Notes from the Underground

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky


Contents

 NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

 PART I Underground
 I
 II
 III
 IV
 V
 VI
 VII
 VIII
 IX
 X
 XI

 PART II À Propos of the Wet Snow
 I
 II
 III
 IV
 V
 VI
 VII
 VIII
 IX
 X




NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND[*]
A NOVEL


* 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.




PART I
Underground




I


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. 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 afterwards 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.




II


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.




III


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.




IV


“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 toothache
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?




V


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?




VI


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
and beautiful.” 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.




VII


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 bloodthirsty, 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, _à propos_ 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.




VIII


“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 if it 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. It 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!




IX


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.




X


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....




XI


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.




PART II
À Propos of the Wet Snow


When from dark error’s subjugation
My words of passionate exhortation
    Had wrenched thy fainting spirit free;
And writhing prone in thine affliction
Thou didst recall with malediction
    The vice that had encompassed thee:
And when thy slumbering conscience, fretting
    By recollection’s torturing flame,
Thou didst reveal the hideous setting
    Of thy life’s current ere I came:
When suddenly I saw thee sicken,
    And weeping, hide thine anguished face,
Revolted, maddened, horror-stricken,
    At memories of foul disgrace.
                    NEKRASSOV (_translated by Juliet Soskice_).




I


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 unmask 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 ton_ than 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?




II


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. It 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.




III


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, jumping into a high-class sledge, on
which I spent my last half rouble, I drove up in grand style to the
Hôtel de Paris.




IV


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’œuvres_.

“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 cafés 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! It 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. It 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!”




V


“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 snowy 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, ran 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.”




VI


... 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 it 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 everyone 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 look 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.




VII


“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 wailing, 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.




VIII


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 fail 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.




IX


“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 naïveté
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
commonplace, 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 because 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.




X


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.]