The Darling and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 267 pages of information about The Darling and Other Stories.

The Darling and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 267 pages of information about The Darling and Other Stories.

“Yes, when Russians come together they discuss nothing but abstract subjects and women.  We are so intellectual, so solemn, that we utter nothing but truths and can discuss only questions of a lofty order.  The Russian actor does not know how to be funny; he acts with profundity even in a farce.  We’re just the same:  when we have got to talk of trifles we treat them only from an exalted point of view.  It comes from a lack of boldness, sincerity, and simplicity.  We talk so often about women, I fancy, because we are dissatisfied.  We take too ideal a view of women, and make demands out of all proportion with what reality can give us; we get something utterly different from what we want, and the result is dissatisfaction, shattered hopes, and inward suffering, and if any one is suffering, he’s bound to talk of it.  It does not bore you to go on with this conversation?

“No, not in the least.”

“In that case, allow me to introduce myself,” said my companion, rising from his seat a little: 

“Ivan Ilyitch Shamohin, a Moscow landowner of a sort. . . .  You I know very well.”

He sat down and went on, looking at me with a genuine and friendly expression: 

“A mediocre philosopher, like Max Nordau, would explain these incessant conversations about women as a form of erotic madness, or would put it down to our having been slave-owners and so on; I take quite a different view of it.  I repeat, we are dissatisfied because we are idealists.  We want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and to everything in the world.  When we are young we adore and poeticize those with whom we are in love:  love and happiness with us are synonyms.  Among us in Russia marriage without love is despised, sensuality is ridiculed and inspires repulsion, and the greatest success is enjoyed by those tales and novels in which women are beautiful, poetical, and exalted; and if the Russian has been for years in ecstasies over Raphael’s Madonna, or is eager for the emancipation of women, I assure you there is no affectation about it.  But the trouble is that when we have been married or been intimate with a woman for some two or three years, we begin to feel deceived and disillusioned:  we pair off with others, and again—­disappointment, again—­repulsion, and in the long run we become convinced that women are lying, trivial, fussy, unfair, undeveloped, cruel—­in fact, far from being superior, are immeasurably inferior to us men.  And in our dissatisfaction and disappointment there is nothing left for us but to grumble and talk about what we’ve been so cruelly deceived in.”

While Shamohin was talking I noticed that the Russian language and our Russian surroundings gave him great pleasure.  This was probably because he had been very homesick abroad.  Though he praised the Russians and ascribed to them a rare idealism, he did not disparage foreigners, and that I put down to his credit.  It could be seen, too, that there was some uneasiness in his soul, that he wanted to talk more of himself than of women, and that I was in for a long story in the nature of a confession.  And when we had asked for a bottle of wine and had each of us drunk a glass, this was how he did in fact begin: 

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The Darling and Other Stories from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.