In bad company

CONCLUSION

Soon after the events I have described the "bad company" dispersed. The "Professor" alone remained, loitering in the town streets to his very last days, and there was Turkevich, too, to whom my father would occasionally give some writing to do. And I shed a good deal of blood in skirmishes with the Jewish boys who tormented the "Professor" by reminding him of the sharp and cutting instruments.
The artillery officer and the rest of the shady characters went away to try their luck elsewhere, Tyburcy and Valek vanished suddenly, and nobody knew where they went to, just as nobody had known where they had come from to our town.
The old chapel fell into greater decay. First, the roof collapsed, and crushed the ceiling of the underground vaults. Then the ground around the chapel sank in, making it look grimmer still. The owls hooted ever louder in the ruins, and on dark autumn nights, there appeared over the graves startling flashes of a sinister blue light.
But one little grave was lovingly surrounded by a fence, and was bright with fresh green turf and flowers when the spring was back.
Sonya and I used to pay frequent visits to this grave, and sometimes our father would accompany us. We liked to sit there in the shade of a gently whispering birch and look at the town beaming mistily below. Here we read and meditated, shared our first elated and sincere youthful thoughts and dreams.
And when the call came to us to leave this peaceful place, where we were born, we came up there on the last day and full of life and hope made vows over the tiny grave.
1885.

VLADIMIR KOROLENKO

THE BLIND MUSICIAN

An Etude
Translated from the Russian
by Helen Altschuler

AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THE SIXTH EDITION*

[* In which considerable changes and additions have been made.]

The present revision and enlargement of a story which has already appeared in several editions is rather a departure from the usual, I realise; and a brief explanation must be offered. My etude centres, as its basic psychological motif, around man's instinctive, organic craving for light. From this craving arises the spiritual crisis in the hero's development, and its eventual resolution. In criticism of the story, both printed and oral, I have repeatedly encountered an objection which at first glance may seem very well founded. The craving for light, my critics feel, cannot be predicated of the born blind; for they have never seen light, know nothing of it, and cannot, therefore, be aware the lack of it. This consideration does not seem to me convincing. None of us have ever flown like birds; yet we all know how long the sensation of flight persists in dreams—all through childhood and youth. Still, I must admit that my adoption of this motif was purely a priori, based on imagination rather than on concrete knowledge. It was not until several years after the first editions of the story had come out that I chanced, in the course of one of my excursions, upon an opportunity for direct observation. The two bell-ringers (one born blind, the other blind from childhood) whom the reader will find in Chapter VI; the contrast in their moods; their attitude towards the children; Yegor's talk of dreams—all this was noted in my memorandum book as I actually observed it in the belfry of the Sarova Monastery, Tambov Eparchy, where, perhaps, the two blind bellmen are showing visitors up the winding stairs to this very day. From the hour when I observed it, that scene in the belfry—conclusive, to my mind, in the question under debate—lay more heavily on my conscience with each new edition of the story; and it was only the difficulty of return to a once finished work that prevented me from introducing it. Of the changes finally made in the present edition, the most important is the addition of this scene. As to the rest—once I had made the return, and my mind had fallen again into its former train of thought, there could be no question, of course, of a mere mechanical insertion of the one new bit. Other changes, throughout the story, were inevitable.

February 25, 1898