The Idiot (81 page)

And there was much, much more of the same kind of delirium in those letters. One of them, the second, was on two sheets of closely written, large format notepaper.

At last the prince left the sombre park, in which he had been wandering for a long time, as he had done yesterday. The light, transparent night seemed even lighter than usual; ‘is it really still so early?’ he thought. (He had forgotten to take his watch.) Somewhere he thought he heard distant music: ‘it must be in the pleasure gardens,’ he thought again, ‘they haven’t gone there today, of course.’ Having grasped this, he saw that he was standing right outside their dacha; he had known that in the end he would be bound to finish here, and, with sinking heart, stepped on to the veranda. No one came to greet him, and the veranda was deserted. He waited for a moment and opened the door into the drawing room. ‘They’ve never kept this door locked,’ flashed through his head, but the drawing room was also deserted; it was almost completely dark there. He stood in the middle of the room, perplexed. Suddenly a door opened and Alexandra Ivanovna came in, holding a candle. Seeing the prince, she was surprised, and stopped before him, as though asking a question. Evidently, she was merely passing through the room, from one door to another, certainly not expecting to find anyone there.

‘How did you get in here?’ she said quietly, at last.

‘I... dropped by ...’

‘
Maman
is not quite well, and neither is Aglaya. Adelaida is going to bed, and I am, too. We’ve been at home alone all evening. Papa and the Prince are in St Petersburg.’

‘I’ve come ... I’ve come to see you ... now ...’

‘Do you know what time it is?’

‘N-no...’

‘It’s half-past twelve. We always go to bed at one.’

‘Oh, I thought it was ... half-past nine.’

‘It doesn’t matter!’ she began to laugh. ‘But why didn’t you come earlier? They were probably expecting you.’

‘I ... thought ...’ he mouthed, as he walked away.

‘Au revoir!
Tomorrow I’ll make them all laugh.’

He walked along the road that skirted the park, to his dacha. His heart was thumping, his thoughts were in a muddle, and everything around him seemed like a dream. And suddenly, just as before, when on both occasions he had woken from the same apparition, that apparition appeared to him again. That woman walked out of the park and stood before him, as though she had been waiting for him here. He shuddered and stopped; she seized his hand and pressed it hard. ‘No, this is not an apparition!’

And here, at last, she stood before him face to face, for the first time since they had parted; she was saying something to him, but he gazed at her in silence; his heart overflowed and began to ache with pain. Oh, never afterwards was he able to forget this meeting with her and always remembered it with the same pain. She sank to her knees before him, right there in the street, like one demented; he stepped back in alarm, but she caught his hand in order to kiss it, and, just as before, in his dream, tears now shone on her long eyelashes.

‘Get up, get up!’ he said in a frightened whisper, trying to make her rise. ‘Get up, quickly!’

‘Are you happy? Happy?’ she kept asking. ‘Just tell me one thing, are you happy now? Today, right now? With her? What did she say?’

She did not rise, she did not listen to him; she questioned him in a hurry, and hurried to speak, as though she were being pursued.

‘I’m going tomorrow, as you told me to. I shall not ... I mean, I’m seeing you for the last time, the last! Now, this is the very last time!’

‘Calm yourself, get up!’ he said quietly in despair.

She scrutinized him avidly, seizing his hands.

‘Farewell!’ she said at last, got up and quickly walked away from him, almost running. The prince saw Rogozhin suddenly appear at her side, grip her by the arm and lead her away.

‘Wait, Prince,’ cried Rogozhin, ‘I’ll be back in five minutes.’

Five minutes later he really did come back; the prince was waiting for him in the same place.

‘I’ve put her in the carriage,’ he said. ‘There’s been a barouche waiting on the corner there since ten o’clock. She had a feeling that you’d spend the whole evening with the other one. I told her in detail the things you wrote to me earlier. She won’t write to the other one any more; she’s promised; and, in accordance with your wishes, she’ll be leaving here tomorr
ow. She wanted to see you, for the last time, even though you refused; we’ve been waiting right here at this spot for you to come back, look, over there, on that bench.’

‘She took you with her herself?’

‘So what?’ Rogozhin grinned. ‘I saw what I knew to be true. You’ve read the letters, evidently?’

‘Have you really read them?’ asked the prince, shocked by this thought.

‘You bet I have; she showed me all the letters herself. Do you remember the part about the razor, heh-heh!’

‘She’s insane!’ exclaimed the prince, wringing his hands.

‘Who knows, perhaps she isn’t,’ Rogozhin said quietly, as if to himself.

The prince did not reply.

‘Well, goodbye,’ said Rogozhin. ‘I mean, I’m going tomorrow, too; don’t hold it against me! But listen, brother,’ he added, quickly turning round. ‘Why didn’t you answer her question? “Are you happy, or aren’t you?”’

‘No, no, no!’ exclaimed the prince, with boundless sorrow.

‘I didn’t think you’d say “yes”!’ Rogozhin laughed maliciously, and left without looking back.

About a week had passed since the meeting of two characters from our story on the green bench. One bright morning, at about half-past ten, Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyna, who had gone out to visit some friends, returned home in great and sorrowful reflection.

There are people of whom it is difficult to say something that would present them at once and entirely, in their most typical and characteristic aspect; they are those people who are usually called ‘ordinary’, ‘the majority’, and who really do constitute the overwhelming majority of any society. In their novels and stories, writers mostly try to select social types and to present them vividly and pictorially - types who are extremely seldom encountered in reality as a whole, but who are none the less almost more real than reality itself. Podkolyosin
¹
in his typical aspect is, perhaps, even an exaggeration, but he is by no means an empty fiction. How many intelligent people, learning about Podkolyosin from Gogol, at once began to discover that dozens, indeed hundreds of their good friends and acquaintances were terribly like Podkolyosin? Even before Gogol came along, they had known that these friends were like Podkolyosin; it was merely that they didn’t yet know this was their name. In reality, bridegrooms very seldom jump out of windows just before their wedding, because, not to mention other drawbacks, it is rather an awkward thing to do; none the less, how many bridegrooms, even worthy and intelligent men, have been ready to admit just before going to the altar that in the depths of their conscience they are Podkolyosins. And not all husbands cry at every step:
‘Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin!
’
²
But good heavens, how many millions and billions of times has this cri de
cœur
been echoed by husbands the world over after their honeymoon, or, who knows, even on the day after their wedding?

And so, without entering upon more serious explanations, we shall merely say that in reality the typical qualities of human beings are, as it were, watered down, and all these Georges Dandins and Podkolyosins really do exist, hurrying and scurrying before us daily, though in a somewhat diluted condition. With the reservation, finally, that the whole of Georges Dandin in his entirety, as Molière created him, may also be encountered in reality, though rarely, we shall now conclude our argument, which is beginning to resemble a critical review in a journal. None the less, we are still faced with the question: what is the novelist to do with people who are commonplace, completely ‘ordinary’, and how are they to be presented to the reader so as to make them at least somewhat interesting? It is simply not possible to avoid them altogether in the narrative, for ordinary people are always, and overwhelmingly, an essential link in the chain of everyday events; thus, by avoiding them, we up
set the realm of the plausible. To fill novels solely with types or even simply, for interest’s sake, with strange and imaginary people would be implausible, and indeed uninteresting. In our opinion, a writer ought to try to find interesting and instructive nuances even among the ordinary. When, for example, the very essence of certain ordinary characters consists precisely in their habitual and invariable ordinariness or, even better, when, in spite of all the extreme efforts of these characters to emerge at all costs from the rut of custom and routine, they still end up remaining invariably and eternally bound to routine, then such characters even acquire a kind of typicality of their own - an ordinariness that is on no account willing to remain what it is, and wants at all costs to become original and independent, while not possessing the slightest means of independence.

Also belonging to this category of ‘commonplace’ or ‘ordinary’ people are some of the characters of our narrative, who have so far (I admit) been insufficiently explained to the reader. Such, in particular, are Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyna, her spouse Mr Ptitsyn and Gavrila Ardalionovich, her brother.

Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for example, than to be wealthy, of decent family, of decent appearance, not badly educated, not stupid, even kind-hearted, and at the same time to possess no talent, no special quality, nor even any eccentricity, not a single idea of one’s own, to be decidedly ‘just like everyone else’. Wealth, perhaps, but not the wealth of a Rothschild; an honourable family, but not one that has ever distinguished itself in any way; a decent appearance, but really not very expressive; a decent education, but no idea about how to put it to use; intelligence, but an absence of
one’s own ideas;
a heart, but a lack of generosity, etcetera, etcetera, in every respect. There is an extremely large number of such people in the world, and even far more than it may seem; they are divided, like all human beings, into two main categories: those who are limited and those who are ‘far more intelligent’. The first category is the happier one. For the limited ‘ordinary’ person there is, for example, nothing easier than to imagine himself to be an unusual and original person, and to take enjoyment in this without hesitation. Some of our young ladies need only have their hair cut short, put on blue spectacles and call themselves nihilists in order to be instantly persuaded that, having donned the spectacles, they have at once begun to possess their own ‘convictions’. Some men need only feel a drop of some universally human and good-natured feeling within their hearts in order to be instantly persuaded that no one feels as they do, that they are in the vanguard of public enlightenment. Others need only accept some idea by word of mouth or read a page of something without beginning or end in order instantly to believe that this is ‘Their own idea’ and has been conceived within their own brains. In such cases, the insolence of naivety, if one may be permitted to express it thus, attains an astonishing dimension; it is all of it incredible, but is constantly encountered. This insolence of naivety, this undoubting trust the stupi
d man has in himself and in his own talent, is splendidly presented by Gogol in the remarkable type of Lieutenant Pirogov.
³
Pirogov does not even doubt that he is a genius, even superior to any genius; so little does he doubt that he never once asks himself any question about it; as a matter of fact, questions do not exist for him. In the end, the great writer was forced to give him a thrashing in order to satisfy the outraged moral sensibilities of his readers, but seeing that the great man merely shook himself and ate a cream pie to fortify himself after his ordeal, he simply threw up his hands in amazement and walked out on his readers. I have always mourned the fact that Gogol bestowed such a lowly rank on the great Pirogov, for Pirogov is so self-satisfied that, as the epaulettes thicken and spiral on him with age and promotion, he finds nothing easier than to imagine himself a commander-in-chief; and not even imagine it, but simply not doubt it at all: if he were to be made a general, then why not a commander-in-chief? And how many such men later commit dreadful blunders on the battlefield? And how many Pirogovs have there been among our littérateurs, our scholars and propagandists? I say ‘have been’, but, of course, they exist even now ...

One of the dramatis personae of our narrative, Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, belonged to the second category; he belonged to the category of men who are ‘far more intelligent’, though completely inflamed, from head to toe, with the desire to be original. As we noted above, however, this category is far more unhappy than the first. The fact of the matter is that the
intelligent
ordinary man, even though he may imagine himself in passing (and, indeed, throughout the whole of his life) to be a man of genius, and most original, none the less retains within his heart a worm of doubt, which sometimes leads to the intelligent man ending in total despair; for if he submits, it is not until he has been entirely poisoned by a vanity that has been driven inward. However, we have in any case taken an extreme instance: for the overwhelming majority of this
intelligent
category of men, matters do not proceed at all so tragically; their livers may deteriorate towards the sunset of their lives, perhaps, but that is all. Even so, before surrendering and resigning themselves, these men sometimes continue to play the fool for an extremely long time, all the way from their youth to the age of submission, and all from a desire to be original. Strange instances are even encountered: from a desire for originality an honest man may be prepared to resolve upon a base action; it sometimes even happens that one of these unfortunates is not only honest, but is kind, the Provider of his household, maintaining and nourishing by his toils not only his own family, but others, too, and what do we see? All through his life he can have no rest! For him, the thought that he has performed his duties as a human being so well is not at all a calming or a consoling one; even the contrary - it is this thought that irritates him: ‘This,’ he says, ‘is what I have wasted all my life on, this is what has bound me hand and foot, this is what has prevented me from discovering gunpowder! Had it not been for this, I would certainly have discovered either gunpowder or America- I don’t really know
which, but I would certainly have discovered one of them!’ Most typical of all for these gentlemen is that throughout their lives they can never ascertain for certain just what it is they need to discover and just what it is that, all their lives, they are on the point of discovering: gunpowder or America? While their sufferings, their longing for discovery, would truly have been enough for Columbus or Galileo.