The Damaged One

…When I arrived at the hotel, it was already very hot outside. I sat on the balcony. Before my eyes stretched a long thread of sun-scorched road; it ran along the sea itself, on a narrow ledge skirting the mountain. Mules, ringing their bells and decorated with red tassels, carried barrels of wine, carefully stepping from foot to foot; their slow procession was disturbed by a stagecoach; the postilion cracked his whip and shouted, the mules pressed against the rocky wall, the drivers swore, the coach covered with thick layers of dust drew closer and closer and stopped beneath the balcony where I sat. The postilion jumped from his horse and began to unhitch; the fat innkeeper in a national guard cap opened the door and twice addressed those sitting in the coach with a princely title before the servant who had been sleeping on the box came to himself and, stretching, got down to the ground.

“Only Russian servants sleep on the box like that and stretch so appetizingly,” I thought, and looked intently at his face; his light-brown mustache turned dirty brown from dust, his broad nose, the sideburns let straight into the mustache at mid-face, and the special national character of all his manners finally convinced me that the worthy stranger was from some Tambov, Penza, or Simbirsk servants’ hall. However much you philosophize and slander yourself, there is something stirring in your heart when you unexpectedly meet your countrymen in distant lands. Meanwhile a man of about thirty jumped out of the coach, with a well-fed, healthy, and cheerful look that comes from being carefree, splendid digestion, and not overly developed nerves. He put riding glasses that hung on a cord onto his nose, looked right, looked left, and with childlike simplicity cried out to his companion in the coach:

“What a wonderful place, really, it’s marvelous! Here is Italy, real Italy, the sky, the sky is blue, sapphire! Italy begins here!”

“You’ve said that six times since Avignon,” remarked his companion in a tired and nervous voice, slowly getting out of the coach.

This was a thin, tall man, considerably older than the first; he was almost all one color—he wore a light green coat, a cap of unbleached batiste matching his blond hair covered with dust, his weak eyes were shaded by light lashes, and finally his faded and sickly face was more yellowish-green than pale.

The sad figure looked silently in the direction his companion was pointing, expressing neither surprise nor pleasure.

“But these are all olives, all olives!” continued the young man.

“Olive green is very boring and monotonous,” objected the light-green companion. “Our birch groves are more beautiful.”

The young man shook his head as if wanting to say: hopeless, might as well give up! and looked up. His face seemed familiar to me, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not remember where I had seen him. Russians in general are hard to recognize abroad; in Russia they go about in German fashion without beards, but in Europe in Russian fashion—growing beards with incredible speed.

I didn’t have to rack my brain for long. The young man, with that good nature and carefree satedness of expression with which he had rejoiced at the olives, came running up to me crying in Russian:

“I never thought, never imagined—truly, as they say: mountain doesn’t meet mountain. But you don’t seem to recognize me? Started forgetting old acquaintances?”

“Now I recognize you very well; you’ve changed terribly—the beard, and you’ve put on weight, and become more handsome, such roses and cream.”

“In corpore sano mens sana,” he replied, laughing heartily and showing a row of teeth that any wolf would envy. “You’ve changed too, gotten older—but there, life leaves its marks? Anyway, we haven’t seen each other for four years; a lot of water has flowed since then.”

“Quite a lot. How did you end up here?”

“I’m traveling with a patient…”

This was a doctor from Moscow University who had once held the position of prosector; some five years before I had studied anatomy and had then become acquainted with him. He was a kind, obliging fellow, extraordinarily diligent, assiduously engaged in science à livre ouvert—that is, never racking his brain over any question not resolved by others, but excellently knowing all the resolved questions.

“Ah! So that green companion is your patient. Where have you put him?”

“He’s such a specimen that even in Italy you won’t easily find the like. What an eccentric! The machine was good, but it got a little damaged”—at this he pointed his finger at his forehead—“and I’m repairing it now. He was coming here, but the devil prompted me to say that I know you; he got frightened—hypochondria approaching mania. Sometimes he’s silent for whole days, but sometimes he talks and talks such things—well, your hair simply stands on end: he rejects everything, everything; it goes too far, of course; I myself, you know, don’t believe old wives’ tales much, but still there’s something. However, he’s very quiet and very kind. He didn’t want to go abroad at all. His relatives talked him into it—you know, to get rid of him, and also they were afraid of his tongue—servants, porters, all on the police payroll—try to justify yourself there. He wanted to go to the village, but his estate is undivided with his sister; she got frightened—he’ll preach communism to the peasants, then try collecting the arrears. Finally he agreed to go, but only to southern Italy—Magna Graecia! He’s off to Calabria, and your humble servant with him as personal physician. For goodness’ sake, what a place—you won’t find anyone there except bandits and priests. I bought myself a revolver in Marseilles on the way—you know, four barrels that rotate?”

“I know. However, your position is not one of the most cheerful—to be constantly with a madman.”

“Well, he doesn’t really climb the walls or bite. He even loves me in his own way, although he doesn’t let me say a word without objecting. I’m quite satisfied, by the way; I get a thousand rubles silver a year with everything provided, I don’t even buy cigars. He’s very delicate in that regard. It’s worth something to see the world too. But listen, I must show you my eccentric; I’ll bring my patient, well, what’s it to you really, you’ll part in an hour; he’s a very kind man and would be very clever…”

“If he hadn’t gone mad.”

“That’s a misfortune… honestly, it’s all the same to you, but he needs distraction, and it’s good for him.”

“You’re already beginning to use me for pharmaceutical purposes,” I remarked, but the doctor was already flying down the corridor.

I would not have submitted to his wish and his Russian management of others’ will, but I was interested in the light-green communist-landowner, and I stayed to wait for him. He came in timidly and bashfully, bowing to me somehow more than necessary, and smiling nervously. The extremely mobile muscles of his face gave a strange and elusive fluctuation to his features, which continuously changed and passed from sadly sorrowful to mocking and sometimes even to a simple-minded expression. In his eyes, which for the most part looked nowhere, one could notice a habit of concentration and great inner work, confirmed by the wrinkles on his forehead, which were all drawn together above the eyebrows. Not for nothing and not in one year had his brain pressed through its bony shell such a forehead with such wrinkles, not for nothing had the muscles of his face become so mobile.

“Evgeny Nikolaevich,” the doctor said to him, “allow me to introduce—imagine what a strange coincidence, meeting here—an old friend with whom we used to cut up cats and dogs together.”

Evgeny Nikolaevich smiled and mumbled:

“Very glad—coincidence… so unexpected… you’ll excuse me.”

“And do you remember,” continued the doctor, “how we cut the pneumogastric nerve of watchman Sychev’s little dog—the dear thing started coughing.”

Evgeny Nikolaevich made a grimace, looked out the window, and after clearing his throat a couple of times, asked me:

“Have you been away from Russia long?”

“Going on five years.”

“And you’re getting used to life here all right?” asked Evgeny Nikolaevich, and blushed.

“All right.”

“Yes, but it’s very unpleasant, boring life abroad.”

“And within borders,” added the easy-going doctor.

Suddenly, which I did not at all expect, my Evgeny Nikolaevich burst out laughing and finally, after long efforts, managed to calm himself enough to say in a breaking voice:

“Filipp Danilovich keeps arguing with me. Ha-ha-ha! I say that the earth is either a failed planet or a sick one, and he says that’s nonsense. How then can you explain that abroad and at home life is boring, disgusting?”—and he again burst out laughing until the veins on his forehead filled with blood.

The doctor winked slyly at me with such an air of superiority that I felt terribly sorry for him.

“Why shouldn’t there be sick planets,” asked Evgeny Nikolaevich quite seriously, “if there are sick people?”

“Because,” replied the doctor for me, “a planet doesn’t feel; where there are no nerves, there is no pain.”

“And what are you and I? And for illness nerves aren’t even needed—grapes get sick and potatoes too, don’t they? I keep expecting the earth to either burst or break from its orbit and fly off. How strange that would be—and Calabria, and Nikolai Pavlovich with the Winter Palace, and you and I, Filipp Danilovich, everything will fly off, and your pistol won’t be needed.”

He burst out laughing again and in the same instant continued with passionate insistence, turning to me:

“One can’t live like this. It’s obvious, after all, that something must happen; better for the planet to start over; the present development has been very unsuccessful, there’s some flaw in it. During the composition, or when the moon was separating, something didn’t work out, everything has been going wrong since then. At first the illnesses were acute: what internal heat there was during the geological upheavals! Life prevailed, but the illness left traces. The balance was lost, the planet rushes from side to side. First it went into quantitative absurdity: well, there appeared lizards as big as houses, ferns so huge that you could cover an exercise hall with one leaf—well, of course, all that died out. How could such absurdities live? Now it’s gone into the qualitative direction—even worse—brain, brain, nerves developed, developed to the point where reason went beyond reason. History will destroy man—say what you will, but you’ll see—it will destroy him!”

After this outburst Evgeny Nikolaevich fell silent.

Breakfast was served; he ate very little, drank very little, and the whole time said nothing except “yes” and “no.” Before the end of breakfast he asked for Bordeaux, poured a glass, tasted it, and set it down with disgust.

“What,” asked the doctor, “is it bad?”

“Bad,” replied the patient, and the doctor began to shame the innkeeper, scold the servant, marvel at the greed of people, their selfishness, reproaching them that innkeepers take 35 percent profit and still cheat.

Evgeny Nikolaevich remarked indifferently that he didn’t understand what the doctor was angry about, that for his part he didn’t see why the innkeeper shouldn’t take 65 percent if he could, and that he was acting very sensibly selling bad wine as long as people bought it. With this moral observation our breakfast ended.

The Damaged One astonished me from the very first conversation with the independent boldness of his sick mind. He was obviously “broken,” and although the doctor assured me that he had never had either great misfortune or great shocks in his whole life, I put little faith in the psychology of my good prosector.

We traveled together to Genoa and stopped in one of the palaces demoted in our bourgeois age to a hotel. Evgeny Nikolaevich showed neither particular interest in my conversations nor particular aversion to them. With the doctor he argued constantly.

When dark minutes of hypochondria overwhelmed him, he withdrew, locked himself in his room, rarely came out, was yellow-pale, trembled as if from chills, and sometimes his eyes seemed to have been crying. The doctor feared for his life, took stupid precautions, removed razors and pistols, tormented the patient with diluting and nerve-weakening medicines, put him in a warm bath with aromatic herbs. The patient obeyed with bilious and embittered passivity, objecting to everything and doing everything, like a spoiled child.

In his lucid moments he was quiet, spoke little, but suddenly his speech would rush forth as if from a burst dam, interrupted by spasmodic laughter and nervous constriction of the throat, and then, cut off in mid-course, it would stop, leaving the listener in melancholy reflection. His strange paradoxical outbursts seemed as easy to him as the multiplication table. His view was indeed correct and consistent with the arbitrary principles he took as his foundation.

He knew a great deal, but authorities had not the slightest influence on him—this most of all offended the well-trained doctor, who cited Cuvier or Humboldt as final judgment.

“But why should I think as Humboldt does?” objected Evgeny Nikolaevich. “He’s a clever man, he traveled a lot, it’s interesting to know what he saw and what he thinks, but that doesn’t oblige me to think as he does. Humboldt wears a blue coat—should I wear a blue coat too? But you don’t believe Moses that way.”

“Do you know,” said the deeply wounded doctor, addressing me, “that Evgeny Nikolaevich sees no difference between religion and science—what do you say to that?”

“There is no difference,” the latter added affirmatively, “except that they say one and the same thing in two dialects.”

“And also that one is based on miracles and the other on reason, one demands faith and the other knowledge.”

“Well, miracles are there and here, all the same, only religion proceeds from them and science arrives at them. Religion frankly says that you can’t understand with your mind, but there is, it says, another mind, smarter; that one, it says, said thus and so. But science deceives, imagining that it understands how… but in essence both prove one thing: that man is incapable of knowing everything, but still understands something; people don’t want to admit this, so out of human weakness some believe Moses, others believe Cuvier. What verification is there? One tells how God created animals and grass, and the other how the life force created them. The real opposition is not between knowledge and revelation, but between doubt and taking on faith.”

“But why should I take on faith some pathological truths when I derive them with my mind from the laws of the organism?”

“Of course it wouldn’t be necessary, but neither you nor anyone else knows these laws, so it comes to believing and remembering.”

“You reason in such a way,” I said to him jokingly, taking both his hands, “that I won’t be at all surprised if after your return Nikolai Pavlovich makes you minister of public education.”

“Don’t accuse me, please, don’t accuse me,” he replied with feeling, “and don’t joke about my thoughts. I myself joked about Rousseau and I know how Voltaire wrote to him that it was too late to learn to walk on all fours. Through hard and torturous labor I came to understand where all the evil comes from; I understood and was frightened myself. I told no one, kept silent; but when the sufferings and weeping of people grew louder and louder, the evil more and more obvious, then I stopped hiding the truth. We are lost people, we are victims of age-old deviations and pay for the sins of our forefathers. How can we be cured! Future generations may perhaps come to their senses.”

“So, à la fin des fins, man’s recovery will begin when instead of progress people go backward, with the aim of eventually enrolling among the orangutans,” said the doctor, lighting a fresh cigar.

“To draw closer to animals is not a bad thing after unsuccessful attempts to become angels. All animals are calculated according to the environment in which they must live; rearrangements are almost always fatal. River water is more pleasant and cleaner for us than seawater, but put some sea mollusk in it—it will die. Man is not as richly endowed by nature as he imagines; the morbid development of his nerves and brain draws him into a life not proper to him, a higher life, and in it he perishes, wastes away, suffers! Where people have broken this illness, there they have calmed down, there they are content and would be happy if they were left in peace. Look at those rows of generations somewhere in India; nature has given them everything in abundance. The plague of state and political life has passed, the morbid predominance of the mind over other functions of the organism has subsided. World history has forgotten them, and they lived as is good for people to live, as is possible for people to live, until the damned East India Company, which spoiled everything.”

“Besides,” remarked the doctor, “the masses live almost like that with us too.”

“That would be the most important proof in my favor. What you call the masses—that is the human race. But the masses are not allowed to live as they wish—that’s the trouble. Enlightenment costs terribly much. The state, religion, soldiers starve the lower classes. And to ruin them completely, they hang their riches before their eyes, they develop in them unnatural tastes, unnecessary needs, and take away the means of satisfying even the necessary ones. What a sad, heart-rending situation! From below swarms a population crushed by labor, exhausted by hunger; from above withers and struggles another population, crushed by thought, exhausted by strivings that have as little answer as the poor have bread for their hunger. And between these two illnesses, two sufferings, between the fever from bad living and the consumption from crazy nerves, between them is the best flower of civilization, its spoiled children, the only people who somehow enjoy life. And who are they? Our landowners of middle means and shopkeepers here. But nature doesn’t let itself be insulted… She brands for betrayal no worse than any executioner,” he continued, pacing the room, and suddenly stopped before a mirror: “Well, look at this mug—ha-ha-ha! It’s terrible; compare any peasant of ours with me—a new varietas that Blumenbach overlooked, ‘Caucasian-urban’; to it belong officials and shopkeepers, scholars, nobles, and all those albinos and cretins who populate the civilized world—a weak tribe, without muscles, in rheumatism, and moreover stupid, evil, petty, ugly, clumsy—exactly like me, an old man at thirty-five, helpless, unnecessary, who has spent his whole life like watercress grown in winter between two felt mats—ugh, how disgusting! No, no, this cannot continue, this is too absurd, too rotten! To nature… to nature for peace!.. Enough of building and rebuilding the Tower of Babel of social organization! Leave it, and be done with it! Enough striving for impossible things! It’s all very well for lovesick girls to dream of wings, von einer besseren Natur, von einem andern Sonnenlichte. Time to go home to the soft bed prepared by nature, to the fresh air, to the wild freedom of self-rule, to the mighty liberty of anarchy!”

And Evgeny Nikolaevich, his face flushed, the veins on his forehead filled with blood, suddenly frowned, took on a serious look, and stubbornly fell silent.

—Alexander Herzen

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Translator’s Notes:

• Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) was one of the most important Russian thinkers of the nineteenth century. A socialist, publisher, and memoirist, he spent most of his life in exile in Western Europe after 1847.
• “Nikolai Pavlovich” refers to Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855), whose authoritarian regime forced many intellectuals, including Herzen, into exile.
• The foreign phrases: In corpore sano mens sana (“a healthy mind in a healthy body”); à livre ouvert (“at sight, without preparation”); à la fin des fins (“ultimately”); varietas (“variety,” a biological classification term); von einer besseren Natur, von einem andern Sonnenlichte (“of a better nature, of another sunlight”—German).
• Cuvier and Humboldt were the leading scientific authorities of the era: Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the father of paleontology; Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the great naturalist and explorer.
• Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) developed early racial classifications, dividing humanity into five “races” including the “Caucasian.”
• The “Damaged One’s” critique of civilization anticipates Tolstoy’s own later attacks on progress, science, and the artificial life of the educated classes. His view that the overdevelopment of the human brain leads to suffering echoes themes in Tolstoy’s Confession and his late religious writings.