When I was on the street thinking about the gaslight, I glanced up at the sky. The sky was terribly dark, but one could clearly distinguish the ragged clouds, and in their midst bottomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a little star and I began watching it intently. That was because this little star had given me an idea: I had decided to kill myself that night. I had firmly made up my mind about this two months before, and poor as I was, had purchased a fine revolver and loaded it that same day. But two months had already passed, and it was still lying in the drawer; but it made so little difference to me that in the end I wanted to seize the moment when things wouldn’t make so little difference, but why this was so – I don’t know. And so it was that for these two months as I made my way home every night I thought that I would shoot myself. I kept waiting for the moment. And now this little star had given me the idea and I made up my mind that it would take place without fail that night. But why the little star gave me the idea – I do not know.
And just then, as I was looking at the sky, this little girl suddenly grabbed me by the elbow. The street was empty, and there was practically nobody about. In the distance a cabbie was sleeping on his droshky.2 The girl was about eight years old, wearing just a kerchief and a little dress, wet all the way through, but I remembered in particular her wet, torn shoes and I remember them still. They particularly caught my eye. She suddenly started tugging me by the elbow and calling out to me. She wasn’t crying, but was somewhat convulsively shouting words, which she couldn’t say properly, because her whole body was shivering from the cold. She was terrified for some reason and shouted desperately: ‘Mama! Mama!’ I almost turned to face her, but I didn’t say a word and continued on my way, but she ran after me and kept tugging at me, and in her voice could be heard the sound that signals despair in very frightened children. I know this sound. Even though she wasn’t getting the words out properly, I understood that her mother was dying somewhere or that something had happened to them and that she had run out to call somebody, to find something to help her mother. But I didn’t follow her, and, on the contrary, I suddenly had the idea to chase her away. At first I told her to find a policeman. But she suddenly clasped her little hands together and, sobbing and gasping for breath, she kept running alongside me and wouldn’t leave me. That was when I stamped my feet and shouted at her. She merely cried out: ‘Sir, sir! …’ But suddenly she gave up on me and took off running to the other side of the street: another passer-by had come into view there and evidently she had rushed to him.
I made the climb to my fifth storey. I rent a private room from my landlady. My room is shabby and small with a semicircular attic window. I have an oilcloth sofa, a table with books on it, two chairs and a comfortable armchair, which is very, very old but still and all a Voltaire armchair.3 I sat down, lit the candle and began thinking. Next door, in the room on the other side of the partition, the bedlam continued. It had been going on now since the day before yesterday. A retired captain lived there and he had guests – half a dozen ne’er-do-wells were drinking vodka and playing stoss4 with old cards. There had been a fight last night, and I know that two of them had been pulling each other by the hair for a long time. The landlady wanted to complain, but she was terribly afraid of the captain. There was only one other tenant renting a room: a short, frail woman, the wife of a regimental officer, who had arrived from out of town with three small children who had fallen ill since coming to live here. Both she and the children were mortally afraid of the captain and they trembled and crossed themselves all night long, while the youngest child was so afraid that he had some sort of attack. This captain – I know this for certain – sometimes stops passers-by on Nevsky Prospekt5 and begs for money. He can’t get a job, but the strange thing is (and this is why I’m telling you this, you see) that the captain during the whole month that he has been living with us has not caused me to become the least bit irritated. Of course, I avoided his acquaintance from the very beginning, and he himself was bored with me from the very first, but no matter how much they shouted on the other side of their partition and no matter how many of them there were – it made no difference to me at all. I would sit there the whole night and I really didn’t hear them – I had so completely forgotten about them. You see, I don’t ever go to bed before dawn and it’s been like that for a year now. I spend all night sitting at the table in my armchair, not doing anything. I only read books during the day. I sit there like that without even thinking, and some sort of ideas wander about and I set them free. The candle burns down completely during the night. I carefully sat down by the table, took out the revolver and placed it in front of me. When I had put it down, I remember that I asked myself ‘Is this really it?’ And I answered myself quite positively: ‘Yes.’ That is, I would shoot myself. I knew that I would shoot myself that very night for certain, but how much longer I would sit at the table – that I didn’t know. And of course I would have shot myself had it not been for that little girl.
II
You see, don’t you, that even though it didn’t make any difference to me, I did, for example, feel pain. If someone were to strike me, I would have felt pain. And it was just the same in the moral regard: if something very pitiful were to take place, I would feel pity just as I would have done when things in my life did make a difference to me. And I had felt pity earlier: I would have helped a child without fail. Why hadn’t I helped the little girl? Because of a certain idea that had occurred to me then: when she was tugging and calling out to me, I was suddenly confronted by a question and I couldn’t resolve it. It was an idle question but it made me angry. I got angry as a result of the conclusion: that if I had already made up my mind to kill myself that night, then consequently everything in the world should make even less difference than ever before. Why, then, did I suddenly feel that it did make a difference and that I pitied the little girl? I remember that I pitied her a great deal; to the point even of some strange pain, which was even quite incredible given my situation. Indeed, I don’t know how better to convey this fleeting sensation of mine then, but it stayed with me when I was sitting at the table at home and I was very irritated, more than I had been for a very long time. One explanation was followed by another. It seemed clear that if I was a man and not yet a zero, then until I turned into a zero I was alive, and consequently, I can suffer, get angry and experience shame for my actions. Very well. But, you see, if I was going to kill myself, for example, in two hours’ time, then what did I care about that little girl, and what does shame or anything else in the world have to do with me? I was turning into a zero, into an absolute zero. And can it be that the knowledge that I will soon completely cease to exist and that, therefore, nothing would exist, could not have the slightest influence on my feeling of pity for the little girl or my feeling of fear after the base act I had committed? You see, that was why I stamped and shouted in a ferocious voice at the unfortunate child, since as I put it, ‘not only do I feel no pity, but if I commit some inhuman base act, I may do so now, because in two hours all will be extinguished’. Do you believe that’s why I shouted? I’m almost convinced of it now. It seemed clear to me that life and the world now depended on me. One might even say that the world now seemed, as it were, to have been made for me alone: I’ll shoot myself and the world will no longer exist, at least for me. To say nothing of the fact that perhaps there really would be nothing for anybody after me, and that the entire world, as soon as my consciousness is extinguished, would at once be extinguished, like a phantom, like the property of my consciousness alone, and would be annihilated, for perhaps all this world and all these people are nothing but me alone. I remember that as I was sitting and pondering, I was working my way through all these new questions, which came crowding one after the other, from a quite different angle and came up with something quite new. For example, a strange thought suddenly occurred to me that if I used to live on the moon or on Mars and had committed there the most shameless and dishonest act imaginabl
e and had met with such disgrace and dishonour as one could only experience and imagine sometimes, perhaps, in a dream, in a nightmare, and if, upon finding myself on the earth afterwards, I continued to retain some consciousness of what I had done on the other planet and, moreover, knew that I now would never return there under any circumstances, then as I look at the moon from the earth – would it make any difference to me or not? Would I experience shame for my action or not? The questions were idle and superfluous, since the revolver already lay before me, and I knew with all my being that this would take place for certain, but they were exciting me and driving me mad. It was as if I could no longer die now without resolving something beforehand. In a word, this little girl saved me, because I postponed the shot with these questions. Meanwhile, things were becoming quieter and quieter at the captain’s: they had finished with their cards and were settling down to sleep, but for now they were grumbling and half-heartedly finishing up their bickering. That was when I suddenly fell asleep, while sitting at the table in my armchair, which had never happened to me before. I fell asleep completely unawares. Dreams, as everybody knows, are an extremely strange thing: certain events are presented with frightful clarity, with a jeweller’s fine attention to detail, while you gallop through others, seeming not to notice at all, for example, either the time or the place. Dreams, it would seem, are dictated not by reason, but desire, not by the head, but the heart, and yet what clever things my reason has sometimes accomplished in my dreams! And yet what utterly incomprehensible things take place in my dreams. My brother, for example, died five years ago. I sometimes see him in my dreams: he takes part in my affairs, we are very engaged, and yet, you see, I fully know and remember, throughout the course of the entire dream, that my brother is dead and buried.6 How is it that I’m not surprised that though he is dead, nevertheless he is there beside me and scrambling about with me? Why does my reason permit all this unequivocally? But enough. I’ll turn to my dream. Yes, I had this dream then, my dream of the 3rd of November! They tease me now that after all it was merely a dream. But does it really make any difference whether it was a dream or not, if this dream proclaimed to me the Truth? You see, once you’ve learned the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth, and there is no other, nor can there be, whether you are asleep or awake. And what if it was a dream, just a dream; but this life, which you extol so very much, I wanted to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream – oh, it proclaimed to me a new, great, renewed, powerful life!
Listen.
III
I said that I fell asleep unawares and even while continuing to ponder the same matters, as it were. Suddenly I dreamed that I was picking up the revolver and as I sat there I aimed it right at my heart – at my heart and not my head; whereas I had decided earlier that I would shoot myself in the head, in the right temple to be exact. Having taken aim at my chest, I waited for a second or two, and my candle, table and wall suddenly began to move and sway before me. I fired quickly.
In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or you’re knifed, or beaten, but you never feel pain, except perhaps if you somehow really bruise yourself in your bed, then you’ll feel pain and you’ll almost always wake up because of the pain. And that was how it was in my dream: I didn’t feel any pain, but it seemed to me that after the shot everything inside me shuddered and suddenly everything died out, and it became terribly black all around me. It was as if I had become blind and dumb, and here I was lying on something solid, stretched out on my back – I don’t see anything and can’t make the slightest movement. They’re milling about me and shouting, the captain bellows, the landlady screeches – and suddenly there’s a break again, and then I’m being carried in a closed coffin. And I feel the coffin swaying and I ponder that, and suddenly for the first time I’m struck by the idea that I’m dead, quite dead, I know this and I don’t doubt it, I don’t see and don’t move, and yet I’m feeling and pondering. But I quickly make my peace with this and, as usually happens in dreams, I accept the reality without argument.
And then I’m being buried in the ground. Everyone leaves. I’m alone, absolutely alone. I don’t move. Whenever I had imagined before when I was alive how I would be buried in my grave, the only sensation I really associated with the grave was damp and cold. And that was how I felt now, that I was very cold, particularly the tips of my toes, but I didn’t feel anything else.
I lay there and strangely enough – I didn’t expect anything, having accepted without argument that a dead man has nothing to expect. But it was damp. I don’t know how much time passed – an hour or a day, or several days. But then suddenly on my closed left eye fell a drop of water that had leaked through the coffin lid; a minute later it was followed by another, and then a minute later by another, and so forth and so on – one every minute. Suddenly my heart was inflamed with deep indignation, and I suddenly felt physical pain there: ‘That’s my wound,’ I thought, ‘it’s the shot, the bullet’s there …’ And the drops kept dripping, every minute and right on to my closed eye. And suddenly I called out, not with my voice, because I couldn’t move, but with all my being, to the Sovereign of all that was happening to me:
‘Whoever you may be, but if you are and if there exists something more sensible than what is happening now, then grant that it come to pass here as well. If you are taking vengeance for my senseless suicide – by means of the sordidness and absurdity of this further existence, then know that no torment that might befall me could ever compare with the contempt that I will experience in silence, even in the course of millions of years of martydom! …’
I called out and fell silent. Deep silence continued for almost a whole minute and even another drop fell, but I knew, I boundlessly and steadfastly knew and believed that everything would certainly change now. And then suddenly my grave was opened wide. That is, I don’t know whether it was opened and dug up, but I had been seized by some dark and unknown being, and we found ourselves in space. I suddenly began to see clearly: it was deep night, and never, never had there ever been such darkness! We had already flown in space far from the earth. I didn’t ask the one who was carrying me about anything; I waited and was proud. I kept assuring myself that I wasn’t afraid, and I was beside myself with delight at the thought that I wasn’t afraid. I don’t remember how long we were flying, and I can’t envision it: it all happened like it always does in a dream, when you vault over space and time and over the laws of existence and reason, and only come to a stop on those points for which your heart yearns. I remember that I suddenly saw a little star in the darkness. ‘Is that Sirius?’7 I asked, suddenly unable to restrain myself, for I didn’t want to ask about anything. ‘No, it’s the very same star that you used to see between the clouds on your way home,’ answered the being who was carrying me. I knew that it had what seemed to be a human face. Strangely enough, I didn’t like this being, I even felt a deep-seated revulsion. I had been expecting total non-existence and had shot myself in the heart accordingly. And here I was in the hands of a being, of course, not a human one, but one which is, which exists: ‘So, this means that there is life beyond the grave!’ I thought with the strange blitheness of dreams, but the essence of my heart stayed with me in all its intensity: ‘And if I must be again,’ I thought, ‘and live again according to someone’s implacable will, then I don’t want to be defeated and humiliated!’ ‘You know that I am afraid of you and that you despise me for that,’ I said suddenly to my companion, unable to refrain from the humiliating question, which comprised a confession; and feeling, like the jab of a pin, my humiliation in my heart. He didn’t reply to my question, but I suddenly sensed that I wasn’t despised, and I wasn’t being laughed at, and that I wasn’t even pitied, and that our journey had a purpose, unknown and mysterious, and which concerned only me. Fear was growing in my heart. Something was communicated to me, mutely but torturously, from my silent companion, which seemed to bore through me. We were flying through dark and unknown expanses. I had long since stopped s
eeing constellations familiar to my eye. I knew that there were such stars in the heavenly expanses from which the rays reach earth only after thousands and millions of years. Perhaps we were already flying through those expanses. I was expecting something in the terrible anguish that tormented my heart. And suddenly I was shaken by a feeling that was at once familiar and highly inviting: I suddenly saw our sun! I knew that this couldn’t be our sun, the one which had given birth to our earth, and that we were an infinite distance away from our sun, but I recognized for some reason, with all my being, that it was absolutely the same sun as ours, a repetition of it and its double. The sweet, inviting feeling began to ring with delight in my soul: the innate force of light, the same light that had given birth to me, resounded in my heart and resurrected it, and I felt life, my former life, for the first time since I’d left the grave.
‘But if this is the sun, if this is absolutely the same sun as ours,’ I cried out, ‘then where is the earth?’ And my companion pointed to a little star, a twinkling emerald-green brilliance in the darkness. We were flying straight for it.
The Gambler and Other Stories (Penguin ed.) Page 43