I AM A SICK MAN.... I
am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.
However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain
what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a
respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious,
sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to
be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor
from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it,
though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in
this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay
out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by
all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't
consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!
I have been going on
like that for a long time--twenty years. * The author of the diary and the
diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such
persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist
in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our
society is formed. I have tried to expose to the view of the public more
distinctly than is commonly done, one of the characters of the recent past. He
is one of the representatives of a generation still living. In this fragment,
entitled "Underground," this person introduces himself and his views,
and, as it were, tries to explain the causes owing to which he has made his
appearance and was bound to make his appearance in our midst. In the second
fragment there are added the actual notes of this person concerning certain
events in his life. --AUTHOR's NOTE. Now I am forty. I used to be in the
government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and
took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to
find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it
out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen
myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch
it out on purpose!)
When petitioners used
to come for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth
at them, and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody unhappy.
I almost did succeed. For the most part they were all timid people--of course,
they were petitioners. But of the uppish ones there was one officer in
particular I could not endure. He simply would not be humble, and clanked his
sword in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for eighteen months
over that sword. At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it. That
happened in my youth, though.
But do you know,
gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite? Why, the whole point, the
real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the
acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not a
spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at
random and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll
to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should be
appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I should grind my
teeth at myself after-wards and lie awake at night with shame for months after.
That was my way.
I was lying when I said
just now that I was a spiteful official. I was lying from spite. I was simply
amusing myself with the petitioners and with the officer, and in reality I
never could become spiteful. I was conscious every moment in myself of many,
very many elements absolutely opposite to that. I felt them positively swarming
in me, these opposite elements. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my
life and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them, would not let
them, purposely would not let them come out. They tormented me till I was ashamed:
they drove me to convulsions and-- sickened me, at last, how they sickened me!
Now, are not you fancying, gentlemen, that I am expressing remorse for
something now, that I am asking your forgiveness for something? I am sure you
are fancying that ... However, I assure you I do not care if you are....
It was not only that I
could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither
spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an
insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the
spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything
seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the
nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless
creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited
creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and
you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To
live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live
beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools
and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these
venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the
whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on
living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty! ... Stay, let me take breath ...
You imagine no doubt,
gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are mistaken in that, too. I am by no
means such a mirthful person as you imagine, or as you may imagine; however,
irritated by all this babble (and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit
to ask me who I am--then my answer is, I am a collegiate assessor. I was in the
service that I might have something to eat (and solely for that reason), and
when last year a distant relation left me six thousand roubles in his will I
immediately retired from the service and settled down in my corner. I used to
live in this corner before, but now I have settled down in it. My room is a
wretched, horrid one in the outskirts of the town. My servant is an old
country-woman, ill-natured from stupidity, and, moreover, there is always a
nasty smell about her. I am told that the Petersburg climate is bad for me, and
that with my small means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg. I know all
that better than all these sage and experienced counsellors and monitors....
But I am remaining in Petersburg; I am not going away from Petersburg! I am not
going away because ... ech! Why, it is absolutely no matter whether I am going
away or not going away
But what can a decent
man speak of with most pleasure?
Answer: Of himself.
Well, so I will talk
about myself.
I want now to tell you,
gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not, why I could not even become an
insect. I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect.
But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious
is an illness--a real thorough-going illness. For man's everyday needs, it
would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is,
half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of
our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to
inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole
terrestrial globe. (There are intentional and unintentional towns.) It would
have been quite enough, for instance, to have the consciousness by which all
so-called direct persons and men of action live. I bet you think I am writing
all this from affectation, to be witty at the expense of men of action; and
what is more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am clanking a sword like my
officer. But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself on his diseases and even
swagger over them?
Though, after all,
everyone does do that; people do pride themselves on their diseases, and I do,
may be, more than anyone. We will not dispute it; my contention was absurd. But
yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of
consciousness, in fact, is a disease. I stick to that. Let us leave that, too,
for a minute. Tell me this: why does it happen that at the very, yes, at the very
moments when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all that is
"sublime and beautiful," as they used to say at one time, it would,
as though of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do such ugly things,
such that ... Well, in short, actions that all, perhaps, commit; but which, as
though purposely, occurred to me at the very time when I was most conscious
that they ought not to be committed. The more conscious I was of goodness and
of all that was "sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank into
my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the chief point
was that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it were
bound to be so. It was as though it were my most normal condition, and not in
the least disease or depravity, so that at last all desire in me to struggle
against this depravity passed. It ended by my almost believing (perhaps
actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in
the beginning, what agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it
was the same with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as
a secret. I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the point
of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to
my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, acutely conscious that that day
I had committed a loathsome action again, that what was done could never be
undone, and secretly, inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and
consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful
accursed sweetness, and at last--into positive real enjoyment! Yes, into
enjoyment, into enjoyment! I insist upon that. I have spoken of this because I
keep wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment? I
will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of
one's own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had reached the
last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that
there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that
even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different
you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you
would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to
change into.
And the worst of it
was, and the root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal
fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the inertia that was the
direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to
change but could do absolutely nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of
acute consciousness, that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as though
that were any consolation to the scoundrel once he has come to realise that he
actually is a scoundrel. But enough.... Ech, I have talked a lot of nonsense,
but what have I explained? How is enjoyment in this to be explained? But I will
explain it. I will get to the bottom of it! That is why I have taken up my
pen....
I, for instance, have a
great deal of amour propre. I am as suspicious and prone to take offence as a
humpback or a dwarf. But upon my word I sometimes have had moments when if I
had happened to be slapped in the face I should, perhaps, have been positively
glad of it. I say, in earnest, that I should probably have been able to
discover even in that a peculiar sort of enjoyment--the enjoyment, of course,
of despair; but in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially
when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position. And
when one is slapped in the face--why then the consciousness of being rubbed
into a pulp would positively overwhelm one. The worst of it is, look at it which
way one will, it still turns out that I was always the most to blame in
everything. And what is most humiliating of all, to blame for no fault of my
own but, so to say, through the laws of nature. In the first place, to blame
because I am cleverer than any of the people surrounding me. (I have always
considered myself cleverer than any of the people surrounding me, and
sometimes, would you believe it, have been positively ashamed of it. At any
rate, I have all my life, as it were, turned my eyes away and never could look
people straight in the face.) To blame, finally, because even if I had had
magnanimity, I should only have had more suffering from the sense of its
uselessness. I should certainly have never been able to do anything from being
magnanimous--neither to forgive, for my assailant would perhaps have slapped me
from the laws of nature, and one cannot forgive the laws of nature; nor to
forget, for even if it were owing to the laws of nature, it is insulting all
the same. Finally, even if I had wanted to be anything but magnanimous, had
desired on the contrary to revenge myself on my assailant, I could not have
revenged myself on any one for anything because I should certainly never have
made up my mind to do anything, even if I had been able to. Why should I not
have made up my mind? About that in particular I want to say a few words.
With people who know
how to revenge themselves and to stand up for themselves in general, how is it
done? Why, when they are possessed, let us suppose, by the feeling of revenge,
then for the time there is nothing else but that feeling left in their whole
being. Such a gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an
infuriated bull with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him. (By
the way: facing the wall, such gentlemen--that is, the "direct"
persons and men of action--are genuinely nonplussed. For them a wall is not an
evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not an
excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very glad, though
we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule. No, they are nonplussed in all
sincerity. The wall has for them something tranquillising, morally soothing,
final-maybe even something mysterious ... but of the wall later.)
Well, such a direct
person I regard as the real normal man, as his tender mother nature wished to
see him when she graciously brought him into being on the earth. I envy such a
man till I am green in the face. He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but
perhaps the normal man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very
beautiful, in fact. And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can
call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis of the
normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has come, of course,
not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this is almost mysticism,
gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this retort-made man is sometimes so
nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis that with all his exaggerated
consciousness he genuinely thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man. It may
be an acutely conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and
therefore, et caetera, et caetera. And the worst of it is, he himself, his very
own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one asks him to do so; and that is an
important point. Now let us look at this mouse in action. Let us suppose, for
instance, that it feels insulted, too (and it almost always does feel
insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too. There may even be a greater
accumulation of spite in it than in l'homme de la nature et de la vérité. The
base and nasty desire to vent that spite on its assailant rankles perhaps even
more nastily in it than in l'homme de la nature et de la vérité . For through
his innate stupidity the latter looks upon his revenge as justice pure and
simple; while in consequence of his acute consciousness the mouse does not
believe in the justice of it. To come at last to the deed itself, to the very
act of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse
succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts
and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there
inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of
its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of
action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it
till their healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to
dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt
in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its
mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed
and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above
all, everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury
down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of
itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting
itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings,
but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will
invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might
happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too,
but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito,
without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of
its revenge, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a
hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I daresay,
will not even scratch himself. On its deathbed it will recall it all over
again, with interest accumulated over all the years and ...
But it is just in that
cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in that conscious burying oneself
alive for grief in the underworld for forty years, in that acutely recognised
and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of
unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of
resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a minute later--that the
savour of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies. It is so subtle,
so difficult of analysis, that persons who are a little limited, or even simply
persons of strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of it.
"Possibly," you will add on your own account with a grin,
"people will not understand it either who have never received a slap in
the face," and in that way you will politely hint to me that I, too,
perhaps, have had the experience of a slap in the face in my life, and so I
speak as one who knows. I bet that you are thinking that. But set your minds at
rest, gentlemen, I have not received a slap in the face, though it is
absolutely a matter of indifference to me what you may think about it.
Possibly, I even regret, myself, that I have given so few slaps in the face
during my life. But enough ... not another word on that subject of such extreme
interest to you.
I will continue calmly
concerning persons with strong nerves who do not understand a certain
refinement of enjoyment. Though in certain circumstances these gentlemen bellow
their loudest like bulls, though this, let us suppose, does them the greatest
credit, yet, as I have said already, confronted with the impossible they
subside at once. The impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of
course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As
soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey,
then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that
in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand
of your fellow-creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all
so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have
just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of
mathematics. Just try refuting it.
"Upon my word,
they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two
makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with
your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to
accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is
a wall ... and so on, and so on."
Merciful Heavens! but
what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I
dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot
break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the
strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply
because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.
As though such a stone
wall really were a consolation, and really did contain some word of
conciliation, simply because it is as true as twice two makes four. Oh,
absurdity of absurdities! How much better it is to understand it all, to
recognise it all, all the impossibilities and the stone wall; not to be
reconciled to one of those impossibilities and stone walls if it disgusts you
to be reconciled to it; by the way of the most inevitable, logical combinations
to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting theme, that even for
the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear
as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in
silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that
there is no one even for you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and
perhaps never will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of
hand, a bit of juggling, a card-sharper's trick, that it is simply a mess, no
knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these uncertainties and
jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the
worse the ache.
"Ha, ha, ha! You
will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you cry, with a laugh.
"Well, even in
toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had tooth-ache for a whole
month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in
silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and
the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds
expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not
moan. It is a good example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans
express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so
humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which
you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while
she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish,
but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all possible
Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes
it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on
aching another three months; and that finally if you are still contumacious and
still protest, all that is left you for your own gratification is to thrash
yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely
nothing more. Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone
unknown, end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree
of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an
educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second
or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on
the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any
coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a
man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as
they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and
go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is
doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that
he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows
that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole
family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and
inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills
and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour,
from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there
lies a voluptuous pleasure. As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I
am lacerating your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay
awake then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache. I am not a hero
to you now, as I tried to seem before, but simply a nasty person, an impostor.
Well, so be it, then! I am very glad that you see through me. It is nasty for
you to hear my despicable moans: well, let it be nasty; here I will let you
have a nastier flourish in a minute...." You do not understand even now,
gentlemen? No, it seems our development and our consciousness must go further
to understand all the intricacies of this pleasure. You laugh? Delighted. My
jests, gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking
self-confidence. But of course that is because I do not respect myself. Can a
man of perception respect himself at all?
Come, can a man who
attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of his own degradation possibly
have a spark of respect for himself? I am not saying this now from any mawkish
kind of remorse. And, indeed, I could never endure saying, "Forgive me,
Papa, I won't do it again," not because I am incapable of saying that--on
the contrary, perhaps just because I have been too capable of it, and in what a
way, too. As though of design I used to get into trouble in cases when I was
not to blame in any way. That was the nastiest part of it. At the same time I
was genuinely touched and penitent, I used to shed tears and, of course,
deceived myself, though I was not acting in the least and there was a sick
feeling in my heart at the time.... For that one could not blame even the laws
of nature, though the laws of nature have continually all my life offended me
more than anything. It is loathsome to remember it all, but it was loathsome
even then. Of course, a minute or so later I would realise wrathfully that it
was all a lie, a revolting lie, an affected lie, that is, all this penitence,
this emotion, these vows of reform. You will ask why did I worry myself with
such antics: answer, because it was very dull to sit with one's hands folded,
and so one began cutting capers. That is really it. Observe yourselves more
carefully, gentlemen, then you will understand that it is so. I invented
adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way.
How many times it has happened to me--well, for instance, to take offence
simply on purpose, for nothing; and one knows oneself, of course, that one is
offended at nothing; that one is putting it on, but yet one brings oneself at
last to the point of being really offended. All my life I have had an impulse
to play such pranks, so that in the end I could not control it in myself.
Another time, twice, in fact, I tried hard to be in love. I suffered, too, gentlemen,
I assure you. In the depth of my heart there was no faith in my suffering, only
a faint stir of mockery, but yet I did suffer, and in the real, orthodox way; I
was jealous, beside myself... and it was all from ennui, gentlemen, all from
ennui ; inertia overcame me. You know the direct, legitimate fruit of
consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded. I
have referred to this already. I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all
"direct" persons and men of action are active just because they are
stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their
limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in
that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that
they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds
are at ease and you know that is the chief thing. To begin to act, you know,
you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of doubt left in
it. Why, how am I, for example to set my mind at rest? Where are the primary
causes on which I am to build? Where are my foundations? Where am I to get them
from? I exercise myself in reflection, and consequently with me every primary
cause at once draws after itself another still more primary, and so on to
infinity. That is just the essence of every sort of consciousness and
reflection. It must be a case of the laws of nature again. What is the result
of it in the end? Why, just the same. Remember I spoke just now of vengeance. (I
am sure you did not take it in.) I said that a man revenges himself because he
sees justice in it. Therefore he has found a primary cause, that is, justice.
And so he is at rest on all sides, and consequently he carries out his revenge
calmly and successfully, being persuaded that he is doing a just and honest
thing. But I see no justice in it, I find no sort of virtue in it either, and
consequently if I attempt to revenge myself, it is only out of spite. Spite, of
course, might overcome everything, all my doubts, and so might serve quite
successfully in place of a primary cause, precisely because it is not a cause.
But what is to be done if I have not even spite (I began with that just now,
you know). In consequence again of those accursed laws of consciousness, anger
in me is subject to chemical disintegration. You look into it, the object flies
off into air, your reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the
wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for
which no one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left
again--that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can. So you give it up with a
wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause. And try
letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly, without reflection,
without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at least for a time; hate or
love, if only not to sit with your hands folded. The day after tomorrow, at the
latest, you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived
yourself. Result: a soap-bubble and inertia. Oh, gentlemen, do you know,
perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have
been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a
harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the
direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the
intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
Oh, if I had done
nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself,
then. I should have respected myself because I should at least have been
capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were,
positive in me, in which I could have believed myself. Question: What is he? Answer:
A sluggard; how very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself! It
would mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was
something to say about me. "Sluggard"--why, it is a calling and
vocation, it is a career. Do not jest, it is so. I should then be a member of
the best club by right, and should find my occupation in continually respecting
myself. I knew a gentleman who prided himself all his life on being a
connoisseur of Lafitte. He considered this as his positive virtue, and never
doubted himself. He died, not simply with a tranquil, but with a triumphant
conscience, and he was quite right, too. Then I should have chosen a career for
myself, I should have been a sluggard and a glutton, not a simple one, but, for
instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime and beautiful. How do you
like that? I have long had visions of it. That "sublime and
beautiful" weighs heavily on my mind at forty But that is at forty;
then--oh, then it would have been different! I should have found for myself a
form of activity in keeping with it, to be precise, drinking to the health of
everything "sublime andbeautiful." I should have snatched at every
opportunity to drop a tear into my glass and then to drain it to all that is "sublime
and beautiful." I should then have turned everything into the sublime and
the beautiful; in the nastiest, unquestionable trash, I should have sought out
the sublime and the beautiful. I should have exuded tears like a wet sponge. An
artist, for instance, paints a picture worthy of Gay. At once I drink to the
health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I love all
that is "sublime and beautiful." An author has written As you will:
at once I drink to the health of "anyone you will" because I love all
that is "sublime and beautiful."
I should claim respect
for doing so. I should persecute anyone who would not show me respect. I should
live at ease, I should die with dignity, why, it is charming, perfectly
charming! And what a good round belly I should have grown, what a treble chin I
should have established, what a ruby nose I should have coloured for myself, so
that everyone would have said, looking at me: "Here is an asset! Here is
something real and solid!" And, say what you like, it is very agreeable to
hear such remarks about oneself in this negative age.
But these are all
golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first
proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own
interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real
normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once
become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real
advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we
all know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests,
consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good? Oh, the
babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these
thousands of years has there been a time when man has acted only from his own
interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that
men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left
them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril
and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were,
simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully, struck out
another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. So, I
suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any
advantage.... Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself
to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of man consists? And what
if it so happens that a man's advantage, sometimes, not only may, but even
must, consist in his desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and
not advantageous. And if so, if there can be such a case, the whole principle
falls into dust. What do you think--are there such cases? You laugh; laugh
away, gentlemen, but only answer me: have man's advantages been reckoned up
with perfect certainty? Are there not some which not only have not been
included but cannot possibly be included under any classification? You see, you
gentlemen have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human
advantages from the averages of statistical figures and politico-economical
formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace--and so on,
and so on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in
opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine, too, of
course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he? But, you know,
this is what is surprising: why does it so happen that all these statisticians,
sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon up human advantages invariably
leave out one? They don't even take it into their reckoning in the form in
which it should be taken, and the whole reckoning depends upon that. It would
be no greater matter, they would simply have to take it, this advantage, and
add it to the list. But the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not
fall under any classification and is not in place in any list. I have a friend
for instance ... Ech! gentlemen, but of course he is your friend, too; and
indeed there is no one, no one to whom he is not a friend! When he prepares for
any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and
clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and
truth. What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the
true normal interests of man; with irony he will upbraid the short-sighted
fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of
virtue; and, within a quarter of an hour, without any sudden outside
provocation, but simply through something inside him which is stronger than all
his interests, he will go off on quite a different tack--that is, act in direct
opposition to what he has just been saying about himself, in opposition to the
laws of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to
everything ... I warn you that my friend is a compound personality and
therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual. The fact is,
gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost
every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a
most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now)
which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for
the sake of which a man if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws;
that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity--in fact, in
opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only he can attain that
fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all.
"Yes, but it's advantage all the same," you will retort. But excuse
me, I'll make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What
matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks
down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed
by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. In fact, it upsets everything.
But before I mention this advantage to you, I want to compromise myself
personally, and therefore I boldly declare that all these fine systems, all
these theories for explaining to mankind their real normal interests, in order
that inevitably striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good
and noble--are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises! Yes, logical
exercises. Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of mankind by means
of the pursuit of his own advantage is to my mind almost the same thing ... as
to affirm, for instance, following Buckle, that through civilisation mankind
becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty and less fitted for warfare.
Logically it does seem to follow from his arguments. But man has such a
predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort
the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to
justify his logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance
of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the
merriest way, as though it were champagne. Take the whole of the nineteenth
century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon--the Great and also the present
one. Take North America--the eternal union. Take the farce of
Schleswig-Holstein... . And what is it that civilisation softens in us? The
only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of
sensations--and absolutely nothing more. And through the development of this
many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this
has already happened to him. Have you noticed that it is the most civilised
gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and
Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as
the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with,
are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. In any case civilisation has
made mankind if not more blood-thirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely
bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience
at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed
abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than
ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra
(excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her
slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from their screams and
writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times;
that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins
are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than
in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and
science would dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to
learn when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and
science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal
direction. You are confident that then man will cease from intentional error
and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his
normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach man
(though to my mind it's a superfluous luxury) that he never has really had any
caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a
piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the
laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but
is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover
these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and
life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of
course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of
logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there
would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic
lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that
there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world.
Then--this is all what
you say--new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked
out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish
in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be
provided. Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built. Then ... In
fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is
my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what
will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated), but on
the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom
may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into
people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again)
is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Man is
stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but
he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation.
I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, àpropos
of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or
rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting
his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick
over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these
logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet
foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that
he would be sure to find followers--such is the nature of man. And all that for
the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning:
that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred
to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And
one may choose what is contrary to one's own interests, and sometimes one
positively ought (that is my idea). One's own free unfettered choice, one's own
caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to
frenzy--is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have
overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems
and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these
wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them
conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is
simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it
may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
"Ha! ha! ha! But
you know there is no such thing as choice in reality, say what you like,"
you will interpose with a chuckle. "Science has succeeded in so far
analysing man that we know already that choice and what is called freedom of
will is nothing else than--"
Stay, gentlemen, I
meant to begin with that myself I confess, I was rather frightened. I was just
going to say that the devil only knows what choice depends on, and that perhaps
that was a very good thing, but I remembered the teaching of science ... and pulled
myself up. And here you have begun upon it. Indeed, if there really is some day
discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices--that is, an explanation
of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they
are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical
formula--then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he
will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at
once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the
sort; for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice,
if not a stop in an organ? What do you think? Let us reckon the chances--can
such a thing happen or not?
"H'm!" you
decide. "Our choice is usually mistaken from a false view of our
advantage. We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we
see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage. But
when all that is explained and worked out on paper (which is perfectly
possible, for it is contemptible and senseless to suppose that some laws of
nature man will never understand), then certainly so-called desires will no
longer exist. For if a desire should come into conflict with reason we shall then
reason and not desire, because it will be impossible retaining our reason to be
senseless in our desires, and in that way knowingly act against reason and
desire to injure ourselves. And as all choice and reasoning can be really
calculated--because there will some day be discovered the laws of our so-called
free will--so, joking apart, there may one day be something like a table
constructed of them, so that we really shall choose in accordance with it. If,
for instance, some day they calculate and prove to me that I made a long nose
at someone because I could not help making a long nose at him and that I had to
do it in that particular way, what freedom is left me, especially if I am a
learned man and have taken my degree somewhere? Then I should be able to
calculate my whole life for thirty years beforehand. In short, if this could be
arranged there would be nothing left for us to do; anyway, we should have to
understand that. And, in fact, we ought unwearyingly to repeat to ourselves
that at such and such a time and in such and such circumstances nature does not
ask our leave; that we have got to take her as she is and not fashion her to
suit our fancy, and if we really aspire to formulas and tables of rules, and
well, even ... to the chemical retort, there's no help for it, we must accept
the retort too, or else it will be accepted without our consent ...."
Yes, but here I come to
a stop! Gentlemen, you must excuse me for being over-philosophical; it's the
result of forty years underground! Allow me to indulge my fancy. You see,
gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason
is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature,
while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human
life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this
manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply
extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in
order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for
reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does
reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things,
perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so
frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it,
consciously or unconsciously, and, even it if goes wrong, it lives. I suspect,
gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me again that an
enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the future man will be,
cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to himself, that that can be
proved mathematically. I thoroughly agree, it can--by mathematics. But I repeat
for the hundredth time, there is one case, one only, when man may consciously,
purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very
stupid--simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is
very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is
sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in
reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth,
especially in certain cases. And in particular it may be more advantageous than
any advantage even when it does us obvious harm, and contradicts the soundest
conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage--for in any circumstances it
preserves for us what is most precious and most important--that is, our
personality, our individuality. Some, you see, maintain that this really is the
most precious thing for mankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in
agreement with reason; and especially if this be not abused but kept within
bounds. It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy. But very often, and
even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason ... and ...
and ... do you know that that, too, is profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy?
Gentlemen, let us suppose that man is not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to
suppose that, if only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then
who is wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful!
Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is
the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his
worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity, perpetual--from the days of the
Flood to the Schleswig-Holstein period. Moral obliquity and consequently lack
of good sense; for it has long been accepted that lack of good sense is due to
no other cause than moral obliquity. Put it to the test and cast your eyes upon
the history of mankind. What will you see? Is it a grand spectacle? Grand, if
you like. Take the Colossus of Rhodes, for instance, that's worth something.
With good reason Mr. Anaevsky testifies of it that some say that it is the work
of man's hands, while others maintain that it has been created by nature
herself. Is it many-coloured? May be it is many-coloured, too: if one takes the
dress uniforms, military and civilian, of all peoples in all ages--that alone
is worth something, and if you take the undress uniforms you will never get to
the end of it; no historian would be equal to the job. Is it monotonous? May be
it's monotonous too: it's fighting and fighting; they are fighting now, they
fought first and they fought last--you will admit, that it is almost too
monotonous. In short, one may say anything about the history of the
world--anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only
thing one can't say is that it's rational. The very word sticks in one's
throat. And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there
are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers
of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and
rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply
in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in
this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have
been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one.
Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with
strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea
of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface;
give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but
sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and
even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty
trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most
fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all
this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. lt is just his fantastic
dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to
prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and
not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so
completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.
And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if
this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would
not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple
ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will
contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to
gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can
curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other
animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is,
convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all
this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so
that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all,
and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to
be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the
whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself
every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his
skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted
to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on
something we don't know?
You will scream at me
(that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will,
that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own
free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and
arithmetic.
Good heavens,
gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic,
when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without
my will. As if free will meant that!
Gentlemen, I am joking,
and I know myself that my jokes are not brilliant,but you know one can take
everything as a joke. I am, perhaps, jesting against the grain. Gentlemen, I am
tormented by questions; answer them for me. You, for instance, want to cure men
of their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and good
sense. But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also that it is
desirable to reform man in that way? And what leads you to the conclusion that
man's inclinations need reforming? In short, how do you know that such a
reformation will be a benefit to man? And to go to the root of the matter, why
are you so positively convinced that not to act against his real normal
interests guaranteed by the conclusions of reason and arithmetic is certainly
always advantageous for man and must always be a law for mankind? So far, you
know, this is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the
law of humanity. You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to
defend myself. I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined
to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering--that is,
incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead. But the
reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is
predestined to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the
"direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to
him that the road almost always does lead somewhere, and that the destination
it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief
thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so
giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all
the vices. Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond
dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also?
Tell me that! But on that point I want to say a couple of words myself. May it
not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he
does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object
and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves
that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close
quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it,
but will leave it, when completed, for the use of les animaux domestiques--such
as the ants, the sheep, and so on. Now the ants have quite a different taste.
They have a marvellous edifice of that pattern which endures for ever--the
ant-heap.
With the ant-heap the
respectable race of ants began and with the ant-heap they will probably end,
which does the greatest credit to their perseverance and good sense. But man is
a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves
the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying
with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving
lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself,
and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a
formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not
life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been
afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that
man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans,
sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I
assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing for him to
look for. When workmen have finished their work they do at least receive their
pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station--and
there is occupation for a week. But where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a
certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the
process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of
course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a
kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something
insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence.
Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your
path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but
if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very
charming thing too.
And why are you so
firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive--in
other words, only what is conducive to welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is
not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something
besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering
is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes
extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.
There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask
yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion
is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred.
Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.
I hold no brief for suffering nor for well-being either. I am standing for ...
my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would
be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the "Palace
of Crystal" it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what
would be the good of a "palace of crystal" if there could be any
doubt about it? And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that
is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.
Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest
misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any
satisfaction. Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two
makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or
to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and
plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the
same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that
will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is
better than nothing.
You believe in a palace
of crystal that can never be destroyed--a palace at which one will not be able
to put out one's tongue or make a long nose on the sly. And perhaps that is
just why I am afraid of this edifice, that it is of crystal and can never be
destroyed and that one cannot put one's tongue out at it even on the sly
You see, if it were not
a palace, but a hen-house, I might creep into it to avoid getting wet, and yet
I would not call the hen-house a palace out of gratitude to it for keeping me
dry. You laugh and say that in such circumstances a hen-house is as good as a
mansion. Yes, I answer, if one had to live simply to keep out of the rain.
But what is to be done
if I have taken it into my head that that is not the only object in life, and
that if one must live one had better live in a mansion? That is my choice, my
desire. You will only eradicate it when you have changed my preference. Well,
do change it, allure me with something else, give me another ideal. But
meanwhile I will not take a hen-house for a mansion. The palace of crystal may
be an idle dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and
that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, through the
old-fashioned irrational habits of my generation. But what does it matter to me
that it is inconsistent? That makes no difference since it exists in my
desires, or rather exists as long as my desires exist. Perhaps you are laughing
again? Laugh away; I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am
satisfied when I am hungry. I know, anyway, that I will not be put off with a
compromise, with a recurring zero, simply because it is consistent with the
laws of nature and actually exists. I will not accept as the crown of my
desires a block of buildings with tenements for the poor on a lease of a
thousand years, and perhaps with a sign-board of a dentist hanging out. Destroy
my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow
you. You will say, perhaps, that it is not worth your trouble; but in that case
I can give you the same answer. We are discussing things seriously; but if you
won't deign to give me your attention, I will drop your acquaintance. I can
retreat into my underground hole.
But while I am alive
and have desires I would rather my hand were withered off than bring one brick
to such a building! Don't remind me that I have just rejected the palace of
crystal for the sole reason that one cannot put out one's tongue at it. I did
not say because I am so fond of putting my tongue out. Perhaps the thing I
resented was, that of all your edifices there has not been one at which one
could not put out one's tongue. On the contrary, I would let my tongue be cut
off out of gratitude if things could be so arranged that I should lose all
desire to put it out. It is not my fault that things cannot be so arranged, and
that one must be satisfied with model flats. Then why am I made with such desires?
Can I have been constructed simply in order to come to the conclusion that all
my construction is a cheat? Can this be my whole purpose? I do not believe it.
But do you know what: I
am convinced that we underground folk ought to be kept on a curb. Though we may
sit forty years underground without speaking, when we do come out into the
light of day and break out we talk and talk and talk....
The long and the short
of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia!
And so hurrah for underground! Though I have said that I envy the normal man to
the last drop of my bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he
is now (though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground
life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can ... Oh, but even now I
am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not underground that is
better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but
which I cannot find! Damn underground!
I will tell you another
thing that would be better, and that is, if I myself believed in anything of
what I have just written. I swear to you, gentlemen, there is not one thing,
not one word of what I have written that I really believe. That is, I believe it,
perhaps, but at the same time I feel and suspect that I am lying like a
cobbler.
"Then why have you
written all this?" you will say to me. "I ought to put you
underground for forty years without anything to do and then come to you in your
cellar, to find out what stage you have reached! How can a man be left with
nothing to do for forty years?"
"Isn't that
shameful, isn't that humiliating?" you will say, perhaps, wagging your
heads contemptuously. "You thirst for life and try to settle the problems of
life by a logical tangle. And how persistent, how insolent are your sallies,
and at the same time what a scare you are in! You talk nonsense and are pleased
with it; you say impudent things and are in continual alarm and apologising for
them. You declare that you are afraid of nothing and at the same time try to
ingratiate yourself in our good opinion. You declare that you are gnashing your
teeth and at the same time you try to be witty so as to amuse us. You know that
your witticisms are not witty, but you are evidently well satisfied with their
literary value. You may, perhaps, have really suffered, but you have no respect
for your own suffering. You may have sincerity, but you have no modesty; out of
the pettiest vanity you expose your sincerity to publicity and ignominy. You
doubtlessly mean to say something, but hide your last word through fear,
because you have not the resolution to utter it, and only have a cowardly
impudence. You boast of consciousness, but you are not sure of your ground, for
though your mind works, yet your heart is darkened and corrupt, and you cannot
have a full, genuine consciousness without a pure heart. And how intrusive you
are, how you insist and grimace! Lies, lies, lies!"
Of course I have myself
made up all the things you say. That, too, is from underground. I have been for
forty years listening to you through a crack under the floor. I have invented
them myself, there was nothing else I could invent. It is no wonder that I have
learned it by heart and it has taken a literary form....
But can you really be
so credulous as to think that I will print all this and give it to you to read
too? And another problem: why do I call you "gentlemen," why do I
address you as though you really were my readers? Such confessions as I intend
to make are never printed nor given to other people to read. Anyway, I am not
strong-minded enough for that, and I don't see why I should be. But you see a
fancy has occurred to me and I want to realise it at all costs. Let me explain.
Every man has
reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He
has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends,
but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man
is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such
things stored away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number
of such things in his mind. Anyway, I have only lately determined to remember
some of my early adventures. Till now I have always avoided them, even with a
certain uneasiness. Now, when I am not only recalling them, but have actually
decided to write an account of them, I want to try the experiment whether one
can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole
truth. I will observe, in parenthesis, that Heine says that a true
autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that man is bound to lie about
himself. He considers that Rousseau certainly told lies about himself in his
confessions, and even intentionally lied, out of vanity. I am convinced that
Heine is right; I quite understand how sometimes one may, out of sheer vanity,
attribute regular crimes to oneself, and indeed I can very well conceive that
kind of vanity. But Heine judged of people who made their confessions to the
public. I write only for myself, and I wish to declare once and for all that if
I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is
easier for me to write in that form. It is a form, an empty form--I shall never
have readers. I have made this plain already ...
I don't wish to be
hampered by any restrictions in the compilation of my notes. I shall not
attempt any system or method. I will jot things down as I remember them.
But here, perhaps,
someone will catch at the word and ask me: if you really don't reckon on
readers, why do you make such compacts with yourself--and on paper too--that
is, that you won't attempt any system or method, that you jot things down as
you remember them, and so on, and so on? Why are you explaining? Why do you
apologise?
Well, there it is, I
answer.
There is a whole
psychology in all this, though. Perhaps it is simply that I am a coward. And
perhaps that I purposely imagine an audience before me in order that I may be more
dignified while I write. There are perhaps thousands of reasons. Again, what is
my object precisely in writing? If it is not for the benefit of the public why
should I not simply recall these incidents in my own mind without putting them
on paper?
Quite so; but yet it is
more imposing on paper. There is something more impressive in it; I shall be
better able to criticise myself and improve my style. Besides, I shall perhaps
obtain actual relief from writing. Today, for instance, I am particularly oppressed
by one memory of a distant past. It came back vividly to my mind a few days
ago, and has remained haunting me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid
of. And yet I must get rid of it somehow. I have hundreds of such
reminiscences; but at times some one stands out from the hundred and oppresses
me. For some reason I believe that if I write it down I should get rid of it.
Why not try?
Besides, I am bored,
and I never have anything to do. Writing will be a sort of work. They say work
makes man kind-hearted and honest. Well, here is a chance for me, anyway.
Snow is falling today,
yellow and dingy. It fell yesterday, too, and a few days ago. I fancy it is the
wet snow that has reminded me of that incident which I cannot shake off now.
And so let it be a story à propos of the falling snow.
AT THAT TIME I was only
twenty-four. My life was even then gloomy, ill-regulated, and as solitary as
that of a savage. I made friends with no one and positively avoided talking,
and buried myself more and more in my hole. At work in the office I never
looked at anyone, and was perfectly well aware that my companions looked upon
me, not only as a queer fellow, but even looked upon me--I always fancied
this--with a sort of loathing. I sometimes wondered why it was that nobody
except me fancied that he was looked upon with aversion? One of the clerks had
a most repulsive, pock-marked face, which looked positively villainous. I
believe I should not have dared to look at anyone with such an unsightly
countenance. Another had such a very dirty old uniform that there was an
unpleasant odour in his proximity. Yet not one of these gentlemen showed the
slightest self-consciousness--either about their clothes or their countenance
or their character in any way. Neither of them ever imagined that they were
looked at with repulsion; if they had imagined it they would not have
minded--so long as their superiors did not look at them in that way. It is clear
to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for
myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on
loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone. I hated my
face, for instance: I thought it disgusting, and even suspected that there was
something base in my expression, and so every day when I turned up at the
office I tried to behave as independently as possible, and to assume a lofty
expression, so that I might not be suspected of being abject. "My face may
be ugly," I thought, "but let it be lofty, expressive, and, above
all, extremely intelligent." But I was positively and painfully certain
that it was impossible for my countenance ever to express those qualities. And
what was worst of all, I thought it actually stupid looking, and I would have
been quite satisfied if I could have looked intelligent. In fact, I would even
have put up with looking base if, at the same time, my face could have been
thought strikingly intelligent.
Of course, I hated my
fellow clerks one and all, and I despised them all, yet at the same time I was,
as it were, afraid of them. In fact, it happened at times that I thought more
highly of them than of myself. It somehow happened quite suddenly that I
alternated between despising them and thinking them superior to myself. A
cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high
standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at
certain moments. But whether I despised them or thought them superior I dropped
my eyes almost every time I met anyone. I even made experiments whether I could
face so and so's looking at me, and I was always the first to drop my eyes.
This worried me to distraction. I had a sickly dread, too, of being ridiculous,
and so had a slavish passion for the conventional in everything external. I
loved to fall into the common rut, and had a whole-hearted terror of any kind
of eccentricity in myself. But how could I live up to it? I was morbidly sensitive
as a man of our age should be. They were all stupid, and as like one another as
so many sheep. Perhaps I was the only one in the office who fancied that I was
a coward and a slave, and I fancied it just because I was more highly
developed. But it was not only that I fancied it, it really was so. I was a
coward and a slave. I say this without the slightest embarrassment. Every
decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal
condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that
very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstances,
but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave. It
is the law of nature for all decent people all over the earth. If anyone of them
happens to be valiant about something, he need not be comforted nor carried
away by that; he would show the white feather just the same before something
else. That is how it invariably and inevitably ends. Only donkeys and mules are
valiant, and they only till they are pushed up to the wall. It is not worth
while to pay attention to them for they really are of no consequence.
Another circumstance,
too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike
anyone else. "I am alone and they are everyone," I thought--and
pondered.
From that it is evident
that I was still a youngster.
The very opposite
sometimes happened. It was loathsome sometimes to go to the office; things
reached such a point that I often came home ill. But all at once, à propos of
nothing, there would come a phase of scepticism and indifference (everything
happened in phases to me), and I would laugh myself at my intolerance and
fastidiousness, I would reproach myself with being romantic. At one time I was
unwilling to speak to anyone, while at other times I would not only talk, but
go to the length of contemplating making friends with them. All my
fastidiousness would suddenly, for no rhyme or reason, vanish. Who knows,
perhaps I never had really had it, and it had simply been affected, and got out
of books. I have not decided that question even now. Once I quite made friends
with them, visited their homes, played preference, drank vodka, talked of
promotions.... But here let me make a digression.
We Russians, speaking
generally, have never had those foolish transcendental
"romantics"--German, and still more French--on whom nothing produces
any effect; if there were an earthquake, if all France perished at the
barricades, they would still be the same, they would not even have the decency
to affect a change, but would still go on singing their transcendental songs to
the hour of their death, because they are fools. We, in Russia, have no fools;
that is well known. That is what distinguishes us from foreign lands.
Consequently these transcendental natures are not found amongst us in their
pure form. The idea that they are is due to our "realistic"
journalists and critics of that day, always on the look out for Kostanzhoglos
and Uncle Pyotr Ivanitchs and foolishly accepting them as our ideal; they have
slandered our romantics, taking them for the same transcendental sort as in
Germany or France. On the contrary, the characteristics of our
"romantics" are absolutely and directly opposed to the transcendental
European type, and no European standard can be applied to them. (Allow me to
make use of this word "romantic"--an old-fashioned and much respected
word which has done good service and is familiar to all.) The characteristics
of our romantic are to understand everything, to see everything and to see it
often incomparably more clearly than our most realistic minds see it; to refuse
to accept anyone or anything, but at the same time not to despise anything; to
give way, to yield, from policy; never to lose sight of a useful practical
object (such as rent-free quarters at the government expense, pensions,
decorations), to keep their eye on that object through all the enthusiasms and
volumes of lyrical poems, and at the same time to preserve "the sublime
and the beautiful" inviolate within them to the hour of their death, and
to preserve themselves also, incidentally, like some precious jewel wrapped in
cotton wool if only for the benefit of "the sublime and the
beautiful." Our "romantic" is a man of great breadth and the
greatest rogue of all our rogues, I assure you.... I can assure you from
experience, indeed. Of course, that is, if he is intelligent. But what am I
saying! The romantic is always intelligent, and I only meant to observe that
although we have had foolish romantics they don't count, and they were only so
because in the flower of their youth they degenerated into Germans, and to
preserve their precious jewel more comfortably, settled somewhere out there--by
preference in Weimar or the Black Forest.
I, for instance,
genuinely despised my official work and did not openly abuse it simply because
I was in it myself and got a salary for it. Anyway, take note, I did not openly
abuse it. Our romantic would rather go out of his mind--a thing, however, which
very rarely happens--than take to open abuse, unless he had some other career
in view; and he is never kicked out. At most, they would take him to the
lunatic asylum as "the King of Spain" if he should go very mad. But
it is only the thin, fair people who go out of their minds in Russia.
Innumerable "romantics" attain later in life to considerable rank in
the service. Their many-sidedness is remarkable! And what a faculty they have
for the most contradictory sensations! I was comforted by this thought even in
those days, and I am of the same opinion now. That is why there are so many
"broad natures" among us who never lose their ideal even in the
depths of degradation; and though they never stir a finger for their ideal,
though they are arrant thieves and knaves, yet they tearfully cherish their
first ideal and are extraordinarily honest at heart. Yes, it is only among us
that the most incorrigible rogue can be absolutely and loftily honest at heart
without in the least ceasing to be a rogue. I repeat, our romantics,
frequently, become such accomplished rascals (I use the term
"rascals" affectionately), suddenly display such a sense of reality and
practical knowledge that their bewildered superiors and the public generally
can only ejaculate in amazement.
Their many-sidedness is
really amazing, and goodness knows what it may develop into later on, and what
the future has in store for us. It is not a poor material! I do not say this
from any foolish or boastful patriotism. But I feel sure that you are again
imagining that I am joking. Or perhaps it's just the contrary and you are
convinced that I really think so. Anyway, gentlemen, I shall welcome both views
as an honour and a special favour. And do forgive my digression.
I did not, of course,
maintain friendly relations with my comrades and soon was at loggerheads with
them, and in my youth and inexperience I even gave up bowing to them, as though
I had cut off all relations. That, however, only happened to me once. As a
rule, I was always alone.
In the first place I
spent most of my time at home, reading. I tried to stifle all that was
continually seething within me by means of external impressions. And the only
external means I had was reading. Reading, of course, was a great
help--exciting me, giving me pleasure and pain. But at times it bored me
fearfully. One longed for movement in spite of everything, and I plunged all at
once into dark, underground, loathsome vice of the pettiest kind. My wretched
passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had
hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except
reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect
and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an
hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice. I
have not said all this to justify myself.... But, no! I am lying. I did want to
justify myself. I make that little observation for my own benefit, gentlemen. I
don't want to lie. I vowed to myself I would not.
And so, furtively,
timidly, in solitude, at night, I indulged in filthy vice, with a feeling of
shame which never deserted me, even at the most loathsome moments, and which at
such moments nearly made me curse. Already even then I had my underground world
in my soul. I was fearfully afraid of being seen, of being met, of being
recognised. I visited various obscure haunts.
One night as I was
passing a tavern I saw through a lighted window some gentlemen fighting with
billiard cues, and saw one of them thrown out of the window. At other times I
should have felt very much disgusted, but I was in such a mood at the time, that
I actually envied the gentleman thrown out of the window--and I envied him so
much that I even went into the tavern and into the billiard-room.
"Perhaps," I thought, "I'll have a fight, too, and they'll throw
me out of the window."
I was not drunk--but
what is one to do--depression will drive a man to such a pitch of hysteria? But
nothing happened. It seemed that I was not even equal to being thrown out of
the window and I went away without having my fight.
An officer put me in my
place from the first moment.
I was standing by the
billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and he wanted to pass;
he took me by the shoulders and without a word--without a warning or
explanation--moved me from where I was standing to another spot and passed by
as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not
forgive his having moved me without noticing me.
Devil knows what I
would have given for a real regular quarrel--a more decent, a more literary
one, so to speak. I had been treated like a fly. This officer was over six
foot, while I was a spindly little fellow. But the quarrel was in my hands. I
had only to protest and I certainly would have been thrown out of the window.
But I changed my mind and preferred to beat a resentful retreat.
I went out of the
tavern straight home, confused and troubled, and the next night I went out
again with the same lewd intentions, still more furtively, abjectly and
miserably than before, as it were, with tears in my eyes--but still I did go
out again. Don't imagine, though, it was cowardice made me slink away from the
officer; I never have been a coward at heart, though I have always been a
coward in action. Don't be in a hurry to laugh--I assure you I can explain it
all.
Oh, if only that officer
had been one of the sort who would consent to fight a duel! But no, he was one
of those gentlemen (alas, long extinct!) who preferred fighting with cues or,
like Gogol's Lieutenant Pirogov, appealing to the police. They did not fight
duels and would have thought a duel with a civilian like me an utterly unseemly
procedure in any case--and they looked upon the duel altogether as something
impossible, something free-thinking and French. But they were quite ready to
bully, especially when they were over six foot.
I did not slink away
through cowardice, but through an unbounded vanity. I was afraid not of his six
foot, not of getting a sound thrashing and being thrown out of the window; I
should have had physical courage enough, I assure you; but I had not the moral
courage. What I was afraid of was that everyone present, from the insolent
marker down to the lowest little stinking, pimply clerk in a greasy collar,
would jeer at me and fail to understand when I began to protest and to address
them in literary language. For of the point of honour--not of honour, but of
the point of honour (point d'honneur)--one cannot speak among us except in
literary language. You can't allude to the "point of honour" in
ordinary language. I was fully convinced (the sense of reality, in spite of all
my romanticism!) that they would all simply split their sides with laughter,
and that the officer would not simply beat me, that is, without insulting me,
but would certainly prod me in the back with his knee, kick me round the
billiard-table, and only then perhaps have pity and drop me out of the window.
Of course, this trivial
incident could not with me end in that. I often met that officer afterwards in
the street and noticed him very carefully. I am not quite sure whether he
recognised me, I imagine not; I judge from certain signs. But I--I stared at
him with spite and hatred and so it went on ... for several years! My
resentment grew even deeper with years. At first I began making stealthy
inquiries about this officer. It was difficult for me to do so, for I knew no
one. But one day I heard someone shout his surname in the street as I was
following him at a distance, as though I were tied to him--and so I learnt his
surname. Another time I followed him to his flat, and for ten kopecks learned
from the porter where he lived, on which storey, whether he lived alone or with
others, and so on--in fact, everything one could learn from a porter. One
morning, though I had never tried my hand with the pen, it suddenly occurred to
me to write a satire on this officer in the form of a novel which would un-
mask his villainy. I wrote the novel with relish. I did unmask his villainy, I
even exaggerated it; at first I so altered his surname that it could easily be
recognised, but on second thoughts I changed it, and sent the story to the
Otetchestvenniya Zapiski. But at that time such attacks were not the fashion
and my story was not printed. That was a great vexation to me.
Sometimes I was
positively choked with resentment. At last I determined to challenge my enemy
to a duel. I composed a splendid, charming letter to him, imploring him to
apologise to me, and hinting rather plainly at a duel in case of refusal. The
letter was so composed that if the officer had had the least understanding of
the sublime and the beautiful he would certainly have flung himself on my neck
and have offered me his friendship. And how fine that would have been! How we
should have got on together! "He could have shielded me with his higher
rank, while I could have improved his mind with my culture, and, well ... my
ideas, and all sorts of things might have happened." Only fancy, this was
two years after his insult to me, and my challenge would have been a ridiculous
anachronism, in spite of all the ingenuity of my letter in disguising and
explaining away the anachronism. But, thank God (to this day I thank the
Almighty with tears in my eyes) I did not send the letter to him. Cold shivers
run down my back when I think of what might have happened if I had sent it.
And all at once I
revenged myself in the simplest way, by a stroke of genius! A brilliant thought
suddenly dawned upon me. Sometimes on holidays I used to stroll along the sunny
side of the Nevsky about four o'clock in the afternoon. Though it was hardly a
stroll so much as a series of innumerable miseries, humiliations and
resentments; but no doubt that was just what I wanted. I used to wriggle along
in a most unseemly fashion, like an eel, continually moving aside to make way
for generals, for officers of the guards and the hussars, or for ladies. At
such minutes there used to be a convulsive twinge at my heart, and I used to
feel hot all down my back at the mere thought of the wretchedness of my attire,
of the wretchedness and abjectness of my little scurrying figure. This was a
regular martyrdom, a continual, intolerable humiliation at the thought, which
passed into an incessant and direct sensation, that I was a mere fly in the
eyes of all this world, a nasty, disgusting fly--more intelligent, more highly
developed, more refined in feeling than any of them, of course--but a fly that
was continually making way for everyone, insulted and injured by everyone. Why
I inflicted this torture upon myself, why I went to the Nevsky, I don't know. I
felt simply drawn there at every possible opportunity.
Already then I began to
experience a rush of the enjoyment of which I spoke in the first chapter. After
my affair with the officer I felt even more drawn there than before: it was on
the Nevsky that I met him most frequently, there I could admire him. He, too,
went there chiefly on holidays, He, too, turned out of his path for generals
and persons of high rank, and he too, wriggled between them like an eel; but
people, like me, or even better dressed than me, he simply walked over; he made
straight for them as though there was nothing but empty space before him, and
never, under any circumstances, turned aside. I gloated over my resentment
watching him and ... always resentfully made way for him. It exasperated me that
even in the street I could not be on an even footing with him.
"Why must you
invariably be the first to move aside?" I kept asking myself in hysterical
rage, waking up sometimes at three o'clock in the morning. "Why is it you
and not he? There's no regulation about it; there's no written law. Let the
making way be equal as it usually is when refined people meet; he moves
half-way and you move half-way; you pass with mutual respect."
But that never
happened, and I always moved aside, while he did not even notice my making way
for him. And lo and behold a bright idea dawned upon me! "What," I
thought, "if I meet him and don't move on one side? What if I don't move
aside on purpose, even if I knock up against him? How would that be?" This
audacious idea took such a hold on me that it gave me no peace. I was dreaming
of it continually, horribly, and I purposely went more frequently to the Nevsky
in order to picture more vividly how I should do it when I did do it. I was
delighted. This intention seemed to me more and more practical and possible.
"Of course I shall
not really push him," I thought, already more good- natured in my joy.
"I will simply not turn aside, will run up against him, not very
violently, but just shouldering each other--just as much as decency permits. I
will push against him just as much as he pushes against me." At last I
made up my mind completely. But my preparations took a great deal of time. To
begin with, when I carried out my plan I should need to be looking rather more
decent, and so I had to think of my get-up. "In case of emergency, if, for
instance, there were any sort of public scandal (and the public there is of the
most recherché: the Countess walks there; Prince D. walks there; all the
literary world is there), I must be well dressed; that inspires respect and of
itself puts us on an equal footing in the eyes of the society."
With this object I
asked for some of my salary in advance, and bought at Tchurkin's a pair of
black gloves and a decent hat. Black gloves seemed to me both more dignified
and bon tonthan the lemon-coloured ones which I had contemplated at first.
"The colour is too gaudy, it looks as though one were trying to be
conspicuous," and I did not take the lemon-coloured ones. I had got ready
long beforehand a good shirt, with white bone studs; my overcoat was the only
thing that held me back. The coat in itself was a very good one, it kept me
warm; but it was wadded and it had a raccoon collar which was the height of
vulgarity. I had to change the collar at any sacrifice, and to have a beaver
one like an officer's. For this purpose I began visiting the Gostiny Dvor and
after several attempts I pitched upon a piece of cheap German beaver. Though
these German beavers soon grow shabby and look wretched, yet at first they look
exceedingly well, and I only needed it for the occasion. I asked the price;
even so, it was too expensive. After thinking it over thoroughly I decided to
sell my raccoon collar. The rest of the money--a considerable sum for me, I
decided to borrow from Anton Antonitch Syetotchkin, my immediate superior, an
unassuming person, though grave and judicious. He never lent money to anyone,
but I had, on entering the service, been specially recommended to him by an
important personage who had got me my berth. I was horribly worried. To borrow
from Anton Antonitch seemed to me monstrous and shameful. I did not sleep for
two or three nights. Indeed, I did not sleep well at that time, I was in a
fever; I had a vague sinking at my heart or else a sudden throbbing, throbbing,
throbbing! Anton Antonitch was surprised at first, then he frowned, then he
reflected, and did after all lend me the money, receiving from me a written
authorisation to take from my salary a fortnight later the sum that he had lent
me.
In this way everything
was at last ready. The handsome beaver replaced the mean-looking raccoon, and I
began by degrees to get to work. It would never have done to act offhand, at
random; the plan had to be carried out skilfully, by degrees. But I must
confess that after many efforts I began to despair: we simply could not run
into each other. I made every preparation, I was quite determined--it seemed as
though we should run into one another directly--and before I knew what I was
doing I had stepped aside for him again and he had passed without noticing me.
I even prayed as I approached him that God would grant me determination. One
time I had made up my mind thoroughly, but it ended in my stumbling and falling
at his feet because at the very last instant when I was six inches from him my
courage failed me. He very calmly stepped over me, while I flew on one side
like a ball. That night I was ill again, feverish and delirious.
And suddenly it ended
most happily. The night before I had made up my mind not to carry out my fatal
plan and to abandon it all, and with that object I went to the Nevsky for the
last time, just to see how I would abandon it all. Suddenly, three paces from
my enemy, I unexpectedly made up my mind--I closed my eyes, and we ran full
tilt, shoulder to shoulder, against one another! I did not budge an inch and
passed him on a perfectly equal footing! He did not even look round and
pretended not to notice it; but he was only pretending, I am convinced of that.
I am convinced of that to this day! Of course, I got the worst of it--he was
stronger, but that was not the point. The point was that I had attained my
object, I had kept up my dignity, I had not yielded a step, and had put myself
publicly on an equal social footing with him. I returned home feeling that I
was fully avenged for everything. I was delighted. I was triumphant and sang
Italian arias. Of course, I will not describe to you what happened to me three
days later; if you have read my first chapter you can guess for yourself. The
officer was afterwards transferred; I have not seen him now for fourteen years.
What is the dear fellow doing now? Whom is he walking over?
But the period of my
dissipation would end and I always felt very sick afterwards. It was followed
by remorse--I tried to drive it away; I felt too sick. By degrees, however, I
grew used to that too. I grew used to everything, or rather I voluntarily resigned
myself to enduring it. But I had a means of escape that reconciled
everything--that was to find refuge in "the sublime and the
beautiful," in dreams, of course. I was a terrible dreamer, I would dream
for three months on end, tucked away in my corner, and you may believe me that
at those moments I had no resemblance to the gentleman who, in the perturbation
of his chicken heart, put a collar of German beaver on his great-coat. I
suddenly became a hero. I would not have admitted my six-foot lieutenant even
if he had called on me. I could not even picture him before me then. What were
my dreams and how I could satisfy myself with them--it is hard to say now, but
at the time I was satisfied with them. Though, indeed, even now, I am to some
extent satisfied with them. Dreams were particularly sweet and vivid after a
spell of dissipation; they came with remorse and with tears, with curses and
transports. There were moments of such positive intoxication, of such
happiness, that there was not the faintest trace of irony within me, on my
honour. I had faith, hope, love. I believed blindly at such times that by some
miracle, by some external circumstance, all this would suddenly open out,
expand; that suddenly a vista of suitable activity--beneficent, good, and, above
all, ready made (what sort of activity I had no idea, but the great thing was
that it should be all ready for me)--would rise up before me--and I should come
out into the light of day, almost riding a white horse and crowned with laurel.
Anything but the foremost place I could not conceive for myself, and for that
very reason I quite contentedly occupied the lowest in reality. Either to be a
hero or to grovel in the mud--there was nothing between. That was my ruin, for
when I was in the mud I comforted myself with the thought that at other times I
was a hero, and the hero was a cloak for the mud: for an ordinary man it was
shameful to defile himself, but a hero was too lofty to be utterly defiled, and
so he might defile himself. lt is worth noting that these attacks of the
"sublime and the beautiful" visited me even during the period of
dissipation and just at the times when I was touching the bottom. They came in
separate spurts, as though reminding me of themselves, but did not banish the
dissipation by their appearance. On the contrary, they seemed to add a zest to
it by contrast, and were only sufficiently present to serve as an appetising
sauce. That sauce was made up of contradictions and sufferings, of agonising
inward analysis, and all these pangs and pin-pricks gave a certain piquancy,
even a significance to my dissipation--in fact, completely answered the purpose
of an appetising sauce. There was a certain depth of meaning in it. And I could
hardly have resigned myself to the simple, vulgar, direct debauchery of a clerk
and have endured all the filthiness of it. What could have allured me about it
then and have drawn me at night into the street? No, I had a lofty way of
getting out of it all.
And what
loving-kindness, oh Lord, what loving-kindness I felt at times in those dreams
of mine! in those "flights into the sublime and the beautiful";
though it was fantastic love, though it was never applied to anything human in
reality, yet there was so much of this love that one did not feel afterwards even
the impulse to apply it in reality; that would have been superfluous.
Everything, however, passed satisfactorily by a lazy and fascinating transition
into the sphere of art, that is, into the beautiful forms of life, lying ready,
largely stolen from the poets and novelists and adapted to all sorts of needs
and uses. I, for instance, was triumphant over everyone; everyone, of course,
was in dust and ashes, and was forced spontaneously to recognise my
superiority, and I forgave them all. I was a poet and a grand gentleman, I fell
in love; I came in for countless millions and immediately devoted them to
humanity, and at the same time I confessed before all the people my shameful
deeds, which, of course, were not merely shameful, but had in them much that was
"sublime and beautiful" something in the Manfred style. Everyone
would kiss me and weep (what idiots they would be if they did not), while I
should go barefoot and hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious
Austerlitz against the obscurantists. Then the band would play a march, an
amnesty would be declared, the Pope would agree to retire from Rome to Brazil;
then there would be a ball for the whole of Italy at the Villa Borghese on the
shores of Lake Como, Lake Como being for that purpose transferred to the
neighbourhood of Rome; then would come a scene in the bushes, and so on, and so
on--as though you did not know all about it? You will say that it is vulgar and
contemptible to drag all this into public after all the tears and transports
which I have myself confessed. But why is it contemptible? Can you imagine that
I am ashamed of it all, and that it was stupider than anything in your life,
gentlemen? And I can assure you that some of these fancies were by no means
badly composed.... It did not all happen on the shores of Lake Como. And yet
you are right--it really is vulgar and contemptible. And most contemptible of
all it is that now I am attempting to justify myself to you. And even more
contemptible than that is my making this remark now. But that's enough, or
there will be no end to it; each step will be more contemptible than the
last....
I could never stand
more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible
desire to plunge into society. To plunge into society meant to visit my
superior at the office, Anton Antonitch Syetotchkin. He was the only permanent
acquaintance I have had in my life, and I wonder at the fact myself now. But I
only went to see him when that phase came over me, and when my dreams had
reached such a point of bliss that it became essential at once to embrace my
fellows and all mankind; and for that purpose I needed, at least, one human
being, actually existing. I had to call on Anton Antonitch, however, on
Tuesday--his at-home day; so I had always to time my passionate desire to
embrace humanity so that it might fall on a Tuesday.
This Anton Antonitch
lived on the fourth storey in a house in Five Corners, in four low-pitched
rooms, one smaller than the other, of a particularly frugal and sallow
appearance. He had two daughters and their aunt, who used to pour out the tea.
Of the daughters one was thirteen and another fourteen, they both had snub
noses, and I was awfully shy of them because they were always whispering and
giggling together. The master of the house usually sat in his study on a
leather couch in front of the table with some grey-headed gentleman, usually a
colleague from our office or some other department. I never saw more than two
or three visitors there, always the same. They talked about the excise duty;
about business in the senate, about salaries, about promotions, about His
Excellency, and the best means of pleasing him, and so on. I had the patience
to sit like a fool beside these people for four hours at a stretch, listening
to them without knowing what to say to them or venturing to say a word. I
became stupefied, several times I felt myself perspiring, I was overcome by a
sort of paralysis; but this was pleasant and good for me. On returning home I
deferred for a time my desire to embrace all mankind.
I had however one other
acquaintance of a sort, Simonov, who was an old schoolfellow. I had a number of
schoolfellows, indeed, in Petersburg, but I did not associate with them and had
even given up nodding to them in the street. I believe I had transferred into
the department I was in simply to avoid their company and to cut off all
connection with my hateful childhood. Curses on that school and all those
terrible years of penal servitude! In short, I parted from my schoolfellows as
soon as I got out into the world. There were two or three left to whom I nodded
in the street. One of them was Simonov, who had in no way been distinguished at
school, was of a quiet and equable disposition; but I discovered in him a
certain independence of character and even honesty I don't even suppose that he
was particularly stupid. I had at one time spent some rather soulful moments
with him, but these had not lasted long and had somehow been suddenly clouded
over. He was evidently uncomfortable at these reminiscences, and was, I fancy,
always afraid that I might take up the same tone again. I suspected that he had
an aversion for me, but still I went on going to see him, not being quite
certain of it.
And so on one occasion,
unable to endure my solitude and knowing that as it was Thursday Anton
Antonitch's door would be closed, I thought of Simonov. Climbing up to his
fourth storey I was thinking that the man disliked me and that it was a mistake
to go and see him. But as it always happened that such reflections impelled me,
as though purposely, to put myself into a false position, I went in. It was
almost a year since I had last seen Simonov.
I found two of my old
schoolfellows with him. They seemed to be discussing an important matter. All
of them took scarcely any notice of my entrance, which was strange, for I had
not met them for years. Evidently they looked upon me as something on the level
of a common fly. I had not been treated like that even at school, though they
all hated me. I knew, of course, that they must despise me now for my lack of
success in the service, and for my having let myself sink so low, going about
badly dressed and so on--which seemed to them a sign of my incapacity and
insignificance. But I had not expected such contempt. Simonov was positively
surprised at my turning up. Even in old days he had always seemed surprised at
my coming. All this disconcerted me: I sat down, feeling rather miserable, and
began listening to what they were saying.
They were engaged in
warm and earnest conversation about a farewell dinner which they wanted to
arrange for the next day to a comrade of theirs called Zverkov, an officer in
the army, who was going away to a distant province. This Zverkov had been all
the time at school with me too. I had begun to hate him particularly in the
upper forms. In the lower forms he had simply been a pretty, playful boy whom
everybody liked. I had hated him, however, even in the lower forms, just
because he was a pretty and playful boy. He was always bad at his lessons and
got worse and worse as he went on; however, he left with a good certificate, as
he had powerful interests. During his last year at school he came in for an
estate of two hundred serfs, and as almost all of us were poor he took up a
swaggering tone among us. He was vulgar in the extreme, but at the same time he
was a good-natured fellow, even in his swaggering. In spite of superficial,
fantastic and sham notions of honour and dignity, all but very few of us
positively grovelled before Zverkov, and the more so the more he swaggered. And
it was not from any interested motive that they grovelled, but simply because
he had been favoured by the gifts of nature. Moreover, it was, as it were, an
accepted idea among us that Zverkov was a specialist in regard to tact and the
social graces. This last fact particularly infuriated me. I hated the abrupt
self-confident tone of his voice, his admiration of his own witticisms, which
were often frightfully stupid, though he was bold in his language; I hated his
handsome, but stupid face (for which I would, however, have gladly exchanged my
intelligent one), and the free-and-easy military manners in fashion in the
"'forties." I hated the way in which he used to talk of his future
conquests of women (he did not venture to begin his attack upon women until he
had the epaulettes of an officer, and was looking forward to them with
impatience), and boasted of the duels he would constantly be fighting. I
remember how I, invariably so taciturn, suddenly fastened upon Zverkov, when
one day talking at a leisure moment with his schoolfellows of his future
relations with the fair sex, and growing as sportive as a puppy in the sun, he
all at once declared that he would not leave a single village girl on his estate
unnoticed, that that was his droit de seigneur, and that if the peasants dared
to protest he would have them all flogged and double the tax on them, the
bearded rascals. Our servile rabble applauded, but I attacked him, not from
compassion for the girls and their fathers, but simply because they were
applauding such an insect. I got the better of him on that occasion, but though
Zverkov was stupid he was lively and impudent, and so laughed it off, and in
such a way that my victory was not really complete; the laugh was on his side.
He got the better of me on several occasions afterwards, but without malice,
jestingly, casually. I remained angrily and contemptuously silent and would not
answer him. When we left school he made advances to me; I did not rebuff them,
for I was flattered, but we soon parted and quite naturally. Afterwards I heard
of his barrack-room success as a lieutenant, and of the fast life he was
leading. Then there came other rumours--of his successes in the service. By
then he had taken to cutting me in the street, and I suspected that he was
afraid of compromising himself by greeting a personage as insignificant as me.
I saw him once in the theatre, in the third tier of boxes. By then he was
wearing shoulder-straps. He was twisting and twirling about, ingratiating
himself with the daughters of an ancient General. In three years he had gone
off considerably, though he was still rather handsome and adroit. One could see
that by the time he was thirty he would be corpulent. So it was to this Zverkov
that my schoolfellows were going to give a dinner on his departure. They had
kept up with him for those three years, though privately they did not consider
themselves on an equal footing with him, I am convinced of that.
Of Simonov's two
visitors, one was Ferfitchkin, a Russianised German --a little fellow with the
face of a monkey, a blockhead who was always deriding everyone, a very bitter
enemy of mine from our days in the lower forms--a vulgar, impudent, swaggering
fellow, who affected a most sensitive feeling of personal honour, though, of
course, he was a wretched little coward at heart. He was one of those
worshippers of Zverkov who made up to the latter from interested motives, and
often borrowed money from him. Simonov's other visitor, Trudolyubov, was a
person in no way remarkable--a tall young fellow, in the army, with a cold
face, fairly honest, though he worshipped success of every sort, and was only
capable of thinking of promotion. He was some sort of distant relation of
Zverkov's, and this, foolish as it seems, gave him a certain importance among
us. He always thought me of no consequence whatever; his behaviour to me,
though not quite courteous, was tolerable.
"Well, with seven
roubles each," said Trudolyubov, "twenty-one roubles between the
three of us, we ought to be able to get a good dinner. Zverkov, of course,
won't pay."
"Of course not,
since we are inviting him," Simonov decided.
"Can you
imagine," Ferfitchkin interrupted hotly and conceitedly, like some
insolent flunkey boasting of his master the General's decorations, "can
you imagine that Zverkov will let us pay alone? He will accept from delicacy,
but he will order half a dozen bottles of champagne."
"Do we want half a
dozen for the four of us?" observed Trudolyubov, taking notice only of the
half dozen.
"So the three of
us, with Zverkov for the fourth, twenty-one roubles, at the Hôtel de Paris at
five o'clock tomorrow," Simonov, who had been asked to make the
arrangements, concluded finally,
"How twenty-one
roubles?" I asked in some agitation, with a show of being offended;
"if you count me it will not be twenty-one, but twenty- eight
roubles."
It seemed to me that to
invite myself so suddenly and unexpectedly would be positively graceful, and
that they would all be conquered at once and would look at me with respect.
"Do you want to
join, too?" Simonov observed, with no appearance of pleasure, seeming to
avoid looking at me. He knew me through and through.
It infuriated me that
he knew me so thoroughly.
"Why not? I am an
old schoolfellow of his, too, I believe, and I must own I feel hurt that you
have left me out," I said, boiling over again.
"And where were we
to find you?" Ferfitchkin put in roughly.
"You never were on
good terms with Zverkov," Trudolyubov added, frowning.
But I had already
clutched at the idea and would not give it up.
"It seems to me
that no one has a right to form an opinion upon that," I retorted in a
shaking voice, as though something tremendous had happened. "Perhaps that
is just my reason for wishing it now, that I have not always been on good terms
with him."
"Oh, there's no
making you out ... with these refinements," Trudolyubov jeered.
"We'll put your
name down," Simonov decided, addressing me. "Tomorrow at five-o'clock
at the Hôtel de Paris."
"What about the
money?" Ferfitchkin began in an undertone, indicating me to Simonov, but
he broke off, for even Simonov was embarrassed.
"That will
do," said Trudolyubov, getting up. "If he wants to come so much, let
him."
"But it's a
private thing, between us friends," Ferfitchkin said crossly, as he, too,
picked up his hat. "It's not an official gathering."
"We do not want at
all, perhaps..."
They went away.
Ferfitchkin did not greet me in any way as he went out, Trudolyubov barely
nodded. Simonov, with whom I was left tête-à-tête, was in a state of vexation
and perplexity, and looked at me queerly. He did not sit down and did not ask
me to.
"H'm ... yes ...
tomorrow, then. Will you pay your subscription now? I just ask so as to
know," he muttered in embarrassment.
I flushed crimson, as I
did so I remembered that I had owed Simonov fifteen roubles for ages--which I
had, indeed, never forgotten, though I had not paid it.
"You will
understand, Simonov, that I could have no idea when I came here.... I am very
much vexed that I have forgotten ...."
"All right, all
right, that doesn't matter. You can pay tomorrow after the dinner. I simply
wanted to know.... Please don't..."
He broke off and began
pacing the room still more vexed. As he walked he began to stamp with his
heels.
"Am I keeping
you?" I asked, after two minutes of silence.
"Oh!" he
said, starting, "that is--to be truthful--yes. I have to go and see
someone ... not far from here," he added in an apologetic voice, somewhat
abashed.
"My goodness, why
didn't you say so?" I cried, seizing my cap, with an astonishingly
free-and-easy air, which was the last thing I should have expected of myself
"It's close by ...
not two paces away," Simonov repeated, accompanying me to the front door
with a fussy air which did not suit him at all. "So five o'clock,
punctually, tomorrow," he called down the stairs after me. He was very
glad to get rid of me. I was in a fury.
"What possessed
me, what possessed me to force myself upon them?" I wondered, grinding my
teeth as I strode along the street, "for a scoundrel, a pig like that
Zverkov! Of course I had better not go; of course, I must just snap my fingers
at them. I am not bound in any way. I'll send Simonov a note by tomorrow's
post... ."
But what made me
furious was that I knew for certain that I should go, that I should make a
point of going; and the more tactless, the more unseemly my going would be, the
more certainly I would go.
And there was a
positive obstacle to my going: I had no money. All I had was nine roubles, I
had to give seven of that to my servant, Apollon, for his monthly wages. That
was all I paid him--he had to keep himself.
Not to pay him was
impossible, considering his character. But I will talk about that fellow, about
that plague of mine, another time.
However, I knew I
should go and should not pay him his wages.
That night I had the
most hideous dreams. No wonder; all the evening I had been oppressed by
memories of my miserable days at school, and I could not shake them off. I was
sent to the school by distant relations, upon whom I was dependent and of whom
I have heard nothing since-- they sent me there a forlorn, silent boy, already
crushed by their reproaches, already troubled by doubt, and looking with savage
distrust at everyone. My schoolfellows met me with spiteful and merciless jibes
because I was not like any of them. But I could not endure their taunts; I
could not give in to them with the ignoble readiness with which they gave in to
one another. I hated them from the first, and shut myself away from everyone in
timid, wounded and disproportionate pride. Their coarseness revolted me. They
laughed cynically at my face, at my clumsy figure; and yet what stupid faces
they had themselves. In our school the boys' faces seemed in a special way to
degenerate and grow stupider. How many fine-looking boys came to us! In a few
years they became repulsive. Even at sixteen I wondered at them morosely; even
then I was struck by the pettiness of their thoughts, the stupidity of their
pursuits, their games, their conversations. They had no understanding of such
essential things, they took no interest in such striking, impressive subjects,
that I could not help considering them inferior to myself. It was not wounded
vanity that drove me to it, and for God's sake do not thrust upon me your
hackneyed remarks, repeated to nausea, that "I was only a dreamer,"
while they even then had an understanding of life. They understood nothing,
they had no idea of real life, and I swear that that was what made me most
indignant with them. On the contrary, the most obvious, striking reality they
accepted with fantastic stupidity and even at that time were accustomed to
respect success. Everything that was just, but oppressed and looked down upon,
they laughed at heartlessly and shamefully. They took rank for intelligence;
even at sixteen they were already talking about a snug berth. Of course, a
great deal of it was due to their stupidity, to the bad examples with which
they had always been surrounded in their childhood and boyhood. They were
monstrously depraved. Of course a great deal of that, too, was superficial and
an assumption of cynicism; of course there were glimpses of youth and freshness
even in their depravity; but even that freshness was not attractive, and showed
itself in a certain rakishness. I hated them horribly, though perhaps I was
worse than any of them. They repaid me in the same way, and did not conceal
their aversion for me. But by then I did not desire their affection: on the
contrary, I continually longed for their humiliation. To escape from their
derision I purposely began to make all the progress I could with my studies and
forced my way to the very top. This impressed them. Moreover, they all began by
degrees to grasp that I had already read books none of them could read, and
understood things (not forming part of our school curriculum) of which they had
not even heard. They took a savage and sarcastic view of it, but were morally
impressed, especially as the teachers began to notice me on those grounds. The
mockery ceased, but the hostility remained, and cold and strained relations
became permanent between us. In the end I could not put up with it: with years
a craving for society, for friends, developed in me. I attempted to get on
friendly terms with some of my schoolfellows; but somehow or other my intimacy
with them was always strained and soon ended of itself. Once, indeed, I did
have a friend. But I was already a tyrant at heart; I wanted to exercise
unbounded sway over him; I tried to instil into him a contempt for his
surroundings; I required of him a disdainful and complete break with those
surroundings. I frightened him with my passionate affection; I reduced him to
tears, to hysterics. He was a simple and devoted soul; but when he devoted
himself to me entirely I began to hate him immediately and repulsed him--as
though all I needed him for was to win a victory over him, to subjugate him and
nothing else. But I could not subjugate all of them; my friend was not at all
like them either, he was, in fact, a rare exception. The first thing I did on
leaving school was to give up the special job for which I had been destined so
as to break all ties, to curse my past and shake the dust from off my feet....
And goodness knows why, after all that, I should go trudging off to Simonov's!
Early next morning I
roused myself and jumped out of bed with excitement, as though it were all
about to happen at once. But I believed that some radical change in my life was
coming, and would inevitably come that day. Owing to its rarity, perhaps, any
external event, however trivial, always made me feel as though some radical
change in my life were at hand. I went to the office, however, as usual, but
sneaked away home two hours earlier to get ready. The great thing, I thought,
is not to be the first to arrive, or they will think I am overjoyed at coming.
But there were thousands of such great points to consider, and they all
agitated and overwhelmed me. I polished my boots a second time with my own
hands; nothing in the world would have induced Apollon to clean them twice a
day, as he considered that it was more than his duties required of him. I stole
the brushes to clean them from the passage, being careful he should not detect
it, for fear of his contempt. Then I minutely examined my clothes and thought
that everything looked old, worn and threadbare. I had let myself get too
slovenly. My uniform, perhaps, was tidy, but I could not go out to dinner in my
uniform. The worst of it was that on the knee of my trousers was a big yellow
stain. I had a foreboding that that stain would deprive me of nine-tenths of my
personal dignity. I knew, too, that it was very poor to think so. "But
this is no time for thinking: now I am in for the real thing," I thought,
and my heart sank. I knew, too, perfectly well even then, that I was
monstrously exaggerating the facts. But how could I help it? I could not
control myself and was already shaking with fever. With despair I pictured to
myself how coldly and disdainfully that "scoundrel" Zverkov would
meet me; with what dull-witted, invincible contempt the blockhead Trudolyubov
would look at me; with what impudent rudeness the insect Ferfitchkin would
snigger at me in order to curry favour with Zverkov; how completely Simonov
would take it all in, and how he would despise me for the abjectness of my
vanity and lack of spirit--and, worst of all, how paltry, unliterary,
commonplace it would all be. Of course, the best thing would be not to go at
all. But that was most impossible of all: if I feel impelled to do anything, I
seem to be pitchforked into it. I should have jeered at myself ever afterwards:
"So you funked it, you funked it, you funked the real thing!" On the
contrary, I passionately longed to show all that "rabble" that I was
by no means such a spiritless creature as I seemed to myself. What is more,
even in the acutest paroxysm of this cowardly fever, I dreamed of getting the
upper hand, of dominating them, carrying them away, making them like me--if
only for my "elevation of thought and unmistakable wit." They would
abandon Zverkov, he would sit on one side, silent and ashamed, while I should
crush him. Then, perhaps, we would be reconciled and drink to our everlasting
friendship; but what was most bitter and humiliating for me was that I knew
even then, knew fully and for certain, that I needed nothing of all this
really, that I did not really want to crush, to subdue, to attract them, and
that I did not care a straw really for the result, even if I did achieve it.
Oh, how I prayed for the day to pass quickly! In unutterable anguish I went to
the window, opened the movable pane and looked out into the troubled darkness
of the thickly falling wet snow. At last my wretched little clock hissed out
five. I seized my hat and, trying not to look at Apollon, who had been all day
expecting his month's wages, but in his foolishness was unwilling to be the
first to speak about it, I slipped between him and the door and, lumping into a
high-class sledge, on which I spent my last half rouble, I drove up in grand
style to the Hôtel de Paris.
I had been certain the
day before that I should be the first to arrive. But it was not a question of
being the first to arrive. Not only were they not there, but I had difficulty
in finding our room. The table was not laid even. What did it mean? After a
good many questions I elicited from the waiters that the dinner had been
ordered not for five, but for six o'clock. This was confirmed at the buffet
too. I felt really ashamed to go on questioning them. It was only twenty-five
minutes past five. If they changed the dinner hour they ought at least to have
let me know--that is what the post is for, and not to have put me in an absurd
position in my own eyes and ... and even before the waiters. I sat down; the
servant began laying the table; I felt even more humiliated when he was
present. Towards six o'clock they brought in candles, though there were lamps
burning in the room. It had not occurred to the waiter, however, to bring them
in at once when I arrived. In the next room two gloomy, angry- looking persons
were eating their dinners in silence at two different tables. There was a great
deal of noise, even shouting, in a room further away; one could hear the
laughter of a crowd of people, and nasty little shrieks in French: there were
ladies at the dinner. It was sickening, in fact. I rarely passed more
unpleasant moments, so much so that when they did arrive all together
punctually at six I was overjoyed to see them, as though they were my
deliverers, and even forgot that it was incumbent upon me to show resentment.
Zverkov walked in at
the head of them; evidently he was the leading spirit. He and all of them were
laughing; but, seeing me, Zverkov drew himself up a little, walked up to me
deliberately with a slight, rather jaunty bend from the waist. He shook hands
with me in a friendly, but not over- friendly, fashion, with a sort of
circumspect courtesy like that of a General, as though in giving me his hand he
were warding off something. I had imagined, on the contrary, that on coming in
he would at once break into his habitual thin, shrill laugh and fall to making
his insipid jokes and witticisms. I had been preparing for them ever since the
previous day, but I had not expected such condescension, such high-official
courtesy. So, then, he felt himself ineffably superior to me in every respect!
If he only meant to insult me by that high-official tone, it would not matter,
I thought--I could pay him back for it one way or another. But what if, in
reality, without the least desire to be offensive, that sheepshead had a notion
in earnest that he was superior to me and could only look at me in a
patronising way? The very supposition made me gasp.
"I was surprised
to hear of your desire to join us," he began, lisping and drawling, which
was something new. "You and I seem to have seen nothing of one another.
You fight shy of us. You shouldn't. We are not such terrible people as you
think. Well, anyway, I am glad to renew our acquaintance."
And he turned
carelessly to put down his hat on the window.
"Have you been
waiting long?" Trudolyubov inquired.
"I arrived at five
o'clock as you told me yesterday," I answered aloud, with an irritability
that threatened an explosion.
"Didn't you let
him know that we had changed the hour?" said Trudolyubov to Simonov.
"No, I didn't. I
forgot," the latter replied, with no sign of regret, and without even
apologising to me he went off to order the hors d'oeuvre.
"So you've been
here a whole hour? Oh, poor fellow!" Zverkov cried ironically, for to his
notions this was bound to be extremely funny. That rascal Ferfitchkin followed
with his nasty little snigger like a puppy yapping. My position struck him,
too, as exquisitely ludicrous and embarrassing.
"It isn't funny at
all!" I cried to Ferfitchkin, more and more irritated. "It wasn't my
fault, but other people's. They neglected to let me know. It was ... it was ...
it was simply absurd."
"It's not only
absurd, but something else as well," muttered Trudolyubov, naively taking
my part. "You are not hard enough upon it. It was simply
rudeness--unintentional, of course. And how could Simonov ... h'm!"
"If a trick like
that had been played on me," observed Ferfitchkin, "I should
..."
"But you should
have ordered something for yourself," Zverkov interrupted, "or simply
asked for dinner without waiting for us."
"You will allow
that I might have done that without your permission," I rapped out.
"If I waited, it was..."
"Let us sit down,
gentlemen," cried Simonov, coming in. "Everything is ready; I can
answer for the champagne; it is capitally frozen.... You see, I did not know
your address, where was I to look for you?" he suddenly turned to me, but
again he seemed to avoid looking at me. Evidently he had something against me.
It must have been what happened yesterday.
All sat down; I did the
same. It was a round table. Trudolyubov was on my left, Simonov on my right,
Zverkov was sitting opposite, Ferfitchkin next to him, between him and
Trudolyubov.
"Tell me, are you
... in a government office?" Zverkov went on attending to me. Seeing that
I was embarrassed he seriously thought that he ought to be friendly to me, and,
so to speak, cheer me up.
"Does he want me
to throw a bottle at his head?" I thought, in a fury. In my novel
surroundings I was unnaturally ready to be irritated.
"In the N---
office," I answered jerkily, with my eyes on my plate.
"And ha-ave you a
go-od berth? I say, what ma-a-de you leave your original job?"
"What ma-a-de me
was that I wanted to leave my original job," I drawled more than he,
hardly able to control myself. Ferfitchkin went off into a guffaw. Simonov
looked at me ironically. Trudolyubov left off eating and began looking at me
with curiosity.
Zverkov winced, but he
tried not to notice it.
"And the
remuneration?"
"What
remuneration?"
"I mean, your
sa-a-lary?"
"Why are you cross-examining
me?" However, I told him at once what my salary was. I turned horribly
red.
"It is not very
handsome," Zverkov observed majestically
"Yes, you can't
afford to dine at cafes on that," Ferfitchkin added insolently.
"To my thinking
it's very poor," Trudolyubov observed gravely.
"And how thin you
have grown! How you have changed!" added Zverkov, with a shade of venom in
his voice, scanning me and my attire with a sort of insolent compassion.
"Oh, spare his
blushes," cried Ferfitchkin, sniggering.
"My dear sir,
allow me to tell you I am not blushing," I broke out at last; "do you
hear? I am dining here, at this cafe, at my own expense, not at other
people's--note that, Mr. Ferfitchkin."
"Wha-at? Isn't
every one here dining at his own expense? You would seem to be ..."
Ferfitchkin flew out at me, turning as red as a lobster, and looking me in the
face with fury.
"Tha-at," I
answered, feeling I had gone too far, "and I imagine it would be better to
talk of something more intelligent."
"You intend to
show off your intelligence, I suppose?"
"Don't disturb
yourself, that would be quite out of place here."
"Why are you
clacking away like that, my good sir, eh? Have you gone out of your wits in
your office?"
"Enough,
gentlemen, enough!" Zverkov cried, authoritatively.
"How stupid it
is!" muttered Simonov.
"It really is
stupid. We have met here, a company of friends, for a farewell dinner to a
comrade and you carry on an altercation," said Trudolyubov, rudely
addressing himself to me alone. "You invited yourself to join us, so don't
disturb the general harmony."
"Enough,
enough!" cried Zverkov. "Give over, gentlemen, it's out of place.
Better let me tell you how I nearly got married the day before yesterday
...."
And then followed a
burlesque narrative of how this gentleman had almost been married two days
before. There was not a word about the marriage, however, but the story was
adorned with generals, colonels and kammer-junkers, while Zverkov almost took
the lead among them. It was greeted with approving laughter; Ferfitchkin
positively squealed.
No one paid any
attention to me, and I sat crushed and humiliated.
"Good Heavens,
these are not the people for me!" I thought. "And what a fool I have
made of myself before them! I let Ferfitchkin go too far, though. The brutes
imagine they are doing me an honour in letting me sit down with them. They
don't understand that it's an honour to them and not to me! I've grown thinner!
My clothes! Oh, damn my trousers! Zverkov noticed the yellow stain on the knee
as soon as he came in.... But what's the use! I must get up at once, this very
minute, take my hat and simply go without a word ... with contempt! And
tomorrow I can send a challenge. The scoundrels! As though I cared about the
seven roubles. They may think .... Damn it! I don't care about the seven
roubles. I'll go this minute!"
Of course I remained. I
drank sherry and Lafitte by the glassful in my discomfiture. Being unaccustomed
to it, I was quickly affected. My annoyance increased as the wine went to my
head. I longed all at once to insult them all in a most flagrant manner and
then go away. To seize the moment and show what I could do, so that they would
say, "He's clever, though he is absurd," and ... and ... in fact,
damn them all!
I scanned them all
insolently with my drowsy eyes. But they seemed to have forgotten me
altogether. They were noisy, vociferous, cheerful. Zverkov was talking all the
time. I began listening. Zverkov was talking of some exuberant lady whom he had
at last led on to declaring her love (of course, he was lying like a horse),
and how he had been helped in this affair by an intimate friend of his, a
Prince Kolya, an officer in the hussars, who had three thousand serfs.
"And yet this
Kolya, who has three thousand serfs, has not put in an appearance here tonight
to see you off," I cut in suddenly
For one minute every
one was silent. "You are drunk already." Trudolyubov deigned to
notice me at last, glancing contemptuously in my direction. Zverkov, without a
word, examined me as though I were an insect. I dropped my eyes. Simonov made
haste to fill up the glasses with champagne.
Trudolyubov raised his
glass, as did everyone else but me.
"Your health and
good luck on the journey!" he cried to Zverkov. "To old times, to our
future, hurrah!"
They all tossed off
their glasses, and crowded round Zverkov to kiss him. I did not move; my full
glass stood untouched before me.
"Why, aren't you
going to drink it?" roared Trudolyubov, losing patience and turning
menacingly to me.
"I want to make a
speech separately, on my own account ... and then I'll drink it, Mr.
Trudolyubov."
"Spiteful
brute!" muttered Simonov. I drew myself up in my chair and feverishly
seized my glass, prepared for something extraordinary, though I did not know
myself precisely what I was going to say.
"Silence!"
cried Ferfitchkin. "Now for a display of wit!"
Zverkov waited very
gravely, knowing what was coming.
"Mr. Lieutenant
Zverkov," I began, "let me tell you that I hate phrases,
phrasemongers and men in corsets ... that's the first point, and there is a
second one to follow it."
There was a general
stir.
"The second point
is: I hate ribaldry and ribald talkers. Especially ribald talkers! The third point:
I love justice, truth and honesty." I went on almost mechanically, for I
was beginning to shiver with horror myself and had no idea how I came to be
talking like this. "I love thought, Monsieur Zverkov; I love true
comradeship, on an equal footing and not ... H'm ... I love ... But, however,
why not? I will drink your health, too, Mr. Zverkov. Seduce the Circassian
girls, shoot the enemies of the fatherland and ... and ... to your health,
Monsieur Zverkov!"
Zverkov got up from his
seat, bowed to me and said:
"I am very much
obliged to you." He was frightfully offended and turned pale.
"Damn the
fellow!" roared Trudolyubov, bringing his fist down on the table.
"Well, he wants a
punch in the face for that," squealed Ferfitchkin.
"We ought to turn
him out," muttered Simonov.
"Not a word,
gentlemen, not a movement!" cried Zverkov solemnly, checking the general
indignation. "I thank you all, but I can show him for myself how much
value I attach to his words."
"Mr. Ferfitchkin,
you will give me satisfaction tomorrow for your words just now!" I said
aloud, turning with dignity to Ferfitchkin.
"A duel, you mean?
Certainly," he answered. But probably I was so ridiculous as I challenged
him and it was so out of keeping with my appearance that everyone including
Ferfitchkin was prostrate with laughter.
"Yes, let him
alone, of course! He is quite drunk," Trudolyubov said with disgust.
"I shall never
forgive myself for letting him join us," Simonov muttered again.
"Now is the time to
throw a bottle at their heads," I thought to myself I picked up the bottle
... and filled my glass...."No, I'd better sit on to the end," I went
on thinking; "you would be pleased, my friends, if I went away. Nothing
will induce me to go. I'll go on sitting here and drinking to the end, on
purpose, as a sign that I don't think you of the slightest consequence. I will
go on sitting and drinking, because this is a public-house and I paid my
entrance money. I'll sit here and drink, for I look upon you as so many pawns,
as inanimate pawns. I'll sit here and drink... and sing if I want to, yes,
sing, for I have the right to ... to sing... H'm!"
But I did not sing. I
simply tried not to look at any of them. I assumed most unconcerned attitudes
and waited with impatience for them to speak first. But alas, they did not
address me! And oh, how I wished, how I wished at that moment to be reconciled
to them! lt struck eight, at last nine. They moved from the table to the sofa.
Zverkov stretched himself on a lounge and put one foot on a round table. Wine
was brought there. He did, as a fact, order three bottles on his own account.
I, of course, was not invited to join them. They all sat round him on the sofa.
They listened to him, almost with reverence. It was evident that they were fond
of him. "What for? What for?" I wondered. From time to time they were
moved to drunken enthusiasm and kissed each other. They talked of the Caucasus,
of the nature of true passion, of snug berths in the service, of the income of
an hussar called Podharzhevsky, whom none of them knew personally, and rejoiced
in the largeness of it, of the extraordinary grace and beauty of a Princess D.,
whom none of them had ever seen; then it came to Shakespeare's being immortal.
I smiled contemptuously
and walked up and down the other side of the room, opposite the sofa, from the
table to the stove and back again. I tried my very utmost to show them that I
could do without them, and yet I purposely made a noise with my boots, thumping
with my heels. But it was all in vain. They paid no attention. I had the
patience to walk up and down in front of them from eight o'clock till eleven,
in the same place, from the table to the stove and back again. "I walk up
and down to please myself and no one can prevent me." The waiter who came
into the room stopped, from time to time, to look at me. I was somewhat giddy
from turning round so often; at moments it seemed to me that I was in delirium.
During those three hours I was three times soaked with sweat and dry again. At
times, with an intense, acute pang I was stabbed to the heart by the thought
that ten years, twenty years, forty years would pass, and that even in forty
years I would remember with loathing and humiliation those filthiest, most
ludicrous, and most awful moments of my life. No one could have gone out of his
way to degrade himself more shamelessly, and I fully realised it, fully, and
yet I went on pacing up and down from the table to the stove. "Oh, if you
only knew what thoughts and feelings I am capable of, how cultured I am!"
I thought at moments, mentally addressing the sofa on which my enemies were
sitting. But my enemies behaved as though I were not in the room. Once--only
once-- they turned towards me, just when Zverkov was talking about Shakespeare,
and I suddenly gave a contemptuous laugh. I laughed in such an affected and
disgusting way that they all at once broke off their conversation, and silently
and gravely for two minutes watched me walking up and down from the table to
the stove, taking no notice of them. But nothing came of it: they said nothing,
and two minutes later they ceased to notice me again. lt struck eleven.
"Friends,"
cried Zverkov getting up from the sofa, "let us all be off now,
there!"
"Of course, of
course," the others assented. I turned sharply to Zverkov. I was so
harassed, so exhausted, that I would have cut my throat to put an end to it. I
was in a fever; my hair, soaked with perspiration, stuck to my forehead and
temples.
"Zverkov, I beg
your pardon," I said abruptly and resolutely. "Ferfitchkin, yours
too, and everyone's, everyone's: I have insulted you all!"
"Aha! A duel is
not in your line, old man," Ferfitchkin hissed venomously.
It sent a sharp pang to
my heart.
"No, it's not the
duel I am afraid of, Ferfitchkin! I am ready to fight you tomorrow, after we
are reconciled. I insist upon it, in fact, and you cannot refuse. I want to
show you that I am not afraid of a duel. You shall fire first and I shall fire
into the air."
"He is comforting
himself," said Simonov.
"He's simply
raving," said Trudolyubov.
"But let us pass.
Why are you barring our way? What do you want?" Zverkov answered
disdainfully.
They were all flushed,
their eyes were bright: they had been drinking heavily.
"I ask for your friendship,
Zverkov; I insulted you, but ..."
"Insulted? You
insulted me? Understand, sir, that you never, under any circumstances, could
possibly insult me."
"And that's enough
for you. Out of the way!" concluded Trudolyubov.
"Olympia is mine,
friends, that's agreed!" cried Zverkov.
"We won't dispute
your right, we won't dispute your right," the others answered, laughing.
I stood as though spat
upon. The party went noisily out of the room. Trudolyubov struck up some stupid
song. Simonov remained behind for a moment to tip the waiters. I suddenly went
up to him.
"Simonov! give me
six roubles!" I said, with desperate resolution.
He looked at me in
extreme amazement, with vacant eyes. He, too, was drunk.
"You don't mean
you are coming with us?"
"Yes."
"I've no
money," he snapped out, and with a scornful laugh he went out of the room.
I clutched at his
overcoat. It was a nightmare.
"Simonov, I saw
you had money. Why do you refuse me? Am I a scoundrel? Beware of refusing me:
if you knew, if you knew why I am asking! My whole future, my whole plans
depend upon it!"
Simonov pulled out the
money and almost flung it at me.
"Take it, if you
have no sense of shame!" he pronounced pitilessly, and ran to overtake
them.
I was left for a moment
alone. Disorder, the remains of dinner, a broken wine-glass on the floor, spilt
wine, cigarette ends, fumes of drink and delirium in my brain, an agonising
misery in my heart and finally the waiter, who had seen and heard all and was
looking inquisitively into my face.
"I am going
there!" I cried. "Either they shall all go down on their knees to beg
for my friendship, or I will give Zverkov a slap in the face!"
"So this is it,
this is it at last--contact with real life," I muttered as I ran headlong
downstairs. "This is very different from the Pope's leaving Rome and going
to Brazil, very different from the ball on Lake Como!"
"You are a
scoundrel," a thought flashed through my mind, "if you laugh at this
now."
"No matter!"
I cried, answering myself. "Now everything is lost!"
There was no trace to
be seen of them, but that made no difference--I knew where they had gone.
At the steps was
standing a solitary night sledge-driver in a rough peasant coat, powdered over
with the still falling, wet, and as it were warm, snow. It was hot and steamy.
The little shaggy piebald horse was also covered with snow and coughing, I
remember that very well. I made a rush for the roughly made sledge; but as soon
as I raised my foot to get into it, the recollection of how Simonov had just
given me six roubles seemed to double me up and I tumbled into the sledge like
a sack.
"No, I must do a
great deal to make up for all that," I cried. "But I will make up for
it or perish on the spot this very night. Start!"
We set off. There was a
perfect whirl in my head.
"They won't go
down on their knees to beg for my friendship. That is a mirage, cheap mirage,
revolting, romantic and fantastical--that's another ball on Lake Como. And so I
am bound to slap Zverkov's face! It is my duty to. And so it is settled; I am
flying to give him a slap in the face. Hurry up!"
The driver tugged at
the reins.
"As soon as I go
in I'll give it him. Ought I before giving him the slap to say a few words by
way of preface? No. I'll simply go in and give it him. They will all be sitting
in the drawing-room, and he with Olympia on the sofa. That damned Olympia! She
laughed at my looks on one occasion and refused me. I'll pull Olympia's hair,
pull Zverkov's ears! No, better one ear, and pull him by it round the room.
Maybe they will all begin beating me and will kick me out. That's most likely,
indeed. No matter! Anyway, I shall first slap him; the initiative will be mine;
and by the laws of honour that is everything: he will be branded and cannot
wipe off the slap by any blows, by nothing but a duel. He will be forced to
fight. And let them beat me now. Let them, the ungrateful wretches! Trudolyubov
will beat me hardest, he is so strong; Ferfitchkin will be sure to catch hold
sideways and tug at my hair. But no matter, no matter! That's what I am going
for. The blockheads will be forced at last to see the tragedy of it all! When
they drag me to the door I shall call out to them that in reality they are not
worth my little finger. Get on, driver, get on!" I cried to the driver. He
started and flicked his whip, I shouted so savagely.
"We shall fight at
daybreak, that's a settled thing. I've done with the office. Ferfitchkin made a
joke about it just now. But where can I get pistols? Nonsense! I'll get my
salary in advance and buy them. And powder, and bullets? That's the second's
business. And how can it all be done by daybreak? and where am I to get a
second? I have no friends. Nonsense!" I cried, lashing myself up more and
more. "It's of no consequence! the first person I meet in the street is
bound to be my second, just as he would be bound to pull a drowning man out of
water. The most eccentric things may happen. Even if I were to ask the director
himself to be my second tomorrow, he would be bound to consent, if only from a
feeling of chivalry, and to keep the secret! Anton Antonitch... ."
The fact is, that at
that very minute the disgusting absurdity of my plan and the other side of the
question was clearer and more vivid to my imagination than it could be to
anyone on earth. But ....
"Get on, driver,
get on, you rascal, get on!"
"Ugh, sir!"
said the son of toil.
Cold shivers suddenly
ran down me. Wouldn't it be better ... to go straight home? My God, my God! Why
did I invite myself to this dinner yesterday? But no, it's impossible. And my
walking up and down for three hours from the table to the stove? No, they, they
and no one else must pay for my walking up and down! They must wipe out this
dishonour! Drive on!
And what if they give
me into custody? They won't dare! They'll be afraid of the scandal. And what if
Zverkov is so contemptuous that he refuses to fight a duel? He is sure to; but
in that case I'll show them ... I will turn up at the posting station when he's
setting off tomorrow, I'll catch him by the leg, I'll pull off his coat when he
gets into the carriage. I'll get my teeth into his hand, I'll bite him.
"See what lengths you can drive a desperate man to!" He may hit me on
the head and they may belabour me from behind. I will shout to the assembled
multitude: "Look at this young puppy who is driving off to captivate the
Circassian girls after letting me spit in his face!"
Of course, after that
everything will be over! The office will have vanished off the face of the
earth. I shall be arrested, I shall be tried, I shall be dismissed from the
service, thrown in prison, sent to Siberia. Never mind! In fifteen years when
they let me out of prison I will trudge off to him, a beggar, in rags. I shall
find him in some provincial town. He will be married and happy. He will have a
grown-up daughter.... I shall say to him: "Look, monster, at my hollow
cheeks and my rags! I've lost everything--my career, my happiness, art,
science, the woman I loved, and all through you. Here are pistols. I have come
to discharge my pistol and ... and I ... forgive you. Then I shall fire into
the air and he will hear nothing more of me ...."
I was actually on the
point of tears, though I knew perfectly well at that moment that all this was
out of Pushkin's Silvio and Lermontov's Masquerade. And all at once I felt
horribly ashamed, so ashamed that I stopped the horse, got out of the sledge,
and stood still in the snow in the middle of the street. The driver gazed at me,
sighing and astonished.
What was I to do? I
could not go on there--it was evidently stupid, and I could not leave things as
they were, because that would seem as though ... Heavens, how could I leave
things! And after such insults! "No!" I cried, throwing myself into
the sledge again. "It is ordained! It is fate! Drive on, drive on!"
And in my impatience I
punched the sledge-driver on the back of the neck.
"What are you up
to? What are you hitting me for?" the peasant shouted, but he whipped up
his nag so that it began kicking.
The wet snow was
falling in big flakes; I unbuttoned myself, regardless of it. I forgot
everything else, for I had finally decided on the slap, and felt with horror
that it was going to happen now, at once, and that no force could stop it. The
deserted street lamps gleamed sullenly in the showy darkness like torches at a
funeral. The snow drifted under my great-coat, under my coat, under my cravat,
and melted there. I did not wrap myself up--all was lost, anyway.
At last we arrived. I
jumped out, almost unconscious, rail up the steps and began knocking and
kicking at the door. I felt fearfully weak, particularly in my legs and knees.
The door was opened quickly as though they knew I was coming. As a fact,
Simonov had warned them that perhaps another gentleman would arrive, and this
was a place in which one had to give notice and to observe certain precautions.
It was one of those "millinery establishments" which were abolished
by the police a good time ago. By day it really was a shop; but at night, if
one had an introduction, one might visit it for other purposes.
I walked rapidly
through the dark shop into the familiar drawing- room, where there was only one
candle burning, and stood still in amazement: there was no one there.
"Where are they?" I asked somebody. But by now, of course, they had
separated. Before me was standing a person with a stupid smile, the "madam"
herself, who had seen me before. A minute later a door opened and another
person came in.
Taking no notice of
anything I strode about the room, and, I believe, I talked to myself. I felt as
though I had been saved from death and was conscious of this, joyfully, all over:
I should have given that slap, I should certainly, certainly have given it! But
now they were not here and ... everything had vanished and changed! I looked
round. I could not realise my condition yet. I looked mechanically at the girl
who had come in: and had a glimpse of a fresh, young, rather pale face, with
straight, dark eyebrows, and with grave, as it were wondering, eyes that
attracted me at once; I should have hated her if she had been smiling. I began
looking at her more intently and, as it were, with effort. I had not fully
collected my thoughts. There was something simple and good-natured in her face,
but something strangely grave. I am sure that this stood in her way here, and
no one of those fools had noticed her. She could not, however, have been called
a beauty, though she was tall, strong-looking, and well built. She was very
simply dressed. Something loathsome stirred within me. I went straight up to
her.
I chanced to look into
the glass. My harassed face struck me as revolting in the extreme, pale, angry,
abject, with dishevelled hair. "No matter, I am glad of it," I
thought; "I am glad that I shall seem repulsive to her; I like that."
... Somewhere behind a
screen a clock began wheezing, as though oppressed by something, as though
someone were strangling it. After an unnaturally prolonged wheezing there
followed a shrill, nasty, and as it were unexpectedly rapid, chime--as though
someone were suddenly jumping forward. It struck two. I woke up, though I had
indeed not been asleep but lying half-conscious.
It was almost
completely dark in the narrow, cramped, low-pitched room, cumbered up with an
enormous wardrobe and piles of cardboard boxes and all sorts of frippery and
litter. The candle end that had been burning on the table was going out and
gave a faint flicker from time to time. In a few minutes there would be
complete darkness.
I was not long in
coming to myself; everything came back to my mind at once, without an effort,
as though it had been in ambush to pounce upon me again. And, indeed, even
while I was unconscious a point seemed continually to remain in my memory
unforgotten, and round it my dreams moved drearily. But strange to say,
everything that had happened to me in that day seemed to me now, on waking, to
be in the far, far away past, as though I had long, long ago lived all that
down.
My head was full of
fumes. Something seemed to be hovering over me, rousing me, exciting me, and
making me restless. Misery and spite seemed surging up in me again and seeking
an outlet. Suddenly I saw beside me two wide open eyes scrutinising me
curiously and persistently. The look in those eyes was coldly detached, sullen,
as it were utterly remote; it weighed upon me.
A grim idea came into
my brain and passed all over my body, as a horrible sensation, such as one
feels when one goes into a damp and mouldy cellar. There was something
unnatural in those two eyes, beginning to look at me only now. I recalled, too,
that during those two hours I had not said a single word to this creature, and
had, in fact, considered it utterly superfluous; in fact, the silence had for
some reason gratified me. Now I suddenly realised vividly the hideous idea--
revolting as a spider--of vice, which, without love, grossly and shamelessly
begins with that in which true love finds its consummation. For a long time we
gazed at each other like that, but she did not drop her eyes before mine and
her expression did not change, so that at last I felt uncomfortable.
"What is your
name?" I asked abruptly, to put an end to it.
"Liza," she
answered almost in a whisper, but somehow far from graciously, and she turned
her eyes away.
I was silent.
"What weather! The
snow ... it's disgusting!" I said, almost to myself, putting my arm under
my head despondently, and gazing at the ceiling.
She made no answer.
This was horrible.
"Have you always
lived in Petersburg?" I asked a minute later, almost angrily, turning my
head slightly towards her.
"No."
"Where do you come
from?"
"From Riga,"
she answered reluctantly.
"Are you a
German?"
"No,
Russian."
"Have you been
here long?"
"Where?"
"In this
house?"
"A
fortnight."
She spoke more and more
jerkily. The candle went out; I could no longer distinguish her face.
"Have you a father
and mother?"
"Yes ... no ... I
have."
"Where are
they?"
"There ... in
Riga."
"What are
they?"
"Oh,
nothing."
"Nothing? Why,
what class are they?"
"Tradespeople."
"Have you always
lived with them?"
"Yes."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty."
"Why did you leave
them?"
"Oh, for no
reason."
That answer meant
"Let me alone; I feel sick, sad."
We were silent.
God knows why I did not
go away. I felt myself more and more sick and dreary. The images of the
previous day began of themselves, apart from my will, flitting through my
memory in confusion. I suddenly recalled something I had seen that morning
when, full of anxious thoughts, I was hurrying to the office.
"I saw them
carrying a coffin out yesterday and they nearly dropped it," I suddenly
said aloud, not that I desired to open the conversation, but as it were by
accident.
"A coffin?"
"Yes, in the
Haymarket; they were bringing it up out of a cellar."
"From a
cellar?"
"Not from a
cellar, but a basement. Oh, you know... down below... from a house of ill-fame.
It was filthy all round... Egg-shells, litter... a stench. It was
loathsome."
Silence.
"A nasty day to be
buried," I began, simply to avoid being silent.
"Nasty, in what
way?"
"The snow, the
wet." (I yawned.)
"It makes no
difference," she said suddenly, after a brief silence.
"No, it's
horrid." (I yawned again). "The gravediggers must have sworn at
getting drenched by the snow. And there must have been water in the
grave."
"Why water in the
grave?" she asked, with a sort of curiosity, but speaking even more
harshly and abruptly than before.
I suddenly began to
feel provoked.
"Why, there must
have been water at the bottom a foot deep. You can't dig a dry grave in Volkovo
Cemetery."
"Why?"
"Why? Why, the
place is waterlogged. It's a regular marsh. So they bury them in water. I've
seen it myself ... many times."
(I had never seen it
once, indeed I had never been in Volkovo, and had only heard stories of it.)
"Do you mean to
say, you don't mind how you die?"
"But why should I
die?" she answered, as though defending herself.
"Why, some day you
will die, and you will die just the same as that dead woman. She was ... a girl
like you. She died of consumption."
"A wench would
have died in hospital..." (She knows all about it already: she said
"wench," not "girl.")
"She was in debt
to her madam," I retorted, more and more provoked by the discussion;
"and went on earning money for her up to the end, though she was in consumption.
Some sledge-drivers standing by were talking about her to some soldiers and
telling them so. No doubt they knew her. They were laughing. They were going to
meet in a pot-house to drink to her memory."
A great deal of this
was my invention. Silence followed, profound silence. She did not stir.
"And is it better
to die in a hospital?"
"Isn't it just the
same? Besides, why should I die?" she added irritably.
"If not now, a
little later."
"Why a little
later?"
"Why, indeed? Now
you are young, pretty, fresh, you fetch a high price. But after another year of
this life you will be very different--you will go off."
"In a year?"
"Anyway, in a year
you will be worth less," I continued malignantly. "You will go from
here to something lower, another house; a year later-- to a third, lower and
lower, and in seven years you will come to a basement in the Haymarket. That
will be if you were lucky. But it would be much worse if you got some disease,
consumption, say ... and caught a chill, or something or other. It's not easy
to get over an illness in your way of life. If you catch anything you may not
get rid of it. And so you would die."
"Oh, well, then I
shall die," she answered, quite vindictively, and she made a quick
movement.
"But one is
sorry."
"Sorry for
whom?"
"Sorry for
life."
Silence.
"Have you been
engaged to be married? Eh?"
"What's that to
you?"
"Oh, I am not
cross-examining you. It's nothing to me. Why are you so cross? Of course you
may have had your own troubles. What is it to me? It's simply that I felt
sorry."
"Sorry for
whom?"
"Sorry for
you."
"No need,"
she whispered hardly audibly, and again made a faint movement.
That incensed me at
once. What! I was so gentle with her, and she ....
"Why, do you think
that you are on the right path?"
"I don't think
anything."
"That's what's
wrong, that you don't think. Realise it while there is still time. There still
is time. You are still young, good-looking; you might love, be married, be
happy... ."
"Not all married
women are happy," she snapped out in the rude abrupt tone she had used at
first.
"Not all, of
course, but anyway it is much better than the life here. Infinitely better.
Besides, with love one can live even without happiness. Even in sorrow life is
sweet; life is sweet, however one lives. But here what is there but ...
foulness? Phew!"
I turned away with
disgust; I was no longer reasoning coldly. I began to feel myself what I was
saying and warmed to the subject. I was already longing to expound the
cherished ideas I had brooded over in my corner. Something suddenly flared up
in me. An object had appeared before me.
"Never mind my
being here, I am not an example for you. I am, perhaps, worse than you are. I
was drunk when I came here, though," I hastened, however, to say in
self-defence. "Besides, a man is no example for a woman. It's a different
thing. I may degrade and defile myself, but I am not anyone's slave. I come and
go, and that's an end of it. I shake it off, and I am a different man. But you
are a slave from the start. Yes, a slave! You give up everything, your whole
freedom. If you want to break your chains afterwards, you won't be able to; you
will be more and more fast in the snares. It is an accursed bondage. I know it.
I won't speak of anything else, maybe you won't understand, but tell me: no
doubt you are in debt to your madam? There, you see," I added, though she
made no answer, but only listened in silence, entirely absorbed, "that's a
bondage for you! You will never buy your freedom. They will see to that. It's
like selling your soul to the devil.... And besides ... perhaps, I too, am just
as unlucky--how do you know--and wallow in the mud on purpose, out of misery?
You know, men take to drink from grief; well, maybe I am here from grief. Come,
tell me, what is there good here? Here you and I ... came together ... just now
and did not say one word to one another all the time, and it was only
afterwards you began staring at me like a wild creature, and I at you. Is that
loving? Is that how one human being should meet another? It's hideous, that's
what it is!"
"Yes!" she
assented sharply and hurriedly.
I was positively
astounded by the promptitude of this "Yes." So the same thought may
have been straying through her mind when she was staring at me just before. So
she, too, was capable of certain thoughts? "Damn it all, this was
interesting, this was a point of likeness!" I thought, almost rubbing my
hands. And indeed it's easy to turn a young soul like that!
It was the exercise of
my power that attracted me most.
She turned her head
nearer to me, and it seemed to me in the darkness that she propped herself on
her arm. Perhaps she was scrutinising me. How I regretted that I could not see
her eyes. I heard her deep breathing.
"Why have you come
here?" I asked her, with a note of authority already in my voice.
"Oh, I don't
know."
"But how nice it
would be to be living in your father's house! It's warm and free; you have a
home of your own."
"But what if it's
worse than this?"
"I must take the
right tone," flashed through my mind. "I may not get far with
sentimentality." But it was only a momentary thought. I swear she really
did interest me. Besides, I was exhausted and moody. And cunning so easily goes
hand-in-hand with feeling.
"Who denies
it!" I hastened to answer. "Anything may happen. I am convinced that
someone has wronged you, and that you are more sinned against than sinning. Of
course, I know nothing of your story, but it's not likely a girl like you has
come here of her own inclination... ."
"A girl like
me?" she whispered, hardly audibly; but I heard it.
Damn lt all, I was
flattering her. That was horrid. But perhaps it was a good thing.... She was
silent.
"See, Liza, I will
tell you about myself. If I had had a home from childhood, I shouldn't be what
I am now. I often think that. However bad it may be at home, anyway they are
your father and mother, and not enemies, strangers. Once a year at least,
they'll show their love of you. Anyway, you know you are at home. I grew up
without a home; and perhaps that's why I've turned so ... unfeeling."
I waited again.
"Perhaps she doesn't understand," I thought, "and, indeed, it is
absurd--it's moralising."
"If I were a
father and had a daughter, I believe I should love my daughter more than my
sons, really," I began indirectly, as though talking of something else, to
distract her attention. I must confess I blushed.
"Why so?" she
asked.
Ah! so she was
listening!
"I don't know,
Liza. I knew a father who was a stern, austere man, but used to go down on his
knees to his daughter, used to kiss her hands, her feet, he couldn't make
enough of her, really. When she danced at parties he used to stand for five
hours at a stretch, gazing at her. He was mad over her: I understand that! She
would fall asleep tired at night, and he would wake to kiss her in her sleep
and make the sign of the cross over her. He would go about in a dirty old coat,
he was stingy to every one else, but would spend his last penny for her, giving
her expensive presents, and it was his greatest delight when she was pleased
with what he gave her. Fathers always love their daughters more than the
mothers do. Some girls live happily at home! And I believe I should never let
my daughters marry.
"What next?"
she said, with a faint smile.
"I should be
jealous, I really should. To think that she should kiss anyone else! That she
should love a stranger more than her father! It's painful to imagine it. Of
course, that's all nonsense, of course every father would be reasonable at
last. But I believe before I should let her marry, I should worry myself to
death; I should find fault with all her suitors. But I should end by letting
her marry whom she herself loved. The one whom the daughter loves always seems
the worst to the father, you know. That is always so. So many family troubles
come from that."
"Some are glad to
sell their daughters, rather than marrying them honourably."
Ah, so that was it!
"Such a thing,
Liza, happens in those accursed families in which there is neither love nor God,"
I retorted warmly, "and where there is no love, there is no sense either.
There are such families, it's true, but I am not speaking of them. You must
have seen wickedness in your own family, if you talk like that. Truly, you must
have been unlucky. H'm! ... that sort of thing mostly comes about through
poverty."
"And is it any
better with the gentry? Even among the poor, honest people who live
happily?"
"H'm ... yes.
Perhaps. Another thing, Liza, man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but
does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought, he would see that
every lot has enough happiness provided for it. And what if all goes well with
the family, if the blessing of God is upon it, if the husband is a good one,
loves you, cherishes you, never leaves you! There is happiness in such a
family! Even sometimes there is happiness in the midst of sorrow; and indeed
sorrow is everywhere. If you marry you will find out for yourself. But think of
the first years of married life with one you love: what happiness, what
happiness there sometimes is in it! And indeed it's the ordinary thing. In
those early days even quarrels with one's husband end happily. Some women get
up quarrels with their husbands just because they love them. Indeed, I knew a
woman like that: she seemed to say that because she loved him, she would
torment him and make him feel it. You know that you may torment a man on
purpose through love. Women are particularly given to that, thinking to
themselves 'I will love him so, I will make so much of him afterwards, that
it's no sin to torment him a little now.' And all in the house rejoice in the
sight of you, and you are happy and gay and peaceful and honourable.... Then
there are some women who are jealous. If he went off anywhere--I knew one such
woman, she couldn't restrain herself, but would jump up at night and run off on
the sly to find out where he was, whether he was with some other woman. That's
a pity. And the woman knows herself it's wrong, and her heart fails her and she
suffers, but she loves--it's all through love. And how sweet it is to make up
after quarrels, to own herself in the wrong or to forgive him! And they both
are so happy all at once--as though they had met anew, been married over again;
as though their love had begun afresh. And no one, no one should know what
passes between husband and wife if they love one another. And whatever quarrels
there may be between them they ought not to call in their own mother to judge
between them and tell tales of one another. They are their own judges. Love is
a holy mystery and ought to be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens.
That makes it holier and better. They respect one another more, and much is
built on respect. And if once there has been love, if they have been married for
love, why should love pass away? Surely one can keep it! It is rare that one
cannot keep it. And if the husband is kind and straightforward, why should not
love last? The first phase of married love will pass, it is true, but then
there will come a love that is better still. Then there will be the union of
souls, they will have everything in common, there will be no secrets between
them. And once they have children, the most difficult times will seem to them
happy, so long as there is love and courage. Even toil will be a joy, you may
deny yourself bread for your children and even that will be a joy, They will
love you for it afterwards; so you are laying by for your future. As the
children grow up you feel that you are an example, a support for them; that
even after you die your children will always keep your thoughts and feelings,
because they have received them from you, they will take on your semblance and
likeness. So you see this is a great duty. How can it fail to draw the father
and mother nearer? People say it's a trial to have children. Who says that? It
is heavenly happiness! Are you fond of little children, Liza? I am awfully fond
of them. You know--a little rosy baby boy at your bosom, and what husband's
heart is not touched, seeing his wife nursing his child! A plump little rosy
baby, sprawling and snuggling, chubby little hands and feet, clean tiny little
nails, so tiny that it makes one laugh to took at them; eyes that look as if
they understand everything. And while it sucks it clutches at your bosom with
its little hand, plays. When its father comes up, the child tears itself away
from the bosom, flings itself back, looks at its father, laughs, as though it
were fearfully funny, and falls to sucking again. Or it will bite its mother's
breast when its little teeth are coming, while it looks sideways at her with
its little eyes as though to say, 'Look, I am biting!' Is not all that
happiness when they are the three together, husband, wife and child? One can
forgive a great deal for the sake of such moments. Yes, Liza, one must first
learn to live oneself before one blames others!"
"It's by pictures,
pictures like that one must get at you," I thought to myself, though I did
speak with real feeling, and all at once I flushed crimson. "What if she
were suddenly to burst out laughing, what should I do then?" That idea
drove me to fury. Towards the end of my speech I really was excited, and now my
vanity was somehow wounded. The silence continued. I almost nudged her.
"Why are
you--" she began and stopped. But I understood: there was a quiver of
something different in her voice, not abrupt, harsh and unyielding as before,
but something soft and shamefaced, so shamefaced that I suddenly felt ashamed
and guilty.
"What?" I
asked, with tender curiosity
"Why, you
..."
"What?"
"Why, you ...
speak somehow like a book," she said, and again there was a note of irony
in her voice.
That remark sent a pang
to my heart. It was not what I was expecting.
I did not understand
that she was hiding her feelings under irony, that this is usually the last
refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is
coarsely and intrusively invaded, and that their pride makes them refuse to
surrender till the last moment and shrink from giving expression to their
feelings before you. I ought to have guessed the truth from the timidity with
which she had repeatedly approached her sarcasm, only bringing herself to utter
it at last with an effort. But I did not guess, and an evil feeling took possession
of me.
"Wait a bit!"
I thought.
"Oh, hush, Liza!
How can you talk about being like a book, when it makes even me, an outsider,
feel sick? Though I don't look at it as an outsider, for, indeed, it touches me
to the heart.... Is it possible, is it possible that you do not feel sick at
being here yourself? Evidently habit does wonders! God knows what habit can do
with anyone. Can you seriously think that you will never grow old, that you
will always be good- looking, and that they will keep you here for ever and
ever? I say nothing of the loathsomeness of the life here.... Though let me
tell you this about it--about your present life, I mean; here though you are
young now, attractive, nice, with soul and feeling, yet you know as soon as I
came to myself just now I felt at once sick at being here with you! One can
only come here when one is drunk. But if you were anywhere else, living as good
people live, I should perhaps be more than attracted by you, should fall in
love with you, should be glad of a look from you, let alone a word; I should
hang about your door, should go down on my knees to you, should look upon you
as my betrothed and think it an honour to be allowed to. I should not dare to
have an impure thought about you. But here, you see, I know that I have only to
whistle and you have to come with me whether you like it or not. I don't
consult your wishes, but you mine. The lowest labourer hires himself as a
workman, but he doesn't make a slave of himself altogether; besides, he knows
that he will be free again presently. But when are you free? Only think what
you are giving up here? What is it you are making a slave of? It is your soul,
together with your body; you are selling your soul which you have no right to
dispose of! You give your love to be outraged by every drunkard! Love! But
that's everything, you know, it's a priceless diamond, it's a maiden's
treasure, love--why, a man would be ready to give his soul, to face death to
gain that love. But how much is your love worth now? You are sold, all of you,
body and soul, and there is no need to strive for love when you can have
everything without love. And you know there is no greater insult to a girl than
that, do you understand? To be sure, I have heard that they comfort you, poor
fools, they let you have lovers of your own here. But you know that's simply a
farce, that's simply a sham, it's just laughing at you, and you are taken in by
it! Why, do you suppose he really loves you, that lover of yours? I don't
believe it. How can he love you when he knows you may be called away from him
any minute? He would be a low fellow if he did! Will he have a grain of respect
for you? What have you in common with him? He laughs at you and robs you--that
is all his love amounts to! You are lucky if he does not beat you. Very likely
he does beat you, too. Ask him, if you have got one, whether he will marry you.
He will laugh in your face, if he doesn't spit in it or give you a blow--though
maybe he is not worth a bad halfpenny himself. And for what have you ruined
your life, if you come to think of it? For the coffee they give you to drink
and the plentiful meals? But with what object are they feeding you up? An
honest girl couldn't swallow the food, for she would know what she was being
fed for. You are in debt here, and, of course, you will always be in debt, and
you will go on in debt to the end, till the visitors here begin to scorn you.
And that will soon happen, don't rely upon your youth--all that flies by
express train here, you know. You will be kicked out. And not simply kicked
out; long before that she'll begin nagging at you, scolding you, abusing you,
as though you had not sacrificed your health for her, had not thrown away your
youth and your soul for her benefit, but as though you had ruined her, beggared
her, robbed her. And don't expect anyone to take your part: the others, your
companions, will attack you, too, win her favour, for all are in slavery here,
and have lost all conscience and pity here long ago. They have become utterly
vile, and nothing on earth is viler, more loathsome, and more insulting than
their abuse. And you are laying down everything here, unconditionally, youth
and health and beauty and hope, and at twenty-two you will look like a woman of
five-and-thirty, and you will be lucky if you are not diseased, pray to God for
that! No doubt you are thinking now that you have a gay time and no work to do!
Yet there is no work harder or more dreadful in the world or ever has been. One
would think that the heart alone would be worn out with tears. And you won't
dare to say a word, not half a word when they drive you away from here; you
will go away as though you were to blame. You will change to another house,
then to a third, then somewhere else, till you come down at last to the Haymarket.
There you will be beaten at every turn; that is good manners there, the
visitors don't know how to be friendly without beating you. You don't believe
that it is so hateful there? Go and look for yourself some time, you can see
with your own eyes. Once, one New Year's Day, I saw a woman at a door. They had
turned her out as a joke, to give her a taste of the frost because she had been
crying so much, and they shut the door behind her. At nine o'clock in the
morning she was already quite drunk, dishevelled, half-naked, covered with
bruises, her face was powdered, but she had a black-eye, blood was trickling
from her nose and her teeth; some cabman had just given her a drubbing. She was
sitting on the stone steps, a salt fish of some sort was in her hand; she was
crying, wailing something about her luck and beating with the fish on the
steps, and cabmen and drunken soldiers were crowding in the doorway taunting
her. You don't believe that you will ever be like that? I should be sorry to
believe it, too, but how do you know; maybe ten years, eight years ago that
very woman with the salt fish came here fresh as a cherub, innocent, pure,
knowing no evil, blushing at every word. Perhaps she was like you, proud, ready
to take offence, not like the others; perhaps she looked like a queen, and knew
what happiness was in store for the man who should love her and whom she should
love. Do you see how it ended? And what if at that very minute when she was
beating on the filthy steps with that fish, drunken and dishevelled--what if at
that very minute she recalled the pure early days in her father's house, when
she used to go to school and the neighbour's son watched for her on the way,
declaring that he would love her as long as he lived, that he would devote his life
to her, and when they vowed to love one another for ever and be married as soon
as they were grown up! No, Liza, it would be happy for you if you were to die
soon of consumption in some corner, in some cellar like that woman just now. In
the hospital, do you say? You will be lucky if they take you, but what if you
are still of use to the madam here? Consumption is a queer disease, it is not
like fever. The patient goes on hoping till the last minute and says he is all
right. He deludes himself And that just suits your madam. Don't doubt it,
that's how it is; you have sold your soul, and what is more you owe money, so
you daren't say a word. But when you are dying, all will abandon you, all will
turn away from you, for then there will be nothing to get from you. What's
more, they will reproach you for cumbering the place, for being so long over
dying. However you beg you won't get a drink of water without abuse: 'Whenever
are you going off, you nasty hussy, you won't let us sleep with your moaning,
you make the gentlemen sick.' That's true, I have heard such things said
myself. They will thrust you dying into the filthiest corner in the cellar--in
the damp and darkness; what will your thoughts be, lying there alone? When you
die, strange hands will lay you out, with grumbling and impatience; no one will
bless you, no one will sigh for you, they only want to get rid of you as soon
as may be; they will buy a coffin, take you to the grave as they did that poor
woman today, and celebrate your memory at the tavern. In the grave, sleet,
filth, wet snow-- no need to put themselves out for you--'Let her down, Vanuha;
it's just like her luck--even here, she is head-foremost, the hussy. Shorten
the cord, you rascal.' 'It's all right as it is.' 'All right, is it? Why, she's
on her side! She was a fellow-creature, after all! But, never mind, throw the
earth on her.' And they won't care to waste much time quarrelling over you.
They will scatter the wet blue clay as quick as they can and go off to the
tavern ... and there your memory on earth will end; other women have children
to go to their graves, fathers, husbands. While for you neither tear, nor sigh,
nor remembrance; no one in the whole world will ever come to you, your name
will vanish from the face of the earth--as though you had never existed, never
been born at all! Nothing but filth and mud, however you knock at your coffin
lid at night, when the dead arise, however you cry: 'Let me out, kind people,
to live in the light of day! My life was no life at all; my life has been
thrown away like a dish-clout; it was drunk away in the tavern at the
Haymarket; let me out, kind people, to live in the world again.'"
And I worked myself up
to such a pitch that I began to have a lump in my throat myself, and ... and
all at once I stopped, sat up in dismay and, bending over apprehensively, began
to listen with a beating heart. I had reason to be troubled.
I had felt for some
time that I was turning her soul upside down and rending her heart, and--and
the more I was convinced of it, the more eagerly I desired to gain my object as
quickly and as effectually as possible. It was the exercise of my skill that
carried me away; yet it was not merely sport....
I knew I was speaking
stiffly, artificially, even bookishly, in fact, I could not speak except
"like a book." But that did not trouble me: I knew, I felt that I
should be understood and that this very bookishness might be an assistance. But
now, having attained my effect, I was suddenly panic-stricken. Never before had
I witnessed such despair! She was lying on her face, thrusting her face into
the pillow and clutching it in both hands. Her heart was being torn. Her
youthful body was shuddering all over as though in convulsions. Suppressed sobs
rent her bosom and suddenly burst out in weeping and walling, then she pressed
closer into the pillow: she did not want anyone here, not a living soul, to
know of her anguish and her tears. She bit the pillow, bit her hand till it
bled (I saw that afterwards), or, thrusting her fingers into her dishevelled
hair, seemed rigid with the effort of restraint, holding her breath and
clenching her teeth. I began saying something, begging her to calm herself, but
felt that I did not dare; and all at once, in a sort of cold shiver, almost in
terror, began fumbling in the dark, trying hurriedly to get dressed to go. It
was dark; though I tried my best I could not finish dressing quickly. Suddenly
I felt a box of matches and a candlestick with a whole candle in it. As soon as
the room was lighted up, Liza sprang up, sat up in bed, and with a contorted
face, with a half insane smile, looked at me almost senselessly. I sat down
beside her and took her hands; she came to herself, made an impulsive movement
towards me, would have caught hold of me, but did not dare, and slowly bowed
her head before me.
"Liza, my dear, I
was wrong ... forgive me, my dear," I began, but she squeezed my hand in
her fingers so tightly that I felt I was saying the wrong thing and stopped.
"This is my
address, Liza, come to me."
"I will
come," she answered resolutely, her head still bowed.
"But now I am
going, good-bye ... till we meet again."
I got up; she, too,
stood up and suddenly flushed all over, gave a shudder, snatched up a shawl
that was lying on a chair and muffled herself in it to her chin. As she did
this she gave another sickly smile, blushed and looked at me strangely. I felt
wretched; I was in haste to get away--to disappear.
"Wait a
minute," she said suddenly, in the passage just at the doorway, stopping me
with her hand on my overcoat. She put down the candle in hot haste and ran off;
evidently she had thought of something or wanted to show me something. As she
ran away she flushed, her eyes shone, and there was a smile on her lips--what
was the meaning of it? Against my will I waited: she came back a minute later
with an expression that seemed to ask forgiveness for something. In fact, it
was not the same face, not the same look as the evening before: sullen,
mistrustful and obstinate. Her eyes now were imploring, soft, and at the same
time trustful, caressing, timid. The expression with which children look at
people they are very fond of, of whom they are asking a favour. Her eyes were a
light hazel, they were lovely eyes, full of life, and capable of expressing
love as well as sullen hatred.
Making no explanation,
as though I, as a sort of higher being, must understand everything without
explanations, she held out a piece of paper to me. Her whole face was
positively beaming at that instant with naive, almost childish, triumph. I
unfolded it. It was a letter to her from a medical student or someone of that
sort--a very high-flown and flowery, but extremely respectful, love-letter. I
don't recall the words now, but I remember well that through the high-flown
phrases there was apparent a genuine feeling, which cannot be feigned. When I
had finished reading it I met her glowing, questioning, and childishly
impatient eyes fixed upon me. She fastened her eyes upon my face and waited
impatiently for what I should say. In a few words, hurriedly, but with a sort
of joy and pride, she explained to me that she had been to a dance somewhere in
a private house, a family of "very nice people, who knew nothing,
absolutely nothing, for she had only come here so lately and it had all
happened ... and she hadn't made up her mind to stay and was certainly going
away as soon as she had paid her debt..." and at that party there had been
the student who had danced with her all the evening. He had talked to her, and
it turned out that he had known her in old days at Riga when he was a child,
they had played together, but a very long time ago--and he knew her parents,
but about this he knew nothing, nothing whatever, and had no suspicion! And the
day after the dance (three days ago) he had sent her that letter through the
friend with whom she had gone to the party ... and ... well, that was
all."
She dropped her shining
eyes with a sort of bashfulness as she finished.
The poor girl was
keeping that student's letter as a precious treasure, and had run to fetch it,
her only treasure, because she did not want me to go away without knowing that
she, too, was honestly and genuinely loved; that she, too, was addressed respectfully.
No doubt that letter was destined to lie in her box and lead to nothing. But
none the less, I am certain that she would keep it all her life as a precious
treasure, as her pride and justification, and now at such a minute she had
thought of that letter and brought it with naive pride to raise herself in my
eyes that I might see, that I, too, might think well of her. I said nothing,
pressed her hand and went out. I so longed to get away ... I walked all the way
home, in spite of the fact that the melting snow was still falling in heavy
flakes. I was exhausted, shattered, in bewilderment. But behind the
bewilderment the truth was already gleaming. The loathsome truth.
It was some time,
however, before I consented to recognise that truth. Waking up in the morning
after some hours of heavy, leaden sleep, and immediately realising all that had
happened on the previous day, I was positively amazed at my last night's
sentimentality with Liza, at all those "outcries of horror and pity."
"To think of having such an attack of womanish hysteria, pah!" I
concluded. And what did I thrust my address upon her for? What if she comes?
Let her come, though; it doesn't matter.... But obviously, that was not now the
chief and the most important matter: I had to make haste and at all costs save
my reputation in the eyes of Zverkov and Simonov as quickly as possible; that
was the chief business. And I was so taken up that morning that I actually
forgot all about Liza.
First of all I had at
once to repay what I had borrowed the day before from Simonov. I resolved on a
desperate measure: to borrow fifteen roubles straight off from Anton Antonitch.
As luck would have it he was in the best of humours that morning, and gave it
to me at once, on the first asking. I was so delighted at this that, as I
signed the IOU with a swaggering air, I told him casually that the night before
"I had been keeping it up with some friends at the Hôtel de Paris; we were
giving a farewell party to a comrade, in fact, I might say a friend of my
childhood, and you know--a desperate rake, fearfully spoilt--of course, he
belongs to a good family, and has considerable means, a brilliant career; he is
witty, charming, a regular Lovelace, you understand; we drank an extra
'half-dozen' and..."
And it went off all
right; all this was uttered very easily, unconstrainedly and complacently.
On reaching home I
promptly wrote to Simonov.
To this hour I am lost
in admiration when I recall the truly gentlemanly, good-humoured, candid tone
of my letter. With tact and good- breeding, and, above all, entirely without
superfluous words, I blamed myself for all that had happened. I defended
myself, "if I really may be allowed to defend myself," by alleging
that being utterly unaccustomed to wine, I had been intoxicated with the first
glass, which I said, I had drunk before they arrived, while I was waiting for
them at the Hôtel de Paris between five and six o'clock. I begged Simonov's
pardon especially; I asked him to convey my explanations to all the others, especially
to Zverkov, whom "I seemed to remember as though in a dream" I had
insulted. I added that I would have called upon all of them myself, but my head
ached, and besides I had not the face to. I was particularly pleased with a
certain lightness, almost carelessness (strictly within the bounds of
politeness, however), which was apparent in my style, and better than any
possible arguments, gave them at once to understand that I took rather an
independent view of "all that unpleasantness last night"; that I was
by no means so utterly crushed as you, my friends, probably imagine; but on the
contrary, looked upon it as a gentleman serenely respecting himself should look
upon it. "On a young hero's past no censure is cast!"
"There is actually
an aristocratic playfulness about it!" I thought admiringly, as I read
over the letter. "And it's all because I am an intellectual and cultivated
man! Another man in my place would not have known how to extricate himself, but
here I have got out of it and am as jolly as ever again, and all because I am
'a cultivated and educated man of our day.' And, indeed, perhaps, everything
was due to the wine yesterday. H'm!" ... no, it was not the wine. I did
not drink anything at all between five and six when I was waiting for them. I
had lied to Simonov; I had lied shamelessly; and indeed I wasn't ashamed
now.... Hang it all though, the great thing was that I was rid of it.
I put six roubles in
the letter, sealed it up, and asked Apollon to take it to Simonov. When he
learned that there was money in the letter, Apollon became more respectful and
agreed to take it. Towards evening I went out for a walk. My head was still
aching and giddy after yesterday. But as evening came on and the twilight grew
denser, my impressions and, following them, my thoughts, grew more and more
different and confused. Something was not dead within me, in the depths of my
heart and conscience it would not die, and it showed itself in acute
depression. For the most part I jostled my way through the most crowded
business streets, along Myeshtchansky Street, along Sadovy Street and in
Yusupov Garden. I always liked particularly sauntering along these streets in
the dusk, just when there were crowds of working people of all sorts going home
from their daily work, with faces looking cross with anxiety. What I liked was
just that cheap bustle, that bare prose. On this occasion the jostling of the
streets irritated me more than ever, I could not make out what was wrong with
me, I could not find the clue, something seemed rising up continually in my
soul, painfully, and refusing to be appeased. I returned home completely upset,
it was just as though some crime were lying on my conscience.
The thought that Liza
was coming worried me continually. It seemed queer to me that of all my
recollections of yesterday this tormented me, as it were, especially, as it
were, quite separately. Everything else I had quite succeeded in forgetting by
the evening; I dismissed it all and was still perfectly satisfied with my letter
to Simonov. But on this point I was not satisfied at all. It was as though I
were worried only by Liza. "What if she comes," I thought
incessantly, "well, it doesn't matter, let her come! H'm! it's horrid that
she should see, for instance, how I live. Yesterday I seemed such a hero to
her, while now, h'm! It's horrid, though, that I have let myself go so, the
room looks like a beggar's. And I brought myself to go out to dinner in such a
suit! And my American leather sofa with the stuffing sticking out. And my
dressing-gown, which will not cover me, such tatters, and she will see all this
and she will see Apollon. That beast is certain to insult her. He will fasten
upon her in order to be rude to me. And I, of course, shall be panic-stricken
as usual, I shall begin bowing and scraping before her and pulling my
dressing-gown round me, I shall begin smiling, telling lies. Oh, the
beastliness! And it isn't the beastliness of it that matters most! There is
something more important, more loathsome, viler! Yes, viler! And to put on that
dishonest lying mask again!..."
When I reached that
thought I fired up all at once.
"Why dishonest?
How dishonest? I was speaking sincerely last night. I remember there was real
feeling in me, too. What I wanted was to excite an honourable feeling in
her.... Her crying was a good thing, it will have a good effect."
Yet I could not feel at
ease. All that evening, even when I had come back home, even after nine
o'clock, when I calculated that Liza could not possibly come, still she haunted
me, and what was worse, she came back to my mind always in the same position.
One moment out of all that had happened last night stood vividly before my
imagination; the moment when I struck a match and saw her pale, distorted face,
with its look of torture. And what a pitiful, what an unnatural, what a
distorted smile she had at that moment! But I did not know then, that fifteen
years later I should still in my imagination see Liza, always with the pitiful,
distorted, inappropriate smile which was on her face at that minute.
Next day I was ready
again to look upon it all as nonsense, due to over- excited nerves, and, above
all, as exaggerated. I was always conscious of that weak point of mine, and
sometimes very much afraid of it. "I exaggerate everything, that is where
I go wrong," I repeated to myself every hour. But, however, "Liza
will very likely come all the same," was the refrain with which all my
reflections ended. I was so uneasy that I sometimes flew into a fury: "She'll
come, she is certain to come!" I cried, running about the room, "if
not today, she will come tomorrow; she'll find me out! The damnable romanticism
of these pure hearts! Oh, the vileness--oh, the silliness--oh, the stupidity of
these 'wretched sentimental souls!' Why, how fail to understand? How could one
fall to understand? ..."
But at this point I
stopped short, and in great confusion, indeed.
And how few, how few
words, I thought, in passing, were needed; how little of the idyllic (and
affectedly, bookishly, artificially idyllic too) had sufficed to turn a whole
human life at once according to my will. That's virginity, to be sure!
Freshness of soil!
At times a thought
occurred to me, to go to her, "to tell her all," and beg her not to
come to me. But this thought stirred such wrath in me that I believed I should
have crushed that "damned" Liza if she had chanced to be near me at
the time. I should have insulted her, have spat at her, have turned her out,
have struck her!
One day passed,
however, another and another; she did not come and I began to grow calmer. I
felt particularly bold and cheerful after nine o'clock, I even sometimes began
dreaming, and rather sweetly: I, for instance, became the salvation of Liza,
simply through her coming to me and my talking to her.... I develop her,
educate her. Finally, I notice that she loves me, loves me passionately. I
pretend not to understand (I don't know, however, why I pretend, just for
effect, perhaps). At last all confusion, transfigured, trembling and sobbing,
she flings herself at my feet and says that I am her saviour, and that she
loves me better than anything in the world. I am amazed, but.... Liza," I
say, "can you imagine that I have not noticed your love? I saw it all, I
divined it, but I did not dare to approach you first, because I had an
influence over you and was afraid that you would force yourself, from
gratitude, to respond to my love, would try to rouse in your heart a feeling
which was perhaps absent, and I did not wish that ... because it would be tyranny
... it would be indelicate (in short, I launch off at that point into European,
inexplicably lofty subtleties a la George Sand), but now, now you are mine, you
are my creation, you are pure, you are good, you are my noble wife.
'Into my house come bold and free,
Its rightful mistress there to be'."
Then we begin living together,
go abroad and so on, and so on. In fact, in the end it seemed vulgar to me
myself, and I began putting out my tongue at myself
Besides, they won't let
her out, "the hussy!" I thought. They don't let them go out very
readily, especially in the evening (for some reason I fancied she would come in
the evening, and at seven o'clock precisely). Though she did say she was not
altogether a slave there yet, and had certain rights; so, h'm! Damn it all, she
will come, she is sure to come!
It was a good thing, in
fact, that Apollon distracted my attention at that time by his rudeness. He
drove me beyond all patience! He was the bane of my life, the curse laid upon
me by Providence. We had been squabbling continually for years, and I hated
him. My God, how I hated him! I believe I had never hated anyone in my life as
I hated him, especially at some moments. He was an elderly, dignified man, who
worked part of his time as a tailor. But for some unknown reason he despised me
beyond all measure, and looked down upon me insufferably. Though, indeed, he
looked down upon everyone. Simply to glance at that flaxen, smoothly brushed
head, at the tuft of hair he combed up on his forehead and oiled with sunflower
oil, at that dignified mouth, compressed into the shape of the letter V, made
one feel one was confronting a man who never doubted of himself. He was a
pedant, to the most extreme point, the greatest pedant I had met on earth, and
with that had a vanity only befitting Alexander of Macedon. He was in love with
every button on his coat, every nail on his fingers--absolutely in love with
them, and he looked it! In his behaviour to me he was a perfect tyrant, he
spoke very little to me, and if he chanced to glance at me he gave me a firm,
majestically self- confident and invariably ironical look that drove me
sometimes to fury. He did his work with the air of doing me the greatest
favour, though he did scarcely anything for me, and did not, indeed, consider
himself bound to do anything. There could be no doubt that he looked upon me as
the greatest fool on earth, and that "he did not get rid of me" was
simply that he could get wages from me every month. He consented to do nothing
for me for seven roubles a month. Many sins should be forgiven me for what I
suffered from him. My hatred reached such a point that sometimes his very step
almost threw me into convulsions. What I loathed particularly was his lisp. His
tongue must have been a little too long or something of that sort, for he
continually lisped, and seemed to be very proud of it, imagining that it
greatly added to his dignity. He spoke in a slow, measured tone, with his hands
behind his back and his eyes fixed on the ground. He maddened me particularly
when he read aloud the psalms to himself behind his partition. Many a battle I
waged over that reading! But he was awfully fond of reading aloud in the
evenings, in a slow, even, sing-song voice, as though over the dead. It is
interesting that that is how he has ended: he hires himself out to read the
psalms over the dead, and at the same time he kills rats and makes blacking.
But at that time I could not get rid of him, it was as though he were
chemically combined with my existence. Besides, nothing would have induced him
to consent to leave me. I could not live in furnished lodgings: my lodging was
my private solitude, my shell, my cave, in which I concealed myself from all
mankind, and Apollon seemed to me, for some reason, an integral part of that
flat, and for seven years I could not turn him away.
To be two or three days
behind with his wages, for instance, was impossible. He would have made such a
fuss, I should not have known where to hide my head. But I was so exasperated
with everyone during those days, that I made up my mind for some reason and
with some object to punish Apollon and not to pay him for a fortnight the wages
that were owing him. I had for a long time--for the last two years--been
intending to do this, simply in order to teach him not to give himself airs
with me, and to show him that if I liked I could withhold his wages. I purposed
to say nothing to him about it, and was purposely silent indeed, in order to
score off his pride and force him to be the first to speak of his wages. Then I
would take the seven roubles out of a drawer, show him I have the money put
aside on purpose, but that I won't, I won't, I simply won't pay him his wages,
I won't just because that is "what I wish," because "I am
master, and it is for me to decide," because he has been disrespectful,
because he has been rude; but if he were to ask respectfully I might be
softened and give it to him, otherwise he might wait another fortnight, another
three weeks, a whole month....
But angry as I was, yet
he got the better of me. I could not hold out for four days. He began as he
always did begin in such cases, for there had been such cases already, there
had been attempts (and it may be observed I knew all this beforehand, I knew
his nasty tactics by heart). He would begin by fixing upon me an exceedingly
severe stare, keeping it up for several minutes at a time, particularly on
meeting me or seeing me out of the house. If I held out and pretended not to
notice these stares, he would, still in silence, proceed to further tortures.
All at once, à propos of nothing, he would walk softly and smoothly into my
room, when I was pacing up and down or reading, stand at the door, one hand
behind his back and one foot behind the other, and fix upon me a stare more than
severe, utterly contemptuous. If I suddenly asked him what he wanted, he would
make me no answer, but continue staring at me persistently for some seconds,
then, with a peculiar compression of his lips and a most significant air,
deliberately turn round and deliberately go back to his room. Two hours later
he would come out again and again present himself before me in the same way. It
had happened that in my fury I did not even ask him what he wanted, but simply
raised my head sharply and imperiously and began staring back at him. So we
stared at one another for two minutes; at last he turned with deliberation and
dignity and went back again for two hours.
If I were still not
brought to reason by all this, but persisted in my revolt, he would suddenly begin
sighing while he looked at me, long, deep sighs as though measuring by them the
depths of my moral degradation, and, of course, it ended at last by his
triumphing completely: I raged and shouted, but still was forced to do what he
wanted.
This time the usual
staring manoeuvres had scarcely begun when I lost my temper and flew at him in
a fury. I was irritated beyond endurance apart from him.
"Stay," I
cried, in a frenzy, as he was slowly and silently turning, with one hand behind
his back, to go to his room. "Stay! Come back, come back, I tell
you!" and I must have bawled so unnaturally, that he turned round and even
looked at me with some wonder. However, he persisted in saying nothing, and
that infuriated me.
"How dare you come
and look at me like that without being sent for? Answer!"
After looking at me
calmly for half a minute, he began turning round again.
"Stay!" I
roared, running up to him, "don't stir! There. Answer, now: what did you
come in to look at?"
"If you have any
order to give me it's my duty to carry it out," he answered, after another
silent pause, with a slow, measured lisp, raising his eyebrows and calmly
twisting his head from one side to another, all this with exasperating composure.
"That's not what I
am asking you about, you torturer!" I shouted, turning crimson with anger.
"I'll tell you why you came here myself: you see, I don't give you your
wages, you are so proud you don't want to bow down and ask for it, and so you
come to punish me with your stupid stares, to worry me and you have no sus...
pic ... ion how stupid it is-- stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid! ..."
He would have turned
round again without a word, but I seized him.
"Listen," I
shouted to him. "Here's the money, do you see, here it is," (I took
it out of the table drawer); "here's the seven roubles complete, but you
are not going to have it, you ... are ... not ... going ... to ... have it
until you come respectfully with bowed head to beg my pardon. Do you
hear?"
"That cannot
be," he answered, with the most unnatural self- confidence.
"It shall be
so," I said, "I give you my word of honour, it shall be!"
"And there's
nothing for me to beg your pardon for," he went on, as though he had not
noticed my exclamations at all. "Why, besides, you called me a 'torturer,'
for which I can summon you at the police-station at any time for insulting
behaviour."
"Go, summon
me," I roared, "go at once, this very minute, this very second! You
are a torturer all the same! a torturer!"
But he merely looked at
me, then turned, and regardless of my loud calls to him, he walked to his room
with an even step and without looking round.
"If it had not
been for Liza nothing of this would have happened," I decided inwardly.
Then, after waiting a minute, I went myself behind his screen with a dignified
and solemn air, though my heart was beating slowly and violently.
"Apollon," I
said quietly and emphatically, though I was breathless, "go at once
without a minute's delay and fetch the police-officer."
He had meanwhile
settled himself at his table, put on his spectacles and taken up some sewing.
But, hearing my order, he burst into a guffaw.
"At once, go this
minute! Go on, or else you can't imagine what will happen."
"You are certainly
out of your mind," he observed, without even raising his head, lisping as
deliberately as ever and threading his needle. "Whoever heard of a man
sending for the police against himself? And as for being frightened--you are
upsetting yourself about nothing, for nothing will come of it."
"Go!" I
shrieked, clutching him by the shoulder. I felt I should strike him in a
minute.
But I did not notice
the door from the passage softly and slowly open at that instant and a figure
come in, stop short, and begin staring at us in perplexity I glanced, nearly
swooned with shame, and rushed back to my room. There, clutching at my hair
with both hands, I leaned my head against the wall and stood motionless in that
position.
Two minutes later I
heard Apollon's deliberate footsteps. "There is some woman asking for
you," he said, looking at me with peculiar severity. Then he stood aside
and let in Liza. He would not go away, but stared at us sarcastically.
"Go away, go
away," I commanded in desperation. At that moment my clock began whirring
and wheezing and struck seven.
"Into my house come bold and free,
Its rightful mistress there to be."
I stood before her crushed,
crestfallen, revoltingly confused, and I believe I smiled as I did my utmost to
wrap myself in the skirts of my ragged wadded dressing-gown--exactly as I had
imagined the scene not long before in a fit of depression. After standing over
us for a couple of minutes Apollon went away, but that did not make me more at
ease. What made it worse was that she, too, was overwhelmed with confusion,
more so, in fact, than I should have expected. At the sight of me, of course.
"Sit down," I
said mechanically, moving a chair up to the table, and I sat down on the sofa.
She obediently sat down at once and gazed at me open-eyed, evidently expecting
something from me at once. This naivete of expectation drove me to fury, but I
restrained myself.
She ought to have tried
not to notice, as though everything had been as usual, while instead of that,
she ... and I dimly felt that I should make her pay dearly for all this.
"You have found me
in a strange position, Liza," I began, stammering and knowing that this
was the wrong way to begin. "No, no, don't imagine anything," I
cried, seeing that she had suddenly flushed. "I am not ashamed of my
poverty.... On the contrary, I look with pride on my poverty. I am poor but
honourable.... One can be poor and honourable," I muttered. "However
... would you like tea?...."
"No," she was
beginning.
"Wait a
minute."
I leapt up and ran to
Apollon. I had to get out of the room somehow.
"Apollon," I
whispered in feverish haste, flinging down before him the seven roubles which
had remained all the time in my clenched fist, "here are your wages, you
see I give them to you; but for that you must come to my rescue: bring me tea
and a dozen rusks from the restaurant. If you won't go, you'll make me a
miserable man! You don't know what this woman is.... This is--everything! You
may be imagining something.... But you don't know what that woman is! ..."
Apollon, who had
already sat down to his work and put on his spectacles again, at first glanced
askance at the money without speaking or putting down his needle; then, without
paying the slightest attention to me or making any answer, he went on busying
himself with his needle, which he had not yet threaded. I waited before him for
three minutes with my arms crossed à la Napoléon . My temples were moist with
sweat. I was pale, I felt it. But, thank God, he must have been moved to pity,
looking at me. Having threaded his needle he deliberately got up from his seat,
deliberately moved back his chair, deliberately took off his spectacles,
deliberately counted the money, and finally asking me over his shoulder:
"Shall I get a whole portion?" deliberately walked out of the room.
As I was going back to Liza, the thought occurred to me on the way: shouldn't I
run away just as I was in my dressing-gown, no matter where, and then let
happen what would?
I sat down again. She
looked at me uneasily. For some minutes we were silent.
"I will kill
him," I shouted suddenly, striking the table with my fist so that the ink
spurted out of the inkstand.
"What are you
saying!" she cried, starting.
"I will kill him!
kill him!" I shrieked, suddenly striking the table in absolute frenzy, and
at the same time fully understanding how stupid it was to be in such a frenzy.
"You don't know, Liza, what that torturer is to me. He is my torturer....
He has gone now to fetch some rusks; he ..."
And suddenly I burst
into tears. It was an hysterical attack. How ashamed I felt in the midst of my
sobs; but still I could not restrain them.
She was frightened.
"What is the
matter? What is wrong?" she cried, fussing about me.
"Water, give me
water, over there!" I muttered in a faint voice, though I was inwardly
conscious that I could have got on very well without water and without
muttering in a faint voice. But I was, what is called, putting it on, to save
appearances, though the attack was a genuine one.
She gave me water,
looking at me in bewilderment. At that moment Apollon brought in the tea. It
suddenly seemed to me that this common- place, prosaic tea was horribly
undignified and paltry after all that had happened, and I blushed crimson. Liza
looked at Apollon with positive alarm. He went out without a glance at either
of us.
"Liza, do you
despise me?" I asked, looking at her fixedly, trembling with impatience to
know what she was thinking.
She was confused, and
did not know what to answer.
"Drink your
tea," I said to her angrily. I was angry with myself, but, of course, it
was she who would have to pay for it. A horrible spite against her suddenly
surged up in my heart; I believe I could have killed her. To revenge myself on
her I swore inwardly not to say a word to her all the time. "She is the
cause of it all," I thought.
Our silence lasted for
five minutes. The tea stood on the table; we did not touch it. I had got to the
point of purposely refraining from beginning in order to embarrass her further;
it was awkward for her to begin alone. Several times she glanced at me with
mournful perplexity. I was obstinately silent. I was, of course, myself the
chief sufferer, because I was fully conscious of the disgusting meanness of my
spiteful stupidity, and yet at the same time I could not restrain myself
"I want to... get
away ... from there altogether," she began, to break the silence in some
way, but, poor girl, that was just what she ought not to have spoken about at
such a stupid moment to a man so stupid as I was. My heart positively ached
with pity for her tactless and unnecessary straightforwardness. But something
hideous at once stifled all compassion in me; it even provoked me to greater
venom. I did not care what happened. Another five minutes passed.
"Perhaps I am in
your way," she began timidly, hardly audibly, and was getting up.
But as soon as I saw
this first impulse of wounded dignity I positively trembled with spite, and at
once burst out.
"Why have you come
to me, tell me that, please?" I began, gasping for breath and regardless
of logical connection in my words. I longed to have it all out at once, at one
burst; I did not even trouble how to begin. "Why have you come? Answer,
answer," I cried, hardly knowing what I was doing. "I'll tell you, my
good girl, why you have come. You've come because I talked sentimental stuff to
you then. So now you are soft as butter and longing for fine sentiments again.
So you may as well know that I was laughing at you then. And I am laughing at
you now. Why are you shuddering? Yes, I was laughing at you! I had been
insulted just before, at dinner, by the fellows who came that evening before
me. I came to you, meaning to thrash one of them, an officer; but I didn't
succeed, I didn't find him; I had to avenge the insult on someone to get back
my own again; you turned up, I vented my spleen on you and laughed at you. I
had been humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate; I had been treated like a rag,
so I wanted to show my power.... That's what it was, and you imagined I had
come there on purpose to save you. Yes? You imagined that? You imagined
that?"
I knew that she would
perhaps be muddled and not take it all in exactly, but I knew, too, that she
would grasp the gist of it, very well indeed. And so, indeed, she did. She
turned white as a handkerchief, tried to say something, and her lips worked
painfully; but she sank on a chair as though she had been felled by an axe. And
all the time afterwards she listened to me with her lips parted and her eyes wide
open, shuddering with awful terror. The cynicism, the cynicism of my words
overwhelmed her....
"Save you!" I
went on, jumping up from my chair and running up and down the room before her.
"Save you from what? But perhaps I am worse than you myself. Why didn't
you throw it in my teeth when I was giving you that sermon: 'But what did you
come here yourself for? was it to read us a sermon?' Power, power was what I
wanted then, sport was what I wanted, I wanted to wring out your tears, your
humiliation, your hysteria--that was what I wanted then! Of course, I couldn't
keep it up then, because I am a wretched creature, I was frightened, and, the
devil knows why, gave you my address in my folly. Afterwards, before I got
home, I was cursing and swearing at you because of that address, I hated you
already because of the lies I had told you. Because I only like playing with
words, only dreaming, but, do you know, what I really want is that you should
all go to hell. That is what I want. I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole
world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the
world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go
to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not? Well,
anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard. Here
I have been shuddering for the last three days at the thought of your coming.
And do you know what has worried me particularly for these three days? That I
posed as such a hero to you, and now you would see me in a wretched torn
dressing-gown, beggarly, loathsome. I told you just now that I was not ashamed
of my poverty; so you may as well know that I am ashamed of it; I am more
ashamed of it than of anything, more afraid of it than of being found out if I
were a thief, because I am as vain as though I had been skinned and the very
air blowing on me hurt. Surely by now you must realise that I shall never
forgive you for having found me in this wretched dressing-gown, just as I was
flying at Apollon like a spiteful cur. The saviour, the former hero, was flying
like a mangy, unkempt sheep-dog at his lackey, and the lackey was jeering at
him! And I shall never forgive you for the tears I could not help shedding
before you just now, like some silly woman put to shame! And for what I am
confessing to you now, I shall never forgive you either! Yes--you must answer
for it all because you turned up like this, because I am a blackguard, because
I am the nastiest, stupidest, absurdest and most envious of all the worms on
earth, who are not a bit better than I am, but, the devil knows why, are never
put to confusion; while I shall always be insulted by every louse, that is my
doom! And what is it to me that you don't understand a word of this! And what do
I care, what do I care about you, and whether you go to ruin there or not? Do
you understand? How I shall hate you now after saying this, for having been
here and listening. Why, it's not once in a lifetime a man speaks out like
this, and then it is in hysterics! ... What more do you want? Why do you still
stand confronting me, after all this? Why are you worrying me? Why don't you
go?"
But at this point a
strange thing happened. I was so accustomed to think and imagine everything
from books, and to picture everything in the world to myself just as I had made
it up in my dreams beforehand, that I could not all at once take in this
strange circumstance. What happened was this: Liza, insulted and crushed by me,
understood a great deal more than I imagined. She understood from all this what
a woman understands first of all, if she feels genuine love, that is, that I
was myself unhappy.
The frightened and
wounded expression on her face was followed first by a look of sorrowful
perplexity. When I began calling myself a scoundrel and a blackguard and my
tears flowed (the tirade was accompanied throughout by tears) her whole face
worked convulsively. She was on the point of getting up and stopping me; when I
finished she took no notice of my shouting: "Why are you here, why don't
you go away?" but realised only that it must have been very bitter to me
to say all this. Besides, she was so crushed, poor girl; she considered herself
infinitely beneath me; how could she feel anger or resentment? She suddenly leapt
up from her chair with an irresistible impulse and held out her hands, yearning
towards me, though still timid and not daring to stir.... At this point there
was a revulsion in my heart too. Then she suddenly rushed to me, threw her arms
round me and burst into tears. I, too, could not restrain myself, and sobbed as
I never had before.
"They won't let me
... I can't be good!" I managed to articulate; then I went to the sofa,
fell on it face downwards, and sobbed on it for a quarter of an hour in genuine
hysterics. She came close to me, put her arms round me and stayed motionless in
that position. But the trouble was that the hysterics could not go on for ever,
and (I am writing the loathsome truth) lying face downwards on the sofa with my
face thrust into my nasty leather pillow, I began by degrees to be aware of a
far-away, involuntary but irresistible feeling that it would be awkward now for
me to raise my head and look Liza straight in the face. Why was I ashamed? I
don't know, but I was ashamed. The thought, too, came into my overwrought brain
that our parts now were completely changed, that she was now the heroine, while
I was just a crushed and humiliated creature as she had been before me that
night--four days before.... And all this came into my mind during the minutes I
was lying on my face on the sofa.
My God! surely I was
not envious of her then.
I don't know, to this
day I cannot decide, and at the time, of course, I was still less able to
understand what I was feeling than now. I cannot get on without domineering and
tyrannising over someone, but ... there is no explaining anything by reasoning
and so it is useless to reason.
I conquered myself,
however, and raised my head; I had to do so sooner or later ... and I am
convinced to this day that it was just became I was ashamed to look at her that
another feeling was suddenly kindled and flamed up in my heart ... a feeling of
mastery and possession. My eyes gleamed with passion, and I gripped her hands
tightly. How I hated her and how I was drawn to her at that minute! The one
feeling intensified the other. It was almost like an act of vengeance. At first
there was a look of amazement, even of terror on her face, but only for one
instant. She warmly and rapturously embraced me.
A quarter of an hour
later I was rushing up and down the room in frenzied impatience, from minute to
minute I went up to the screen and peeped through the crack at Liza. She was
sitting on the ground with her head leaning against the bed, and must have been
crying. But she did not go away, and that irritated me. This time she
understood it all. I had insulted her finally, but ... there's no need to
describe it. She realised that my outburst of passion had been simply revenge,
a fresh humiliation, and that to my earlier, almost causeless hatred was added
now a personal hatred, born of envy.... Though I do not maintain positively
that she understood all this distinctly; but she certainly did fully understand
that I was a despicable man, and what was worse, incapable of loving her.
I know I shall be told
that this is incredible--but it is incredible to be as spiteful and stupid as I
was; it may be added that it was strange I should not love her, or at any rate,
appreciate her love. Why is it strange? In the first place, by then I was
incapable of love, for I repeat, with me loving meant tyrannising and showing
my moral superiority. I have never in my life been able to imagine any other
sort of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking that
love really consists in the right--freely given by the beloved object--to
tyrannise over her.
Even in my underground
dreams I did not imagine love except as a struggle. I began it always with
hatred and ended it with moral subjugation, and afterwards I never knew what to
do with the subjugated object. And what is there to wonder at in that, since I
had succeeded in so corrupting myself, since I was so out of touch with
"real life," as to have actually thought of reproaching her, and
putting her to shame for having come to me to hear "fine sentiments";
and did not even guess that she had come not to hear fine sentiments, but to
love me, because to a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of
ruin, and all moral renewal is included in love and can only show itself in
that form.
I did not hate her so
much, however, when I was running about the room and peeping through the crack
in the screen. I was only insufferably oppressed by her being here. I wanted
her to disappear. I wanted "peace," to be left alone in my
underground world. Real life oppressed me with its novelty so much that I could
hardly breathe.
But several minutes
passed and she still remained, without stirring, as though she were
unconscious. I had the shamelessness to tap softly at the screen as though to
remind her.... She started, sprang up, and flew to seek her kerchief, her hat,
her coat, as though making her escape from me.... Two minutes later she came
from behind the screen and looked with heavy eyes at me. I gave a spiteful grin,
which was forced, however, to keep up appearances, and I turned away from her
eyes.
"Good-bye,"
she said, going towards the door.
I ran up to her, seized
her hand, opened it, thrust something in it and closed it again. Then I turned
at once and dashed away in haste to the other corner of the room to avoid
seeing, anyway....
I did mean a moment
since to tell a lie--to write that I did this accidentally, not knowing what I
was doing through foolishness, through losing my head. But I don't want to lie,
and so I will say straight out that I opened her hand and put the money in it
... from spite. It came into my head to do this while I was running up and down
the room and she was sitting behind the screen. But this I can say for certain:
though I did that cruel thing purposely, it was not an impulse from the heart,
but came from my evil brain. This cruelty was so affected, so purposely made
up, so completely a product of the brain, of books, that I could not even keep
it up a minute--first I dashed away to avoid seeing her, and then in shame and
despair rushed after Liza. I opened the door in the passage and began
listening.
"Liza! Liza!"
I cried on the stairs, but in a low voice, not boldly.
There was no answer,
but I fancied I heard her footsteps, lower down on the stairs.
"Liza!" I
cried, more loudly.
No answer. But at that
minute I heard the stiff outer glass door open heavily with a creak and slam
violently; the sound echoed up the stairs.
She had gone. I went
back to my room in hesitation. I felt horribly oppressed.
I stood still at the
table, beside the chair on which she had sat and looked aimlessly before me. A
minute passed, suddenly I started; straight before me on the table I saw ....
In short, I saw a crumpled blue five- rouble note, the one I had thrust into
her hand a minute before. It was the same note; it could be no other, there was
no other in the flat. So she had managed to fling it from her hand on the table
at the moment when I had dashed into the further corner.
Well! I might have
expected that she would do that. Might I have expected it? No, I was such an
egoist, I was so lacking in respect for my fellow-creatures that I could not
even imagine she would do so. I could not endure it. A minute later I flew like
a madman to dress, flinging on what I could at random and ran headlong after
her. She could not have got two hundred paces away when I ran out into the
street.
It was a still night
and the snow was coming down in masses and falling almost perpendicularly,
covering the pavement and the empty street as though with a pillow. There was
no one in the street, no sound was to be heard. The street lamps gave a
disconsolate and useless glimmer. I ran two hundred paces to the cross-roads
and stopped short.
Where had she gone? And
why was I running after her?
Why? To fall down
before her, to sob with remorse, to kiss her feet, to entreat her forgiveness!
I longed for that, my whole breast was being rent to pieces, and never, never
shall I recall that minute with indifference. But--what for? I thought. Should
I not begin to hate her, perhaps, even tomorrow, just because I had kissed her
feet today? Should I give her happiness? Had I not recognised that day, for the
hundredth time, what I was worth? Should I not torture her?
I stood in the snow,
gazing into the troubled darkness and pondered this.
"And will it not
be better?" I mused fantastically, afterwards at home, stifling the living
pang of my heart with fantastic dreams. "Will it not be better that she
should keep the resentment of the insult for ever? Resentment--why, it is
purification; it is a most stinging and painful consciousness! Tomorrow I
should have defiled her soul and have exhausted her heart, while now the
feeling of insult will never die in her heart, and however loathsome the filth
awaiting her--the feeling of insult will elevate and purify her ... by hatred
... h'm! ... perhaps, too, by forgiveness.... Will all that make things easier
for her though? ..."
And, indeed, I will ask
on my own account here, an idle question: which is better--cheap happiness or
exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?
So I dreamed as I sat
at home that evening, almost dead with the pain in my soul. Never had I endured
such suffering and remorse, yet could there have been the faintest doubt when I
ran out from my lodging that I should turn back half-way? I never met Liza
again and I have heard nothing of her. I will add, too, that I remained for a
long time afterwards pleased with the phrase about the benefit from resentment
and hatred in spite of the fact that I almost fell ill from misery.
Even now, so many years
later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now,
but ... hadn't I better end my "Notes" here? I believe I made a
mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time
I've been writing this story; so it's hardly literature so much as a corrective
punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life
through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment,
through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world,
would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits
for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most,
it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all divorced from life, we
are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it
that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be
reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an
effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better
in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask
for something else? We don't know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us
if our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for
instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our
activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you ... we should be
begging to be under control again at once. I know that you will very likely be
angry with me for that, and will begin shouting and stamping. Speak for
yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes, and
don't dare to say all of us-- excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself
with that "all of us." As for what concerns me in particular I have
only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway,
and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found
comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life
in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what
living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without
books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to
join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect
and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual
body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to
contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and
for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits
us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive
to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from
"Underground."
[The notes of this
paradoxalist do not end here, however. He could not refrain from going on with
them, but it seems to us that we may stop here.]