Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2 полностью

The tea was really like beer, but I drank a glass of it.⁵ Just then the guard entered. Pózdnyshev followed him with angry eyes, and only began to speak after he had left.¹⁷

III

‘WELL then, I’ll tell you.¹⁸ But do you really want to hear it?’ I repeated that I wished it very much. He paused, rubbed his face with his hands, and began:

‘If I am to tell it, I must tell everything from the beginning: I must tell how and why I married, and the kind of man I was before my marriage.¹⁹

‘Till my marriage I lived as everybody does, that is, everybody in our class. I am a landowner and a graduate of the university, and was a marshal of the gentry. Before my marriage I lived as everyone does, that is, dissolutely; and while living dissolutely I was convinced, like everybody in our class, that I was living as one has to. I thought I was a charming fellow and quite a moral man.²⁰ I was not a seducer, had no unnatural tastes, did not make that the chief purpose of my life as many of my associates did, but I practised debauchery in a steady, decent way for health’s sake.²¹ I avoided women who might tie my hands by having a child or by attachment for me. However, there may have been children and attachments, but I acted as if there were not. And this I not only considered moral, but I was even proud of it.’

He paused and gave vent to his peculiar sound, as he evidently did whenever a new idea occurred to him.

‘And you know, that is the chief abomination!’ he exclaimed. ‘Dissoluteness does not lie in anything physical – no kind of physical misconduct is debauchery; real debauchery lies precisely in freeing oneself from moral relations with a woman with whom you have physical intimacy. And such emancipation I regarded as a merit. I remember how I once worried because I had not had an opportunity to pay a woman who gave herself to me (having probably taken a fancy to me) and how I only became tranquil after having sent her some money – thereby intimating that I did not consider myself in any way morally bound to her … Don’t nod as if you agreed with me,’ he suddenly shouted at me. ‘Don’t I know these things? We all, and you too unless you are a rare exception, hold those same views, just as I used to. Never mind, I beg your pardon, but the fact is that it’s terrible, terrible, terrible!’

‘What is terrible?’ I asked.

‘That abyss of error in which we live²² regarding women and our relations with them. No, I can’t speak calmly about it, not because of that “episode”, as he called it, in my life, but because since that “episode” occurred my eyes have been opened and I have seen everything in quite a different light. Everything reversed, everything reversed!’

He lit a cigarette and began to speak, leaning his elbows on his knees.

It was too dark to see his face, but, above the jolting of the train, I could hear his impressive and pleasant voice.

IV

‘YES, only after such torments as I have endured, only by their means, have I understood where the root of the matter lies – understood what ought to be, and therefore seen all the horror of what is.²³

‘So you will see how and when that which led up to my “episode” began. It began when I was not quite sixteen. It happened when I still went to the grammar school and my elder brother was a first-year student at the university. I had not yet known any woman, but, like all the unfortunate children of our class, I was no longer an innocent boy. I had been depraved two years before that by other boys. Already woman, not some particular woman but woman as something to be desired, woman, every woman, woman’s nudity, tormented me. My solitude was not pure. I was tormented, as ninety-nine per cent. of our boys are. I was horrified, I suffered, I prayed, and I fell. I was already depraved in imagination and in fact, but I had not yet taken the last step. I was perishing, but I had not yet laid hands on another human being. But one day a comrade of my brother’s, a jolly student, a so-called good fellow, that is, the worst kind of good-for-nothing, who had taught us to drink and to play cards, persuaded us after a carousal to go there. We went. My brother was also still innocent, and he fell that same night. And I, a fifteen-year-old boy, defiled myself and took part in defiling a woman, without at all understanding what I was doing. I had never heard from any of my elders that what I was doing was wrong, you know. And indeed no one hears it now. It is true it is in the Commandments, but then the Commandments are only needed to answer the priest at Scripture examination, and even then they are not very necessary, not nearly as necessary as the commandment about the use of ut in conditional sentences in Latin.