... Happily he died last week on Friday. I say "happily," and repeat
that my brother's death was a great blessing to him. A cripple with
no legs, palsied, with a smitten soul, he was terrible and piteous in
his senseless creative ecstasy. Ever since that night he wrote for
two months, without leaving his chair, refusing all food, weeping and
scolding whenever we wheeled him away from his table even for a short
time. He moved his dry pen over the paper with wonderful rapidity,
throwing aside page after page, and kept on writing and writing. Sleep
deserted him, and only twice did we succeed in putting him to bed for
a few hours, thanks to a strong narcotic, but, later, even a narcotic
was powerless to conquer his senseless creative ecstasy. At his order
the curtains were kept drawn over all the windows the whole day long
and the lamp was allowed to burn, giving the illusion of night, while
he wrote on, smoking one cigarette after another. Apparently he was
happy, and I never happened to meet any healthy person with such an
inspired face--the face of a prophet or of a great poet. He became
extremely emaciated, with the waxen transparency of a corpse or of an
ascetic, and his hair grew quite grey; he began his senseless work
a comparatively young man, but finished it an old one. Sometimes he
hurried on his work, writing more than usual, and his pen would stick
into the pages and break, but he never noticed it; at such times one
durst not touch him, for at the slightest contact he was overtaken
by fits of tears and laughter; but sometimes, very rarely, he rested
blissfully from his work and talked to me affably, each time asking the
same questions: Who was I, what was my name, and since when had I taken
up literature.
And then he would condescendingly tell, always using the same words,
what an absurd fright he had had at the thought that he had lost his
memory and was incapable of work, and how splendidly he had refuted the
insane supposition there and then by beginning his great immortal work
about the flowers and songs.
"Of course I do not count upon being recognised by my contemporaries,"
he would say proudly and unassumingly at the same time, putting his
trembling hand on the heap of empty sheets, "but the future--the
future--will understand my idea."
He never once remembered the war or his wife and son; the mirage of
his endless work engrossed his attention so undividedly that it is
doubtful whether he was conscious of anything else. One could walk
and talk in his presence--he noticed nothing, and not for an instant
did his face lose its expression of terrible tension and inspiration.
In the stillness of the night, when everybody was asleep and he alone
wove untiringly the endless thread of insanity, he seemed terrible,
and only his mother and I ventured to approach him. Once I tried to
give him a pencil instead of his dry pen, thinking that perhaps he
really wrote something, but on the paper there remained only hideous
lines, broken, crooked, devoid of any sense. And he died in the night
at his work. I knew my brother well, and his insanity did not come as
a surprise to me: the passionate dream of work that filled all his
letters from the war and was the stay of his life after his return, had
to come into inevitable collision with the impotence of his exhausted,
tortured brain, and bring about the catastrophe. And I believe that
I have succeeded in reconstructing with sufficient accuracy the
successive feelings that brought him to the end during that fatal
night. Generally speaking, all that I have written down concerning the
war is founded upon the words of my dead brother, often very confused
and incoherent; only a few separate episodes were burnt into his brain
so deeply and indelibly that I could cite the very words that he used
in telling me them. I loved him, and his death weighs upon me like
a stone, oppressing my brain by its senselessness. It has added one
more loop to the incomprehensible that envelops my head like a web,
and has drawn it tight. The whole family has left for the country on a
visit to some relatives, and I am alone in the house--the house that
my brother loved so. The servants have been paid off, and only the
porter from the next door comes every morning to light the fires, while
the rest of the time I am alone, and resemble a fly caught between
two window-frames,[1] plunging about and knocking myself against a
transparent but insurmountable obstacle. And I feel, I know, that I
shall never leave the house. Now, when I am alone, the war possesses
me wholly and stands before me like an inscrutable mystery, like a
terrible spirit, to which I can give no form. I give it all sorts of
shapes: of a headless skeleton on horseback, of a shapeless shadow,
born in a black thundercloud, mutely enveloping the earth, but not one
of them can give me an answer and extinguish the cold, constant, blunt
horror that possesses me.
[1] In Russia the windows have double panes during the winter
for the purpose of keeping out the cold.--_Trans._
I do not understand war, and I must go mad, like my brother, like
the hundreds of men that are sent back from there. And this does not
terrify me. The loss of reason seems to me honourable, like the death
of a sentry at his post. But the expectancy, the slow and infallible
approach of madness, the instantaneous feeling of something enormous
falling into an abyss, the unbearable pain of tortured thought.... My
heart has grown benumbed, it is dead, and there is no new life for it,
but thought--is still alive, still struggling, once mighty as Samson,
but now helpless and weak as a child, and--I am sorry for my poor
thought. There are moments when I cannot endure the torture of those
iron clasps that are compressing my brain; I feel an irrepressible
longing to run out into the street, into the marketplace, where there
are people and cry out,--
"Stop the war this instant--or else...."
But what "else" is there? Are there any words that can make them come
to their senses? Words, in answer to which one cannot find just such
other loud and lying words? Or must I fall upon my knees before them
and burst into tears? But then, hundreds of thousands are making the
earth resound with their weeping, but does that change anything? Or,
perhaps, kill myself before them all? Kill myself. Thousands are dying
every day, but does that change anything?
And when I feel my impotence, I am seized with rage--the rage of war,
which I hate. Like the doctor, I long to burn down their houses with
all their treasures, their wives and children; to poison the water
which they drink; to raise all the killed from their graves and throw
the corpses into their unclean houses on to their beds. Let them sleep
with them as with their wives or mistresses!
Oh, if only I were the Devil! I would transplant all the horrors that
hell exhales on to their earth. I would become the lord of all their
dreams, and, when they cross their children with a smile before falling
asleep, I would rise up before them a black vision.... Yes, I must go
mad--only let it come quicker--let it come quicker....