Short Fiction - Vsevolod Garshin (my miracle luna book free read .TXT) 📗

Bezsonow was always against it. When I first told him of my intention, he shrugged his shoulders, and smiled in a dissatisfied manner.

“You are mad people, you Russian painters,” said he. “Have you so little of your own about which to paint? Charlotte Corday! What have you got to do with Charlotte? Can you really transfer yourself to that time and those surroundings?”

Perhaps he was right.⁠ ⁠… Only, the figure of the French heroine so possessed me that I could not but take it for a picture. I decided to paint her full length, alone standing square before the spectators, with her eyes gazing ahead of her. She had already decided on her deed⁠—crime, but it is only discernible as yet on her face. The hand which will deal the fatal blow at present hangs helplessly, and shows up delicately in its whiteness against the dark blue cloth of her dress. A lace cape, fastened crossways, tints the delicate neck, along which tomorrow a line of blood will pass.⁠ ⁠… I remember how her image shaped itself in my mind.⁠ ⁠… I read her history in a sentimental and perhaps untruthful book by Lamartine; from out of the false pathos of the garrulous Frenchman, delighting in his verbosity and style, the clean figure of the girl⁠—a fanatic for the good cause⁠—stood out in clear relief. I read over and over again all that I could get hold of about her, studied her portraits, and decided to paint a picture.

The first picture, like a first love, takes entire possession of one. I carried about mentally the figure which I had formed; I thought out the minutest details, and reached such a stage that, by closing my eyes, I could clearly see the Charlotte I had decided to put to canvas.

But, having begun the picture with a happy feeling of fear and tremulous excitement, I at once met an unexpected and almost unsurmountable obstacle. I had no model.

Or, rather, strictly speaking, there were models. I chose the one which seemed to me the most suitable from amongst those acting as models in St. Petersburg, and started zealously to work. But, alas! how unlike was this Anna Ivanovna to the creation of my fancy, as it appeared before my closed eyes! Anna posed splendidly. For a whole hour she would sit motionless, never stirring, and conscientiously earned her rouble, very pleased that she might sit draped.

“Ah! How nice it is to pose like this!” she said, with a sigh, and a slight flush on her face at her first sitting⁠—“elsewhere⁠—”

She had only been a model for two months, and could not as yet accustom herself to sitting in the nude. Russian girls, it would seem, never can quite accustom themselves.

I painted her hand, shoulders, and pose; but when it came to her face, despair seized me. The small, plump, young face, with its slightly upturned nose, the kind grey eyes which gazed trustfully and somewhat dolefully from under very arched brows, shut out my vision. I could not transfer these nondescript features into that face. I wrestled with my Anna Ivanovna three or four days, then finally left her alone. There was no other model, and I decided to do what should never under any circumstances be done, to paint the face without a study⁠—from “out of my head,” as they say. I decided on this because I saw it as if living before me. But when work began, brushes went flying into the corner. Instead of a living face, a sort of sketch resulted, which possessed neither flesh nor blood.

I took the canvas from the easel and placed it in a corner, face to the wall. My failure surprised me greatly. I remember that I even tore my hair. It seemed to me that it was not worth living, to have thought out such a beautiful picture (and how beautiful it was in my imagination!), and not be able to paint it. I threw myself on my bed, and from grief and vexation tried to sleep. I remember that when I had already dropped asleep there was a ring at the door. The postman had brought me a letter from my cousin Sonia. She was rejoiced that I had thought out so big and difficult a task, and lamented that it was so difficult to find a model. “Would not I do when I leave the Institute? Wait a little, Andrei,” she wrote. “I will come to Petersburg, and you may paint ten Charlotte Cordays from me if you wish⁠ ⁠… if only there is a vestige of resemblance between me and that which you write now possesses your soul.⁠ ⁠…”

Sonia is not the least like Charlotte. She is incapable of inflicting a wound. She loves, rather, to heal them, and wondrously well she does it. And she would cure me⁠ ⁠… if it were possible.