Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

This science of life he made the subject of a separate course of study, to which he admitted only the most excellent. Those of small ability he let go into government service after the first year, maintaining that there was no need to torment them too much: it was enough for them if they learned to be patient, industrious workers, without acquiring presumptuousness or any long-range views. "But with the clever ones, the gifted ones, I must take a lot more trouble," he used to say. And in this course he became a totally different Alexander Petrovich, who from the first announced to them that so far he had demanded simple intelligence from them, but now he would demand a higher intelligence. Not the intelligence that knows how to taunt a fool and laugh at him, but one that knows how to endure any insult, ignore the fool—and not become irritated. It was here that he started to demand what others demand of children. It was this that he called the highest degree of intelligence! To preserve the lofty calm in which man must abide eternally amid any griefs whatever—it was this that he called intelligence! It was in this course that Alexander Petrovich showed that he indeed knew the science of life. Of subjects those alone were selected which were able to form a man into a citizen of his country. The majority of the lectures consisted of accounts of what lay ahead for a man in all careers and steps of government service and private occupations. All the troubles and obstacles that could be set up on a man's path, all the temptations and seductions lying in wait for him, he gathered before them in all their nakedness, concealing nothing. Everything was known to him, just as if he himself had filled every rank and post. In short, what he outlined for them was not at all a bright future. Strangely enough, whether because ambition was already so strongly awakened in them, or because there was something in the very eyes of their extraordinary mentor that said to a young man: Forward!— that word which produces such miracles in the Russian man—in any case, the young men sought only difficulties from the very start, longing to act only where it was difficult, where one had to show great strength of soul. There was something sober in their life. Alexander Petrovich did all sorts of experiments and tests with them, inflicting palpable insults on them either himself or by means of their comrades, but, perceiving as much, they would become still more prudent. Few finished this course, but those few were stalwarts, people who had been under fire. In the service they held out in the most unstable posts, while many far more intelligent men, not able to endure, quit the service on account of petty personal troubles, quit altogether, or, quite unawares, wound up in the hands of bribe takers and crooks. But those educated by Alexander Petrovich not only did not waver, but, wise in their knowledge of man and the soul, acquired a lofty moral influence even over the bribe takers and bad people.

But poor Andrei Ivanovich did not manage to taste this learning. He had just been deemed worthy of moving on to this higher course as one of the very best, and suddenly—disaster; the extraordinary mentor, from whom one word of approval sent him into sweet tremors, unexpectedly died. Everything changed at the school: to replace Alexander Petrovich there came a certain Fyodor Ivanovich, a man both kind and diligent, but with a totally different view of things. He imagined something unbridled in the free casualness of the children in the first course. He began to introduce certain external rules among them, demanded that the young men remain somehow mutely silent, that they never walk otherwise than in pairs. He himself even began to measure the distance between pairs with a yardstick. At table, to improve appearances, he seated them all by height rather than by intelligence, so that the asses got the best portions, and the clever got only scraps. All this caused murmuring, especially when the new head, as if in defiance of his predecessor, announced that intelligence and success in studies meant nothing to him, that he looked only at conduct, that even if a person was a poor student, if his conduct was good, he would prefer him to a clever one. But Fyodor Ivanovich did not get exactly what he wanted. Secret pranks started, which, as everyone knows, are worse than open ones. Everything was tip-top during the day, but at night—a spree.

In his manner of teaching subjects he turned everything upside down. With the best intentions, he introduced all sorts of novelties—all of them inappropriate. He brought in new teachers with new opinions and new points of view. They taught learnedly, showered their listeners with a host of new words and terms. One could see the logical connection and the conformity with new discoveries, but, alas! there was simply no life in the subject itself. It all seemed like carrion in the eyes of listeners who had already begun to have some understanding. Everything was inside out. But the worst thing was the loss of respect for their superiors and for authority: they began to mock both mentors and teachers; the director came to be called Fedka, Breadroll, and various other names; such things got started that many boys had to be expelled and thrown out.

Andrei Ivanovich was of a quiet disposition. He did not participate in the nighttime orgies of his comrades, who, despite the strictest supervision, had got themselves a mistress on the side— one for eight of them—nor in other pranks that went as far as blasphemy and the mockery of religion itself, only because the director demanded frequent attendance at church and the priest happened to be a bad one. But he was downcast. Ambition had been strongly awakened in him, but there was no activity or career before him. It would have been better for him not to be awakened! He listened to the professors getting excited at the podium, and remembered his former mentor, who had known how to speak clearly without getting excited. He heard lectures in chemistry and the philosophy of law, and profound professorial analyses of all the subtleties of political science, and the universal history of mankind on such an enormous scale that in three years the professor managed only to give an introduction and to speak on the development of communes in some German cities; but all this remained as some sort of misshapen scraps in his head. Thanks to his natural intelligence, he simply felt that that was not how to teach, but how to teach—he did not know. And he often remembered Alexander Petrovich, and it made him so sad that he did not know where to turn for sorrow.

But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: "This is still not life, this is only the preparation for life: real life is in the service. The great deeds are there." And without even a glance at the beautiful corner that so struck every visiting guest, without paying respects to his parents' remains, following the pattern of all ambitious men, he raced off to Petersburg, where, as is well known, our ardent youth flock from all ends of Russia—to serve, to shine, to make careers, or simply to skim the surface of our colorless, ice-cold, delusive higher education. Andrei Ivanovich's ambition was, however, brought up short from the very beginning by his uncle, the actual state councillor Onufry Ivanovich. He announced that the chief thing is good handwriting, that and nothing else, and without it one can become neither a minister nor a state councillor, whereas Tentetnikov's handwriting was the sort of which people say: "A magpie wrote it with her claw, and not a man."

With great difficulty, and with the help of his uncle's connections, after spending two months studying calligraphy, he finally found a position as a copying clerk in some department. When he entered the big, bright room, all filled with writing gentlemen, sitting at lacquered desks, scratching with their quills, and tilting their heads to one side, and when he himself was seated and straightaway handed some document to copy—an extraordinarily strange feeling came over him. For a moment it seemed to him that he was at some primary school, starting to learn his ABCs over again, as if on account of some delinquency he had been transferred from the upper grade to the lowest. The gentlemen sitting around him seemed to him so like pupils. Some of them were reading novels, holding them between the big pages of the case in hand, pretending to be busy with it and at the same time giving a start each time a superior appeared. His schooldays suddenly stood before him as an irretrievably lost paradise. So lofty did his studies suddenly become compared with this petty writing occupation. How much higher that school preparation for the service now seemed to him than the service itself. And suddenly in his thoughts Alexander Petrovich stood before him as if alive—his wonderful mentor, incomparable with anyone else, irreplaceable by anyone else—and tears suddenly poured in streams from his eyes. The room spun, the desks moved, the officials all mixed together, and he almost fell down in a momentary blackout. "No," he said to himself, recovering, "I'll set to work, however petty it seems at the start!" Harnessing his heart and spirit, he resolved to serve on the example of the others.