Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  CHAPTER 10

  Myshkin understood at last why he turned cold every time he touched those three letters, and why he had put off reading them until the evening. When, in the morning, he had sunk into a heavy sleep on the lounge in the verandah without having brought himself to open those three envelopes, he had another painful dream, and again the same “sinful woman” came to him. Again she looked at him with tears sparkling on her long eyelashes, again beckoned him to follow her, and again he waked up, as he had done before, with anguish recalling her face. He wanted to go to her at once, but could not. At last, almost in despair he opened the letters and began reading them.

  These letters too were like a dream. Sometimes one dreams strange, impossible and incredible dreams; on awakening you remember them and are amazed at a strange fact. You remember first of all that your reason did not desert you throughout the dream; you remember even that you acted very cunningly and logically through all that long, long time, while you were surrounded by murderers who deceived you, hid their intentions, behaved amicably to you while they had a weapon in readiness, and were only waiting for some signal; you remember how cleverly you deceived them at last, hiding from them; then you guessed that they’d seen through your deception and were only pretending not to know where you were hidden; but you were sly then and deceived them again; all this you remember clearly. But how was it that you could at the same time reconcile your reason to the obvious absurdities and impossibilities with which your dream was overflowing? One of your murderers turned into a woman before your eyes, and the woman into a little, sly, loathsome dwarf — and you accepted it all at once as an accomplished fact, almost without the slightest surprise, at the very time when, on another side, your reason was at its highest tension and showed extraordinary power, cunning, sagacity, and logic? And why, too, on waking up and fully returning to reality, do you feel almost every time, and sometimes with extraordinary intensity, that you have left something unexplained behind with the dream? “Vbu laugh at the absurdities of your dream, and at the same time you feel that interwoven with those absurdities some thought lies hidden, and a thought that is real, something belonging to your actual life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart. It’s as though something new, prophetic, that you were awaiting, has been told you in your dream. bur impression is vivid, it may be joyful or agonising, but what it is, and what was said to you, you cannot understand or recall.

  It was almost like this, after reading these letters. But even before he had unfolded them, Myshkin felt that the very fact of the existence and the possibility of them was like a nightmare. How could she have brought herself to write to her, he asked himself as he wandered about alone that evening (at times not knowing where he was going). How could she write of that, how could such a mad fantasy have arisen in her mind? But that fantasy had by now taken shape, and the most amazing thing of all for him was that, as he read those letters, he himself almost believed in the possibility and the justification of that fantasy. “Vfet, of course, it was a dream, a nightmare, a madness; but there was something in it tormentingly real, and agonisingly true, which justified the dream and the nightmare and the madness. For several hours together he seemed to be haunted by what he had read, every minute recalling fragments of it; brooding over them, pondering them. Sometimes he was even inclined to tell himself that he had foreseen all this and known it beforehand. It even seemed to him as though he had read it all before, some time very long ago, and that everything that he had grieved over since, everything that had been a pain or a dread to him had all lain hidden in those letters he had read long ago.

  “When you open this letter” — so the first epistle began— “you will look first of all at the signature. The signature will tell you all, and explain all, so there’s no need to make any defence or explanation. If I were in any way on a level with you, you might be offended at such impertinence. But, who am I, and who are you?

  We are two such opposite extremes and I am so infinitely below you that I cannot insult you, even if I wanted to.”

  In another place she wrote:

  “Don’t consider my words the sick ecstasy of a sick mind, but you are for me perfection! I have seen you, I see you everyday. I don’t judge you; I have not come by reason to believe that you are perfection; I simply have faith in it. But one wrong I do you: I love you. Perfection should not be loved; one can only look on perfection as perfection. Is that not so? “Vfet I am in love with you. Though love makes equal, yet don’t be uneasy; I have not put myself on an equality with you even in my most secret thought. I have written, ‘don’t be uneasy.’ Can you possibly be uneasy? I would kiss your footprints if I could. Oh, I don’t put myself on a level with you. . . . Look at my signature, you need only look at my signature!”

  “I notice, however,” she wrote in another letter, “that I join your name with his, and I have never once asked myself whether you love him. He loved you, though he had seen you only once. He thought of you as of ‘light.’ Those are his own words, I heard them from him. But without words I knew that you were ‘light’ for him. I’ve lived a whole month beside him, and understood then that you love him too. To me you and he are one.”

  “What does this mean?” she wrote again. “Yesterday I passed by you and you seemed to blush. It can’t be so. It was my fancy. If you were brought to the filthiest den and shown vice in its nakedness, you should not blush; you are too lofty to resent an insult. “Vbu can hate every one base and low, not for your own sake, but for the sake of others, those whom they wrong. You no one can wrong. Do you know I think you even ought to love me? You are for me the same as for him — a ray of light. An angel cannot hate, cannot help loving. Can one love every one, all men, all one’s neighbours? I have often asked myself that question. Of course not. It’s unnatural indeed. In abstract love for humanity one almost always loves no one but oneself. But that’s impossible for us and you are different. How could you not love anyone, when you cannot compare yourself with anyone, and when you are above every insult, every personal resentment. You alone can love without egoism, you alone can love, not for yourself, but for the sake of him whom vou love. Oh, how bitter it would be for me to find out that you feel shame or anger on account of me. That would be your ruin. You would sink to my level at once.

  “Yesterday, after meeting you I went home and invented a picture. Artists always paint Christ as He appears in the Gospel stories. I would paint Him differently. I would imagine Him alone, His disciples must have sometimes left Him alone. I would leave only a little child beside Him. The child would be playing beside Him, perhaps be telling Him something in his childish words. Christ has been listening, but now He is thoughtful. His hand still resting unconsciously on the child’s fair little head. He is looking into the distance at the horizon; thought, great as the whole world, dwells in His eyes. His face is sorrowful. The child leans silent with his elbow on Christ’s knees, his cheek on his little hand and his head turned upwards, and looks intently at Him, pondering as little children sometimes ponder. The sun is setting. . . . That is my picture. You are innocent, and in your innocence lies all your perfection. Oh, only remember that! What have you to do with my passion for you? bu are now altogether mine, I shall be all my life beside you. ... I shall soon die.”

  Finally, in the very last letter stood the words:

  “For God’s sake, think nothing of me, and don’t think that I am abasing myself by writing to you like this, or that I belong to the class of people who enjoy abasing themselves, even if from pride. No, I have my consolation; but it is difficult for me to explain it to you. It would be difficult for me to explain it clearly even to myself, although it torments me that I cannot. But I know that I cannot abase myself, even from an access of pride; and of self-abasement from purity of heart I am incapable. And so I do not abase myself at all.

  “Why do I so want to bring you together — for your sake, or for my own? For my own sake, of course; for myself, of course, it wo
uld solve all my difficulties, I have told myself so long ago. I have heard that your sister Adelaida said of my portrait then that with such beauty one might turn the world upside down. But I have renounced the world. Does it amuse you to hear that from me, meeting me decked in lace and diamonds, in the company of drunkards and profligates? Don’t mind that, I have almost ceased to exist and I know it. God knows what in my stead lives within me. I read that every day in two terrible eyes which are always gazing at me, even when they are not before me. Those eyes are silent now (they are always silent), but I know their secret. His house is gloomy, and there is a secret in it. I’m sure that he has, hidden in his box, a razor, wrapped in silk like that murderer in Moscow; he too lived in the same house with his mother, and kept a razor wrapped in silk to cut a throat with. All the time I was in their house, I kept fancying that somewhere under the floor there might be a corpse hidden there by his father perhaps, wrapped in American leather, like the corpse in the Moscow case, and surrounded in the same way with jars of Zhdanov’s fluid. I could show you the corner. He is always silent: but I know he loves me so much that he can’t help hating me. bur marriage and ours are to take place together: we have fixed that. I have no secrets from him. I should kill him from terror. . . . But he will kill me first. He laughed just now and said I was raving: he knows I am writing to you.”

  And there was much, much more of the same kind of ravinq in those letters. One of them, the second,

  written in a small hand, covered two large sheets of note-paper.

  At last Myshkin came out of the darkness of the park, where he had been wandering a long time, as he had the previous night. The clear limpid night seemed to him lighter than ever.

  “Can it still be so early?” he thought. (He had forgotten to take his watch.) He fancied he heard music somewhere in the distance. “It must be at the station,” he thought, “they’ve certainly not gone there to-day.” As he made the reflection, he saw that he was standing close to the Epanchins’ villa. He knew quite well that he was bound to find himself there at last, and with a beating heart he went up to the steps of the verandah. No one met him. The verandah was empty. He waited, and opened the door into the room. “They never shut that door,” the thought flickered through his mind, but the room was empty too. It was almost dark in it.

  He stood still in the middle of the room in perplexity. Suddenly the door opened and Alexandra came in, with a candle in her hand. On seeing Myshkin she was surprised and stopped short before him inquiringly. Obviously she was simply crossing the room from one door to the other, with no idea of finding anyone there.

  “How do you come here?” she asked at last.

  “I... came in....”

  “Maman is not quite well, nor Aglaia either. Adelaida is going to bed, I’m going too. We’ve been at home by ourselves all the evening. Papa and the prince are in Petersburg.”

  “I’ve come ... I’ve come to you ... now....”

  “Do you know what the time is?”

  “N-no.”

  “Half-past twelve. We always go to bed by one.”

  “Why, I thought it was half-past nine.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” she laughed. “And, why didn’t you come in before? We may have been expecting you.”

  “I... thought..,” he faltered, moving away.

  “Good-bye. To-morrow I shall make them all laugh.”

  He went homewards by the road that encircled the park. His heart was beating, his thoughts were in a maze, and everything round him became like a dream. And suddenly, just as yesterday he had twice waked up at the same dream, the same apparition rose again before him. The same woman came out of the park and stood before him, as though she had been waiting for him there. He started, and stood still. She snatched his hand and pressed it tight. “No, this was not an apparition!”

  And at last she stood before him, face to face for the first time since their parting. She was saying something to him, but he looked at her in silence; his heart was too full, and ached with anguish. Oh, never could he forget that meeting with her and he always remembered it with the same anguish. She sank on her knees before him on the spot, in the street, like one demented. He stepped back in horror, and she tried to catch his hand to kiss it, and just as in his dream that night, the tears glistened on her long eyelashes.

  “Stand up! Stand up!” he said in a frightened whisper, raising her. “Stand up, at once!”

  “Are you happy? Happy?” she asked. “Only say one word to me, are you happy now? To-day, this minute? Have you been with her? What did she say?”

  She did not qet up. She did not hear him. She questioned him hurriedly, and was in haste to speak, as though she were being pursued.

  “I’m going to-morrow as you told me. I won’t. . . . It’s the last time I shall see you. The last time! Now it’s absolutely the last time!”

  “Calm yourself, stand up!” he said in despair.

  She looked greedily at him, clutching at his hands.

  “Good-bye,” she said at last; she got up and went quickly away from him, almost running. Myshkin saw that Rogozhin had suddenly appeared beside her, that he had taken her arm, and was leading her away.

  “Wait a minute, prince,” cried Rogozhin, “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  Five minutes later he did, in fact, return. Myshkin was waiting for him at the same place.

  “I’ve put her in the carriage,” he said. “It’s been waiting there at the corner since ten o’clock. She knew you’d be at the young lady’s all the evening. I told her exactly what you wrote to me to-day. She won’t write to the young lady again, she’s promised; and she’ll go away from here to-morrow as you wish. She wanted to see you for the last time, though you refused her. We’ve been waiting for you here, on that seat there, to catch you as you came back.”

  “Did she take you with her of her own accord?”

  “Why not?” grinned Rogozhin. “I saw what I knew before. You’ve read the letters I suppose?”

  “Have you really read them?” asked Myshkin, struck by that idea.

  “Rather! She showed me each one of them herself. About the razor, too, do you remember, ha-ha!”

  “She’s mad!” cried Myshkin, wringing his hands.

  “Who knows about that? Perhaps not,” Rogozhin said softly, as though to himself. Myshkin did not answer.

  “Well, good-bye,” said Rogozhin. “I’m going away to-morrow too: don’t remember evil against me! And I say, brother,” he added, turning quickly, “why didn’t you answer her question: are you happy or not?”

  “No, no, no!” cried Myshkin with unspeakable sadness.

  “I should think not, indeed,” laughed Rogozhin maliciously as he went away without looking back.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 1

  About a week had passed since the meeting of the two persons of our story on the green seat. One bright morning about half-past ten Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyn was returning from visiting some friends, plunged in mournful reflection.

  There are people whom it is difficult to describe completely in their typical and characteristic aspect. These are the people who are usually called “ordinary,”

  “the majority,” and who do actually make up the vast majority of mankind. Authors for the most part attempt in their tales and novels to select and represent vividly and artistically types rarely met with in actual life in their entirety, though they are nevertheless almost more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin^ as a type is perhaps exaggerated,

  but not at all unreal. What numbers of clever people after being introduced by Gogol to Podkolyosin at once discovered that tens and hundreds of their friends and acquaintances were extraordinarily like him. They knew before reading Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, only they did not know what name to give them. In real life, extremely few bridegrooms jump out of windows just before their wedding, for, apart from other considerations, it’s not a convenient mode of escape. Yet how many men, ev
en intelligent and virtuous persons, on the eve of their wedding day have been ready to acknowledge at the bottom of their hearts that they were Podkolyosins. Not all husbands exclaim at every turn “Tu I’a voulu, Georges Dandin!” But how many millions and billions of times that cry from the heart has been uttered by husbands all the world over after the honeymoon, or — who knows? — even perhaps the day after the wedding!

  Without entering into deeper considerations, we will simply point out that in actual life typical characteristics are apt to be watered down, and that Georges Dandins and Podkolyosins exist and are moving before our eyes every day, only in a less concentrated form. With the reservation that Georges Dandin in full perfection, as Moliere has portrayed him, may also be met with in real life, though not frequently, we will conclude our reflections, which are beginning to be suggestive of newspaper criticism.

  “Vfet the question remains! What is an author to do with ordinary people, absolutely “ordinary,” and how can he put them before his readers so as to make them at all interesting? It is impossible to leave them out of fiction altogether, for commonplace people are at every moment the chief and essential links in the chain of human affairs; if we leave them out, we lose all semblance of truth. To fill a novel completely with types or, more simply, to make it interesting with strange and incredible characters, would be to make it unreal and even uninteresting. To our thinking a writer ought to seek out interesting and instructive features even among commonplace people. When, for instance, the very nature of some commonplace persons lies just in their perpetual and invariable commonplaceness, or better still, when in spite of the most strenuous efforts to escape from the daily round of commonplaceness and routine, they end by being left invariably for ever chained to the same routine, such people acquire a typical character of their own — the character of a commonplaceness desirous above all things of being independent and original without the faintest possibility of becoming so.