Among the Pioneers

While still in the entrance hall, Mirkin could hear the sounds of a passionate argument being waged by young voices. Kapluner jumped up and was running out of the room to meet him; he was wearing an unbuttoned school uniform and his hair was tousled.

“Ah! It’s you!” he cried excitedly. “People are gathered here and we’re having an argument. It’s very interesting!”

“Well, read it! Revel in it! And to hell with you! I’ve known for a long time that you were a philistine!” Mirkin heard Geverman’s exclamation of disgust just as he entered the room.

“Who’s the philistine here? Who?” Mirkin asked, looking around with his nearsighted eyes and smiling.

“He is!” cried Geverman shrilly from where he was standing at the window, pointing at the gymnasium student who lay sprawled on the bed, stretched at full length, his hands folded under his head.

“I’m the philistine!” he confirmed serenely, even with a trace of self-satisfaction. “I’m Tsivershtein! Do you understand? I’m a philistine because I’m reading Dostoevsky!”

“We’ll live to see him reading Fet and Maikov!” Geverman continued with indignation.

“Maybe you will live to see it—I’m capable of anything,” Tsivershtein replied to him in his previous serene and sarcastic tone.

“Wait a minute! What are you arguing about?” Mirkin intervened.

“You see,” Kapluner spoke up excitedly. “Tsivershtein maintains that Dostoevsky is higher than Mikhailov.”

“You idiot!” Geverman put in.

“I didn’t say that Dostoevsky is higher than Mikhailov,” Tsivershtein replied, imperturbably as before. “I haven’t measured their height. I said, and I repeat, that Dostoevsky is incomparably more talented than Mikhailov!”

“That’s a lie!” cried Geverman.

“Have you measured their talents? How do you know that?” asked another of the students, the one with a dark face; he was thin, wore glasses, and was pacing the room, his head bowed.

“Dostoevsky? More talented than Mikhailov?” Mirkin said in surprise. “Where did you get that? Why do you think so?”

“Because Dostoevsky’s a great psychologist!” Tsivershtein replied firmly. “Even your Pisarev acknowledges that fact,” he added, emphasizing the word “your.”

“And what does Pisarev say about Pushkin? Pushkin?” a little, very lively student exclaimed gleefully; he seemed so young, in spite of his sixteen years. His kind eyes shone with the plaintive entreaty of a timid pupil who doesn’t know his lesson.

Running up to Mirkin and looking him right in the eye with his woefully imploring glance, he asked in agitation:

“Have you read him? Have you?”

“What?”

“Pisarev’s article, ‘Pushkin and Belinsky’? How he does away with Pushkin’s Onegin? Oy! He calls him brainless! Brainless!” the student whined.

“Wait, Kevesh,” Mirkin shoved him aside lightly; turning to Tsivershtein, he asked insistently:

“Well, and if Dostoevsky is a great psychologist, so what?”

“What do you mean, so what?”

“Just that! What follows from the fact that he’s a great psychologist?”

“I don’t understand you. You can ask the same thing about any great writer—about Shakespeare, about . . .”

“And I do ask! What follows from the fact that they’re great writers?”

“What do you mean? Don’t you experience aesthetic pleasure when you read . . .”

“Aha!” Geverman interrupted him triumphantly. “Did you hear that? ‘Aesthetics’! ‘Pleasure’! That’s why I say you’re a philistine! ‘Pleasure’! Perhaps a roast or a pastry also affords you pleasure! Well, may you choke on them! Go read your Dostoevsky! I don’t seek pleasure in books, nor aesthetics, but substance, real meaning! What use is Crime and Punishment to me? None whatsoever! Whereas Mikhailov’s novel If You Chop Down a Forest, Woodchips Will Fly, and his Rotten Marshes opened my eyes, showed me the path. I, too, was a philistine, a drone, a brainless idiot before I read those books. From them I understood that man must work!”

“Does that mean, in your opinion, that Kirpichnikov’s textbook of Russian grammar is also higher than Shakespeare or Pushkin?” asked Tsivershtein. “After all, it has its uses...