Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  “‘ “What about that old general, is he still alive, I wonder?”

  ‘“Perhaps he smiles as he says it. And that’s all. But how can you tell what seed may have been dropped in his soul for ever by that old general, whom he hasn’t forgotten for twenty years? How can you tell, Bahmutov, what significance such an association of one personality with another may have on the destiny of those associated? . . . You know it’s a matter of a whole lifetime, an infinite multitude of ramifications hidden from us. The most skilful chess-player, the cleverest of them, can only look a few moves ahead; a French player who could reckon out ten moves ahead was written about as a marvel. How many moves there are in this, and how much that is unknown to us! In scattering the seed, scattering your “charity,” your kind deeds, you are giving away, in one form or another, part of your personality, and taking into yourself part of another; you are in mutual communion with one another, a little more attention and you will be rewarded with the knowledge of the most unexpected discoveries. You will come at last to look upon your work as a science; it will lay hold of all your life, and may fill up your whole life. On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds scattered by you, perhaps forgotten by you, will grow up and take form. He who has received them from you will hand them on to another. And how can you tell what part you may have in the future determination of the destinies of humanity? If this knowledge and a whole lifetime of this work should make you at last able to sow some mighty seed, to bequeath the world some mighty thought, then ...’ and so on. I talked a great deal.

  ‘“And to think that you, talking like this, are condemned to death!’ cried Bahmutov, with a warm note of reproach against some one in his voice.

  “At that moment we were standing on the bridge, and leaning our elbows on the rail, we looked into the Neva.

  ‘“And do you know what’s just struck me?’ I said, bending lower over the rail.

  ‘“Not to throw yourself into the water!’ cried Bahmutov, almost in alarm. Perhaps he read my thought in my face.

  ‘“No; for the time being, only the following reflection: here I have two or three months left to live, perhaps four; but when I’ve only two months, for instance, left, if I’m terribly anxious to do a good deed which requires a great deal of work, activity, and bother, like our business with the doctor, I ought to refuse it because I haven’t time enough left, and seek some other good work on a smaller scale, and more within my means (if I am still so drawn to good deeds). You must own that’s an amusing idea.’

  “Poor Bahmutov was much distressed on my account. He took me home to my very door, and was for the most part silent, having too much tact to attempt to console me. As he said ‘good-bye’ to me he pressed my hand warmly and asked permission to come and see me. I answered that if he came to comfort me (and that, even if he were silent, he would come to comfort me, I explained that to him) each time by doing so, he would remind me of death more than ever. He shrugged his shoulders, but agreed with me. We parted fairly civilly, which was more than I had expected.

  “But that eveninq and that niqht there was sown the first seed of my ‘last conviction.’ I clutched eagerly at this new idea and eagerly analysed it in all its branches, in all its aspects. I didn’t sleep all night, and the more deeply I went into it, the more I absorbed it, the more frightened I became. An awful terror came over me and haunted me continually for the following days. Sometimes, thinking of that continual terror of mine, I shivered suddenly with another dread. From that dread I could not but conclude that my ‘last conviction’ had taken too grave a hold upon me, and must lead to its logical conclusion. But I had not resolution enough for that conclusion. Three weeks later it was all over and that resolution came to me, but it was through a very strange circumstance.

  “Here in my ‘Explanation’ I note down all these dates and numbers. Of course it will make no difference to me, butnow(and perhaps only for this moment) I should like those who will judge of my action to be able to see what long chain of logical reasoning led to my ‘last conviction.’ I have just written above that the final resoluteness, which I had lacked for carrying out my ‘last conviction,’ seemed to come to me, not from logical reasoning, but from a strange shock, from a strange circumstance, perhaps quite irrelevant. Ten days ago Rogozhin came to see me about an affair of his own, which there is no need to go into. I had never seen Rogozhin before, but I had heard a great deal about him. I gave him the necessary information. He soon went away, and as he had simply come for the information, our acquaintance might have ended there. But he interested me too much, and all that day I was possessed by strange ideas, so that I made up my mind to go to him next day, to return his visit. Rogozhin was evidently not pleased to see me, and even dropped a ‘delicate’ hint that it was no good for us to continue the acquaintance; yet I spent a very interesting hour, and probably he did the same. The contrast between us was so great that it could not be ignored by us, especially by me. I was a man whose days were numbered, while he was living the fullest, the most actual life, absorbed in the moment, entirely unconcerned about ‘final’ deductions, numbers, or anything whatever except what. .. what. . . what he was mad upon, in fact. Mr. Rogozhin must forgive me that expression, if only because I’m a poor hand at literature and don’t know how to express my ideas. In spite of his unfriendliness, I thought he was a man of intelligence and capable of understanding much, though he had few outside interests. I gave him no hint of my ‘final conviction,’ but yet I fancied that he guessed it as he listened to me. He did not speak; he is awfully silent. As I took leave I hinted that, in spite of all the difference and the contrast between us — les extremites se touchent (I explained that in Russian for him), and that perhaps he was by no means so far from my ‘final conviction’ as he seemed. To that he responded with a very grim and sour grimace, got up, himself handed me my cap, making it appear as though I were going away of my own accord, and without more ado led me out of his gloomy house, pretending to see me out from politeness. His house impressed me; it’s like a graveyard, and I believe he likes it, which is very natural, indeed; such a full, vivid life as he leads is too full in itself to need a setting.

  “That visit to Rogozhin exhausted me very much, and I had felt very unwell all that morning. Towards the evening I was very weak and lay down on my bed; from time to time I was in a high fever, and even delirious. Kolya was with me till eleven o’clock. I remember everything he talked of, however, and everything we spoke about. But when at moments a mist passed before my eyes I kept seeing Ivan Fomitch, who seemed to be receiving millions of money and not to know where to put it, to be worried about it, terrified that it would be stolen, and at last he seemed to decide to bury it in the earth. Finally I advised him, instead of digging such a mountain of gold into the earth, to have the whole heap melted down into a gold coffin for the frozen baby and to have the baby dug up for the purpose. This sarcasm of mine seemed to be accepted by Surikov with tears of gratitude, and he went at once to carry out the plan, and I thought I left him with a curse.

  “Kolya assured me, when I was quite myself again, that I had not slept at all, but that I had been talking to him all the time about Surikov. At moments I was in great misery and in a state of collapse, so that Kolya was uneasy when he left me. When I got up myself to lock the door after him, I suddenly recalled a picture I had seen at Rogozhin’s, over the door of one of the dreariest of his rooms. He showed it me himself in passing. I believe I stood before it for five minutes. There was nothing good about it from an artistic point of view, but it produced a strange uneasiness in me.

  “The picture represented Christ who has only just been taken from the cross. I believe artists usually paint Christ, both on the cross and after He has been taken from the cross, still with extraordinary beauty of face. They strive to preserve that beauty even in His most terrible agonies. In Rogozhin’s picture there’s no trace of beauty. It is in every detail the corpse of a man who has endured infinite agony before the crucifixi
on; who has been wounded, tortured, beaten by the guards and the people when He carried the cross on His back and fell beneath its weight, and after that has undergone the agony of crucifixion, lasting for six hours at least (according to my reckoning). It’s true it’s the face of a man only just taken from the cross — that is to say, still bearing traces of warmth and life. Nothing is rigid in it yet, so that there’s still a look of suffering in the face of the dead man, as though he were still feeling it (that has been very well caught by the artist). “Vfet the face has not been spared in the least. It is simply nature, and the corpse of a man, whoever he might be, must really look like that after such suffering. I know that the Christian Church laid it down, even in the early ages, that Christ’s suffering was not symbolical but actual, and that His body was therefore fully and completely subject to the laws of nature on the cross. In the picture the face is fearfully crushed by blows, swollen, covered with fearful, swollen and bloodstained bruises, the eyes are open and squinting: the great wide-open whites of the eyes glitter with a sort of deathly, glassy light. But, strange to say, as one looks at this corpse of a tortured man, a peculiar and curious question arises; if just such a corpse (and it must have been just like that) was seen by all His disciples, by those who were to become His chief apostles, by the women that followed Him and stood by the cross, by all who believed in Him and worshipped Him, how could they believe that that martyr would rise again? The question instinctively arises: if death is so awful and the laws of nature so mighty, how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when even He did not conquer them, He who vanquished nature in His lifetime, who exclaimed, ‘Maiden, arise!’ and the maiden arose—’Lazarus, come forth!’ and the dead man came forth? Looking at such a picture, one conceives of nature in the shape of an immense, merciless, dumb beast, or more correctly, much more correctly, speaking, though it sounds strange, in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of that Being. This picture expresses and unconsciously suggests to one the conception of such a dark, insolent, unreasoning and eternal Power to which everything is in subjection. The people surrounding the dead man, not one of whom is shown in the picture, must have experienced the most terrible anguish and consternation on that evening, which had crushed all their hopes, and almost their convictions. They must have parted in the most awful terror, though each one bore within him a mighty thought which could never be wrested from him. And if the Teacher could have seen Himself on the eve of the crucifixion, would He have gone up to the cross and died as He did? That question too rises involuntarily, as one looks at the picture.

  “All this floated before my mind by snatches, perhaps in actual delirium, for fully an hour and a half before Kolya went away, sometimes taking definite shape. Can anything that has no shape appear in a shape? But I seemed to fancy at times that I saw in some strange, incredible form that infinite Power, that dull, dark, dumb force. I remember that some one seemed to lead me by the hand, holding a candle, to show me a huge and loathsome spider, and to assure me, laughing at my indignation, that this was that same dark, dumb and almighty Power. There is always a little lamp lighted at night before the ikon in my room. It is a dim and feeble light, yet one can make out everything, and even read just under the lamp. I believe it must have been after midnight. I had not slept at all and lay with wide-open eyes. Suddenly my door opened and Rogozhin walked in.

  “He walked in, shut the door, looked at me without speaking, and went quietly to the chair standing just under the lamp. I was awfully surprised and looked at him in suspense. Rogozhin put his elbows on the little table and began to stare at me without speaking. So passed two or three minutes, and I remember his silence greatly offended and annoyed me. Why wouldn’t he talk? His coming so late at night did strike me as strange, of course, but I remember that I was not so tremendously taken aback by it. Rather the other way, indeed; for though I had not put my thought clearly into words in the morning, I know he understood it; and it was a thought that one might well come to talk over once more, even at a very late hour. I took it for granted he had come for that. Our parting in the morning had been rather unfriendly, and I remember that he looked at me once or twice very sarcastically. I saw the same sarcastic look in his face now, and it was that which offended me. That it actually was Rogozhin and not an apparition, an hallucination, I had not the slightest doubt at the beginning. I never thought of it, in fact.

  “Meanwhile he went on sitting there and still staring at me with the same sarcastic look. I turned angrily on my bed, leaned with my elbow on the pillow, and made up mv mind to be silent too, even if we had to sit like that all the time. I was set on his beginning first. I think twenty minutes must have passed in that way. Suddenly the idea occurred to me: what if it’s not Rogozhin, but only an apparition?

  “I had never once seen an apparition, during my illness or before it. But I had always felt as a boy, and now too — that is, quite lately — that if I should ever see such a thing I should die on the spot, although I don’t believe in ghosts. Yet when the idea struck me that it was not Rogozhin but only an apparition, I remember I wasn’t in the least frightened. In fact it made me feel angry. Another strange thing was that I was not nearly so concerned and anxious to decide whether it was Rogozhin or an apparition, as I should have been. I believe I was thinking of something else at the time. I was much more interested, for instance, in the question why Rogozhin, who had been in his dressing-gown and slippers earlier in the day, was now wearing a dress-coat, a white waistcoat, and a white tie. The thought struck me too: if it is an apparition and I’m not afraid of it, why not get up, go to him, and make sure? Perhaps I didn’t dare and was afraid. But I’d no sooner thought of being afraid than an icy shiver ran all down me; I felt a cold chill at my spine and my knees trembled. At that very instant, as though guessing that I was afraid, Rogozhin moved away the hand on which he was leaning, drew himself up, and his lips began to part, as though he were going to laugh; he stared at me persistently. I was seized with such fury that I longed to fall upon him, but as I had vowed not to be the first to speak, I remained in bed. Besides, I was still not sure whether it was Rogozhin or not.

  “I don’t remember exactly how long it lasted; I can’t be quite sure either whether I didn’t lose consciousness from time to time. But at last Rogozhin got up and looked at me as deliberately and intently as he had on coming in. He no longer grinned at me, and softly, almost on tip-toe, went to the door, opened it, and went out. I did not get out of bed. I don’t know how long I lay with my eyes open, thinking. Goodness knows what I thought about. I don’t remember either how I lost consciousness. But I waked next morning at ten o’clock when they knocked at my door. I have arranged that, if I don’t open the door myself before ten o’clock and call for tea to be brought to me, Matryona should knock.

  When I opened the door to her, the thought occurred to me at once: how could he have come in when the door was locked? I made inquiries, and convinced myself that Rogozhin in the flesh could not have come in, as all our doors are locked at night.

  “Well, this peculiar incident which I have described so minutely was the cause of my making up my mind. What helped to bring about that ‘final decision’ was not logic, not a logical conviction, but a feeling of repulsion. I could not go on living a life which was taking such strange, humiliating forms. That apparition degraded me. I am not able to submit to the gloomy power that takes the shape of a spider. And it was only when I felt at last, as it was getting dark, that I had reached the final moment of full determination that I felt better. But that was only the first stage; for the second stage I had to go to Pavlovsk. But all that I have explained sufficiently already.

  CHAPTER 7

  I HAD a little pocket-pistol; I got it when I was quite a child, at that absurd
age when one is delighted at the story of a duel or of an attack by robbers, at imagining how one might be challenged to a duel and how bravely one would face the pistol-shot. A month ago I looked at it, and got it ready. In the box where it lay I found two bullets, and in the powder-horn there was powder enough for three charges. It’s a miserable pistol, it doesn’t aim straight, and wouldn’t kill further than fifteen paces. But, of course, it would blow one’s skull off, if one put it right against the temple.

  “I decided to die at Pavlovsk at sunrise, and I meant to go into the park, so as not to upset anyone in the villa. My ‘Explanation’ will explain things sufficiently to the police. Lovers of psychology, and anyone else who likes, are welcome to get anything they can out of it. But I don’t want this manuscript to be made public. I beg the prince to keep one copy for himself, and give another to Aglaia Ivanovna Epanchin. Such is my will. I bequeath my skeleton to the Medical Academy, for the good of science.

  “I don’t admit the right of any man to judge me, and I know that I am now beyond the reach of all judgment. Not long ago I was much amused by imagining — what if the fancy suddenly took me to kill some one, a dozen people at once, or to do something awful, something considered the most awful crime in the world — what a predicament my judges would be in, with my having only a fortnight to live, now that corporal punishment and torture is abolished. I should die comfortably in hospital, warm and snug, with an attentive doctor, and very likely much more snug and comfortable than at home. I wonder that the idea doesn’t strike people in my position, if only as a joke. But perhaps it does; there are plenty of people fond of a joke, even among us.

  “But though I don’t recognise the right of any to judge me, I know that I shall be judged when I am dumb, and have no voice to defend myself. I don’t want to go away without leaving some word of defence — a free defence, not forced out of me, not to justify myself — oh, no! I have no one’s forgiveness to ask, and nothing to ask forgiveness for — it’s simply because I want to.