium permanganate stood on the bookshelf amid volumes of mathematics: yes, he spread words, just like black little sticks of potassium permanganate, instantaneously eliminating the foul smell of words with a genteel tendency Our Papa was an altruist in the highest sense: now and then: there were so many egoistic smells in the dark little room, that the besmeared plumber, rattling his boots, would pass by on the way there; and he would drag out strange parts: both pipes and little basins; Papa with his candle used to inquire of him then, what, strictly speaking, did the damage consist of; it seemed then: Papa is nearing his aim; and The Society for the Propagation of Technical Accomplishments would rise up right here in front of the dark room; the plumber would be the president of the society: Papa would take his minutes: Papa was not allowed to take minutes in the drawing room! . . . . . . . . He was dear to me also at those times, when he would make himself resemble a bigheaded gnome: he used to turn to us with his head withdrawn into his sloping shoulders; andstare very intently, almost sucking in his lip, emitting a special sound through his lips of sifted air vvvsss, as though he wanted to say something; instead he would wink and, turning his head, stomp off to his study, like to a remote deaf cave. . . . . . Now and then I fasten my gaze on Papas, very big, ruddy, some-what full face, framed by a not so large, curly, chestnut beard; the years had made their mark on it with distinct streaks of gray; this face seems especially tender to me (how often I fear it), fullweighted, crushing and flattening Papa; it was ridiculously constructed; yes, the whole head was ridiculously constructed with a very-very big protruding brow and with deeply squatted, small, very slanted little eyes, like those of a Tatar; the little eyes, like arrows: they are sent out to the interlocuter, they prick like safety pins: they seem to be dark brown; or they run about, spin like little wheels: they seem to be gray: but, all out of breath, they stumble upon a new thought, smile, bluening and overflowing with superlative goodness, like the heavens enlightening behind the clouds. There is thunderin the beard, under the mustache, in the mouth: the beard and mustache: he has them trimmed, he returns with a not so large beard which has become doubly prickly, with a neck which has become fuller, with a face grown smaller,he seems so bestial, so fanatical the mouth: wide, thrust forward by the upper lips, eating on the lower lip, concealed by the stubble of the sternly hanging mustache, which is hard and prickly kissing me; so it seems, the mouth bursts apart into a simplistic, natural bark: All this, my Kotenka,yes-yes-yes-yes: is idle babble, babblethe babble of liberals (it isa Scythian, not a Westerner: the mouth); and it goes, baring its fists, this mouth, to press down upon the babbler; Papa collapses his breast, withdraws his neck into his crumpled collar running up to meet his head, he lets the whole head down below his shoulders, just like a bull (the nose hangs on his clavicle; the spectacles seat themselves apart); and above the browa tuft of hair; the little eyes filled with blood begin to run about unpleasantly, a red vein traces itself on the neck andhow it beats: Pardon me, old chap, you are talking nonsense! You should read Kant, Spinoza and Leibniz! and the liberal babbler lets out a bon mot: A most horrible debater! Once some students asked me at a lecture: Who is that savage eccentric? I answered: Professor Letaev. A most horrible debater! the mouth isa debater! But the mouth bursts into a laugh: andthis dear face is covered with a distinct prominent wrinkle, arranged to the right and to the left of the nose and puffing out the cheeks with bumps; the white, strong teeth, on which Papa prides himself, show themselves; a big, curved, but wide gooselike nose separates, like an old scoffer, spreading his arms apart at his wide sidesthe nostrils; andhere-here-here it begins to jump about, like a lively frog: And Papa becomes a ruddy prankster, like a satyr; he should put ivy on his head (it may be he has little hooves); a handkerchief hangs down behind: a satyrical tail exactly! He stuck out his head and looks at a little fly, flying downward from the ceiling: A little fly is, you knowafter all, like a little bird: a magnificent little machine; Professor Zhukovsky could not complicate such a little machine. Andwith a hee-hee-hee-heehe steals up with his full, bent palm, to the little machine cleaning its paws. Andtsap-tsarap: the little fly sitsin his fist The noseis an entertainer: the spectacles: they gleam quite sternly; he speaks, he raises the spectacles on words, precisely propping them up from below with his trembling fingers; his hands tremble from excitement; savage well-defined creases slice through all of the brow, collecting in a little wisp above the nose. Afterwards he is smoothed out, he reclines: having grown in goodness all over, he shines; and he sits quietly, in great tendernessthus: neither this way nor that: bigbrowed, bespectacled, with a fallen lock on his brow, a let-down little shoulder falling somehow slantingly to the right to the side; andpulling the other shoulder straight up to the ear, drawing in the hands of his completely calmed arms toward himself under the cuffs; he had shouted to his hearts content; andhe sits quietly, in great tenderness,thus, neither this way nor that; he smiles clearly, ever so quietly to himself and to everything there is, re-calling a Chinese wiseman who has mastered the wisdom of the I ching, spreading subtle smells of tea and ripe antonovka apples: strange: for here in the study it smells sooner of an old book, papers, dust, now and then of sealing wax; then where does the smell of antonovka apples come from? after the scandals and the arguments this smell fell away; and it smelled naturally: of dust. . . . . . Sunset! In the distance the horizons were pillared by a strengthening smoke; everywhere pillars hang motionlessly; hardly overhanging, barely moving, not falling a drop; and the heavens are no longer the heavens; what can be yellower? Simply some sort of canarium? and Papochka isillumined by the heavens, enlightened by the spirit! In the completely turquoise heavens singing luminaries come clearly to life out of the cloudwith a cry: in a cherry one; they go out: and it became stern, and became lilac: exactly like a symphony, where humor taking to its wings, flowing together with tears into a crystal little lake, raises up resounding songs of seethrough icebergs and crystals: you know not what it is: crystallography, music?  The Christened Chinaman The Study  vxt to the side; andpulling; andhe sits quietly, in greatis, re-calling a Chinese wiseman nds of his completely calmed /////00 01i12)2.2:2v334 444445H5O5W5g5577B!B%B*B.DDE#E*FG'RRVgVvZ[_C_L_M_N_e_f_g_n_q_z_{_|_}_~____@@X@G  #" 9 @ XƸޣvl`TH?? h  h|  h  h  h  h t h  h hh  h  h $  h8  h h  h-AO%OA ,fm!!#H#O#X#f#r#$$&h&x&&''($(.(>徾v  h  h  h  h  h  h8 hh  h h h h h+(>).)****.+G+T++++,/X0013D68:<7>>ASǻypg[RI  h   h   h   hT  h  h  h h  h  h h h h h hASD DE5EvGGHIIM#M}N>NLQR<RrRRRRRTVWW1XH[?[ĻIJ֦Ļvj^R  d  h|  h @    h  h  h  hX  h h h  h h  h  h  h[\F\[\d]g]_C_D_E_F_G_H_I_J_K_L_f_g_h_i_j_k_l_m_n_o_p_}_~____ʿ   @   @ `    @ `   @        h h h  h t A    ^_1!Y(./9/C KS\g^PEV Y & B $;=@_0(>AS[_12345 xyz{HH(FG(HH(d'@=/ @ @H -:LaserWriter +IC-?YY Y