In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

✦ 195 ✦ 17 The Brother Berthold Schwartz Dormitory the dim moscow sky was stuccoed in clouds along the horizon. Streetcars turning corners squealed so naturally that it seemed as if it weren’t the streetcar squealing but the conductor himself, squashed up by crowds of government workers against the sign smoking and spitting are forbidden. Smoking and spitting were forbidden, but elbowing the conductor in the stomach, breathing in his ear, and getting on his case for no reason at all were obviously not forbidden, and everyone rushed to take advantage of this. It was a critical hour. Earthly and unearthly creatures were hurrying to work. A ragtag bunch of little birds covered in the first dust of May was raising a ruckus in the trees. At the House of Nations the streetcars let their citizens out and, relieved, sped farther on their way. Office workers approached the House of Nations from three directions and disappeared into three entrances. The building was a large white five-story square, sliced through with a thousand windows. The feet of secretaries, typists, executive officers, shipping agents with their paperwork, reporters, couriers, and poets all tramped along the floors and hallways. With the exception of the poets, the entire workforce slowly started conducting its usual, necessary business. The poets were taking their poems around to all the various specialized magazines ’ editorial offices. The House of Nations was rich in offices and office workers. It had more offices than a provincial town has buildings. The editorial and business offices of the big daily newspaper The Lathe took up an entire verst of the second-floor hallway. The windows of the editorial office looked out over the inside courtyard, where a close-cropped physical culture enthusiast in sky-blue trunks and soft shoes was running around the ring of the athletic field, training for a race. His white legs, still untanned, flashed between the trees. Short skirmishes were taking place between editorial office employees. They were clarifying who would get to take vacation when. Each and every one cried, “The velvet season,” thus expressing the desire to go on vacation only in August. As soon as the chairman of the local labor union committee had been driven to exhaustion by these claims, Persitsky, a reporter , tore himself away from the telephone on which he was inquiring about the achievements of the joint-stock company Merinos and announced, “I’m not going in August. Write me down for June. August is malaria season.” “Well, that’s good,” said the chairman. But then all the other employees also switched their sympathies to June. The chairman, annoyed, tossed the list aside and left. The fashionable writer Agafon Shakhov drove up to the House of Nations in a horse-cab. The alcohol thermometer mounted on the wall showed sixty-four degrees, but Shakhov wore a shaggy three-season coat, a white muffler, an astrakhan hat touched with gray, and big galoshes. Agafon Shakhov guarded his health solicitously. Agafon Shakhov’s meatball-shaped beard was the finest ornament of his face. His full cheeks, the color of a salmon steak, were handsome. His eyes gleamed almost wisely. The writer was 196 ✦ in moscow getting on for forty. He’d been writing and publishing since he was fifteen, but real fame had only come the year before last. It had begun when Agafon Shakhov took to writing psychological novels and bringing a variety of problems before his readers for judgment. Problems in nice covers, with dedications on a special page (“To Soviet youth”; “Dedicated to students of Moscow’s institutes of higher education”; “To young women”) flashed before his readers, particularly female ones. The problems were as follows: gender and marriage, marriage and love, love and gender, gender and jealousy, jealousy and love, marriage and jealousy. The novels, sprinkled with a small dose of Soviet ideology, enjoyed widespread sales. Ever since, Shakhov had taken to saying that students liked him. However, subsisting perpetually on marriage and jealousy turned out to be difficult . Critics started nagging, drawing the writer’s attention to the narrow range of his themes. Shakhov grew alarmed. He buried himself in newspapers. He was in such fear that he was about to sit down to write a novel illustrating the reduction of overhead expenses, and even wrote eighty pages in three days. But he couldn’t fit a single word about the reduction of overhead expenses into the description of the amorous fix the manager had gotten himself into with...

Share