living on the surface we mistakenly thought that death there was death. The
body revives, as it were, here, the remains of life are concentrated, but
only in consciousness. I don't know how to express it, but life goes on, as
it were, by inertia. In his opinion everything is concentrated somewhere in
consciousness and goes on for two or three months ... sometimes even for
half a year.... There is one here, for instance, who is almost completely
decomposed, but once every six weeks he suddenly utters one word, quite
senseless of course, about some _bobok_,[1] 'Bobok, bobok,' but you see
that an imperceptible speck of life is still warm within him."
[Footnote 1: _i. e._ small bean.]
"It's rather stupid. Well, and how is it I have no sense of smell and yet I
feel there's a stench?"
"That ... he-he.... Well, on that point our philosopher is a bit foggy.
It's apropos of smell, he said, that the stench one perceives here is, so
to speak, moral--he-he! It's the stench of the soul, he says, that in these
two or three months it may have time to recover itself ... and this is, so
to speak, the last mercy.... Only, I think, baron, that these are mystic
ravings very excusable in his position...."
"Enough; all the rest of it, I am sure, is nonsense. The great thing is
that we have two or three months more of life and then--bobok! I propose
to spend these two months as agreeably as possible, and so to arrange
everything on a new basis. Gentlemen! I propose to cast aside all shame."
"Ah, let us cast aside all shame, let us!" many voices could be heard
saying; and strange to say, several new voices were audible, which must
have belonged to others newly awakened. The engineer, now fully awake,
boomed out his agreement with peculiar delight. The girl Katiche giggled
gleefully.
"Oh, how I long to cast off all shame!" Avdotya Ignatyevna exclaimed
rapturously.
"I say, if Avdotya Ignatyevna wants to cast off all shame...."
"No, no, no, Klinevitch, I was ashamed up there all the same, but here I
should like to cast off shame, I should like it awfully."
"I understand, Klinevitch," boomed the engineer, "that you want to
rearrange life here on new and rational principles."
"Oh, I don't care a hang about that! For that we'll wait for Kudeyarov who
was brought here yesterday. When he wakes he'll tell you all about it. He
is such a personality, such a titanic personality! To-morrow they'll bring
along another natural scientist, I believe, an officer for certain, and
three or four days later a journalist, and, I believe, his editor with him.
But deuce take them all, there will be a little group of us anyway, and
things will arrange themselves. Though meanwhile I don't want us to be
telling lies. That's all I care about, for that is one thing that matters.
One cannot exist on the surface without lying, for life and lying are
synonymous, but here we will amuse ourselves by not lying. Hang it all, the
grave has some value after all! We'll all tell our stories aloud, and we
won't be ashamed of anything. First of all I'll tell you about myself. I am
one of the predatory kind, you know. All that was bound and held in check
by rotten cords up there on the surface. Away with cords and let us spend
these two months in shameless truthfulness! Let us strip and be naked!"
"Let us be naked, let us be naked!" cried all the voices.
"I long to be naked, I long to be," Avdotya Ignatyevna shrilled.
"Ah ... ah, I see we shall have fun here; I don't want Ecke after all."
"No, I tell you. Give me a taste of life!"
"He-he-he!" giggled Katiche.
"The great thing is that no one can interfere with us, and though I see
Pervoyedov is in a temper, he can't reach me with his hand. _Grand-père_,
do you agree?"
"I fully agree, fully, and with the utmost satisfaction, but on condition
that Katiche is the first to give us her biography."
"I protest! I protest with all my heart!" General Pervoyedov brought out
firmly.
"Your Excellency!" the scoundrel Lebeziatnikov persuaded him in a murmur of
fussy excitement, "your Excellency, it will be to our advantage to agree.
Here, you see, there's this girl's ... and all their little affairs."
"There's the girl, it's true, but...."
"It's to our advantage, your Excellency, upon my word it is! If only as an
experiment, let us try it...."
"Even in the grave they won't let us rest in peace."
"In the first place, General, you were playing preference in the grave, and
in the second we don't care a hang about you," drawled Klinevitch.
"Sir, I beg you not to forget yourself."
"What? Why, you can't get at me, and I can tease you from here as though
you were Julie's lapdog. And another thing, gentlemen, how is he a general
here? He was a general there, but here is mere refuse."
"No, not mere refuse.... Even here...."
"Here you will rot in the grave and six brass buttons will be all that will
be left of you."
"Bravo, Klinevitch, ha-ha-ha!" roared voices.
"I have served my sovereign.... I have the sword...."
"Your sword is only fit to prick mice, and you never drew it even for
that."
"That makes no difference; I formed a part of the whole."
"There are all sorts of parts in a whole."
"Bravo, Klinevitch, bravo! Ha-ha-ha!"
"I don't understand what the sword stands for," boomed the engineer.
"We shall run away from the Prussians like mice, they'll crush us to
powder!" cried a voice in the distance that was unfamiliar to me, that was
positively spluttering with glee.
"The sword, sir, is an honour," the general cried, but only I heard him.
There arose a prolonged and furious roar, clamour, and hubbub, and only the
hysterically impatient squeals of Avdotya Ignatyevna were audible.
"But do let us make haste! Ah, when are we going to begin to cast off all
shame!"
"Oh-ho-ho!... The soul does in truth pass through torments!" exclaimed the
voice of the plebeian, "and ..."
And here I suddenly sneezed. It happened suddenly and unintentionally, but
the effect was striking: all became as silent as one expects it to be in a
churchyard, it all vanished like a dream. A real silence of the tomb set
in. I don't believe they were ashamed on account of my presence: they had
made up their minds to cast off all shame! I waited five minutes--not a
word, not a sound. It cannot be supposed that they were afraid of my
informing the police; for what could the police do to them? I must conclude
that they had some secret unknown to the living, which they carefully
concealed from every mortal.
"Well, my dears," I thought, "I shall visit you again." And with those
words, I left the cemetery.
No, that I cannot admit; no, I really cannot! The _bobok_ case does not
trouble me (so that is what that bobok signified!)
Depravity in such a place, depravity of the last aspirations, depravity of
sodden and rotten corpses--and not even sparing the last moments of
consciousness! Those moments have been granted, vouchsafed to them, and ...
and, worst of all, in such a place! No, that I cannot admit.
I shall go to other tombs, I shall listen everywhere. Certainly one ought
to listen everywhere and not merely at one spot in order to form an idea.
Perhaps one may come across something reassuring.
But I shall certainly go back to those. They promised their biographies and
anecdotes of all sorts. Tfoo! But I shall go, I shall certainly go; it is a
question of conscience!
I shall take it to the _Citizen_; the editor there has had his portrait
exhibited too. Maybe he will print it.
THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN
I
I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a
promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as
before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when
they laugh at me--and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly
dear to me. I could join in their laughter--not exactly at myself, but
through affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as I look at them. Sad
because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to
be the only one who knows the truth! But they won't understand that. No,
they won't understand it.
In old days I used to be miserable at seeming ridiculous. Not seeming, but
being. I have always been ridiculous, and I have known it, perhaps, from
the hour I was born. Perhaps from the time I was seven years old I knew I
was ridiculous. Afterwards I went to school, studied at the university,
and, do you know, the more I learned, the more thoroughly I understood that
I was ridiculous. So that it seemed in the end as though all the sciences I
studied at the university existed only to prove and make evident to me as I
went more deeply into them that I was ridiculous. It was the same with life
as it was with science. With every year the same consciousness of the
ridiculous figure I cut in every relation grew and strengthened. Every one
always laughed at me. But not one of them knew or guessed that if there
were one man on earth who knew better than anybody else that I was absurd,
it was myself, and what I resented most of all was that they did not know
that. But that was my own fault; I was so proud that nothing would have
ever induced me to tell it to any one. This pride grew in me with the
years; and if it had happened that I allowed myself to confess to any one
that I was ridiculous, I believe that I should have blown out my brains the
same evening. Oh, how I suffered in my early youth from the fear that I
might give way and confess it to my schoolfellows. But since I grew to
manhood, I have for some unknown reason become calmer, though I realised my
awful characteristic more fully every year. I say "unknown," for to this
day I cannot tell why it was. Perhaps it was owing to the terrible misery
that was growing in my soul through something which was of more consequence
than anything else about me: that something was the conviction that had
come upon me that _nothing in the world mattered_. I had long had an
inkling of it, but the full realisation came last year almost suddenly. I
suddenly felt that it was all the same to me whether the world existed or
whether there had never been anything at all: I began to feel with all my
being that there was _nothing existing_. At first I fancied that many
things had existed in the past, but afterwards I guessed that there never
had been anything in the past either, but that it had only seemed so for
some reason. Little by little I guessed that there would be nothing in the
future either. Then I left off being angry with people and almost ceased to
notice them. Indeed this showed itself even in the pettiest trifles: I
used, for instance, to knock against people in the street. And not so much
from being lost in thought: what had I to think about? I had almost given
up thinking by that time; nothing mattered to me. If at least I had solved
my problems! Oh, I had not settled one of them, and how many they were! But
I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.
And it was after that that I found out the truth. I learnt the truth last
November--on the third of November, to be precise--and I remember every
instant since. It was a gloomy evening, one of the gloomiest possible
evenings. I was going home at about eleven o'clock, and I remember that I
thought that the evening could not be gloomier. Even physically. Rain had
been falling all day, and it had been a cold, gloomy, almost menacing rain,
with, I remember, an unmistakable spite against mankind. Suddenly between
ten and eleven it had stopped, and was followed by a horrible dampness,
colder and damper than the rain, and a sort of steam was rising from
everything, from every stone in the street, and from every by-lane if one
looked down it as far as one could. A thought suddenly occurred to me, that
if all the street lamps had been put out it would have been less cheerless,
that the gas made one's heart sadder because it lighted it all up. I had
had scarcely any dinner that day, and had been spending the evening with an
engineer, and two other friends had been there also. I sat silent--I fancy
I bored them. They talked of something rousing and suddenly they got
excited over it. But they did not really care, I could see that, and only
made a show of being excited. I suddenly said as much to them. "My
friends," I said, "you really do not care one way or the other." They were
not offended, but they all laughed at me. That was because I spoke without
any note of reproach, simply because it did not matter to me. They saw it
did not, and it amused them.
As I was thinking about the gas lamps in the street I looked up at the sky.
The sky was horribly dark, but one could distinctly see tattered clouds,
and between them fathomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of
these patches a star, and began watching it intently. That was because that
star gave me an idea: I decided to kill myself that night. I had firmly
determined to do so two months before, and poor as I was, I bought a
splendid revolver that very day, and loaded it. But two months had passed
and it was still lying in my drawer; I was so utterly indifferent that I
wanted to seize a moment when I would not be so indifferent--why, I don't
know. And so for two months every night that I came home I thought I would
shoot myself. I kept waiting for the right moment. And so now this star
gave me a thought. I made up my mind that it should certainly be that
night. And why the star gave me the thought I don't know.
And just as I was looking at the sky, this little girl took me by the
elbow. The street was empty, and there was scarcely any one to be seen. A
cabman was sleeping in the distance in his cab. It was a child of eight
with a kerchief on her head, wearing nothing but a wretched little dress
all soaked with rain, but I noticed particularly her wet broken shoes and I
recall them now. They caught my eye particularly. She suddenly pulled me by
the elbow and called me. She was not weeping, but was spasmodically crying
out some words which she could not utter properly, because she was
shivering and shuddering all over. She was in terror about something, and
kept crying, "Mammy, mammy!" I turned facing her, I did not say a word and
went on; but she ran, pulling at me, and there was that note in her voice
which in frightened children means despair. I know that sound. Though she
did not articulate the words, I understood that her mother was dying, or
that something of the sort was happening to them, and that she had run out
to call some one, to find something to help her mother. I did not go with
her; on the contrary, I had an impulse to drive her away. I told her first
to go to a policeman. But clasping her hands, she ran beside me sobbing and
gasping, and would not leave me. Then I stamped my foot, and shouted at
her. She called out "Sir! sir!..." but suddenly abandoned me and rushed
headlong across the road. Some other passer-by appeared there, and she
evidently flew from me to him.
I mounted up to my fifth storey. I have a room in a flat where there are
other lodgers. My room is small and poor, with a garret window in the
shape of a semicircle. I have a sofa covered with American leather, a table
with books on it, two chairs and a comfortable arm-chair, as old as old can
be, but of the good old-fashioned shape. I sat down, lighted the candle,
and began thinking. In the room next to mine, through the partition wall, a
perfect Bedlam was going on. It had been going on for the last three days.
A retired captain lived there, and he had half a dozen visitors, gentlemen
of doubtful reputation, drinking vodka and playing _stoss_ with old cards.
The night before there had been a fight, and I know that two of them had
been for a long time engaged in dragging each other about by the hair. The
landlady wanted to complain, but she was in abject terror of the captain.
There was only one other lodger in the flat, a thin little regimental lady,
on a visit to Petersburg, with three little children who had been taken ill
since they came into the lodgings. Both she and her children were in mortal
fear of the captain, and lay trembling and crossing themselves all night,
and the youngest child had a sort of fit from fright. That captain, I know
for a fact, sometimes stops people in the Nevsky Prospect and begs. They
won't take him into the service, but strange to say (that's why I am
telling this), all this month that the captain has been here his behaviour
has caused me no annoyance. I have, of course, tried to avoid his
acquaintance from the very beginning, and he, too, was bored with me from
the first; but I never care how much they shout the other side of the
partition nor how many of them there are in there: I sit up all night and
forget them so completely that I do not even hear them. I stay awake till
daybreak, and have been going on like that for the last year. I sit up all
night in my arm-chair at the table, doing nothing. I only read by day. I
sit--don't even think; ideas of a sort wander through my mind and I let
them come and go as they will. A whole candle is burnt every night. I sat
down quietly at the table, took out the revolver and put it down before
me. When I had put it down I asked myself, I remember, "Is that so?" and
answered with complete conviction, "It is." That is, I shall shoot myself.
I knew that I should shoot myself that night for certain, but how much
longer I should go on sitting at the table I did not know. And no doubt I
should have shot myself if it had not been for that little girl.
II
You see, though nothing mattered to me, I could feel pain, for instance. If
any one had struck me it would have hurt me. It was the same morally: if
anything very pathetic happened, I should have felt pity just as I used to
do in old days when there were things in life that did matter to me. I had
felt pity that evening. I should have certainly helped a child. Why, then,
had I not helped the little girl? Because of an idea that occurred to me at
the time: when she was calling and pulling at me, a question suddenly arose
before me and I could not settle it. The question was an idle one, but I
was vexed. I was vexed at the reflection that if I were going to make an
end of myself that night, nothing in life ought to have mattered to me. Why
was it that all at once I did not feel that nothing mattered and was sorry
for the little girl? I remember that I was very sorry for her, so much so
that I felt a strange pang, quite incongruous in my position. Really I do
not know better how to convey my fleeting sensation at the moment, but the
sensation persisted at home when I was sitting at the table, and I was very
much irritated as I had not been for a long time past. One reflection
followed another. I saw clearly that so long as I was still a human being
and not nothingness, I was alive and so could suffer, be angry and feel
shame at my actions. So be it. But if I am going to kill myself, in two
hours, say, what is the little girl to me and what have I to do with shame
or with anything else in the world? I shall turn into nothing, absolutely
nothing. And can it really be true that the consciousness that I shall
_completely_ cease to exist immediately and so everything else will cease
to exist, does not in the least affect my feeling of pity for the child nor
the feeling of shame after a contemptible action? I stamped and shouted at
the unhappy child as though to say--not only I feel no pity, but even if I
behave inhumanly and contemptibly, I am free to, for in another two hours
everything will be extinguished. Do you believe that that was why I shouted
that? I am almost convinced of it now. It seemed clear to me that life and
the world somehow depended upon me now. I may almost say that the world now
seemed created for me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be
at least for me. I say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist
for any one when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is
extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like a
phantom, as a mere appurtenance of my consciousness, for possibly all this
world and all these people are only me myself. I remember that as I sat and
reflected, I turned all these new questions that swarmed one after another
quite the other way, and thought of something quite new. For instance, a
strange reflection suddenly occurred to me, that if I had lived before on
the moon or on Mars and there had committed the most disgraceful and
dishonourable action and had there been put to such shame and ignominy as
one can only conceive and realise in dreams, in nightmares, and if, finding
myself afterwards on earth, I were able to retain the memory of what I had
done on the other planet and at the same time knew that I should never,
under any circumstances, return there, then looking from the earth to the
moon--_should I care or not_? Should I feel shame for that action or not?
These were idle and superfluous questions for the revolver was already
lying before me, and I knew in every fibre of my being that it would happen
for certain, but they excited me and I raged. I could not die now without
having first settled something. In short, the child had saved me, for I
put off my pistol shot for the sake of these questions. Meanwhile the
clamour had begun to subside in the captain's room: they had finished their
game, were settling down to sleep, and meanwhile were grumbling and
languidly winding up their quarrels. At that point I suddenly fell asleep
in my chair at the table--a thing which had never happened to me before. I
dropped asleep quite unawares.
Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented
with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish
of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without
noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem
to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the
heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in
dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it! My brother died
five years ago, for instance. I sometimes dream of him; he takes part in my
affairs, we are very much interested, and yet all through my dream I quite
know and remember that my brother is dead and buried. How is it that I am
not surprised that, though he is dead, he is here beside me and working
with me? Why is it that my reason fully accepts it? But enough. I will
begin about my dream. Yes, I dreamed a dream, my dream of the third of
November. They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it
matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the
truth? If once one has recognised the truth and seen it, you know that it
is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you
are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of
which you make so much I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream,
my dream--oh, it revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full
of power!
Listen.
III
I have mentioned that I dropped asleep unawares and even seemed to be still
reflecting on the same subjects. I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the
revolver and aimed it straight at my heart--my heart, and not my head; and
I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After
aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my
table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste
to pull the trigger.
In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or are stabbed, or beaten, but
you never feel pain unless, perhaps, you really bruise yourself against the
bedstead, then you feel pain and almost always wake up from it. It was the
same in my dream. I did not feel any pain, but it seemed as though with my
shot everything within me was shaken and everything was suddenly dimmed,
and it grew horribly black around me. I seemed to be blinded and benumbed,
and I was lying on something hard, stretched on my back; I saw nothing, and
could not make the slightest movement. People were walking and shouting
around me, the captain bawled, the landlady shrieked--and suddenly another
break and I was being carried in a closed coffin. And I felt how the coffin
was shaking and reflected upon it, and for the first time the idea struck
me that I was dead, utterly dead, I knew it and had no doubt of it, I could
neither see nor move and yet I was feeling and reflecting. But I was soon
reconciled to the position, and as one usually does in a dream, accepted
the facts without disputing them.
And now I was buried in the earth. They all went away, I was left alone,
utterly alone. I did not move. Whenever before I had imagined being buried
the one sensation I associated with the grave was that of damp and cold. So
now I felt that I was very cold, especially the tips of my toes, but I felt
nothing else.