University of Virginia Library

XXXIV

"What is the most terrible dream you have ever had?" Tolstoy asked me.

I rarely have dreams and remember them badly, but two have remained in my memory and probably will for the rest of my life.

I dreamt once that I saw the sky scrofulous, putrescent, greenish-yellow, and the stars in it were round, flat, without rays, without luster, like scabs on the skin of a diseased person. And there glided across this putrescent sky slowly reddish forked lightning, rather like a snake, and when it touched a star, the star swelled up into a ball and burst noiselessly, leaving behind it a darkish spot, like a little smoke; and then the spot vanished quickly in the bleared and liquid sky. Thus all the stars one after another burst and perished and the sky, growing darker and more horrible, at last whirled upwards, bubbled, and, bursting into fragments, began to fall on my head in a kind of cold jelly, and in the spaces between the fragments there appeared a shiny blackness as though of iron.

Leo Nikolaevich said: "Now that comes

from a learned book; you must have read something on astronomy; hence the nightmare. And the other dream?"

The other dream: a snowy plain, smooth like a sheet of paper; no hillock, no tree, no bush anywhere, only — barely visible — a few rods poked out from under the snow. And across the snow of this dead desert from horizon to horizon, there stretched a yellow strip of a hardly distinguishable road, and over the road there marched slowly a pair of gray felt top boots — empty.

He raised his shaggy, werewolf eyebrows, looked at me intently and thought for a while.

"That's terrible. . . . Did you really dream that; you didn't invent it? But there's something bookish in it also."

And suddenly he got angry, and said, irritably, sternly, rapping his knee with his finger: "But you're not a drinking man? It's unlikely that you ever drank much. And yet there's something drunken in these dreams. There was a German writer, Hoffmann, who dreamt that card tables ran about the street and all that sort of thing, but then he was a drunkard — a 'calaholic,' as our

literate coachmen say. Empty boots marching — that's really terrible. Even if you did invent it, it's good. Terrible!"

Suddenly he gave a broad smile, so that even his cheek bones beamed: "And imagine this: suddenly, in the Tverskaya Street, there runs a card table with its curved legs, its boards clap-clap, raising a chalky dust, and you can even still see the numbers on the green cloth — excise clerks playing whist on it for three days and nights on end — the table could not bear it any longer and ran away."

He laughed and then, probably noticing that I was a little hurt by his distrust of me:

"Are you hurt because I thought your dreams bookish? Don't be annoyed; sometimes, I know, one invents something without being aware of it, something which one can not believe, which can't possibly be believed, and then one imagines that one dreamt it and did not invent it at all. There was a story which an old landowner told: he dreamt that he was walking in a wood and came out of it onto a steppe. On the steppe he saw two hills which suddenly turned into a woman's breasts, and between them rose up a black

face which instead of eyes had two moons like white spots. The old man dreamt that he was standing between the woman's legs, in front of him a deep dark ravine which sucked him in. After the dream his hair began to grow gray and his hands to tremble, and he went abroad to Doctor Kneipp to take a water cure. But really he must have seen something of the kind — he was a dissolute fellow."

He patted me on the shoulder.

"But you are neither a drunkard nor dissolute — how do you come to have such dreams?"

"I don't know."

"We know nothing about ourselves."

He sighed, screwed up his eyes, thought for a bit, and then added in a low voice: "We know nothing."

This evening, during our walk, he took my arm and said: —

"The boots are marching — terrible, eh? Quite empty — tiop, tiop — and the snow scrunching. Yes, it's good; but you are very bookish, very. Don't be cross, but it's bad and will stand in your way."

I am scarcely more bookish than he, and at the time I thought him a cruel rationalist despite all his pleasant little phrases.