20 Add: This – the fact that I considered myself moral – came about because in our family there was not any of that particular specialized vice which was so common in our landowning class, and therefore, being brought up in a family where neither my father nor my mother was unfaithful, I nursed the dream of a most elevated and poetic family life from my early years. My wife had to be the height of perfection. Our mutual love had to be most elevated. The purity of our family life was to be dovelike. So I thought, and I praised myself all the time for having such elevated thoughts. And at the same time, for ten years, I lived as an adult, in no haste to get married, and led what I called a respectable, reasonable, bachelor life.
21 Add: and I was naively confident that I was quite a moral man. The women I was intimate with were not mine, and I had nothing to do with them except for the pleasure they afforded me. And I saw nothing disgraceful in this.
22 Add: … in regard to the real woman-question …’
‘That is to say … what do you understand to be the real woman-question?’
‘The question of what this organic creature that is distinct from man is, and how she herself and men also should regard her.
23 For this paragraph read: ‘Yes, for ten years I lived in most disgraceful debauchery, dreaming of a pure, elevated love—and even in the name of that love. Yes, I want to tell of how I killed my wife, and to tell that I must tell how I became depraved.
‘I killed her before I met her; I killed a woman the first time I knew one without loving her, and it was already then that I killed my wife.
24 Read: Who deprave youths? They do! Who deprave women by devising means for them and teaching them not to bear children? Who treat syphilis with enthusiasm? They.’
‘But why not treat syphilis?’
‘Because to cure syphilis is the same as to safeguard vice; it is the same as the Foundlings Hospital for discarded babies.’
‘No, not the same … Then omit to end of paragraph.
25 Insert here: To tell the truth without false shame, I was trapped and caught. Her mamma – her papa was dead – arranged all sorts of traps and one of them – namely boating – succeeded.
26 Insert: No, say what you will, we live up to our ears in such a swamp of lies that unless we have our heads bumped, as I did, we cannot come to our senses.
27 Add: How fortunate that would have been for us!
28 Add: If we only reject the conventional explanations of why and for what reason these things are done, if we …
29 Add: There is no difference. Strictly defining the matter, one must say that prostitutes for short terms are usually despised, while prostitutes for long terms are respected.
30 Add: The men of our circle are kept and fed like breeding stallions. It is only necessary, you know, to close the safety-valve – that is, for a vicious young man to live a continent life for a little while – and immediately a terrible restlessness and excitement is caused, which passing through the prism of the artificial conditions of our social life shows itself in the guise of falling in love. Our love affairs and marriages, for the most part, are conditioned by our food. You are surprised: one ought to be surprised that we have not noticed it sooner.
31 Read: through the prism of novels, stories, verses, music – through the idle, luxurious setting of our life – and there will be amorousness of the purest water.
32 Read: … her parents, knowing more of life and not distracted by a momentary infatuation, but yet loving her not less than they loved themselves – arranged the marriage.
33 Instead of the following lines, read: and we talk of woman’s rights, of “freedom” which is somehow obtainable at university lectures.’
34 Add: and as she cannot consent to be a slave and cannot herself propose, there begins that other abominable lie which is sometimes called “coming out into society”, and sometimes “amusing themselves”, and which is nothing but husband-hunting.
35 Add: ‘They all complain that they are deprived of rights and are oppressed.
36 Add: Look at the people’s fětes, and at our balls and parties. Woman knows how she acts, you can see that by her triumphant smile.
37 Add: whether they believe in that or not – is unimportant.
38 Add: My sister, when very young, married a man twice her age and a debauchee. I remember how astonished we were the night of the wedding, when she ran out of her bedroom in tears and, shaking all over, said that she could on no account, on no account, even tell us what he had wanted to do to her.
39 Add: A pure girl only wants children. Children, – yes, but not a husband.’
‘How then,’ I said with astonishment, ‘how is the human race to be continued?’
‘And why should it be continued?’ was his unexpected rejoinder.
