Lights Page #2

"Lives" is a poignant short story by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov that explores the complexities of human emotion and relationships. Set against the backdrop of ordinary life, the narrative delves into the introspections of its characters, revealing their innermost thoughts and struggles. Chekhov masterfully employs his signature style, blending subtle humor with deep pathos, as he examines themes of love, loss, and the fleeting nature of happiness. The story invites readers to reflect on the intricacies of human connections and the quiet moments that define our existence.

								

partiality for these damnable ideas!"

"Good gracious, why are they damnable?" the student asked with a smile,
and from his voice and his face I could see that he asked the question
from simple politeness, and that the discussion raised by the engineer
did not interest him in the least.

I could hardly keep my eyes open. I was dreaming that immediately after
our walk we should wish each other good-night and go to bed, but my
dream was not quickly realised. When we had returned to the hut the
engineer put away the empty bottles and took out of a large wicker
hamper two full ones, and uncorking them, sat down to his work-table
with the evident intention of going on drinking, talking, and working.
Sipping a little from his glass, he made pencil notes on some plans and
went on pointing out to the student that the latter's way of thinking
was not what it should be. The student sat beside him checking accounts
and saying nothing. He, like me, had no inclination to speak or to
listen. That I might not interfere with their work, I sat away from the
table on the engineer's crooked-legged travelling bedstead, feeling
bored and expecting every moment that they would suggest I should go to
bed. It was going on for one o'clock.

Having nothing to do, I watched my new acquaintances. I had never seen
Ananyev or the student before. I had only made their acquaintance on the
night I have described. Late in the evening I was returning on horseback
from a fair to the house of a landowner with whom I was staying, had got
on the wrong road in the dark and lost my way. Going round and round by
the railway line and seeing how dark the night was becoming, I thought
of the "barefoot railway roughs," who lie in wait for travellers on foot
and on horseback, was frightened, and knocked at the first hut I came
to. There I was cordially received by Ananyev and the student. As is
usually the case with strangers casually brought together, we quickly
became acquainted, grew friendly and at first over the tea and afterward
over the wine, began to feel as though we had known each other for
years. At the end of an hour or so, I knew who they were and how fate
had brought them from town to the far-away steppe; and they knew who I
was, what my occupation and my way of thinking.

Nikolay Anastasyevitch Ananyev, the engineer, was a broad-shouldered,
thick-set man, and, judging from his appearance, he had, like Othello,
begun the "descent into the vale of years," and was growing rather too
stout. He was just at that stage which old match-making women mean when
they speak of "a man in the prime of his age," that is, he was neither
young nor old, was fond of good fare, good liquor, and praising the
past, panted a little as he walked, snored loudly when he was asleep,
and in his manner with those surrounding him displayed that calm
imperturbable good humour which is always acquired by decent people by
the time they have reached the grade of a staff officer and begun to
grow stout. His hair and beard were far from being grey, but already,
with a condescension of which he was unconscious, he addressed young men
as "my dear boy" and felt himself entitled to lecture them good-
humouredly about their way of thinking. His movements and his voice were
calm, smooth, and self-confident, as they are in a man who is thoroughly
well aware that he has got his feet firmly planted on the right road,
that he has definite work, a secure living, a settled outlook. . . . His
sunburnt, thick-nosed face and muscular neck seemed to say: "I am well
fed, healthy, satisfied with myself, and the time will come when you
young people too, will be well-fed, healthy, and satisfied with
yourselves. . . ." He was dressed in a cotton shirt with the collar awry
and in full linen trousers thrust into his high boots. From certain
trifles, as for instance, from his coloured worsted girdle, his
embroidered collar, and the patch on his elbow, I was able to guess that
he was married and in all probability tenderly loved by his wife.

Baron Von Schtenberg, a student of the Institute of Transport, was a
young man of about three or four and twenty. Only his fair hair and
scanty beard, and, perhaps, a certain coarseness and frigidity in his
features showed traces of his descent from Barons of the Baltic
provinces; everything else--his name, Mihail Mihailovitch, his religion,
his ideas, his manners, and the expression of his face were purely
Russian. Wearing, like Ananyev, a cotton shirt and high boots, with his
round shoulders, his hair left uncut, and his sunburnt face, he did not
look like a student or a Baron, but like an ordinary Russian workman.
His words and gestures were few, he drank reluctantly without relish,
checked the accounts mechanically, and seemed all the while to be
thinking of something else. His movements and voice were calm, and
smooth too, but his calmness was of a different kind from the
engineer's. His sunburnt, slightly ironical, dreamy face, his eyes which
looked up from under his brows, and his whole figure were expressive of
spiritual stagnatio--mental sloth. He looked as though it did not matter
to him in the least whether the light were burning before him or not,
whether the wine were nice or nasty, and whether the accounts he was
checking were correct or not. . . . And on his intelligent, calm face I
read: "I don't see so far any good in definite work, a secure living,
and a settled outlook. It's all nonsense. I was in Petersburg, now I am
sitting here in this hut, in the autumn I shall go back to Petersburg,
then in the spring here again. . . . What sense there is in all that I
don't know, and no one knows. . . . And so it's no use talking about it.
. . ."

He listened to the engineer without interest, with the condescending
indifference with which cadets in the senior classes listen to an
effusive and good-natured old attendant. It seemed as though there were
nothing new to him in what the engineer said, and that if he had not
himself been too lazy to talk, he would have said something newer and
cleverer. Meanwhile Ananyev would not desist. He had by now laid aside
his good-humoured, jocose tone and spoke seriously, even with a fervour
which was quite out of keeping with his expression of calmness.
Apparently he had no distaste for abstract subjects, was fond of them,
indeed, but had neither skill nor practice in the handling of them. And
this lack of practice was so pronounced in his talk that I did not
always grasp his meaning at once.

"I hate those ideas with all my heart!" he said, "I was infected by them
myself in my youth, I have not quite got rid of them even now, and I
tell you--perhaps because I am stupid and such thoughts were not the
right food for my mind--they did me nothing but harm. That's easy to
understand! Thoughts of the aimlessness of life, of the insignificance
and transitoriness of the visible world, Solomon's 'vanity of vanities'
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