It was late when he awoke the next day. His hosts were no longer in. He
did not go shooting, but now took up a book, and now went out into the
porch, and now again re-entered the hut and lay down on the bed.
Vanyúsha thought he was ill.
Towards evening Olénin got up, resolutely began writing, and wrote on
till late at night. He wrote a letter, but did not post it because he
felt that no one would have understood what he wanted to say, and
besides it was not necessary that anyone but himself should understand
it.
This is what he wrote:
“I receive letters of condolence from Russia. They are afraid that I
shall perish, buried in these wilds. They say about me: ‘He will become
coarse; he will be behind the times in everything; he will take to
drink, and who knows but that he may marry a Cossack girl.’ It was not
for nothing, they say, that Ermólov declared: ‘Anyone serving in the
Caucasus for ten years either becomes a confirmed drunkard or marries a
loose woman.’ How terrible! Indeed it won’t do for me to ruin myself
when I might have the great happiness of even becoming the Countess
B——’s husband, or a Court chamberlain, or a _Maréchal de noblesse_ of
my district. Oh, how repulsive and pitiable you all seem to me! You do
not know what happiness is and what life is! One must taste life once
in all its natural beauty, must see and understand what I see every day
before me—those eternally unapproachable snowy peaks, and a majestic
woman in that primitive beauty in which the first woman must have come
from her creator’s hands—and then it becomes clear who is ruining
himself and who is living truly or falsely—you or I. If you only knew
how despicable and pitiable you, in your delusions, seem to me! When I
picture to myself—in place of my hut, my forests, and my love—those
drawing-rooms, those women with their pomatum-greased hair eked out
with false curls, those unnaturally grimacing lips, those hidden,
feeble, distorted limbs, and that chatter of obligatory drawing-room
conversation which has no right to the name—I feel unendurably
revolted. I then see before me those obtuse faces, those rich eligible
girls whose looks seem to say: ‘It’s all right, you may come near
though I am rich and eligible’—and that arranging and rearranging of
seats, that shameless match-making and that eternal tittle-tattle and
pretence; those rules—with whom to shake hands, to whom only to nod,
with whom to converse (and all this done deliberately with a conviction
of its inevitability), that continual ennui in the blood passing on
from generation to generation. Try to understand or believe just this
one thing: you need only see and comprehend what truth and beauty are,
and all that you now say and think and all your wishes for me and for
yourselves will fly to atoms!
“Happiness is being with nature, seeing her, and conversing with her.
‘He may even (God forbid) marry a common Cossack girl, and be quite
lost socially’ I can imagine them saying of me with sincere pity! Yet
the one thing I desire is to be quite ‘lost’ in your sense of the word.
I wish to marry a Cossack girl, and dare not because it would be a
height of happiness of which I am unworthy.
“Three months have passed since I first saw the Cossack girl, Maryánka.
The views and prejudices of the world I had left were still fresh in
me. I did not then believe that I could love that woman. I delighted in
her beauty just as I delighted in the beauty of the mountains and the
sky, nor could I help delighting in her, for she is as beautiful as
they. I found that the sight of her beauty had become a necessity of my
life and I began asking myself whether I did not love her. But I could
find nothing within myself at all like love as I had imagined it to be.
Mine was not the restlessness of loneliness and desire for marriage,
nor was it platonic, still less a carnal love such as I have
experienced. I needed only to see her, to hear her, to know that she
was near—and if I was not happy, I was at peace.
“After an evening gathering at which I met her and touched her, I felt
that between that woman and myself there existed an indissoluble though
unacknowledged bond against which I could not struggle, yet I did
struggle. I asked myself: ‘Is it possible to love a woman who will
never understand the profoundest interests of my life? Is it possible
to love a woman simply for her beauty, to love the statue of a woman?’
But I was already in love with her, though I did not yet trust to my
feelings.
“After that evening when I first spoke to her our relations changed.
Before that she had been to me an extraneous but majestic object of
external nature: but since then she has become a human being. I began
to meet her, to talk to her, and sometimes to go to work for her father
and to spend whole evenings with them, and in this intimate intercourse
she remained still in my eyes just as pure, inaccessible, and majestic.
She always responded with equal calm, pride, and cheerful equanimity.
Sometimes she was friendly, but generally her every look, every word,
and every movement expressed equanimity—not contemptuous, but crushing
and bewitching. Every day with a feigned smile on my lips I tried to
play a part, and with torments of passion and desire in my heart I
spoke banteringly to her. She saw that I was dissembling, but looked
straight at me cheerfully and simply. This position became unbearable.
I wished not to deceive her but to tell her all I thought and felt. I
was extremely agitated. We were in the vineyard when I began to tell
her of my love, in words I am now ashamed to remember. I am ashamed
because I ought not to have dared to speak so to her because she stood
far above such words and above the feeling they were meant to express.
I said no more, but from that day my position has been intolerable. I
did not wish to demean myself by continuing our former flippant
relations, and at the same time I felt that I had not yet reached the
level of straight and simple relations with her. I asked myself
despairingly, ‘What am I to do?’ In foolish dreams I imagined her now
as my mistress and now as my wife, but rejected both ideas with
disgust. To make her a wanton woman would be dreadful. It would be
murder. To turn her into a fine lady, the wife of Dmítri Andréich
Olénin, like a Cossack woman here who is married to one of our
officers, would be still worse. Now could I turn Cossack like Lukáshka,
and steal horses, get drunk on _chikhir_, sing rollicking songs, kill
people, and when drunk climb in at her window for the night without a
thought of who and what I am, it would be different: then we might
understand one another and I might be happy.
“I tried to throw myself into that kind of life but was still more
conscious of my own weakness and artificiality. I cannot forget myself
and my complex, distorted past, and my future appears to me still more
hopeless. Every day I have before me the distant snowy mountains and
this majestic, happy woman. But not for me is the only happiness
possible in the world; I cannot have this woman! What is most terrible
and yet sweetest in my condition is that I feel that I understand her
but that she will never understand me; not because she is inferior: on
the contrary she ought not to understand me. She is happy, she is like
nature: consistent, calm, and self-contained; and I, a weak distorted
being, want her to understand my deformity and my torments! I have not
slept at night, but have aimlessly passed under her windows not
rendering account to myself of what was happening to me. On the 18th
our company started on a raid, and I spent three days away from the
village. I was sad and apathetic, the usual songs, cards,
drinking-bouts, and talk of rewards in the regiment, were more
repulsive to me than usual. Yesterday I returned home and saw her, my
hut. Daddy Eróshka, and the snowy mountains, from my porch, and was
seized by such a strong, new feeling of joy that I understood it all. I
love this woman; I feel real love for the first and only time in my
life. I know what has befallen me. I do not fear to be degraded by this
feeling, I am not ashamed of my love, I am proud of it. It is not my
fault that I love. It has come about against my will. I tried to escape
from my love by self-renunciation, and tried to devise a joy in the
Cossack Lukáshka’s and Maryánka’s love, but thereby only stirred up my
own love and jealousy. This is not the ideal, the so-called exalted
love which I have known before; not that sort of attachment in which
you admire your own love and feel that the source of your emotion is
within yourself and do everything yourself. I have felt that too. It is
still less a desire for enjoyment: it is something different. Perhaps
in her I love nature: the personification of all that is beautiful in
nature; but yet I am not acting by my own will, but some elemental
force loves through me; the whole of God’s world, all nature, presses
this love into my soul and says, ‘Love her.’ I love her not with my
mind or my imagination, but with my whole being. Loving her I feel
myself to be an integral part of all God’s joyous world. I wrote before
about the new convictions to which my solitary life had brought me, but
no one knows with what labour they shaped themselves within me and with
what joy I realized them and saw a new way of life opening out before
me; nothing was dearer to me than those convictions... Well! ... love
has come and neither they nor any regrets for them remain! It is even
difficult for me to believe that I could prize such a one-sided, cold,
and abstract state of mind. Beauty came and scattered to the winds all
that laborious inward toil, and no regret remains for what has
vanished! Self-renunciation is all nonsense and absurdity! That is
pride, a refuge from well-merited unhappiness, and salvation from the
envy of others’ happiness: ‘Live for others, and do good!’—Why? when in
my soul there is only love for myself and the desire to love her and to
live her life with her? Not for others, not for Lukáshka, I now desire
happiness. I do not now love those others. Formerly I should have told
myself that this is wrong. I should have tormented myself with the
questions: What will become of her, of me, and of Lukáshka? Now I don’t
care. I do not live my own life, there is something stronger than me
which directs me. I suffer; but formerly I was dead and only now do I
live. Today I will go to their house and tell her everything.”