Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/114

104 life of course, but only a preparation for life, real life is to be found in the service, there are great things to be done there.' And like all ambitious youths he went to Petersburg, to which, as we all know, our ardent young men flock from all parts of Russia—to enter the service, to distinguish themselves, to gain promotion or simply to gather a smattering of our sham, colourless, icy cold 'society' education. Andrey Ivanovitch's ambitious yearnings were, however, damped at the outset by his uncle Onufry Ivanovitch, an actual civil councillor. He informed him that the only thing that mattered was a good handwriting, that without that there was no becoming a minister or statesman, while Tyentyetnikov's handwriting was of the sort which is popularly described as a 'magpie's claw, not a man's hand.' After having lessons in calligraphy for two months he succeeded with great difficulty, through his uncle's influence, in obtaining the job of copying documents in some department. When he went into the well-lighted hall in which gentlemen, with their heads on one side, sat at polished tables, writing with scratchy pens, and when he was seated beside them and a document was set before him to copy—he experienced a very strange sensation. He felt for a time as though he were at a school for small boys learning his A B C again. The gentlemen sitting round him seemed to him so like schoolboys! Some of them read novels which they hid between the big pages of their