Those of my kind visitors who honour me by expressing their delight and
even--may this little indiscretion be forgiven me!--even their adoration
of my spiritual clearness, can hardly imagine what I was when I came to
this prison. The tens of years which have passed over my head and
which have whitened my hair cannot muffle the slight agitation which
I experience at the recollection of the first moments when, with the
creaking of the rusty hinges, the fatal prison doors opened and then
closed behind me forever.
Not endowed with literary talent, which in reality is an indomitable
inclination to invent and to lie, I shall attempt to introduce myself to
my indulgent reader exactly as I was at that remote time.
I was a young man, twenty-seven years of age--as I had occasion to
mention before--unrestrained, impetuous, given to abrupt deviations. A
certain dreaminess, peculiar to my age; a self-respect which was easily
offended and which revolted at the slightest insignificant provocation;
a passionate impetuosity in solving world problems; fits of melancholy
alternated by equally wild fits of merriment--all this gave the young
mathematician a character of extreme unsteadiness, of sad and harsh
discord.
I must also mention the extreme pride, a family trait, which I inherited
from my mother, and which often hindered me from taking the advice of
riper and more experienced people than myself; also my extreme obstinacy
in carrying out my purposes, a good quality in itself, which becomes
dangerous, however, when the purpose in question is not sufficiently
well founded and considered.
Thus, during the first days of my confinement, I behaved like all other
fools who are thrown into prison. I shouted loudly and, of course,
vainly about my innocence; I demanded violently my immediate freedom and
even beat against the door and the walls with my fists. The door and
the walls naturally remained mute, while I caused myself a rather sharp
pain. I remember I even beat my head against the wall, and for hours I
lay unconscious on the stone floor of my cell; and for some time, when I
had grown desperate, I refused food, until the persistent demands of my
organism defeated my obstinacy.
I cursed my judges and threatened them with merciless vengeance. At last
I commenced to regard all human life, the whole world, even Heaven, as
an enormous injustice, a derision and a mockery. Forgetting that in my
position I could hardly be unprejudiced, I came with the self-confidence
of youth, with the sickly pain of a prisoner, gradually to the complete
negation of life and its great meaning.
Those were indeed terrible days and nights, when, crushed by the walls,
getting no answer to any of my questions, I paced my cell endlessly and
hurled one after another into the dark abyss all the great valuables
which life has bestowed upon us: friendship, love, reason and justice.
In some justification to myself I may mention the fact that during
the first and most painful years of my imprisonment a series of events
happened which reflected themselves rather painfully upon my psychic
nature. Thus I learned with the profoundest indignation that the girl,
whose name I shall not mention and who was to become my wife, married
another man. She was one of the few who believed in my innocence; at the
last parting she swore to me to remain faithful to me unto death, and
rather to die than betray her love for me--and within one year after
that she married a man I knew, who possessed certain good qualities, but
who was not at all a sensible man. I did not want to understand at that
time that such a marriage was natural on the part of a young, healthy,
and beautiful girl. But, alas! we all forget our natural science when we
are deceived by the woman we love--may this little jest be forgiven me!
At the present time Mme. N. is a happy and respected mother, and this
proves better than anything else how wise and entirely in accordance
with the demands of nature and life was her marriage at that time, which
vexed me so painfully.
I must confess, however, that at that time I was not at all calm. Her
exceedingly amiable and kind letter in which she notified me of her
marriage, expressing profound regret that changed circumstances and a
suddenly awakened love compelled her to break her promise to me--that
amiable, truthful letter, scented with perfume, bearing the traces of
her tender fingers, seemed to me a message from the devil himself.
The letters of fire burned my exhausted brains, and in a wild ecstasy I
shook the doors of my cell and called violently:
“Come! Let me look into your lying eyes! Let me hear your lying voice!
Let me but touch with my fingers your tender throat and pour into your
death rattle my last bitter laugh!”
From this quotation my indulgent reader will see how right were the
judges who convicted me for murder; they had really foreseen in me a
murderer.
My gloomy view of life at the time was aggravated by several other
events. Two years after the marriage of my fiancee, consequently three
years after the first day of my imprisonment, my mother died--she died,
as I learned, of profound grief for me. However strange it may seem, she
remained firmly convinced to the end of her days that I had committed
the monstrous crime. Evidently this conviction was an inexhaustible
source of grief to her, the chief cause of the gloomy melancholy which
fettered her lips in silence and caused her death through paralysis of
the heart. As I was told, she never mentioned my name nor the names of
those who died so tragically, and she bequeathed the entire enormous
fortune, which was supposed to have served as the motive for the murder,
to various charitable organisations. It is characteristic that even
under such terrible conditions her motherly instinct did not forsake her
altogether; in a postscript to the will she left me a considerable sum,
which secures my existence whether I am in prison or at large.
Now I understand that, however great her grief may have been, that alone
was not enough to cause her death; the real cause was her advanced age
and a series of illnesses which had undermined her once strong and
sound organism. In the name of justice, I must say that my father, a
weak-charactered man, was not at all a model husband and family man; by
numerous betrayals, by falsehood and deception he had led my mother
to despair, constantly offending her pride and her strict, unbribable
truthfulness. But at that time I did not understand it; the death of my
mother seemed to me one of the most cruel manifestations of universal
injustice, and called forth a new stream of useless and sacrilegious
curses.
I do not know whether I ought to tire the attention of the reader with
the story of other events of a similar nature. I shall mention but
briefly that one after another my friends, who remained my friends from
the time when I was happy and free, stopped visiting me. According
to their words, they believed in my innocence, and at first warmly
expressed to me their sympathy. But our lives, mine in prison and theirs
at liberty, were so different that gradually under the pressure of
perfectly natural causes, such as forgetfulness, official and other
duties, the absence of mutual interests, they visited me ever more and
more rarely, and finally ceased to see me entirely. I cannot recall
without a smile that even the death of my mother, even the betrayal of
the girl I loved did not arouse in me such a hopelessly bitter feeling
as these gentlemen, whose names I remember but vaguely now, succeeded in
wresting from my soul.
“What horror! What pain! My friends, you have left me alone! My friends,
do you understand what you have done? You have left me alone. Can you
conceive of leaving a human being alone? Even a serpent has its mate,
even a spider has its comrade--and you have left a human being alone!
You have given him a soul--and left him alone! You have given him a
heart, a mind, a hand for a handshake, lips for a kiss--and you have
left him alone! What shall he do now that you have left him alone?”
Thus I exclaimed in my “Diary of a Prisoner,” tormented by woeful
perplexities. In my juvenile blindness, in the pain of my young,
senseless heart, I still did not want to understand that the solitude,
of which I complained so bitterly, like the mind, was an advantage
given to man over other creatures, in order to fence around the sacred
mysteries of his soul from the stranger’s gaze.
Let my serious reader consider what would have become of life if man
were robbed of his right, of his duty to be alone. In the gathering of
idle chatterers, amid the dull collection of transparent glass dolls,
that kill each other with their sameness; in the wild city where all
doors are open, and all windows are open--passers-by look wearily
through the glass walls and observe the same evidences of the hearth and
the alcove. Only the creatures that can be alone possess a face; while
those that know no solitude--the great, blissful, sacred solitude of the
soul--have snouts instead of faces.
And in calling my friends “perfidious traitors” I, poor youth that
I was, could not understand the wise law of life, according to which
neither friendship, nor love, nor even the tenderest attachment of
sister and mother, is eternal. Deceived by the lies of the poets, who
proclaimed eternal friendship and love, I did not want to see that
which my indulgent reader observes from the windows of his dwelling--how
friends, relatives, mother and wife, in apparent despair and in tears,
follow their dead to the cemetery, and after a lapse of some time return
from there. No one buries himself together with the dead, no one asks
the dead to make room in the coffin, and if the grief-stricken wife
exclaims, in an outburst of tears, “Oh, bury me together with him!” she
is merely expressing symbolically the extreme degree of her despair--one
could easily convince himself of this by trying, in jest, to push her
down into the grave. And those who restrain her are merely expressing
symbolically their sympathy and understanding, thus lending the
necessary aspect of solemn grief to the funeral custom.
Man must subject himself to the laws of life, not of death, nor to
the fiction of the poets, however beautiful it may be. But can the
fictitious be beautiful? Is there no beauty in the stern truth of life,
in the mighty work of its wise laws, which subjects to itself with great
disinterestedness the movements of the heavenly luminaries, as well as
the restless linking of the tiny creatures called human beings?