Текст книги "The Idiot"
Автор книги: Федор Достоевский
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"So that . . . that was you . . . you?"
"What? What about me?" Rogozhin answered in perplexity, but Ippolit, flushed, and suddenly seized almost by rage, cried sharply and loudly:
" Youwere in my room last week, at night, past one o'clock, the same day I went to see you in the morning! You!Admit it was you!"
"Last week, at night? You must have gone clean out of your mind, man."
The "man" was silent again for a minute, putting his forefinger to his forehead and as if thinking hard; but in his pale smile, still twisted with fear, there suddenly flashed something cunning, as it were, and even triumphant.
"It was you!" he repeated at last, almost in a whisper, but with extraordinary conviction. "Youcame to my room and sat silently on my chair, by the window, for a whole hour; more; from one till past two in the morning; then you got up and left after two ... It was you, you! Why you frightened me, why you came to torment me—I don't understand, but it was you!"
And in his eyes there suddenly flashed a boundless hatred, in spite of his frightened trembling, which had still not subsided.
"You'll find out all about it presently, gentlemen, I . . . I . . . listen . . ."
Again, and in terrible haste, he seized his pages; they had spilled and scattered, he tried to gather them up; they trembled in his trembling hands; for a long time he could not settle down.
The reading finally began. At first, for about five minutes, the author of the unexpected articlewas still breathless and read dis-jointedly and unevenly; but then his voice grew firm and began to express fully the meaning of what he read. Only occasionally a very strong cough interrupted him; by the middle of the article his voice became very hoarse; the extraordinary animation that came over him more and more as he read, in the end reached the highest
pitch, as did its painful impression on his listeners. Here is the whole of this "article."
My Necessary Explanation
Après moi le déluge!
Yesterday morning the prince came to see me; incidentally, he talked me into moving to his dacha. I knew he would certainly insist on that, and I was sure he would blurt right out to me that it would be "easier for me to die among people and trees," as he puts it. But this time he did not say to die,but said "it would be easier to live," which, however, makes almost no difference for me in my situation. I asked him what he meant by his incessant "trees," and why he was foisting these "trees" on me—and was surprised to learn from him that I myself supposedly said the other evening that I had come to Pavlovsk to look at the trees for the last time. When I observed to him that it made no difference whether I died under the trees or looking out the window at my bricks, and that there was no point in making a fuss over two weeks, he agreed at once; but greenery and clean air, in his opinion, are bound to produce some physical change in me, and my agitation and my dreamswill change and perhaps become lighter. I again observed to him laughingly that he spoke like a materialist. He replied with his smile that he had always been a materialist. Since he never lies, these words must mean something. His smile is nice; I've looked at him more attentively now. I do not know whether I love him or not now; I have no time to bother with that now. My five-month hatred of him, it should be noted, has begun to abate in this last month. Who knows, maybe I went to Pavlovsk mainly to see him. But . . . why did I leave my room then? A man condemned to death should not leave his corner; and if I had not taken a final decision now, but had decided, on the contrary, to wait till the last hour, then, of course, I would not have left my room for anything and would not have accepted the suggestion of moving out "to die" in his place in Pavlovsk.
I must hurry and finish all this "explanation" by tomorrow without fail. Which means I will not have time to reread and correct it; I will reread it tomorrow when I read it to the prince and the two or three witnesses I intend to find there. Since there will not be a single lying word in it, but only the whole truth, ultimate and solemn, I am curious beforehand what sort of impression it will
make on me at that hour and that moment when I start to reread it. However, I need not have written the words "ultimate and solemn truth"; there is no need to lie for the sake of two weeks anyway, because it is not worth living for two weeks; that is the best proof that I will write nothing but the truth. (NB. Do not forget the thought: am I not mad at this moment, that is, at moments? I have been told positively that people in the last stages of consumption sometimes lose their minds temporarily. Check this tomorrow during the reading by the impression made on the listeners. This question must be resolved with the utmost precision; otherwise it is impossible to set about anything.)
It seems to me that I have just written something terribly stupid, but I have no time to correct it, as I said; besides, I give myself my word purposely not to correct a single line in this manuscript, even if I notice that I am contradicting myself every five lines. I precisely want to determine tomorrow during the reading whether the logical course of my thought is correct; whether I notice my own mistakes, and thus whether everything I have thought through during these six months in this room is true or mere raving.
If, just two months ago, I had had to leave my room, as I am doing now, and say good-bye to Meyer's wall, I'm sure I would have felt sad. But now I do not feel anything, and yet tomorrow I am leaving both my room and the wall forever!Thus my conviction that for the sake of two weeks it is not worth regretting anything or giving oneself up to any sort of emotions, has overcome my nature and can now command all my feelings. But is that true? Is it true that my nature is now utterly defeated? If I were to be tortured now, I would surely start shouting, and would not say that it is not worth shouting and feeling pain because I have only two weeks left to live.
But is it true that I have only two weeks left to live, and no more? I lied that time in Pavlovsk: —n never told me anything and never saw me; but about a week ago the student Oxigenov was brought to me; in his convictions he is a materialist, an atheist, and a nihilist, which is precisely why I invited him; I needed somebody who would finally tell me the naked truth, without mawkishness or ceremony. That is what he did, and not only readily and without ceremony, but even with obvious pleasure (which, in my opinion, was unnecessary). He blurted right out to me that I had about a month left; maybe a little more, if the conditions are good; but I may even die much sooner. In his opinion, I may die unexpectedly, even, for
instance, tomorrow: such facts have occurred, and only two days ago a young lady, a consumptive and in a state resembling mine, in Kolomna, was about to go to the market for provisions, but suddenly felt ill, lay down on the sofa, sighed, and died. Oxigenov told me all this, even flaunting his unfeelingness and carelessness somewhat, as if thereby doing me honor, that is, showing that he took me to be just such an all-denying higher being as himself, for whom dying, naturally, amounts to nothing. In the end, all the same, the fact is determined: a month and no more! I am perfectly convinced that he is not mistaken about it.
It surprised me very much how the prince guessed the other day that I have "bad dreams"; he said literally that in Pavlovsk "my agitation and dreams"would change. And why dreams? He is either a doctor or indeed of an extraordinary intelligence and able to guess a great many things. (But that he is ultimately an "idiot" there can be no doubt at all.) As if on purpose, just before he came I had a nice little dream (of a kind, however, that I now have by the hundred). I fell asleep—an hour before he came, I think—and saw myself in a room (but not mine). The room was bigger and higher than mine, better furnished, bright; a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a sofa, and my bed, big and wide and covered with a green silk quilt. But in this room I noticed a terrible animal, a sort of monster. It resembled a scorpion, but it was not a scorpion, it was more vile and much more terrible, and precisely, it seemed, in that there are no such creatures in nature and that it had come to me on purpose,and that very fact presumably contained some sort of mystery. I made it out very well: it was brown and had a shell, a creeping reptile, about seven inches long, about two fingers thick at the head, gradually tapering towards the tail, so that the very tip of the tail was no more than one-fifth of an inch thick. About two inches from the head, a pair of legs came out of the body, at a forty-five-degree angle, one on each side, about three and a half inches long, so that the whole animal, if seen from above, looked like a trident. I could not make out the head very well, but I saw two feelers, not long, like two strong needles, also brown. Two identical feelers at the tip of the tail and at the tip of each foot, making eight feelers in all. The animal ran about the room very quickly, supported on its legs and tail, and when it ran, its body and legs wriggled like little snakes, with extraordinary rapidity, despite its shell, and this was very repulsive to look at. I was terribly afraid it would sting me; I had been told it was venomous, but I
was most tormented by who could have sent it to my room, what did they want to do to me, and what was the secret of it? It hid under the chest of drawers, under the wardrobe, crawled into the corners. I sat on a chair with my legs tucked under me. It quickly ran diagonally across the room and disappeared somewhere near my chair. I looked around in fear, but as I was sitting with my legs tucked under me, I hoped it would not crawl up the chair. Suddenly I heard a sort of crackling rustle behind me, almost by my head. I turned and saw that the reptile was crawling up the wall and was already level with my head and even touching my hair with its tail, which was turning and twisting with extreme rapidity. I jumped up, and the animal disappeared. I was afraid to lie down in bed, lest it crawl under the pillow. My mother and an acquaintance of hers came into the room. They tried to catch the reptile, but were calmer than I, and not even afraid. But they understood nothing. Suddenly the reptile crawled out again; this time it crawled very quietly, and as if with some particular intention, twisting slowly, which was still more repulsive, again diagonally across the room, towards the door. Here my mother opened the door and called Norma, our dog—an enormous Newfoundland, black and shaggy; she died some five years ago. She rushed into the room and stopped over the reptile as if rooted to the spot. The reptile also stopped, but was still twisting and flicking the tips of its legs and tail against the floor. Animals cannot feel mystical fear, if I am not mistaken; but at that moment it seemed to me that in Norma's fear there was something as if very extraordinary, as if almost mystical, which meant that she also sensed, as I did, that there was something fatal and some sort of mystery in the beast. She slowly backed away from the reptile, which was quietly and cautiously crawling towards her; it seemed that it wanted to rush at her suddenly and sting her. But, despite all her fear, Norma's gaze was terribly angry, though she was trembling all over. Suddenly she slowly bared her terrible teeth, opened her entire red maw, took aim, readied herself, resolved, and suddenly seized the reptile with her teeth. The reptile must have made a strong movement to escape, because Norma caught it once more, this time in the air, and twice got her whole mouth around it, still in the air, as if gulping it down. The shell cracked in her teeth; the animal's tail and legs stuck out of her mouth, moving with terrible rapidity. Suddenly Norma squealed pitifully: the reptile had managed after all to sting her on the tongue. Squealing and howling with pain, she opened her mouth,
and I saw that the bitten reptile was still stirring as it lay across her mouth, its half-crushed body oozing a large quantity of white juice onto her tongue, resembling the juice of a crushed black cockroach . . . Here I woke up, and the prince came in.
"Gentlemen," said Ippolit, suddenly tearing himself away from his reading and even almost shamefacedly, "I didn't reread it, but it seems I indeed wrote a lot that's superfluous. This dream . . ."
"Is that," Ganya hastened to put in.
"There's too much of the personal, I agree, that is, about me myself..."
As he said this, Ippolit looked weary and faint and wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.
"Yes, sir, you're much too interested in yourself," hissed Lebedev.
"Again, gentlemen, I'm not forcing anyone: whoever doesn't want to listen can leave."
"Throws us . .. out of somebody else's house," Rogozhin growled barely audibly.
"And what if we all suddenly get up and leave?" Ferdyshchenko, who until then, incidentally, had not dared to speak aloud, said unexpectedly.
Ippolit suddenly dropped his eyes and clutched his manuscript; but in that same second he raised his head again and, his eyes flashing, with two red spots on his cheeks, said, looking point-blank at Ferdyshchenko:
"You don't love me at all!"
There was laughter; however, the majority did not laugh. Ippolit blushed terribly.
"Ippolit," said the prince, "close your manuscript and give it to me, and go to bed here in my room. We can talk before we sleep and tomorrow; but on condition that you never open these pages again. Do you want that?"
"Is this possible?" Ippolit looked at him in decided astonishment. "Gentlemen!" he cried, again growing feverishly animated, "a stupid episode, in which I was unable to behave myself. There will be no further interruptions of the reading. Whoever wants to listen, can listen ..."
He hurriedly gulped some water from a glass, hurriedly leaned his elbow on the table, in order to shield himself from others' eyes, and stubbornly went on with his reading. The shame, however, soon left him . . .
The idea (he went on reading) that it was not worth living for a few weeks began to take possession of me in a real sense about a month ago, I think, when I still had four weeks left to live, but it overcame me completely only three days ago, when I returned from that evening in Pavlovsk. The first moment of my being fully, directly pervaded by this thought occurred on the prince's terrace, precisely at the moment when I had decided to make a last test of life, wanted to see people and trees (I said so myself), became excited, insisted on Burdovsky's—"my neighbor's"—rights, and dreamed that they would all suddenly splay their arms wide and take me into their embrace, and ask my forgiveness for something, and I theirs; in short, I ended up as a giftless fool. And it was during those hours that "the ultimate conviction" flared up in me. I am astonished now at how I could have lived for a whole six months without this "conviction"! I knew positively that I had consumption and it was incurable; I did not deceive myself and understood the matter clearly. But the more clearly I understood it, the more convulsively I wanted to live; I clung to life and wanted to live whatever the cost. I agree that I could have become angry then at the dark and blank fate which had decreed that I be squashed like a fly, and, of course, without knowing why; but why did I not end just with anger? Why did I actually beginto live, knowing that it was no longer possible for me to begin; why did I try, knowing that there was no longer anything to try? And meanwhile I could not even read through a book and gave up reading; why read, why learn for six months? This thought made me drop a book more than once.
Yes, that wall of Meyer's can tell a lot! I have written a lot on it! There is not a spot on that dirty wall that I have not learned by heart. That cursed wall! But all the same it is dearer to me than all of Pavlovsk's trees, that is, it should be dearer, if it were not all the same to me now.
I recall now with what greedy interest I began to follow theirlife; there was no such interest before. Sometimes, when I was so ill that I could not leave the room, I waited for Kolya with impatience and abuse. I went so much into all the little details, was so interested in every sort of rumor, that it seemed I turned into a gossip. I could not understand, for instance, how it was that these people, having so much life, were not able to become rich (however, I don't understand it now either). I knew one poor fellow of whom I was told later that he starved to death, and, I remember, that
made me furious: if it had been possible to revive the poor fellow, I think I would have executed him. Sometimes I felt better for whole weeks and was able to go out in the street; but the street finally began to produce such bitterness in me that I would spend whole days inside on purpose, though I could have gone out like everybody else. I could not bear those scurrying, bustling, eternally worried, gloomy, and anxious people who shuttled around me on the sidewalks. Why their eternal sorrow, their eternal anxiety and bustle; their eternal gloomy spite (for they are spiteful, spiteful, spiteful)? Whose fault is it that they are unhappy and do not know how to live, though they have sixty years of life ahead of them? Why did Zarnitsyn allow himself to die, having sixty years ahead of him? And each of them displays his tatters, his hardworking hands, gets angry and cries: "We work like oxen, we toil, we are hungry as dogs, and poor! The others do not work, do not toil, yet they are rich!" (The eternal refrain!) Alongside them some luckless runt "of the gentlefolk" runs and bustles about from morning till night—Ivan Fomich Surikov, he lives over us, in our house– eternally with holes in his elbows, with torn-off buttons, running errands for various people, delivering messages, and that from morning till night. Go and start a conversation with him: "Poor, destitute, and wretched, the wife died, there was no money for medicine, and in the winter the baby froze to death; the older daughter has become a kept woman . .." he's eternally whimpering, eternally complaining! Oh, never, never have I felt any pity for these fools, not now, not before—I say it with pride! Why isn't he a Rothschild himself? Whose fault is it that he has no millions, as Rothschild has, that he has no mountain of gold imperials and napoleondors, 14a mountain as high as the ice mountains for sliding during carnival week with all its booths! If he's alive, everything is in his power! Whose fault is it that he doesn't understand that?
Oh, now it's all one to me, now I have no time to be angry, but then, then, I repeat, I literally chewed my pillow at night and tore my blanket with rage. Oh, how I dreamed then, how I wished, how I purposely wished, that I, eighteen years old, barely clothed, barely covered, could suddenly be thrown out in the street and left completely alone, with no lodgings, no work, no crust of bread, no relations, not a single acquaintance in the enormous city, hungry, beaten (so much the better!), but healthy, and then I'd show them ...
Show them what?
Oh, can you possibly suppose that I do not know how I have humiliated myself as it is with my "Explanation"! Well, who is not going to consider me a runt who knows nothing of life, forgetting that I am no longer eighteen years old; forgetting that to live as I have lived for these six months means to live till you're gray-haired! But let them laugh and say that it is all tall tales. I did really tell myself tall tales. I filled whole nights with them; I remember them all now.
But do I really have to tell them again now—now, when the time for tall tales is past for me as well? And to whom! For I delighted in them then, when I saw clearly that I was forbidden even to study Greek grammar, as I once conceived of doing: "I won't get as far as the syntax before I die"—I thought at the first page and threw the book under the table. It is still lying there; I forbade Matryona to pick it up.
Let him into whose hands my "Explanation" falls and who has enough patience to read it, consider me a crazy person or even a schoolboy, or most likely of all, a man condemned to death, to whom it naturally seemed that all people except himself value their life too little, are accustomed to spending it too cheaply, too lazily, use it much too shamelessly, and are therefore unworthy of it one and all! And what then? I declare that my reader will be mistaken, and that my conviction is completely independent of my death sentence. Ask them, only ask them one and all, what they understand by happiness? Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it; you may be sure that the highest moment of his happiness was, perhaps, exactly three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew in their despair almost turned the ship back to Europe, right around! The New World is not the point here, it can just as well perish. Columbus died having seen very little of it and in fact not knowing what he had discovered. The point is in life, in life alone—in discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself! But why talk! I suspect that everything I am saying now sounds so much like the most common phrases that I will probably be taken for a student in the lowest grade presenting his essay on "the sunrise," or they will say that I may have wanted to speak something out, but despite all my wishes I was unable to . . . "develop." But, nevertheless, I will add that in any ingenious or new human thought, or even simply in any serious human thought born in someone's head, there
always remains something which it is quite impossible to convey to other people, though you may fill whole volumes with writing and spend thirty-five years trying to explain your thought; there always remains something that absolutely refuses to leave your skull and will stay with you forever; you will die with it, not having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps most important in your idea. But if I also fail now to convey all that has been tormenting me for these six months, people will at least understand that, having reached my present "ultimate conviction," I may have paid too dearly for it; it is this that I have considered it necessary, for my own purposes, to set forth in my "Explanation." However, I continue.
VI
I do not want to lie: reality kept catching me on its hook for these six months, and I sometimes got so carried away that I forgot about my sentence or, better, did not want to think about it and even started doing things. Incidentally, about my situation then. When I became very ill about eight months ago, I broke off all my former relations and dropped all my former comrades. As I had always been a rather sullen man, my comrades easily forgot me; of course, they would have forgotten me even without this circumstance. My situation at home, that is, "in the family," was also solitary. Some five months before, I had locked myself in once and for all and separated myself completely from the family rooms. I was always obeyed, and no one dared to enter my room except at a certain hour to tidy up and bring me my dinner. My mother trembled before my orders and did not even dare to whimper in my presence, when I occasionally decided to let her in. She constantly beat the children on my account, for fear they would make noise and bother me; I often complained about their shouting; I can imagine how they must love me now! I think I also tormented "faithful Kolya," as I called him, quite a bit. Lately he has tormented me as well: all that is quite natural, people are created to torment each other. But I noticed that he put up with my irritability as if he had promised himself beforehand to spare the sick man. Naturally, that irritated me; but it seems he had decided to imitate the prince in his "Christian humility," which was slightly ridiculous. He is a young and ardent boy and, of course, imitates every-
body; but it sometimes seems to me that it is time he lived by his own reason. I love him very much. I also tormented Surikov, who lived over us and ran around from morning till night on other people's errands; I was constantly proving to him that he himself was to blame for his poverty, so that he finally got frightened and stopped coming to see me. He is a very humble man, the humblest of beings (NB. They say that humility is an awesome force; I must ask the prince about that, it's his expression); but when, in the month of March, I went up to his place, to see how, in his words, they had "frozen" the baby, and unintentionally smiled over his infant's body, because I again began explaining to Surikov that "he himself was to blame," the runt's lips suddenly trembled and, seizing me by the shoulder with one hand, he showed me the door with the other, and softly, that is, almost in a whisper, said to me: "Go, sir!" I went out, and I liked it very much, liked it right then, even at the very moment when he was leading me out; but for a long time afterwards, in my memory, his words made the painful impression of a sort of strange, contemptuous pity for him, which I did not want to feel at all. Even at the moment of such an insult (I do feel that I insulted him, though I had no intention of doing so), even at such a moment the man could not get angry! His lips quivered then not at all out of anger, I will swear to that: he seized me by the arm and uttered his splendid "Go, sir!" decidedly without being angry. There was dignity, even a great deal of it, even quite unsuited to him (so that, in truth, it was quite comical), but there was no anger. Maybe he simply began suddenly to despise me. Two or three times after that, when I met him on the stairs, he suddenly started taking his hat off to me, something he never did before, but he no longer stopped as before, but ran past me in embarrassment. If he despised me, he did it in his own way: he "humblydespised" me. But maybe he took his hat off simply out of fear of me, as his creditor's son, because he was constantly in debt to my mother and was never able to get out of it. And that is even the most likely thing of all. I wanted to have a talk with him, and I know for certain that in ten minutes he would have started asking my forgiveness; but I reasoned that it was better not to touch him.
At that same time, that is, around the time when Surikov "froze" his baby, around the middle of March, I felt much better for some reason, and that lasted for about two weeks. I started going out, most often at twilight. I loved the March twilight, when it turned
frosty and the gaslights were lit; I sometimes walked far. Once, in Shestilavochnaya Street, someone of the "gentlefolk" sort overtook me in the dark; I did not make him out very well; he was carrying something wrapped in paper and was dressed in a short and ugly coat—too light for the season. When he came to a streetlight, some ten steps ahead of me, I noticed that something fell out of his pocket. I hastened to pick it up—just in time, because someone in a long kaftan had already rushed for it, but, seeing the object in my hands, did not argue, took a fleeting glance at my hands, and slipped past. The object was a big morocco wallet of old-fashioned design and tightly stuffed; but for some reason I guessed at first glance that there was anything you like in it, except money. The passerby who had lost it was already some forty steps ahead of me and soon dropped from sight in the crowd. I ran and started shouting to him; but as I could only shout "Hey!" he did not turn around. Suddenly he darted to the left into the gateway of some house. When I ran into this gateway, where it was very dark, there was no one there. The house was enormously big, one of those huge things entrepreneurs build to make into little apartments; some of these buildings have as many as a hundred apartments in them. When I ran through the gateway, I thought I saw a man walking in the far right-hand corner of the enormous courtyard, though I could barely make out anything in the darkness. I ran to that corner and saw the entrance to a stairway; the stairway was narrow, extremely dirty, and quite unlighted; but I could hear a man running up the stairs above me, and I raced after him, hoping that while the door was being opened for him, I could catch up with him. And so it happened. The flights were very short, and there was no end of them, so that I was terribly out of breath; a door opened and closed again on the fifth floor, I guessed that from three flights down. Before I ran up, caught my breath on the landing, and found the doorbell, several minutes passed. The door was finally opened for me by a woman who was lighting a samovar in a tiny kitchen; she listened silently to my questions, understood nothing, of course, and silently opened for me the door to the next room, also small, terribly low, with vile necessary furniture and a huge, wide bed under a canopy, on which lay "Terentyich" (as the woman called to him), drunk, as it seemed to me. On the table stood an iron night-light with a candle burning down in it and a nearly empty bottle. Terentyich grunted something to me lying down and waved towards the next door, while the woman left, so
that nothing remained for me but to open that door. I did so and went into the next room.
This room was still smaller and narrower than the previous one, so that I did not even know where to turn in it; a narrow single bed in the corner took up terribly much space; the rest of the furniture consisted of three simple chairs heaped with all sorts of rags and a very simple wooden kitchen table in front of an old oilcloth sofa, so that it was almost impossible to pass between the table and the bed. The same iron night-light with a tallow candle as in the other room burned on the table, and on the bed squealed a tiny baby, maybe only three weeks old, judging by its cry; it was being "changed," that is, put into a clean diaper, by a sick and pale woman, young-seeming, in extreme négligé, and perhaps just beginning to get up after her confinement; but the baby would not be quiet and cried in anticipation of the lean breast. On the sofa another child slept, a three-year-old girl, covered, it seemed, with a tailcoat. By the table stood a gentleman in a very shabby frock coat (he had already taken his coat off and it was lying on the bed), unwrapping the blue paper in which about two pounds of wheat bread and two small sausages were wrapped. On the table, besides that, there was a teapot with tea and some scattered pieces of black bread. An unlocked suitcase showed from under the bed, and two bundles with some rags stuck out.
