This packet contained letters—a girl's letters to Alexey, and copies of his letters to her. There were fifteen of them. Alexey Petrovitch S—— had known Marya Alexandrovna B—— long before, in their childhood, I fancy. Alexey Petrovitch had a cousin, Marya Alexandrovna had a sister. In former years they had all lived together; then they had been separated, and had not seen each other for a long while. Later on, they had chanced one summer to be all together again in the country, and they had fallen in love—Alexey's cousin with Marya Alexandrovna, and Alexey with her sister. The summer had passed by, the autumn came; they parted. Alexey, like a sensible person, soon came to the conclusion that he was not in love at all, and had effected a very satisfactory parting from his charmer. His cousin had continued writing to Marya Alexandrovna for nearly two years longer … but he too perceived at last that he was deceiving her and himself in an unconscionable way, and he too dropped the correspondence.
I could tell you something about Marya Alexandrovna, gentle reader, but you will find out what she was from her letters. Alexey wrote his first letter to her soon after she had finally broken with his cousin. He was at that time in Petersburg; he went suddenly abroad, fell ill, and died at Dresden. I resolved to print his correspondence with Marya Alexandrovna, and trust the reader will look at it with indulgence, as these letters are not love-letters—Heaven forbid! Love-letters are as a rule only read by two persons (they read them over a thousand times to make up), and to a third person they are unendurable, if not ridiculous.
I
FROM ALEXEY PETROVITCH TO MARYA ALEXANDROVNA
ST. PETERSBURG, March 7, 1840.
DEAR MARYA ALEXANDROVNA,—
I fancy I have never written to you before, and here I am writing to you now…. I have chosen a curious time to begin, haven't I? I'll tell you what gave me the impulse. Mon cousin Théodore was with me to-day, and…how shall I put it?…and he confided to me as the greatest secret (he never tells one anything except as a great secret), that he was in love with the daughter of a gentleman here, and that this time he is firmly resolved to be married, and that he has already taken the first step—he has declared himself! I made haste, of course, to congratulate him on an event so agreeable for him; he has been longing to declare himself for a great while…but inwardly, I must own, I was rather astonished. Although I knew that everything was over between you, still I had fancied…. In short, I was surprised. I had made arrangements to go out to see friends to-day, but I have stopped at home and mean to have a little gossip with you. If you do not care to listen to me, fling this letter forthwith into the fire. I warn you I mean to be frank, though I feel you are fully justified in taking me for a rather impertinent person. Observe, however, that I would not have taken up my pen if I had not known your sister was not with you; she is staying, so Théodore told me, the whole summer with your aunt, Madame B—-. God give her every blessing!
And so, this is how it has all worked out…. But I am not going to offer you my friendship and all that; I am shy as a rule of high-sounding speeches and 'heartfelt' effusions. In beginning to write this letter, I simply obeyed a momentary impulse. If there is another feeling latent within me, let it remain hidden under a bushel for the time.
I'm not going to offer you sympathy either. In sympathising with others, people for the most part want to get rid, as quick as they can, of an unpleasant feeling of involuntary, egoistic regret…. I understand genuine, warm sympathy … but such sympathy you would not accept from just any one…. Do, please, get angry with me…. If you're angry, you'll be sure to read my missive to the end.
But what right have I to write to you, to talk of my friendship, of my feelings, of consolation? None, absolutely none; that I am bound to admit, and I can only throw myself on your kindness.
Do you know what the preface of my letter's like? I'll tell you: some Mr. N. or M. walking into the drawing-room of a lady who doesn't in the least expect him, and who does, perhaps, expect some one else…. He realises that he has come at an unlucky moment, but there's no help for it…. He sits down, begins talking…goodness knows what about: poetry, the beauties of nature, the advantages of a good education…talks the most awful rot, in fact. But, meanwhile, the first five minutes have gone by, he has settled himself comfortably; the lady has resigned herself to the inevitable, and so Mr. N. or M. regains his self-possession, takes breath, and begins a real conversation—to the best of his ability.
In spite, though, of all this rigmarole, I don't still feel quite comfortable. I seem to see your bewildered—even rather wrathful—face; I feel that it will be almost impossible you should not ascribe to me some hidden motives, and so, like a Roman who has committed some folly, I wrap myself majestically in my toga, and await in silence your final sentence….
The question is: Will you allow me to go on writing to you?—I remain sincerely and warmly devoted to you,
ALEXEY S.
II
FROM MARYA ALEXANDROVNA TO ALEXEY PETROVITCH
VILLAGE OF X——, March 22, 1840.
DEAR SIR,
ALEXEY PETROVITCH,
I have received your letter, and I really don't know what to say to you. I should not even have answered you at all, if it had not been that I fancied that under your jesting remarks there really lies hid a feeling of some friendliness. Your letter made an unpleasant impression on me. In answer to your rigmarole, as you call it, let me too put to you one question: What for? What have I to do with you, or you with me? I do not ascribe to you any bad motives … on the contrary, I'm grateful for your sympathy … but we are strangers to each other, and I, just now at least, feel not the slightest inclination for greater intimacy with any one whatever.—With sincere esteem, I remain, etc.,
MARYA B.
III
FROM ALEXEY PETROVITCH TO MARYA ALEXANDROVNA
ST. PETERSBURG, March 30.
Thank you, Marya Alexandrovna, thank you for your note, brief as it was. All this time I have been in great suspense; twenty times a day I have thought of you and my letter. You can't imagine how bitterly I laughed at myself; but now I am in an excellent frame of mind, and very much pleased with myself. Marya Alexandrovna, I am going to begin a correspondence with you! Confess, this was not at all what you expected after your answer; I'm surprised myself at my boldness…. Well, I don't care, here goes! But don't be uneasy; I want to talk to you, not of you, but of myself. It's like this, do you see: it's absolutely needful for me, in the old-fashioned phraseology, to open my heart to some one. I have not the slightest right to select you for my confidant—agreed.
But listen: I won't demand of you an answer to my letters; I don't even want to know whether you read my 'rigmarole'; but, in the name of all that's holy, don't send my letters back to me!
Let me tell you, I am utterly alone on earth. In my youth I led a solitary life, though I never, I remember, posed as a Byronic hero; but first, circumstances, and secondly, a faculty of imaginative dreaming and a love for dreaming, rather cool blood, pride, indolence—a number of different causes, in fact, cut me off from the society of men. The transition from dream-life to real life took place in me late…perhaps too late, perhaps it has not fully taken place up to now. So long as I found entertainment in my own thoughts and feelings, so long as I was capable of abandoning myself to causeless and unuttered transports and so on, I did not complain of my solitude. I had no associates; I had what are called friends. Sometimes I needed their presence, as an electrical machine needs a discharger—and that was all. Love… of that subject we will not speak for the present. But now, I will own, now solitude weighs heavy on me; and at the same time, I see no escape from my position. I do not blame fate; I alone am to blame and am deservedly punished. In my youth I was absorbed by one thing—my precious self; I took my simple-hearted self-love for modesty; I avoided society—and here I am now, a fearful bore to myself. What am I to do with myself? There is no one I love; all my relations with other people are somehow strained and false.
/> And I've no memories either, for in all my past life I can find nothing but my own personality. Save me. To you I have made no passionate protestations of love. You I have never smothered in a flood of aimless babble. I passed by you rather coldly, and it is just for that reason I make up my mind to have recourse to you now. (I have had thoughts of doing so before this, but at that time you were not free….) Among all my self-created sensations, pleasures and sufferings, the one genuine feeling was the not great, but instinctive attraction to you, which withered up at the time, like a single ear of wheat in the midst of worthless weeds…. Let me just for once look into another face, into another soul—my own face has grown hateful to me. I am like a man who should have been condemned to live all his life in a room with walls of looking-glass…. I do not ask of you any sort of confessions—oh mercy, no! Bestow on me a sister's unspoken sympathy, or at least the simple curiosity of a reader. I will entertain you, I will really.
Meanwhile I have the honour to be your sincere friend,
A. S.
IV
FROM ALEXEY PETROVITCH TO MARYA ALEXANDROVNA
ST. PETERSBURG, April 7.
I am writing to you again, though I foresee that without your approval I shall soon cease writing. I must own that you cannot but feel some distrust of me. Well, perhaps you are right too. In old days I should have triumphantly announced to you (and very likely I should have quite believed my own words myself) that I had 'developed,' made progress, since the time when we parted. With condescending, almost affectionate, contempt I should have referred to my past, and with touching self-conceit have initiated you into the secrets of my real, present life … but, now, I assure you, Marya Alexandrovna, I'm positively ashamed and sick to remember the capers and antics cut at times by my paltry egoism. Don't be afraid: I am not going to force upon you any great truths, any profound views. I have none of them—of those truths and views. I have become a simple good fellow—really. I am bored, Marya Alexandrovna, I'm simply bored past all enduring. That is why I am writing to you…. I really believe we may come to be friends….
But I'm positively incapable of talking to you, till you hold out a hand to me, till I get a note from you with the one word 'Yes.' Marya Alexandrovna, are you willing to listen to me? That's the question.—Yours devotedly,
A. S.
V
FROM MARYA ALEXANDROVNA TO ALEXEY PETROVITCH
VILLAGE OF X——, April 14.
What a strange person you are! Very well, then.—Yes!
MARYA B.
VI
FROM ALEXEY PETROVITCH TO MARYA ALEXANDROVNA
ST. PETERSBURG, May 2, 1840.
Hurrah! Thanks, Marya Alexandrovna, thanks! You are a very kind and indulgent creature.
I will begin according to my promise to talk about myself, and I shall talk with a relish approaching to appetite…. That's just it. Of anything in the world one may speak with fire, with enthusiasm, with ecstasy, but with appetite one talks only of oneself.
Let me tell you, during the last few days a very strange experience has befallen me. I have for the first time taken an all-round view of my past. You understand me. Every one of us often recalls what is over—with regret, or vexation, or simply from nothing to do. But to bend a cold, clear gaze over all one's past life—as a traveller turns and looks from a high mountain on the plain he has passed through—is only possible at a certain age … and a secret chill clutches at a man's heart when it happens to him for the first time. Mine, anyway, felt a sick pang. While we are young, such an all-round view is impossible. But my youth is over, and, like one who has climbed on to a mountain, everything lies clear before me.
Yes, my youth is gone, gone never to return!… Here it lies before me, as it were in the palm of my hand.
A sorry spectacle! I will confess to you, Marya Alexandrovna, I am very sorry for myself. My God! my God! Can it be that I have myself so utterly ruined my life, so mercilessly embroiled and tortured myself!… Now I have come to my senses, but it's too late. Has it ever happened to you to save a fly from a spider? Has it? You remember, you put it in the sun; its wings and legs were stuck together, glued…. How awkwardly it moved, how clumsily it attempted to get clear!… After prolonged efforts, it somehow gets better, crawls, tries to open its wings … but there is no more frolicking for it, no more light-hearted buzzing in the sunshine, as before, when it was flying through the open window into the cool room and out again, freely winging its way into the hot air…. The fly, at least, fell through none of its own doing into the dreadful web … but I!
I have been my own spider!
And, at the same time, I cannot greatly blame myself. Who, indeed, tell me, pray, is ever to blame for anything—alone? Or, to put it better, we are all to blame, and yet we can't be blamed. Circumstances determine us; they shove us into one road or another, and then they punish us for it. Every man has his destiny…. Wait a bit, wait a bit! A cleverly worked-out but true comparison has just come into my head. As the clouds are first condensed from the vapours of earth, rise from out of her bosom, then separate, move away from her, and at last bring her prosperity or ruin: so, about every one of us, and out of ourselves, is fashioned—how is one to express it?—is fashioned a sort of element, which has afterwards a destructive or saving influence on us. This element I call destiny…. In other words, and speaking simply, every one makes his own destiny and destiny makes every one….
Every one makes his destiny—yes!… but people like us make it too much—that's what's wrong with us! Consciousness is awakened too early in us; too early we begin to keep watch on ourselves…. We Russians have set ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personality, and when we're children hardly grown-up we set to work to cultivate it, this luckless personality! Receiving no definite guidance from without, with no real respect for anything, no strong belief in anything, we are free to make what we choose of ourselves … one can't expect every one to understand on the spot the uselessness of intellect 'seething in vain activity' … and so we get again one monster the more in the world, one more of those worthless creatures in whom habits of self-ccnsciousness distort the very striving for truth, and a ludicrous simplicity exists side by side with a pitiful duplicity … one of those beings of impotent, restless thought who all their lives know neither the satisfaction of natural activity, nor genuine suffering, nor the genuine thrill of conviction…. Mixing up together in ourselves the defects of all ages, we rob each defect of its good redeeming side … we are as silly as children, but we are not sincere as they are; we are cold as old people, but we have none of the good sense of old age…. To make up, we are psychologists. Oh yes, we are great psychologists! But our psychology is akin to pathology; our psychology is that subtle study of the laws of morbid condition and morbid development, with which healthy people have nothing to do…. And, what is the chief point, we are not young, even in our youth we are not young!
And at the same time—why libel ourselves? Were we never young, did we never know the play, the fire, the thrill of life's forces? We too have been in Arcady, we too have strayed about her bright meadows!… Have you chanced, strolling about a copse, to come across those dark grasshoppers which, jumping up from under your very feet, suddenly with a whirring sound expand bright red wings, fly a few yards, and then drop again into the grass? So our dark youth at times spread its particoloured wings for a few moments and for no long flight…. Do you remember our silent evening walks, the four of us together, beside your garden fence, after some long, warm, spirited conversation? Do you remember those blissful moments? Nature, benign and stately, took us to her bosom. We plunged, swooning, into a flood of bliss. All around, the sunset with a sudden and soft flush, the glowing sky, the earth bathed in light, everything on all sides seemed full of the fresh and fiery breath of youth, the joyous triumph of some deathless happiness. The sunset flamed; and, like it, our rapturous hearts burned with soft and passionate fire, and the tiny leaves of the young trees qu
ivered faintly and expectantly over our heads, as though in response to the inward tremor of vague feelings and anticipations in us. Do you remember the purity, the goodness and trustfulness of ideas, the softening of noble hopes, the silence of full hearts? Were we not really then worth something better than what life has brought us to? Why was it ordained for us only at rare moments to see the longed-for shore, and never to stand firmly on it, never to touch it:
The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories Page 17