The Idiot (60 page)

And now this wretched little princeling had appeared, this rubbishy little idiot, and it had all been stirred up again, everything in the house had been turned upside down!

But what had happened, really?

Others would probably not have thought that anything had happened. But what distinguished Lizaveta Prokofyevna was that in the melée and muddle of the most ordinary things, because of the anxiety that was always in her, she always managed to discover something that frightened her to the point of making her ill with the most suspicious, most inexplicable fear, which was therefore very difficult to endure. How must she have felt now, when suddenly, through the confusion of her absurd and unfounded anxieties, there really did begin to peep through something that was indeed important, something that really did justify her anxieties and doubts and suspicions.

‘And how did they dare, how did they dare write me that accursed anonymous letter about that
creature,
that she sees Aglaya?’ thought Lizaveta Prokofyevna all the way, as she dragged the prince after her, and at home, when she had sat him down at the circular table, around which the entire household was assembled. ‘How did they even dare to think of it? Why, I would have died of shame had I believed even one word of it, or had I shown Aglaya that letter! Such gibes at us Yepanchins! And all, all of it because of Ivan Fyodorych, all because of you, Ivan Fyodorych! Oh, why didn’t we go to Yelagin: I mean, I said we should go to Yelagin! It may have been Varya who wrote the letter, I know, or perhaps ... Ivan Fyodorych is to blame for all of it, all of it! That
creature
has played this trick on him, in memory of their previous relations, to make him look like a fool, just as she used to laugh at him like the fool he was, led him by the nose when he took her pearls ... And the end of it is that we’re all mixed up in it, your daughters are mixed up in it, Ivan Fyodorych, girls, young ladies, young ladies of the best society, brides-to-be, they were here, stood here, heard everything, and they were also mixed up in the episode with the urchins, you ought to rejoice in that, they were also here and listened! I shall never forgive, I won’t ever forgive that wretched little prince, I will never forgive him! And why has Aglaya been in a hysterical fit for three days, why has she almost quarrelled with her sisters, even with Alexandra, whose hands she has always kissed like those of her mother - so much did she respect her? Why has she been posing riddles for everyone for
three days? What is Gavrila Ivolgin’s role in all this? Why did she start singing paeans of praise to Gavrila Ivolgin and bursting into tears? Why is that wretched “poor knight” mentioned in that anonymous letter, when she hasn’t shown the letter from the prince even to her sisters? And for what reason ... why, why did I go running to him like a scalded cat and drag him here myself? Merciful Lord, I must have taken leave of my senses, the things I’ve been doing now! Discussing my daughter’s secrets with a young man, and ... and secrets that concern him! Merciful Lord, it’s just as well he’s an idiot and ... and ... a friend of the family! But can Aglaya really have fallen for a freak like that? Lord, what nonsense I’m talking! Pah! We’re eccentrics ... we ought all to be displayed under glass, me first, for an entrance fee of ten copecks. I won’t forgive you for this, Ivan Fedorych, I will never forgive it! And why isn’t she working on him now ? She said she would, but she’s not! Look, look, she’s staring at him, all eyes, she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t go away, just stands there, yet she told him not to come calling ... He sits there all pale. And that damned, damned chatterbox Yevgeny Pavlych, he’s taken over the whole conversation! Listen to his outpourings, he doesn’t let one get a word in. I would have discovered it all at once, if I’d been able to open my mouth ...’

The prince was indeed sitting, rather pale, at the circular table, apparently in a state of extreme fear combined with an intermittent rapture that was incomprehensible to him and enveloped his soul. Oh, how afraid he was to look in that direction, into that corner, from where two familiar black eyes looked at him, and at the same time how he thrilled with happiness that he was sitting here again among them, that he would hear the familiar voice - after what she had written to him. ‘Lord, what will she say now?’ He himself did not utter a single word and listened with strained attention to the ‘outpourings’ of Yevgeny Pavlovich, who had been seldom in such a happy and excited mood as he was now, this evening. The prince listened to him for a long time almost without understanding a word. Everyone had assembled, apart from Ivan Fyodorovich, who had not yet returned from St Petersburg. Prince Shch. was here too. It appeared that in a while, once they had had tea, they were going off to listen to the band. The present conversation had evidently started before the prince’s arrival. Soon Kolya slid on to the veranda, having arrived from somewhere. ‘So he’s being received here as he was before,’ the prince thought to himself.

The Yepanchins’ dacha was a luxurious one, in the style of a Swiss chalet, elegantly adorned on every side with flowers and leaves. It was surrounded on all sides by a small but beautiful flower garden. As at the prince’s, everyone sat on the veranda; only the veranda was somewhat more spacious and more stylishly appointed.

The theme of the conversation that had begun was not, it seemed, to the taste of many; the conversation, as might be expected, had started from an impatient quarrel and, of course, everyone would have liked to have changed the subject, but Yevgeny Pavlovich seemed to be pe
rsisting, and ignoring the effect this was making; the prince’s arrival seemed to stimulate him even more. Lizaveta Prokofyevna was frowning, though she did not understand everything. Aglaya, who sat at the side, almost in the corner, did not go away, listened and was stubbornly silent.

‘If you please,’ Yevgeny Pavlovich was retorting heatedly, ‘I have nothing against liberalism. Liberalism is not a sin; it’s a necessary part of the whole, which without it would disintegrate or start to rigidify; liberalism has just as much right to exist as the most well-behaved conservatism; but it’s Russian liberalism I’m attacking, and I repeat again that I attack it really because a Russian liberal is not a
Russian
liberal, but an
un-Russian
liberal. Give me a Russian liberal, and I will kiss him in front of you right now.’

‘If he’s willing to kiss you, you mean,’ said Alexandra Ivanovna, who was in an extraordinary state of excitement. Her cheeks had grown even redder than usual.

‘Just look at her,’ Lizaveta Prokofyevna thought to herself, ‘she spends all her time sleeping and eating, you can’t budge her, and then once a year she suddenly gets up and says something that makes you simply throw up your hands in horror.’

The prince observed in passing that Alexandra Ivanovna did not like Yevgeny Pavlovich speaking so cheerfully on a serious subject, and seeming to grow vehement while at the same time apparently joking.

‘I was maintaining just now, just before your arrival, Prince,’ Yevgeny Pavlovich continued, ‘that until now our liberals have come from only two social strata, the old landowning class (now obsolete) and the graduates of the religious seminaries. And since both of these classes have finally turned into out and out castes, into something quite distinct from the nation, and increasingly so, from generation to generation, then it follows that all that they have done and are doing is completely non-national ...’

‘What? So all that’s been done-none of it’s Russian?’ retorted Prince Shch.

‘Not national; Russian maybe, but not national; our liberals aren’t Russian, and our conservatives aren’t Russian, none of them ... And you can be assured that the nation won’t recognize anything that’s done by the landowners and the seminarians, either now, or later ...’

‘That’s a good one! How can you maintain such a paradox, if you are serious? I cannot allow such attacks on the Russian landowner; you’re a Russian landowner yourself,’ Prince Shch. retorted heatedly.

‘But I’m not speaking about the Russian landowner in the sense in which you take it. An honourable class, if only because I belong to it; especially now that it’s ceased to exist ...’

‘Has there really been nothing national in our literature, either?’ Alexandra Ivanovna interrupted.

‘I’m no authority on literature, but it seems to me that none of Russian literature is Russian, except perhaps for Lomonosov, Pushkin and Gogol.’

‘For one thing, that’s rather a lot, and for another, one of them was a commoner, while the other two were landowners,’ Alexandra began to laugh.

‘Indeed so, but don’t crow. Because, out of all Russian writers to date, only those three managed to say something to each individual reader that was really
his,
his own, not borrowed from anyone, by that same fact those three also at once became national. Any Russian who says, writes or does something of his own, something that is inalienably
his
and that has not been borrowed, inevitably becomes national, even though he may not even speak Russian very well. To me, this is an axiom. But we weren’t talking about literature, we were talking about the socialists, and it was about them that the conversation started; well, so I maintain that we don’t have a single Russian socialist; we don’t and never have done, because all our socialists are also from the landowners or the seminarians. All our inveterate, proclaimed socialists, both the local and the foreign, are nothing more than landowner liberals from the days of serfdom. Why are you laughing? Give me their books, give me their teachings, their memoirs, and I, who am no literary critic, will undertake to write you a most convincing literary critique, in which I shall prove with daylight clarity that every page of their books, brochures and memoirs is written by none other than a former Russian landowner. Their spite, indignation and wit are landownerly (even pre-Famusov!);
³
their rapture, their tears, genuine, perhaps, sincere, but - landownerly! Landownerly or seminarian ... You’re laughing again, and you’re laughing, too, Prince? You don’t agree either?’

They really were all laughing, and the prince smiled too.

‘I can’t say yet straight out whether I agree or disagree,’ said the prince, suddenly smiling no more, and starting with the look of a schoolboy caught in the act, ‘but I assure you that I’m listening to you with great pleasure ...’

As he said this, he almost choked, and a cold sweat even broke out on his forehead. These were the first words uttered by him since he had sat down here. He tried to look around him, but did not dare; Yevgeny Pavlovich caught his gesture, and smiled.

‘I will tell you a fact, ladies and gentlemen,’ he continued in his earlier tone of voice, that is, apparently with extraordinary enthusiasm and fervour yet at the same time almost laughing, perhaps at his own words, ‘a fact, an observation the discovery of which I have the honour to ascribe to myself, and even to myself alone; at any rate nothing has been said or written about this anywhere yet. In this fact is expressed the whole essence of Russian liberalism of the kind of which I speak. In the first place, what is liberalism, generally speaking, if not an attack (reasonable or erroneous - that is another question) on the existing order of things? That is so, is it not? Well, so my fact consists in the perception that Russian liberalism is not an attack on the existing order of things, but an attack on the very essence of the things in our land, the things themselves, and not just an attack on order, on the Russian social order, but on Russia itself. My liberal has got to the p
oint where he rejects Russia itself, that is, he hates and beats his own mother. Every unhappy and unfortunate fact of Russian life arouses laughter in him, rapture, almost. He hates our national customs, Russian history, everything. If there is an excuse for him, it is perhaps that he doesn’t know what he is doing, and mistakes his hatred of Russia for the most fruitful liberalism (oh, in our country you will often meet a liberal whom the others applaud and who is really, perhaps, the most absurd, the most stupid and dangerous conservative, without being aware of it himself!). Not so long ago, our liberals almost mistook this hatred of Russia for a genuine love of the fatherland, and they boasted that they saw better than others what it ought to consist of; but now they have grown more candid and have even begun to be ashamed of the words ‘love of the fatherland’, have even banished the concept and got rid of it as something harmful and trivial. This is an established fact, I insist on that and ... after all, it was necessary to speak the truth one day, wholly, simply and candidly; but at the same time this fact is something of a kind that has not ever, anywhere, since time immemorial, existed or occurred in a single nation on earth, and so it may be a mere accident, and will pass, I admit. There cannot be a liberal anywhere who would hate his own fatherland. How can all this be explained in our country, then? In the same way as before - because a Russian liberal is at present not a Russian liberal; that’s the only explanation there can be, in my view.’

‘I take all that you have said as a joke, Yevgeny Pavlych,’ Prince Shch. retorted gravely.

‘I haven’t seen every liberal and will not undertake to judge,’ said Alexandra Ivanovna, ‘but I listened to your idea with indignation: you have taken a particular instance and have elevated it into a general law, and so you’ve committed a slander.’

‘A particular instance? Ah, ah! The word is spoken,’ Yevgeny Pavlovich chimed in. ‘Prince, what do you think, is it a particular instance or isn’t it?’

‘I must also say that I haven’t seen much and haven’t spent much time with ... liberals,’ said the prince, ‘but it seems to me that you are possibly right to a certain extent, and that the Russian liberalism you spoke of really is sometimes inclined to hate Russia itself, and not simply the Russian order of things. Of course, it’s only sometimes ... of course, it can’t be true of them all ...’

He stopped short, and did not finish his sentence. In spite of his excitement, the conversation interested him greatly. The prince had one peculiar trait which consisted in the extraordinary naivety of the attention with which he always listened to something that was of interest to him, and of the replies he gave when people addressed him with questions. Somehow his face and even the position of his body expressed this naivety, this faith that suspected neither mockery nor humour. But although Yevgeny Pavlovich had long addressed him only with a certain specia
l kind of ironic smile, now, in response to this reply, he gave him a very serious look, as though he had not at all expected such an answer from him.