To this class of “commonplace” or “ordinary” people belong certain persons of my tale, who have hitherto, I must confess, been insufficiently explained to the reader. Such were Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyn, her husband, Mr. Ptitsyn, and her brother, Gavril Ardalionovitch.
There is, indeed, nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice-looking, fairly intelligent, and even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one’s own, to be precisely “like other people.” To have a fortune, but not the wealth of Rothschild; to be of an honourable family, but one which has never distinguished itself in anyway; to have a pleasing appearance expressive of nothing in particular; to have a decent education, but to have no idea what use to make of it; to have intelligence, but no ideas of one’s own; to have a good heart, but without any greatness of soul; and so on and so on. There is an extraordinary multitude of such people in the world, far more than appears. They may, like all other people, be divided into two classes: some of limited intelligence; others much cleverer. The first are happier. Nothing is easier for “ordinary” people of limited intelligence than to imagine themselves exceptional and original and to revel in that delusion without the slightest misgiving. Some of our young ladies have only to crop their hair, put on blue spectacles, and dub themselves Nihilists, to persuade themselves at once that they have immediately gained “convictions” of their own. Some men have only to feel the faintest stirring of some kindly and humanitarian emotion to persuade themselves at once that no one feels as they do, that they stand in the foremost rank of culture. Some have only to meet with some idea by hearsay, or to read some stray page, to believe at once that it is their own opinion and has sprung spontaneously from their own brain. The impudence of simplicity, if one may so express it, is amazing in such cases. It is almost incredible, but yet often to be met with. This impudence of simplicity, this unhesitating confidence of the stupid man in himself and his talents, is superbly depicted by Gogol in the wonderful character of Lieutenant Pirogov. Pirogov has no doubt that he is a genius, superior indeed to any genius. He is so positive of this that he never questions it; and, indeed, he questions nothing. The great writer is forced in the end to chastise him for the satisfaction of the outraged moral feeling of the reader; but, seeing that the great man simply shook himself after the castigation and fortified himself by consuming a pie, he flung up his hands in amazement and left his readers to make the best of it. I always regretted that Gogol took his great Pirogov from so humble a rank; for he was so self-satisfied that nothing could be easier for him than to imagine himself, as his epaulettes grew thicker and more twisted with years and promotion, an extraordinary military genius; or rather, not imagine it, but simply take it for granted. Since he had been made a general, he must have been a military genius! And how many such have made terrible blunders afterwards on the field of battle! And how manv Piroqovs there have been amonq our writers,
savants and propagandists! I say “have been,” but of course we have them still.
Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin belonged to the second category. He belonged to the class of the “much cleverer” people, though he was infected from head to foot with the desire for originality. But that class, as we observed above, is far less happy than the first; for the clever “commonplace” man, even if he occasionally or even always fancies himself a man of genius and originality, yet preserves the worm of doubt gnawing at his heart, which in some cases drives the clever man to utter despair. Even if he submits, he is completely poisoned by his vanity’s being driven inwards. But we have taken an extreme example. In the vast majority of these clever people, things do not end so tragically. Their liver is apt to be affected in their declining years, that’s all. But before giving in and humbling themselves, such men sometimes play the fool for years, all from the desire of originality. There are strange instances of it, indeed; an honest man is sometimes, for the sake of being original, ready to do something base. It sometimes happens that one of these luckless men is not only honest but good, is the guardian angel of his family, maintains by his labour outsiders as well as his own kindred, and yet can never be at rest all his life! The thought that he has so well fulfilled his duties is no comfort or consolation to him; on the contrary, it irritates him. “This is what I’ve wasted all my life on,” he says; “this is what has fettered me, hand and foot; this is what has hindered me from doing something great! Had it not been for this, I should certainly have discovered — gunpowder or America, I don’t know precisely what, but I would certainly have discovered it!” What is most characteristic of these gentlemen is that they can never find out for certain what it is that they are destined to discover and what they are within an ace of discovering. But their sufferings, their longings for what was to be discovered, would have sufficed for a Columbus or a Galileo.
Gavril Ardalionovitch had taken the first step on that road, but he was only at its beginning; he had many years of playing the fool before him. A profound and continual consciousness of his own lack of talent, and at the same time the overwhelming desire to prove to himself that he was a man of great independence, had rankled in his heart almost from his boyhood up. He was a young man of violent and envious cravings, who seemed to have been positively born with his nerves overwrought. The violence of his desires he took for strength. His passionate craving to distinguish himself sometimes led him to the brink of most ill-considered actions, but our hero was always at the last moment too sensible to take the final plunge. That drove him to despair. He could perhaps have made up his mind to anything extremely base to attain what he dreamed of. But as fate would have it, he always turned out to be too honest for any great meanness. (Small meannesses he was, however, prepared for.) He looked with loathing and hatred on the downfall and poverty of his family. He treated even his mother haughtily and contemptuously, though he knew perfectly well that his mother’s reputation and character were the pivot on which his future rested.
When he entered General Epanchin’s house he said to himself at once, “Since I must be mean, let me be so thoroughly, if only I win my game” — and was scarcely ever thoroughly mean. And why should he imagine that he would certainly need to be mean? Of Aglaia he was simply frightened at the time, but he kept on with her on the off-chance, though he never seriously believed that she would stoop to him. Afterwards, at the time of his affair with Nastasya Filippovna, he suddenly imagined that money would be the means of attaining everything. “If I must be mean, well then I will,” he repeated to himself every day with satisfaction, but with a certain dismay. “If one must be mean, let us be first-rate at it,” he urged himself continually. “Commonplace people are afraid to be, but lam not.”
Losing Aglaia and crushed by circumstances, he completely lost heart, and actually brought Myshkin the money flung him by a mad woman to whom it had been given by a madman. A thousand times afterwards he regretted having returned that money, though he was continually priding himself upon it. He did actually shed tears for three days while Myshkin was in Petersburg; but in those three days he grew to hate the prince because the latter looked at him too compassionately, though “not every one would have had the strength” for such a deed as returning that money. But the frank confession to himself that his misery was due to nothing but the continual mortification of his vanity distressed him horribly.
Only long afterwards he saw and realised what a different ending an affair with such a strange and innocent creature as Aglaia might have had. He was consumed by regrets; he threw up his post and sank into despondency and dejection. He lived with his father and mother in Ptitsyn’s house and at the latter’s expense, and openly despised Ptitsyn, although he followed his advice and had the sense almost always to ask it. Gavril Ardalionovitch was angry, for instance, with Ptitsyn for not aiming at becoming a Rothschild. “If you go in for usury, do it thoroughly — squeeze people, coin money out of them, show will-power, be a king among the Jews.”
Ptitsyn was unassuming and quiet; he did nothing but smile. But once he thought it necessary to have a serious explanation with Ganya, and he carried out the task with a certain degree of dignity. He had proved to Ganya that he was doing nothing dishonest and that he had no right to call him a grasping Jew; that it was not his fault that money was so valuable; that he was acting honestly and justly,
and that in reality he was only an intermediary in these affairs, and that finally, thanks to his accuracy in business, he was already favourably known to first-rate people and his business was increasing. “I shall never be a Rothschild, and I don’t want to be,” he said, smiling; “but I shall have a house in Liteyny, perhaps two even, and there I shall stop.”
“And who knows, perhaps even three,” he thought to himself, but he never uttered this aloud, he concealed that day-dream.
Nature loves such people and is kind to them; she will reward Ptitsyn not with three but with four houses, and just because he has realised from childhood that he will never become a Rothschild. But beyond four houses nature will not go, and Ptitsyn’s success will end there.
Gavril Ardalionovitch’s sister was quite a different person. She too was possessed with strong desires, but they were rather persistent than impulsive. She had plenty of common-sense in emergencies, and was not devoid of it indeed in everyday life. It is true that she also was one of the ordinary people who dream of being original; yet she very soon found out that she had no particular originality, and did not take it too much to heart, perhaps — who knows? — from pride of a sort. She took her first practical step with great decision in marrying Ptitsyn. But in getting married she did not say to herself, “If I must be mean, I will be mean so long as I gain my end,” as her brother Ganya would certainly have said to himself, and may possibly have said aloud to her, when he gave his approval as elder brother to the match. Quite the contrary, in fact: Varvara Ardalionovna married after having convinced herself that her future husband was a pleasant, unassuming, almost educated man, who could never be induced to do anything very dishonourable. As for minor acts of meanness, Varvara Ardalionovna did not worry about such trifles; and, in fact, one can find such trifles everywhere. It’s no good looking for an ideal being! She knew, besides, that by marrying she would provide a refuge for her mother, her father and her brothers. Seeing her brother in trouble, she wanted to help him in spite of all their previous misunderstandings.
Ptitsyn sometimes urged Ganya, in a friendly way, of course, to take another post. “You despise qenerals and beinq a qeneral,” he would sav to him sometimes in joke; “but mind, ‘they will all finish by being generals; if you live long enough you will see.”
“But what makes them think that I despise generals and being a general?” Ganya thought ironically to himself.
For her brother’s sake Varvara Ardalionovna made up her mind to enlarge her circle of acquaintance. She managed to get a footing at the Epanchins’. The memories of childhood stood her in good stead there, for she and Ganya had played with the Epanchins as children. We may observe here that if Varvara Ardalionovna had visited the Epanchins in pursuit of some fantastic dream, by that very fact she would have excluded herself from that class of people with whom she mentally ranked herself. But she was not pursuing a dream; she was working on a fairly firm basis: she was reckoning on the peculiarities of the Epanchin family. She was never tired of studying Aglaia’s character. The task she set before herself was to bring those two, Aglaia and her brother, together again. Possibly she actually did attain this object to some extent; possibly she made blunders, building perhaps too much on her brother and expecting from him what he could not under any circumstances have given. In any case she behaved with considerable art at the Epanchins’: for weeks together she made no allusion to her brother; she was always extremely truthful and sincere; she behaved simply but with dignity. As for the depths of her conscience, she was not afraid to look into them, and she did not reproach herself for anything in the least. It was that that gave her power. There was only one thing she noticed in herself, that she too was spiteful; that she too had a great deal of amour propre, and one might almost say of mortified vanity. She noticed it particularly at certain moments, especially almost every time she was walking home from the Epanchins’.
And just now she was on her way back from them, and, as we have said already, she was dejected and preoccupied. A shade of bitter mockery was apparent in her dejection. At Pavlovsk Ptitsyn occupied a roomy but not very attractive-looking house in a dusty street, which would within a short period become his own property; so that he was already negotiating for the sale of it. As she was going up the steps, Varvara Ardalionovna heard an extraordinary noise from upstairs and caught the voices of her father and brother shouting at one another. Going to the drawing-room and seeing Ganya running to and fro, white with fury and almost tearing his hair, she frowned and, with a weary air, sank on the sofa without taking off her hat. Knowing that if she let a minute pass without asking her brother why he was in such a state, he would certainly be angry with her, Varya hastened to observe, in the form of a question:
“The usual story?”
“The usual story indeed!” cried Ganya. “The usual story! No! The devil only knows what is happening here, it’s not the same as usual. The old man is getting perfectly frantic. . . . Mother’s in floods of tears. Upon my word, Varya, I’ll turn him out, say what you like, or... or I’ll go away myself,” he added, probably recollecting that it was not possible to turn anyone out of another person’s house.
“You must make allowances,” murmured Varya.
“What allowances? For whom?” cried Ganya, firing up. “For his filthy habits? No, you may say what you like, that’s impossible. Impossible, impossible, impossible! And what a wav to behave: he is in fault,
and it makes him all the more stuck up. The gate is not good enough for him, he must pull the wall down!’ Why are you sitting there like that? bu don’t look yourself.”
“I look as I always do,” Varya answered with displeasure.
Ganya looked at her more carefully.
“Have you been there?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes.”
“Stay, shouting again! What a disgrace, and at such a time too!”
“What sort of time? It’s no such special time.”
Ganya looked more intently than ever at his sister.
“Have you found out something more?” he asked.
“Nothing unexpected, anyway. I found out that it’s all a fact. My husband was nearer the truth than either of us; it’s turned out just as he predicted from the beginning. Where is he?”
“Not at home? What’s turned out?”
“The prince is formally betrothed to her. The thing is settled. The elder girls told me. Aglaia consents; they have even left off keeping it dark. (There’s always been so much mystery till now.) Adelaida’s wedding will be put off again so that the two weddings may be on one day. Such a romantic notion! Quite poetical! You’d better be writing a poem for the occasion than running about the room to no purpose. Princess Byelokonsky will be there this evening; she’s come in the nick of time; there are to be visitors. He is to be presented to the Princess Byelokonsky, though she knows him already. I believe the engagement will be publicly announced. They are only afraid he may let something drop or break something when he walks into the drawing-room, or else flop down himself; it’s quite in his line.”
Ganya listened very attentively, but to his sister’s surprise this news, which ought to have overwhelmed him, seemed to have by no means an overwhelming effect on him.
“Well, that was clear,” he said after a moment’s thought. “So it’s the end,” he added, with a strange smile, glancing slyly into his sister’s face and still walking up and down the room, but much more quietly.
“It’s a good thing you take it like a philosopher. I am glad, really,” said Varya.
“Yes, it’s a load off one’s mind; off yours, anyway.”
“I think I’ve served you sincerely without criticising or annoying you. I didn’t ask you what sort of happiness you expected with Aglaia.”
“Why, was I expecting . . . happiness from Aglaia?”
“Oh, please don’t discuss it philosophically! Of course you were. It’s all over and there’s nothing more for us to do. We’ve been fools. I must own I could never take the thing quite seriously. It was simply on the off-chance that I took it up. I was reckoning on her ridiculous character, and my chief object was to please you. It was ten to one it would come to nothing. I don’t know to this day what you have been hoping for.”
“Now your husband and you will be trying to make me get a job; you’ll give me lectures on perseverance and strength of will, and not despising small profits, and all the rest of it. I know it by heart,” laughed Ganya.
“He has something new in his mind,” Varya thought to herself.
“How are they taking it? Are they pleased, the father and mother?” Ganya asked suddenly.
“N-no, I think not. However, you can judge for yourself. Ivan Fyodorovitch is pleased. The mother is uneasy; she’s always viewed him with dislike as a suitor, we know that.”
“I don’t mean that. He is an impossible suitor, unthinkable, that’s evident. I was talking about their attitude now. What’s their line now? Has she given her formal consent?”
“She hasn’t so far said no, that’s all; but that’s all one could expect from her. You know how insanely shy and bashful she still is. When she was a child she would creep into a cupboard and sit there for two or three hours, simply to escape seeing visitors. Though she has grown such a maypole, she is just the same now. bu know, I believe there really is something in it, even on her side. They say she is laughing at the prince from morning till night, so as to hide her feelings; but she must manage to say something on the sly to him every day, for he looks as though he were in heaven, he is beaming. He is fearfully funny, they say. I heard it from them. I fancied too that they laughed at me to my face, the elder girls.”
Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky Page 321