DRESDEN, _September_ 1842.
I am writing to you, my dear Marya Alexandrovna, and I am writing only
because I do not want to die without saying good-bye to you, without
recalling myself to your memory. I am given up by the doctors ... and I
feel myself that my life is ebbing away. On my table stands a rose:
before it withers, I shall be no more. This comparison is not, however,
altogether an apt one. A rose is far more interesting than I.
I am, as you see, abroad. It is now six months since I have been in
Dresden. I received your last letters--I am ashamed to confess--more
than a year ago. I lost some of them and never answered them.... I will
tell you directly why. But it seems you were always dear to me; to no
one but you have I any wish to say good-bye, and perhaps I have no one
else to take leave of.
Soon after my last letter to you (I was on the very point of going down
to your neighbourhood, and had made various plans in advance) an
incident occurred which had, one may truly say, a great influence on my
fate, so great an influence that here I am dying, thanks to that
incident. I went to the theatre to see a ballet. I never cared for
ballets; and for every sort of actress, singer, and dancer I had always
had a secret feeling of repulsion.... But it is clear there's no
changing one's fate, and no one knows himself, and one cannot foresee
the future. In reality, in life it's only the unexpected that happens,
and we do nothing in a whole lifetime but accommodate ourselves to
facts.... But I seem to be rambling off into philosophising again. An
old habit! In brief, I fell in love with a dancing-girl.
This was the more curious as one could not even call her a beauty. It
is true she had marvellous hair of ashen gold colour, and great clear
eyes, with a dreamy, and at the same time daring, look in them....
Could I fail to know the expression of those eyes? For a whole year I
was pining and swooning in the light--of them! She was splendidly
well-made, and when she danced her national dance the audience would
stamp and shout with delight.... But, I fancy, no one but I fell in
love with her,--at least, no one was in love with her as I was. From
the very minute when I saw her for the first time (would you believe
it, I have only to close my eyes, and at once the theatre is before me,
the almost empty stage, representing the heart of a forest, and she
running in from the wing on the right, with a wreath of vine on her
head and a tiger-skin over her shoulders)--from that fatal moment I
have belonged to her utterly, just as a dog belongs to its master; and
if, now that I am dying, I do not belong to her, it is only because she
has cast me off.
To tell the truth, she never troubled herself particularly about me.
She scarcely noticed me, though she was very good-natured in making use
of my money. I was for her, as she expressed it in her broken French,
'oun Rousso, boun enfant,' and nothing more. But I ... I could not live
where she was not living; I tore myself away once for all from
everything dear to me, from my country even, and followed that woman.
You will suppose, perhaps, that she had brains. Not in the least! One
had only to glance at her low brow, one needed only one glimpse of her
lazy, careless smile, to feel certain at once of the scantiness of her
intellectual endowments. And I never imagined her to be an exceptional
woman. In fact, I never for one instant deceived myself about her. But
that was of no avail to me. Whatever I thought of her in her absence,
in her presence I felt nothing but slavish adoration.... In German
fairy-tales, the knights often fall under such an enchantment. I could
not take my eyes off her features, I could never tire of listening to
her talk, of admiring all her gestures; I positively drew my breath as
she breathed. However, she was good-natured, unconstrained--too
unconstrained indeed,--did not give herself airs, as actresses
generally do. There was a lot of life in her--that is, a lot of blood,
that splendid southern blood, into which the sun of those parts must
have infused some of its beams. She slept nine hours out of the
twenty-four, enjoyed her dinner, never read a single line of print,
except, perhaps, the newspaper articles in which she was mentioned; and
almost the only tender feeling in her life was her devotion to il
Signore Carlino, a greedy little Italian, who waited on her in the
capacity of secretary, and whom, later on, she married. And such a
woman I could fall in love with--I, a man, versed in all sorts of
intellectual subtleties, and no longer young! ... Who could have
anticipated it? I, at least, never anticipated it. I never anticipated
the part I was to play. I never anticipated that I should come to
hanging about rehearsals, waiting, bored and frozen, behind the scenes,
breathing in the smut and grime of the theatre, making friends with all
sorts of utterly unpresentable persons.... Making friends, did I say?--
cringing slavishly upon them. I never anticipated that I should carry a
ballet-dancer's shawl; buy her her new gloves, clean her old ones with
bread-crumbs (I did even that, alas!), carry home her bouquets, hang
about the offices of journalists and editors, waste my substance, give
serenades, catch colds, wear myself out.... I never expected in a
little German town to receive the jeering nickname 'der
Kunst-barbar.'... And all this for nothing, in the fullest sense of the
word, for nothing. That's just it.
... Do you remember how we used, in talk and by letter, to reason
together about love and indulge in all sort of subtleties? But in
actual life it turns out that real love is a feeling utterly unlike
what we pictured to ourselves. Love, indeed, is not a feeling at all,
it's a malady, a certain condition of soul and body. It does not
develop gradually. One cannot doubt about it, one cannot outwit it,
though it does not always come in the same way. Usually it takes
possession of a person without question, suddenly, against his
will--for all the world like cholera or fever.... It clutches him, poor
dear, as the hawk pounces on the chicken, and bears him off at its
will, however he struggles or resists.... In love, there's no equality,
none of the so-called free union of souls, and such idealisms,
concocted at their leisure by German professors.... No, in love, one
person is slave, and the other master; and well may the poets talk of
the fetters put on by love. Yes, love is a fetter, and the heaviest to
bear. At least I have come to this conviction, and have come to it by
the path of experience; I have bought this conviction at the cost of my
life, since I am dying in my slavery.
What a life mine has been, if you think of it! In my first youth
nothing would satisfy me but to take heaven by storm for myself....
Then I fell to dreaming of the good of all humanity, of the good of my
country. Then that passed too. I was thinking of nothing but making a
home, family life for myself ... and so tripped over an ant-heap--and
plop, down into the grave.... Ah, we're great hands, we Russians, at
making such a finish!
But it's time to turn away from all that, it's long been time! May this
burden be loosened from off my soul together with life! I want, for the
last time, if only for an instant, to enjoy the sweet and gentle
feeling which is shed like a soft light within me, directly I think of
you. Your image is now doubly precious to me.... With it, rises up
before me the image of my country, and I send to it and to you a
farewell greeting. Live, live long and happily, and remember one thing:
whether you remain in the wilds of the steppes--where you have
sometimes been so sorrowful, but where I should so like to spend my
last days--or whether you enter upon a different career, remember life
deceives all but him who does not reflect upon her, and, demanding
nothing of her, accepts serenely her few gifts and serenely makes the
most of them. Go forward while you can. But if your strength fails you,
sit by the wayside and watch those that pass by without anger or envy.
They, too, have not far to go. In old days, I did not tell you this,
but death will teach any one. Though who says what is life, what is
truth? Do you remember who it was made no reply to that question? ...
Farewell, Marya Alexandrovna, farewell for the last time, and do not
remember evil against poor ALEXEY.