Free Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Nikolái Gógol Page B

no means see their daughters marry anyone save generals or at the least colonels.
    These are the main characteristics of young men of this kind. But Lieutenant Pirogov possessed a large number of talents which belonged to him personally. He declaimed verses wonderfully from “Dimitri Donskoy” and “The Misfortune of Being Clever,” and and had a special gift for making smoke-rings with his pipe so well that he could suddenly thread about ten of them one on another. He knew how to tell pleasant anecdotes about how a field-gun is a field-gun and a howitzer a howitzer. Indeed, it is rather difficult to give a list of all the talents with which fate had rewarded Pirogov. He liked to discuss actresses and dancers but no longer expressed himself so crudely on the subject as a young ensign does. He was very pleased with his rank, to which he had only recently been promoted, and although sometimes he would say as he stretched out on the divan: “Oh, oh! Vanity! All is vanity! What if I am a lieutenant?” yet secretly his new dignity was very flattering to him: he often tried to give a covert hint of it in conversation, and once when he came across a copyist clerk in the street who seemed rude to him, he immediately stopped him and made him see in a few curt words that he had a lieutenant to deal with and not any other officer—and he tried to express this and more eloquently because at that moment two rather good-looking ladies were passing. Pirogov, generally, had a passion for everything elegant and encouraged the painter Piskarev; though, indeed, this might have been due to a desire to see his virile features in a portrait. But enough of Pirogov’s qualities. Man is such a wonderful being that one can never enumerate all his good qualities and the more deeply you look into him the more new peculiarities you find and their description might be endless.
    And so Pirogov continued to follow the stranger and from time to time amused her with the questions to which she answered curtly, brokenly and indistinctly. They went through the dark Kazan Gates into the Meshchanskaya—a street of tobacconists, small shops, German craftsmen and Finnish nymphs. The blonde ran ahead more quickly and fluttered through the gates of a rather dirty-looking house. Pirogov followed. She ran up a narrow dark staircase and entered a door through which Pirogov too passed boldly. He found himself in a large room with black walls and a sooty ceiling. A heap of metal screws, blacksmith’s tools, shining coffee-pots and candlesticks lay on the table; the floor was littered with brass and iron filings. Pirogov immediately realised it was a craftsman’s flat. The stranger flitted on through a side door. He thought for a moment, but then, following the Russian rule, went straight ahead. He entered the other apartment which was quite unlike the first, and very neatly kept, showing that the master of the house was a German. He was amazed by an odd and extraordinary sight: before him sat Schiller, not the Schiller who wrote Wilhelm Tell and The History of the Thirty Years War, but the well-known Schiller, the metal-worker in the Meshchanskaya. Hoffmann stood by his side—not Hoffmann the writer, but a rather good cobbler from Officers’ Street, a great friend of Schiller’s. Schiller was drunk and sat in a chair, stamping his foot and talking heatedly. All this was not the cause of Pirogov’s amazement—what did astonish him was the extraordinary grouping of the figures. Schiller sat with uplifted face, sticking out his rather fat nose and Hoffmann held him by the nose with his fingers and twisted the blade of his cobbler’s knife on its very bridge. Both personages spoke in German, and therefore Pirogov, who only knew “Gut’ Morgen” in German, could make neither head nor tail of this business. In effect Schiller’s words consisted of the following:
    â€œI don’t want it, I