CONQUERED CITY
13
evenings, Professor Vadime Mikhailovitch Lytaev still gave his
lectures. The place might have been in the heart of some forsaken
monastery in a city of another time. Night and cold penetrated
even here. Night lay heavily, in hard rectangles, upon the frost–
ferned windows. The Blackboard seemed to be a gulf opening out
on the night. The professor kept his coat on; his students had
entreated him not to take his hat off, so that his noble head, on
which the white locks of hair mingled with the grey, might not be
too helplessly exposed to the icy shadows :ready to leap upon men.
The sttJ.dents, also in their overcoats, sat listening, benumbed with
cold. From behind his desk, poorly lighted by a green reflector
lamp, (the only light there was here), the professor could make
out no more than a dozen indistinct shapes from which emerged,
in
a kind of fog, the outlines of faces. His was a little more dis–
cernible. He was an old man of about sixty years, slender, erect.
and strong. His cheeks were hollow, his lips like parchment.
Wrinkles encircled his eyes, which, when lowered, were those of
the figure of an ascetic, and when raised, were revealed as caress–
ingly dark. One noticed the delicacy of the straight nose despite
the prominence of the bony structure, the regularity of the mouth,
the graying, neglected beard; taken together, they made up one of
those faces, sombre of countenance, luminous of expression, that
the icon painters of Novgorod used to give to their saints; not
that they were particularly faithful to a mystic type, but more
probably derived them from the stylized types in some very ancient
Greek portraits.
The professor spoke, with an intensity that was almost con–
cealed by his assurance, of the reform of Peter the First. Hence–
forth, it would be necessary to speak of Peter the First instead of
Peter the Great. More often Lytaev simply said Peter, which
affirmed the man of power in the prodigious tsar. His lecture
ended, Vadime Mikhailovitch Lytaev stepped into a night as vast
as any in the past. He followed a path on the frozen Neva, crossing
the broad river obliquely in the direction of the Winter Palace.
Parfenov generally accompanied him, since they both lived in the
center .of town. Parfenov walked in step beside the master, abso–
lutely silent, as if he did not exist. Shod in felt boots, wrapped in
a reindeer skin, on his head a reindeer cap with long ear-laps which
came down to his chest, his face heavy, without distinct contours,
