Lights

Anton Chekhov

THE dog was barking excitedly outside. And Ananyev the engineer, his assistant called Von

Schtenberg, and I went out of the hut to see at whom it was barking. I was the visitor, and might have

remained indoors, but I must confess my head was a little dizzy from the wine I had drunk, and I was

glad to get a breath of fresh air.

"There is nobody here," said Ananyev when we went out. "Why are you telling stories, Azorka? You

fool!"

There was not a soul in sight.

"The fool," Azorka, a black house-dog, probably conscious of his guilt in barking for nothing and

him he has something like an attack of hysterics."

"Yes, a dog of refined feelings," the student chimed in.

Azorka must have understood that the conversation was concerning him. He turned his head upwards

and grinned plaintively, as though to say, "Yes, at times I suffer unbearably, but please excuse it!"

It was an August night, there were stars, but it was dark. Owing to the fact that I had never in my life

been in such exceptional surroundings, as I had chanced to come into now, the starry night seemed to

me gloomy, inhospitable, and darker than it was in reality. I was on a railway line which was still in

process of construction. The high, half-finished embankment, the mounds of sand, clay, and rubble, the

holes, the wheel-barrows standing here and there, the flat tops of the mud huts in which the workmen

lived -- all this muddle, coloured to one tint by the darkness, gave the earth a strange, wild aspect that

away where the pits, holes, and mounds melted into the darkness of the night, a dim light was

twinkling. Beyond it gleamed another light, beyond that a third, then a hundred paces away two red

eyes glowed side by side -- probably the windows of some hut -- and a long series of such lights,

growing continually closer and dimmer, stretched along the line to the very horizon, then turned in a

semicircle to the left and disappeared in the darkness of the distance. The lights were motionless. There

seemed to be something in common between them and the stillness of the night and the disconsolate

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song of the telegraph wire. It seemed as though some weighty secret were buried under the

embankment and only the lights, the night, and the wires knew of it.

"How glorious, O Lord!" sighed Ananyev; "such space and beauty that one can't tear oneself away! And

what an embankment! It's not an embankment, my dear fellow, but a regular Mont Blanc. It's costing

millions. . . ."

Going into ecstasies over the lights and the embankment that was costing millions, intoxicated by the

wine and his sentimental mood, the engineer slapped Von Schtenberg on the shoulder and went on in a

jocose tone:

lights. He was not listening to the engineer, but was thinking, and was apparently in the mood in which

one does not want to speak or to listen. After a prolonged silence he turned to me and said quietly:

"Do you know what those endless lights are like? They make me think of something long dead, that

lived thousands of years ago, something like the camps of the Amalekites or the Philistines. It is as

though some people of the Old Testament had pitched their camp and were waiting for morning to fight

with Saul or David. All that is wanting to complete the illusion is the blare of trumpets and sentries

calling to one another in some Ethiopian language."

And, as though of design, the wind fluttered over the line and brought a sound like the clank of

weapons. A silence followed. I don't know what the engineer and the student were thinking of, but it

seemed to me already that I actually saw before me something long dead and even heard the sentry

reality, it's awful!"

"You must drop those thoughts . . ." said the engineer gravely and admonishingly.

"Why?"

"Because. . . . Thoughts like that are for the end of life, not for the beginning of it. You are too young

for them."

"Why so?" repeated the student.

"All these thoughts of the transitoriness, the insignificance and the aimlessness of life, of the

inevitability of death, of the shadows of the grave, and so on, all such lofty thoughts, I tell you, my dear

fellow, are good and natural in old age when they come as the product of years of inner travail, and are

won by suffering and really are intellectual riches; for a youthful brain on the threshold of real life they

are simply a calamity! A calamity!" Ananyev repeated with a wave of his hand. "To my mind it is better

at your age to have no head on your shoulders at all than to think on these lines. I am speaking

seriously, Baron. And I have been meaning to speak to you about it for a long time, for I noticed from

the very first day of our acquaintance your partiality for these damnable ideas!"

"Good gracious, why are they damnable?" the student asked with a smile, and from his voice and his

face I could see that he asked the question from simple politeness, and that the discussion raised by the

engineer did not interest him in the least.

checking accounts and saying nothing. He, like me, had no inclination to speak or to listen. That I might

not interfere with their work, I sat away from the table on the engineer's crooked-legged travelling

going on for one o'clock.

Having nothing to do, I watched my new acquaintances. I had never seen Ananyev or the student

before. I had only made their acquaintance on the night I have described. Late in the evening I was

returning on horseback from a fair to the house of a landowner with whom I was staying, had got on the

dark the night was becoming, I thought of the "barefoot railway roughs," who lie in wait for travellers

on foot and on horseback, was frightened, and knocked at the first hut I came to. There I was cordially

received by Ananyev and the student. As is usually the case with strangers casually brought together,

rather too stout. He was just at that stage which old match-making women mean when they speak of "a

and praising the past, panted a little as he walked, snored loudly when he was asleep, and in his manner

by decent people by the time they have reached the grade of a staff officer and begun to grow stout. His

hair and beard were far from being grey, but already, with a condescension of which he was

unconscious, he addressed young men as "my dear boy" and felt himself entitled to lecture them good-

humouredly about their way of thinking. His movements and his voice were calm, smooth, and self-

confident, as they are in a man who is thoroughly well aware that he has got his feet firmly planted on

the right road, that he has definite work, a secure living, a settled outlook. . . . His sunburnt, thicknosed

face and muscular neck seemed to say: "I am well fed, healthy, satisfied with myself, and the time will

come when you young people too, will be wellfed, healthy, and satisfied with yourselves. . . ." He was

dressed in a cotton shirt with the collar awry and in full linen trousers thrust into his high boots. From

certain trifles, as for instance, from his coloured worsted girdle, his embroidered collar, and the patch

on his elbow, I was able to guess that he was married and in all probability tenderly loved by his wife.

Baron Von Schtenberg, a student of the Institute of Transport, was a young man of about three or four

and twenty. Only his fair hair and scanty beard, and, perhaps, a certain coarseness and frigidity in his

features showed traces of his descent from Barons of the Baltic provinces; everything else -- his name,

Mihail Mihailovitch, his religion, his ideas, his manners, and the expression of his face were purely

Russian. Wearing, like Ananyev, a cotton shirt and high boots, with his round shoulders, his hair left

uncut, and his sunburnt face, he did not look like a student or a Baron, but like an ordinary Russian

workman. His words and gestures were few, he drank reluctantly without relish, checked the accounts

was in Petersburg, now I am sitting here in this hut, in the autumn I shall go back to Petersburg, then in

the spring here again. . . . What sense there is in all that I don't know, and no one knows. . . . And so it's

He listened to the engineer without interest, with the condescending indifference with which cadets in

the senior classes listen to an effusive and good-natured old attendant. It seemed as though there were

nothing new to him in what the engineer said, and that if he had not himself been too lazy to talk, he

would have said something newer and cleverer. Meanwhile Ananyev would not desist. He had by now

of keeping with his expression of calmness. Apparently he had no distaste for abstract subjects, was

fond of them, indeed, but had neither skill nor practice in the handling of them. And this lack of

practice was so pronounced in his talk that I did not always grasp his meaning at once.

brain is completed with this, and that is natural and in the order of things. Our misfortune is that we

the brain begins working independently, we mount to the very topmost, final step and refuse to know

"What harm is there in that?" said the student.

"But you must understand that it's abnormal," shouted Ananyev, looking at him almost wrathfully. "If

we find means of mounting to the topmost step without the help of the lower ones, then the whole long

ladder, that is the whole of life, with its colours, sounds, and thoughts, loses all meaning for us. That at

your age such reflections are harmful and absurd, you can see from every step of your rational

independent life. Let us suppose you sit down this minute to read Darwin or Shakespeare, you have

scarcely read a page before the poison shows itself; and your long life, and Shakespeare, and Darwin,

seem to you nonsense, absurdity, because you know you will die, that Shakespeare and Darwin have

died too, that their thoughts have not saved them, nor the earth, nor you, and that if life is deprived of

meaning in that way, all science, poetry, and exalted thoughts seem only useless diversions, the idle

playthings of grown up people; and you leave off reading at the second page. Now, let us suppose that

people come to you as an intelligent man and ask your opinion about war, for instance: whether it is

desirable, whether it is morally justifiable or not. In answer to that terrible question you merely shrug

your shoulders and confine yourself to some commonplace, because for you, with your way of thinking,

it makes absolutely no difference whether hundreds of thousands of people die a violent death, or a

natural one: the results are the same -- ashes and oblivion. You and I are building a railway line. What's

the use, one may ask, of our worrying our heads, inventing, rising above the hackneyed thing, feeling

my moral standard an inch. Was not that disastrous? Moreover, besides being corrupted ourselves, we

bring poison into the lives of those surrounding us. It would be all right if, with our pessimism, we

law, we live, feel, love women, bring up children, construct railways!"

"Our thoughts make no one hot or cold," the student said reluctantly.

"Ah! there you are again! -- do stop it! You have not yet had a good sniff at life. But when you have

suppose. In practical life, in contact with human beings, it leads to nothing but horrors and follies. It has

been my lot to pass through experiences which I would not wish a wicked Tatar to endure."

and a dénouement. An excellent lesson! Ah, what a lesson!"

He poured out wine for himself and us, emptied his glass, stroked his broad chest with his open hands,

"It was in the year 187--, soon after the war, and when I had just left the University. I was going to the

Caucasus, and on the way stopped for five days in the seaside town of N. I must tell you that I was born

and grew up in that town, and so there is nothing odd in my thinking N. extraordinarily snug, cosy, and

beautiful, though for a man from Petersburg or Moscow, life in it would be as dreary and comfortless as

in any Tchuhloma or Kashira. With melancholy I passed by the high school where I had been a pupil;

with melancholy I walked about the very familiar park, I made a melancholy attempt to get a nearer

look at people I had not seen for a long time -- all with the same melancholy.

"Among other things, I drove out one evening to the so-called Quarantine. It was a small mangy copse

in which, at some forgotten time of plague, there really had been a quarantine station, and which was

now the resort of summer visitors. It was a drive of three miles from the town along a good soft road.

As one drove along one saw on the left the blue sea, on the right the unending gloomy steppe; there was

plenty of air to breathe, and wide views for the eyes to rest on. The copse itself lay on the seashore.

Dismissing my cabman, I went in at the familiar gates and first turned along an avenue leading to a

little stone summer-house which I had been fond of in my childhood. In my opinion that round, heavy

summer-house on its clumsy columns, which combined the romantic charm of an old tomb with the

ungainliness of a Sobakevitch,* was the most poetical nook in the whole town. It stood at the edge

above the cliff, and from it there was a splendid view of the sea.

and went from my native town to the capital; in the distance there was a dark streak of smoke -- a

steamer was passing -- and except for this hardly visible and motionless streak and the sea-swallows

right and left of the summer-house stretched uneven clay cliffs.

"You know that when a man in a melancholy mood is left tête-à-tête with the sea, or any landscape

which seems to him grandiose, there is always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, a conviction

that he will live and die in obscurity, and he reflectively snatches up a pencil and hastens to write his

my summer-house are always scrawled over in pencil or carved with penknives. I remember as though

it were to-day; looking at the parapet I read: 'Ivan Korolkov, May 16, 1876.' Beside Korolkov some

local dreamer had scribbled freely, adding:

scribbled on one of the columns. All that is irrelevant, however. . . You must forgive me -- I don't know

the line of thought we have been discussing. At that period, towards the end of the 'seventies, it had

begun to be fashionable with the public, and later, at the beginning of the 'eighties, it gradually passed

from the general public into literature, science, and politics. I was no more than twenty-six at the time,

but I knew perfectly well that life was aimless and had no meaning, that everything was a deception and

an illusion, that in its essential nature and results a life of penal servitude in Sahalin was not in any way

different from a life spent in Nice, that the difference between the brain of a Kant and the brain of a fly

was of no real significance, that no one in this world is righteous or guilty, that everything was stuff and

nonsense and damn it all! I lived as though I were doing a favour to some unseen power which

compelled me to live, and to which I seemed to say: 'Look, I don't care a straw for life, but I am living!'

I thought on one definite line, but in all sorts of keys, and in that respect I was like the subtle gourmand

who could prepare a hundred appetising dishes from nothing but potatoes. There is no doubt that I was

one-sided and even to some extent narrow, but I fancied at the time that my intellectual horizon had

neither beginning nor end, and that my thought was as boundless as the sea. Well, as far as I can judge

by myself, the philosophy of which we are speaking has something alluring, narcotic in its nature, like

tobacco or morphia. It becomes a habit, a craving. You take advantage of every minute of solitude to

gloat over thoughts of the aimlessness of life and the darkness of the grave. While I was sitting in the

summer-house, Greek children with long noses were decorously walking about the avenues. I took

advantage of the occasion and, looking at them, began reflecting in this style:

Three young ladies, one in a pink dress, two in white, were walking arm-in-arm, talking and laughing.

Looking after them, I thought:

" 'It wouldn't be bad to have an affair with some woman for a couple of days in this dull place.'

"I recalled by the way that it was three weeks since I had visited my Petersburg lady, and thought that a

passing love affair would come in very appropriately for me just now. The young lady in white in the

middle was rather younger and better looking than her companions, and judging by her manners and her

and at the same time reflected about her: 'She will be trained in music and manners, she will be married

to some Greek -- God help us! -- will lead a grey, stupid, comfortless life, will bring into the world a

crowd of children without knowing why, and then will die. An absurd life!'

was perfectly untroubled. I, the son of honourable parents, a Christian, who had received a superior

as the Germans call it, or when I followed highschool girls with insulting looks. . . . The trouble is that

they are good or whether they are loathsome. One who knows that life is aimless and death inevitable is

not interested in the struggle against nature or the conception of sin: whether you struggle or whether

you don't, you will die and rot just the same. . . . Secondly, my friends, our philosophy instils even into

very young people what is called reasonableness. The predominance of reason over the heart is simply

overwhelming amongst us. Direct feeling, inspiration -- everything is choked by petty analysis. Where

there is reasonableness there is coldness, and cold people -- it's no use to disguise it -- know nothing of

chastity. That virtue is only known to those who are warm, affectionate, and capable of love. Thirdly,

our philosophy denies the significance of each individual personality. It's easy to see that if I deny the

personality of some Natalya Stepanovna, it's absolutely nothing to me whether she is insulted or not.

To-day one insults her dignity as a human being and pays her Blutgeld, and next day thinks no more of

her.

"So I sat in the summer-house and watched the young ladies. Another woman's figure appeared in the

avenue, with fair hair, her head uncovered and a white knitted shawl on her shoulders. She walked

along the avenue, then came into the summer-house, and taking hold of the parapet, looked

indifferently below and into the distance over the sea. As she came in she paid no attention to me, as

though she did not notice me. I scrutinised her from foot to head (not from head to foot, as one

scrutinises men) and found that she was young, not more than five-and-twenty, nice-looking, with a

good figure, in all probability married and belonging to the class of respectable women. She was

way she looked, and the expression of her face, suggested that the sea, the smoke in the distance, and

the sky had bored her long, long ago, and wearied her sight. She seemed to be tired, bored, and thinking

one sees in the face of almost every woman when she is conscious of the presence of an unknown man

in her vicinity.

"The fair-haired lady took a bored and passing glance at me, sat down on a seat and sank into reverie,

and from her face I saw that she had no thoughts for me, and that I, with my Petersburg appearance, did

allow me to ask you at what time do the waggonettes go from here to the town?'

" 'At ten or eleven, I believe. . . .' "

"I was a little confused. I looked intently at her, and -- would you believe it? -- I recognised her not

from her face nor her figure, but from her gentle, weary smile. It was Natalya Stepanovna, or, as she

was called, Kisotchka, the very girl I had been head over ears in love with seven or eight years before,

when I was wearing the uniform of a high-school boy. The doings of far, vanished days, the days of

long ago. . . . I remember this Kisotchka, a thin little high-school girl of fifteen or sixteen, when she

was something just for a schoolboy's taste, created by nature especially for Platonic love. What a

charming little girl she was! Pale, fragile, light -- she looked as though a breath would send her flying

"In the presence of tears I can neither speak nor be silent. I was flustered and muttered some nonsense.

trying to comfort her.

" 'No, no; I will go to my mother's,' said Kisotchka resolutely, getting up and clutching my arm

convulsively (her hands and her sleeves were wet with tears). 'Forgive me, Nikolay Anastasyitch, I am

going. . . . I can bear no more. . . .'

" 'Kisotchka, but there isn't a single cab,' I said. 'How can you go?'

" 'No matter, I'll walk. . . . It's not far. I can't bear it. . . .'

not to go to her mother's, but to stay at home. When people cry, they don't like their tears to be seen.

And I lighted match after match and went on striking till the box was empty. What I wanted with this

even stupid.

"In the end Kisotchka took my arm and we set off. Going out of the gate, we turned to the right and

sauntered slowly along the soft dusty road. It was dark. As my eyes grew gradually accustomed to the

darkness, I began to distinguish the silhouettes of the old gaunt oaks and lime trees which bordered the

showed indistinctly, a black streak on the right. Low bushes nestled by the hollows, looking like sitting

figures. It was uncanny. I looked sideways suspiciously at the cliffs, and the murmur of the sea and the

stillness of the country alarmed my imagination. Kisotchka did not speak. She was still trembling, and

running away from her husband near this tall long monster which repeated the sound of every step I

moved to romantic feelings in such surroundings, but I looked at the dark windows and thought: 'All

of me with my thoughts, not one grain of dust will remain. . . . All is nonsense and vanity. . . .'

"When we reached the flour mill Kisotchka suddenly stopped, took her arm out of mine, and said, no

longer in a childish voice, but in her own:

" 'Nikolay Anastasvitch, I know all this seems strange to you. But I am terribly unhappy! And you

cannot even imagine how unhappy! It's impossible to imagine it! I don't tell you about it because one

can't talk about it. . . . Such a life, such a life! . . .'

"Kisotchka did not finish. She clenched her teeth and moaned as though she were doing her utmost not

to scream with pain.

" 'Such a life!' she repeated with horror, with the cadence and the southern, rather Ukrainian accent

which particularly in women gives to emotional speech the effect of singing. 'It is a life! Ah, my God,

my God! what does it mean? Oh, my God, my God!'

"As though trying to solve the riddle of her fate, she shrugged her shoulders in perplexity, shook her

head, and clasped her hands. She spoke as though she were singing, moved gracefully, and reminded

me of a celebrated Little Russian actress.

with her husband. 'It would be nice to have got on into relations with her!' flitted through my mind; and

this pitiless thought stayed in my brain, haunted me all the way and grew more and more alluring.

"About a mile from the flour mill we had to turn to the left by the cemetery. At the turning by the

corner of the cemetery there stood a stone windmill, and by it a little hut in which the miller lived. We

passed the mill and the hut, turned to the left and reached the gates of the cemetery. There Kisotchka

stopped and said:

not frightened.'

" 'Well, what next!' I said, disconcerted. 'If you are going, you had better go!'

"I remembered that over the gate of the cemetery there was an inscription: 'The hour will come wherein

I and Kisotchka and her husband and the officer in the white tunic would lie under the dark trees in the

recognised distinctly, but at the same time I was troubled by an oppressive and unpleasant dread that

Kisotchka would turn back, and that I should not manage to say to her what had to be said. Never at any

other time in my life have thoughts of a higher order been so closely interwoven with the basest animal

prose as on that night. . . . It was horrible!

"Not far from the cemetery we found a cab. When we reached the High Street, where Kisotchka's

mother lived, we dismissed the cab and walked along the pavement. Kisotchka was silent all the while,

while I looked at her, and I raged at myself, 'Why don't you begin? Now's the time!' About twenty paces

from the hotel where I was staying, Kisotchka stopped by the lamp-post and burst into tears.

" 'Nikolay Anastasyitch!' she said, crying and laughing and looking at me with wet shining eyes, 'I shall

never forget your sympathy. . . . How good you are! All of you are so splendid -- all of you! Honest,

great-hearted, kind, clever. . . . Ah, how good that is!'

"She saw in me a highly educated man, advanced in every sense of the word, and on her tear-stained

laughing face, together with the emotion and enthusiasm aroused by my personality, there was clearly

written regret that she so rarely saw such people, and that God had not vouchsafed her the bliss of being

the wife of one of them. She muttered, 'Ah, how splendid it is!' The childish gladness on her face, the

tears, the gentle smile, the soft hair, which had escaped from under the kerchief, and the kerchief itself

"Kisotchka's face was flooded with bewilderment. She stepped back from the street lamp and,

kisses on her face, her neck, her shoulders, and went on making vows and promises. In love affairs

vows and promises are almost a physiological necessity. There's no getting on without them.

Sometimes you know you are lying and that promises are not necessary, but still you vow and protest.

Kisotchka, utterly overwhelmed, kept staggering back and gazing at me with round eyes.

"I clasped her tightly in my arms. All at once she broke into hysterical tears. And her face had the same

senseless blank expression that I had seen in the summer-house when I lighted the matches. Without

shoulder-blades, while a shiver ran down his huge back. The memory was painful and made him

introductory lecture on women's diseases the medical students are admonished to remember that each

one of them has a mother, a sister, a fiancée, before undressing and examining a female patient. . . .

That advice would be very good not only for medical students but for everyone who in one way or

another has to deal with a woman's life. Now that I have a wife and a little daughter, oh, how well I

understand that advice! How I understand it, my God! You may as well hear the rest, though. . . . As

soon as she had become my mistress, Kisotchka's view of the position was very different from mine.

First of all she felt for me a deep and passionate love. What was for me an ordinary amatory episode

was for her an absolute revolution in her life. I remember, it seemed to me that she had gone out of her

mind. Happy for the first time in her life, looking five years younger, with an inspired enthusiastic face,

not knowing what to do with herself for happiness, she laughed and cried and never ceased dreaming

aloud how next day we would set off for the Caucasus, then in the autumn to Petersburg; how we

would live afterwards.

" 'Don't worry yourself about my husband,' she said to reassure me. 'He is bound to give me a divorce.

Everyone in the town knows that he is living with the elder Kostovitch. We will get a divorce and be

married.'

"When women love they become acclimatised and at home with people very quickly, like cats.

Kisotchka had only spent an hour and a half in my room when she already felt as though she were at

was unpleasantly impressed by the fact that women of Kisotchka's sort, not deep or serious, are too

much in love with life, and exalt what is in reality such a trifle as love for a man to the level of bliss,

for having been so stupid as to get entangled with a woman whom I should have to deceive. And in

spite of my disorderly life I must observe that I could not bear telling lies.

"I remember that Kisotchka sat down at my feet, laid her head on my knees, and, looking at me with

shining, loving eyes, asked:

" 'Kolya, do you love me? Very, very much?'

"And she laughed with happiness. . . . This struck me as sentimental, affected, and not clever; and

after to set off together to Pyatigorsk. I went into the street to see her home, and I remember that I

her, for trusting me so implicitly, and I made up my mind that I would really take her to Pyatigorsk, but

difficult to break it off with her in the autumn than now, I made haste to suppress my compassion.

"We reached the house where Kisotchka

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