A Place Bewitched and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol

Author:Nikolai Gogol
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

Nevsky Prospect

THERE IS NOTHING FINER than Nevsky Prospect, not in Petersburg anyway: it is the making of the city. What splendour does it lack, that fairest of our city thoroughfares? I know that no one among its pale and bureaucratic residents would exchange Nevsky Prospect for all the blessings of the world. Not only the young man of twenty-five summers with a fine moustache and a splendidly cut coat, but even the veteran with white hairs sprouting on his chin and a head as smooth as a silver dish is in ecstasy over Nevsky Prospect. And the ladies! Oh, Nevsky Prospect is even more attractive to the ladies. And indeed to whom is it not attractive? As soon as you step into Nevsky Prospect, there is a whiff of gaiety. Though you may have some necessary and urgent work to do, yet as soon as you are there you forget all about business. This is the one place where people put in an appearance without necessity, without being driven there by the needs and commercial interests that swallow up all Petersburg. A man met on Nevsky Prospect seems less of an egoist than on Morskaya, Gorokhovoy, Liteiny, Meshansky and other streets, where covetousness, self-interest and need are apparent in all those walking by or flying past in carriages and droshkies. Nevsky Prospect is the general channel of communication in Petersburg. The man who lives on the Petersburg or Viborg Side who hasn’t seen his friend at Peski or at the Moscow Gate for years may reckon with certainty on meeting him in Nevsky Prospect. No directory list at an Address Enquiry Office gives such accurate information as Nevsky Prospect. All-powerful Nevsky Prospect! A unique place of entertainment in Petersburg, a city poor in such diversions! How cleanly swept are its pavements, and, my God, how many feet leave their traces on it! The clumsy, dirty boots of the discharged soldier, under whose weight the very granite seems to crack, and the miniature, ethereal little shoes of the young lady who turns her head towards the glittering shop-windows as the sunflower to the sun, and the clanking sabre of the hopeful lieutenant which marks a sharp scratch along it – all print the scars of strength or weakness on it! What rapid phantasms pass over it in a single day! What changes it goes through between one dawn and the next! Let us begin with the earliest morning when all Petersburg smells of hot, freshly baked bread and is filled with old women in ragged gowns and pelisses who are making their raids on the churches and on compassionate passers-by.

Then Nevsky Prospect is empty: the stout shopkeepers and their assistants are still asleep in their linen shirts or washing their genteel cheeks and drinking their coffee; beggars gather near the doors of the confectioners’ shops where the drowsy Ganymede who the day before flew round like a fly with chocolate, walks out with no cravat on, broom in hand, and thrusts stale pies and scraps upon them.

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