Chương Chương 1 · 第1章

Chapter 1. The Mantle

In a certain Russian ministerial department----

But it is perhaps better that I do not mention which department it was.

There are in the whole of Russia no persons more sensitive than

Government officials. Each of them believes if he is annoyed in any way,

that the whole official class is insulted in his person.

Recently an Isprawnik (country magistrate)--I do not know of which

town--is said to have drawn up a report with the object of showing that,

ignoring Government orders, people were speaking of Isprawniks in terms

of contempt. In order to prove his assertions, he forwarded with his

report a bulky work of fiction, in which on about every tenth page an

Isprawnik appeared generally in a drunken condition.

In order therefore to avoid any unpleasantness, I will not definitely

indicate the department in which the scene of my story is laid, and will

rather say "in a certain chancellery."

Well, in a certain chancellery there was a certain man who, as I cannot

deny, was not of an attractive appearance. He was short, had a face

marked with smallpox, was rather bald in front, and his forehead and

cheeks were deeply lined with furrows--to say nothing of other physical

imperfections. Such was the outer aspect of our hero, as produced by the

St Petersburg climate.

As regards his official rank--for with us Russians the official rank

must always be given--he was what is usually known as a permanent

titular councillor, one of those unfortunate beings who, as is well

known, are made a butt of by various authors who have the bad habit of

attacking people who cannot defend themselves.

Our hero's family name was Bashmatchkin; his baptismal name Akaki

Akakievitch. Perhaps the reader may think this name somewhat strange and

far-fetched, but he can be assured that it is not so, and that

circumstances so arranged it that it was quite impossible to give him

any other name.

This happened in the following way. Akaki Akakievitch was born, if I am

not mistaken, on the night of the 23rd of March. His deceased mother,

the wife of an official and a very good woman, immediately made proper

arrangements for his baptism. When the time came, she was lying on the

bed before the door. At her right hand stood the godfather, Ivan

Ivanovitch Jeroshkin, a very important person, who was registrar of the

senate; at her left, the godmother Anna Semenovna Byelobrushkova, the

wife of a police inspector, a woman of rare virtues.

Three names were suggested to the mother from which to choose one for

the child--Mokuja, Sossuja, or Khozdazat.

"No," she said, "I don't like such names."

In order to meet her wishes, the church calendar was opened in another

place, and the names Triphiliy, Dula, and Varakhasiy were found.

"This is a punishment from heaven," said the mother. "What sort of names

are these! I never heard the like! If it had been Varadat or Varukh, but

Triphiliy and Varakhasiy!"

They looked again in the calendar and found Pavsikakhiy and Vakhtisiy.

"Now I see," said the mother, "this is plainly fate. If there is no help

for it, then he had better take his father's name, which was Akaki."

So the child was called Akaki Akakievitch. It was baptised, although it

wept and cried and made all kinds of grimaces, as though it had a

presentiment that it would one day be a titular councillor.

We have related all this so conscientiously that the reader himself

might be convinced that it was impossible for the little Akaki to

receive any other name. When and how he entered the chancellery and who

appointed him, no one could remember. However many of his superiors

might come and go, he was always seen in the same spot, in the same

attitude, busy with the same work, and bearing the same title; so that

people began to believe he had come into the world just as he was, with

his bald forehead and official uniform.

In the chancellery where he worked, no kind of notice was taken of him.

Even the office attendants did not rise from their seats when he

entered, nor look at him; they took no more notice than if a fly had

flown through the room. His superiors treated him in a coldly despotic

manner. The assistant of the head of the department, when he pushed a

pile of papers under his nose, did not even say "Please copy those," or

"There is something interesting for you," or make any other polite

remark such as well-educated officials are in the habit of doing. But

Akaki took the documents, without worrying himself whether they had the

right to hand them over to him or not, and straightway set to work to

copy them.

His young colleagues made him the butt of their ridicule and their

elegant wit, so far as officials can be said to possess any wit. They

did not scruple to relate in his presence various tales of their own

invention regarding his manner of life and his landlady, who was seventy

years old. They declared that she beat him, and inquired of him when he

would lead her to the marriage altar. Sometimes they let a shower of

scraps of paper fall on his head, and told him they were snowflakes.

But Akaki Akakievitch made no answer to all these attacks; he seemed

oblivious of their presence. His work was not affected in the slightest

degree; during all these interruptions he did not make a single error in

copying. Only when the horse-play grew intolerable, when he was held by

the arm and prevented writing, he would say "Do leave me alone! Why do

you always want to disturb me at work?" There was something peculiarly

pathetic in these words and the way in which he uttered them.

One day it happened that when a young clerk, who had been recently

appointed to the chancellery, prompted by the example of the others, was

playing him some trick, he suddenly seemed arrested by something in the

tone of Akaki's voice, and from that moment regarded the old official

with quite different eyes. He felt as though some supernatural power

drew him away from the colleagues whose acquaintance he had made here,

and whom he had hitherto regarded as well-educated, respectable men, and

alienated him from them. Long afterwards, when surrounded by gay

companions, he would see the figure of the poor little councillor and

hear the words "Do leave me alone! Why will you always disturb me at

work?" Along with these words, he also heard others: "Am I not your

brother?" On such occasions the young man would hide his face in his

hands, and think how little humane feeling after all was to be found in

men's hearts; how much coarseness and cruelty was to be found even in

the educated and those who were everywhere regarded as good and

honourable men.

Never was there an official who did his work so zealously as Akaki

Akakievitch. "Zealously," do I say? He worked with a passionate love of

his task. While he copied official documents, a world of varied beauty

rose before his eyes. His delight in copying was legible in his face. To

form certain letters afforded him special satisfaction, and when he came

to them he was quite another man; he began to smile, his eyes sparkled,

and he pursed up his lips, so that those who knew him could see by his

face which letters he was working at.

Had he been rewarded according to his zeal, he would perhaps--to his own

astonishment--have been raised to the rank of civic councillor. However,

he was not destined, as his colleagues expressed it, to wear a cross at

his buttonhole, but only to get haemorrhoids by leading a too sedentary

life.

For the rest, I must mention that on one occasion he attracted a certain

amount of attention. A director, who was a kindly man and wished to

reward him for his long service, ordered that he should be entrusted

with a task more important than the documents which he usually had to

copy. This consisted in preparing a report for a court, altering the

headings of various documents, and here and there changing the first

personal pronoun into the third.

Akaki undertook the work; but it confused and exhausted him to such a

degree that the sweat ran from his forehead and he at last exclaimed:

"No! Please give me again something to copy." From that time he was

allowed to continue copying to his life's end.

Outside this copying nothing appeared to exist for him. He did not even

think of his clothes. His uniform, which was originally green, had

acquired a reddish tint. The collar was so narrow and so tight that his

neck, although of average length, stretched far out of it, and appeared

extraordinarily long, just like those of the cats with movable heads,

which are carried about on trays and sold to the peasants in Russian

villages.

Something was always sticking to his clothes--a piece of thread, a

fragment of straw which had been flying about, etc. Moreover he seemed

to have a special predilection for passing under windows just when

something not very clean was being thrown out of them, and therefore he

constantly carried about on his hat pieces of orange-peel and such

refuse. He never took any notice of what was going on in the streets, in

contrast to his colleagues who were always watching people closely and

whom nothing delighted more than to see someone walking along on the

opposite pavement with a rent in his trousers.

But Akaki Akakievitch saw nothing but the clean, regular lines of his

copies before him; and only when he collided suddenly with a horse's

nose, which blew its breath noisily in his face, did the good man

observe that he was not sitting at his writing-table among his neat

duplicates, but walking in the middle of the street.

When he arrived home, he sat down at once to supper, ate his

cabbage-soup hurriedly, and then, without taking any notice how it

tasted, a slice of beef with garlic, together with the flies and any

other trifles which happened to be lying on it. As soon as his hunger

was satisfied, he set himself to write, and began to copy the documents

which he had brought home with him. If he happened to have no official

documents to copy, he copied for his own satisfaction political letters,

not for their more or less grand style but because they were directed to

some high personage.