I lay unconscious for exactly nine days.
PART THREE
Chapter One
I
NOW ABOUT SOMETHING completely different.
I keep announcing: “something different, something different,” and I keep scribbling away about myself alone. Yet I’ve already declared a thousand times that I don’t want to describe myself at all, and I firmly didn’t want to when I began my notes; I understand only too well that the reader hasn’t got the slightest need of me. I’m describing and want to describe others, and not myself, and if I keep turning up all the time, that is a sad mistake, because I simply can’t avoid it, however much I wish to. Above all, it vexes me that, in describing my own adventures with such ardor, I thereby give reason for thinking that I’m the same now as I was then. The reader will remember, however, that I’ve already exclaimed more than once: “Oh, if only one could change the former and start completely anew!” I wouldn’t be able to exclaim like that if I hadn’t changed radically now and become a totally different person. That is all too obvious; and you can’t imagine how sick I am of all these apologies and prefaces that I’m forced to squeeze every minute even into the very middle of my notes!
To business.
After nine days of unconsciousness, I came to my senses regenerated, but not reformed; my regeneration, however, was stupid, naturally, if it’s taken in the vast sense, and maybe if it were now, it wouldn’t be so. The idea, that is, the feeling, again consisted (as a thousand times before) only in the fact that I should leave them completely, but this time leave without fail, and not as before, when I set myself the same topic a thousand times and never could do it. I didn’t want revenge on anyone, and I give my word of honor on that—though I had been offended by everyone. I was going to leave without disgust, without curses, but I wanted my own strength, and genuine this time, not dependent on any of them or the whole world; for I was all but reconciled with everything in the world! I record this dream of mine not as a thought, but as an irresistible feeling at that time. I didn’t want to formulate it yet, while I was in bed. Sick and without strength, lying in Versilov’s room, which they set aside for me, I was painfully aware of what a low degree of strengthlessness I had come to: some sort of little straw, not a man, lolled there in bed, and not only on account of illness—and how offensive that was to me! And so, from the very depths of my being, from all my strength, a protest began to rise, and I choked with a feeling of boundlessly exaggerated arrogance and defiance. I don’t even remember a time in my whole life when I was more filled with arrogant feelings than in those first days of my recovery, that is, when the little straw lolled in bed.
