The Idiot (70 page)

‘Gentlemen,’ said Ippolit, suddenly tearing himself away from his reading, and even almost in shame, ‘I haven’t read this over, but it seems to me that I really have written much that is superfluous. This dream ...’

‘Is of that order,’ Ganya hurried to put in.

‘There’s too much that’s personal in it, I agree, too much about myself, really ...

As he said this, Ippolit looked tired and limp, wiping away the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.

‘Yes, sir, too damn interested in yourself,’ hissed Lebedev.

‘Gentlemen, I’m not forcing anyone, again I say it: whoever doesn’t want to listen may leave.’

‘He’s kicking people out ... of someone else’s house,’ Rogozhin muttered barely audibly.

‘And what if we all got up and left?’ Ferdyshchenko said suddenly, not having had the boldness to speak out until now, however.

Ippolit suddenly lowered his eyes and reached for the manuscript ; but at that same second he again raised his head and, with glittering eyes, and two red spots on his cheeks, said, as he stared at Ferdyshchenko:

‘You don’t like me at all!’

Laughter rang out; as a matter of fact, though, most people did not laugh. Ippolit turned horribly red.

‘Ippolit,’ said the prince, ‘put your manuscript away and give it to me, and go to bed now, in my room. We shall talk before you sleep, and also tomorrow; but with the proviso that you never take out these sheets again. Would you like that?’

‘How could that be possible?’ Ippolit looked at him in decided astonishment. ‘Gentlemen!’ he cried, again growing feverishly animated. ‘A stupid episode, in which I didn’t know how to conduct myself. I shall not interrupt my reading again. Whoever wants to listen - listen ...’

He took a quick gulp of water from the glass, quickly leaned his elbows on the table to protect himself from their gazes, and began to continue the reading again with dogged tenacity. His shame soon passed, however ...

‘The idea’ (he continued to read) ‘that it was not worth living for a few weeks began to really overpower me, I think, a month ago, when I still had four weeks left to live, but really overwhelmed me only three days ago, when I returned from that soiree in Pavlovsk. The first moment that this thought penetrated me completely and directly was on the veranda at the prince’s, at the very same moment when it occurred to me to sample life for the last time, and I wanted to see people and trees (all right, I did say that), got excited, insisted on the rights of Burdovsky, my “neighbour”, and wished they would all spread their arms wide, take me into their embrace, and ask me to forgive them for something, and I them;
in a word, I ended up an untalented fool. And it was in those hours that my “last conviction” flared up in me. I am astonished now how I could have lived for a whole six months without that “conviction”! I knew positively that I had consumption, and that it was incurable; I did not deceive myself and had a clear understanding of the matter. But the clearer my understanding, the more frantically did I want to live; I clung to life and wanted to live at whatever cost. I agree that I might have been angry at the dark, deaf and blind fate that proposed to crush me like a housefly and, of course, not knowing why; but why did I not leave it there, at anger? Why did I really
start
to live, knowing that it was already too late for me to start; make an attempt, knowing that it was already too late for me to make an attempt? And all the while I was even unable to read books, and gave up reading; what was the point of reading, what was the point of learning anything for six months? That thought made me abandon a book on more than one occasion.

‘Yes, that wall of Meyer’s could tell many stories! I have written many things on it. There was not a stain on that dirty wall that I didn’t know by heart. Accursed wall! And yet it is dearer to me than all the trees in Pavlovsk, or rather would be dearer than them all if everything was not all the same to me now.

‘I recall now with what avid interest I began to follow
their
lives; I had had no such interest earlier. Impatiently and cursing, I would sometimes wait for Kolya, when he himself was so ill that he could not leave his room. I went so deeply into every trivial detail, took such an interest in any kind of rumour that I believe I became a gossip-monger. I did not understand, for example, how these people, possessing so much life, were not able to make themselves rich (as a matter of fact, I don’t understand it even now). I knew one poor fellow of whom it was later told to me that he had died of hunger, and, I remember, this drove me into a fury: if it had been possible to bring that poor fellow back to life, I think I would have killed him. Sometimes I felt better for whole weeks on end, and I was able to go out in the street; but in the end the street began to make me so angry that I deliberately spent whole days locked in my room, though I could have gone out like everyone else. I could not endure that poking, bustling, eternally preoccupied, gloomy and anxious mass of human beings that scurried about me on the pavements. Why their eternal dolefulness, their eternal anxiety and bustle; their eternal gloomy spite (for they are spiteful, spiteful, spiteful)? Whose fault is it that they are unhappy and don’t know how to live, each with sixty years of life ahead of them? Why did Zarnitsyn allow himself to die of hunger when he had sixty years ahead of him? And each of them shows his rags, his toiling hands, is angry and shouts: “We work like oxen, we toil, we’re as hungry as dogs and are poor! Others don’t work and don’t toil, but they’re rich!” (The eternal refrain!) Beside them, running and bustling from morning to night, is some miserable weakling “of noble birth”, Ivan Fomich Surikov - in our building, he lives on the floor above us - eternally
with worn-out elbows, with missing buttons, running errands for other people, carrying out various commissions, and again from morning to night. Talk to him: “I’m poor, destitute and wretched, my wife has died, there was no money to buy medicine, and in winter our baby froze; my eldest daughter is a kept woman ...” - eternally snivelling, eternally complaining! Oh, I never had any sympathy for those fools in the past, and I have none now - I say that with pride! Why is he not a Rothschild? Whose fault is it that he has not a mountain of gold imperials and napoleons, such a mountain, a mountain as high as the helter-skelter at a Shrovetide fair? If he’s alive, then everything should be within his power! Whose fault is it that he doesn’t understand that?

‘Oh, now it’s all the same to me, now I have no time to be angry, but then, then, I repeat, I literally gnawed my pillow at nights and tore my quilt with fury. Oh, how I dreamed then, how I wished, deliberately wished that I, eighteen years old, hardly clothed, hardly covered, could be suddenly turned out into the street and left completely alone, without shelter, without employment, without a crust of bread, without relations, without a single person I knew in the most enormous city, hungry, beaten (so much the better!), but healthy, and then I would have shown ...

‘What would I have shown?

‘Oh, do you really suppose I don’t know how I’ve degraded myself as it is with this “Explanation” of mine? Well, who will not consider me a weakling with no knowledge of life, who’s forgotten he is no longer eighteen; has forgotten that to live as I have lived these past six months means to live to an age where one has grey hair! But let them laugh and say it’s all fairytales. I have filled my nights full of them; I can remember them all now.

‘But do I really have to retell them all now - now, when the time for fairytales has passed for me? And tell whom? I mean, I used to console myself with them when I clearly saw that I was even forbidden to study Greek grammar, as I once had the idea of doing: “I’ll die before I get to the syntax,” I thought as I read the first page, and threw the book under the table. It’s still lying there; I’ve forbidden Matryona to pick it up.

‘Let those into whose hands my “Explanation” falls, and who have the patience to read it through, take me for a madman, or even a schoolboy, or most probably of all a man condemned to death, to whom it has naturally begun to seem that all human beings apart from himself attach far too little value to life, have become far too accustomed to wasting it, avail themselves of it far too lazily, far too unscrupulously, and are therefore unworthy of it, every one of them! And what of it? I declare that my reader will be mistaken and that my conviction has nothing to do with my death sentence. Ask them, just ask them what they all, every one of them, understand by happiness. Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America but when he was discovering it; be assured that the highest point of his happiness was perhaps just three days
before the discovery of the New World, when in despair the mutinying crew very nearly turned the ship towards Europe, back again! What mattered now was not the New World, even though it might have vanished. Columbus died almost without having seen it and not really knowing what he had discovered. What matters is life, nothing but life - its revelation, constant and eternal, while the discovery matters not at all! But what’s the point of talking? I suspect that all I am saying now is so similar to the most commonly used phrases that I will probably be taken for a first-grade schoolboy presenting his essay on “the sunrise”, or it will perhaps be said that I wanted to express something, but in spite of all my desire to do so was unable to ... “develop my thought”. But, on the other hand, I would add that in every human idea that possesses genius or is new, or even simply in every serious human idea that is conceived in someone’s head, there always remains something that cannot be conveyed to other people, even though whole volumes were written and your idea explained for thirty-five years; there will always remain something that is on no account willing to come out of your skull and will remain with you for ever; so that you will die without perhaps ever having conveyed to anyone the most important part of your idea. But if I have also been unable to convey everything that has tormented me these last six months, then at least people will understand that, having attained my present “final conviction”, I may have paid very dearly for it; it was this that I considered necessary, for certain reasons of my own, to set forth in my “Explanation”.

‘But, anyway, to continue.’

‘I will not lie: reality has been trying to catch me on its hook these past six months, and has sometimes distracted me to the point where I forgot about my death sentence or, rather, was unwilling to think about it, and even engaged in practical activities. By the way, about my circumstances at the time. When, about eight months ago, I really became very ill, I broke off all my social contacts and abandoned all the friends I’d had. As I had always been a rather gloomy person, my companions found it easy to forget me; of course, even without that, they would have forgotten me. My circumstances at home, “in the household”, that is, were also those of a recluse. Some five months ago I locked myself away and completely separated myself from the family’s rooms. I was always obeyed, and no one dared to enter my room, except at a predetermined hour to tidy it and bring me my dinner. My mother trembled at my orders and did not even dare to whimper on those rare occasions when I decided to admit her. She was constantly spanking the children to stop them making a noise and disturbing me; I complained often enough about their shouting; they must be very fond of me now! I think I also tormented “faithful Kolya”, as I nicknamed him, rather a lot. Latterly he tormented me, too: it was all quite natural, human beings are created in order to torment one another. But I noticed that he tolerated my irritability, as if he had promised himself in advance that he would spare the invalid. That was naturally a source of irritation to me; but it seems that he had taken it into his head to imitate the prince in “Christian meekness”, which was really rather ridiculous. He’s a young and hotheaded boy, and imitates everything, of course; but it sometimes seemed to me that it was time he developed his own ideas. I’m very fond of him. I also tormented Surikov, who lived above us and ran other people’s errands from morning to night; I constantly attempted to prove to him that he himself was to blame for his poverty, and at last he took fright and stopped coming to see me. He is a very meek person, the meekest of creatures (NB They say that meekness is an awe-inspiring force; I must ask the prince about that, it’s something he said); but when in March I went upstairs to see the baby that had been “a-froze”, to use his own word, and inadvertently smiled over the dead body of his infant, as I had once again begun to explain to Surikov that “he himself was to blame”, that weakling’s lips suddenly began to tremble and, seizing me by the shoulder with one hand, with the other he showed me the door and quietly, that’s to say, almost in a whisper, he said to me: “Go, sir!” I went out, and I really liked that, liked it at the time, even at the very moment he was showing me out; but for a long time afterwards his words produced a painful effect on me, a strange, contemptuous pity for him, which I did not want to feel at all. Even at the moment of such an insult (I mean, I feel that I insulted him, though I didn’t mean to), e
ven at such a moment this man was unable to lose his temper! His lips did not tremble with anger at all, I swear to it: he seized me by the arm and uttered his magnificent “Go, sir” quite without anger. Of dignity there was even a great deal, even an amount that was wholly inappropriate for him (so that, to tell the truth, there was much that was comical here), but there was no anger. Perhaps he just suddenly began to despise me. Since then, two or three times when I’ve met him on the stairs, he has suddenly begun to doff his hat to me, something he never used to do, without stopping as he used to, and instead running past, in embarrassment. If he did despise me, then it was in his own way: he
“meekly
despised me”. Though perhaps he doffed his hat simply out of fear, to the son of his creditor, as he constantly owed my mother money and was quite unable to climb his way out of debt. And that may even be the most probable explanation. I was on the point of remonstrating with him, and I know for certain that he would have begun to apologize to me within ten minutes; but I judged it better not to trouble him.