Whose fault is it that he has no millions, as Rothschild has, that he has no mountain of gold imperials and napoleondors,14 a mountain as high as the ice mountains for sliding during carnival week with all its booths!
If he's alive, everything is in his power!
Whose fault is it that he doesn't understand that?
Oh, now it's all one to me, now I have no time to be angry, but then, then, I repeat, I literally chewed my pillow at night and tore my blanket with rage.
Oh, how I dreamed then, how I wished, how I purposely wished, that I, eighteen years old, barely clothed, barely covered, could suddenly be thrown out in the street and left completely alone, with no lodgings, no work, no crust of bread, no relations, not a single acquaintance in the enormous city, hungry, beaten (so much the better!), but healthy, and then I'd show them ...
Show them what?
Oh, can you possibly suppose that I do not know how I have humiliated myself as it is with my
"Explanation"!
Well, who is not going to consider me a runt who knows nothing of life, forgetting that I am no longer eighteen years old; forgetting that to live as I have lived for these six months means to live till you're gray-haired!
But let them laugh and say that it is all tall tales.
I did really tell myself tall tales.
I filled whole nights with them; I remember them all now.
But do I really have to tell them again now—now, when the time for tall tales is past for me as well?
And to whom!
For I delighted in them then, when I saw clearly that I was forbidden even to study Greek grammar, as I once conceived of doing: "I won't get as far as the syntax before I die"—I thought at the first page and threw the book under the table.
It is still lying there; I forbade Matryona to pick it up.
Let him into whose hands my
"Explanation" falls and who has enough patience to read it, consider me a crazy person or even a schoolboy, or most likely of all, a man condemned to death, to whom it naturally seemed that all people except himself value their life too little, are accustomed to spending it too cheaply, too lazily, use it much too shamelessly, and are therefore unworthy of it one and all!
And what then? I declare that my reader will be mistaken, and that my conviction is completely independent of my death sentence.
Ask them, only ask them one and all, what they understand by happiness?
Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it; you may be sure that the highest moment of his happiness was, perhaps, exactly three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew in their despair almost turned the ship back to Europe, right around!
The New World is not the point here, it can just as well perish.
Columbus died having seen very little of it and in fact not knowing what he had discovered.
The point is in life, in life alone—in discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself!
But why talk!
I suspect that everything I am saying now sounds so much like the most common phrases that I will probably be taken for a student in the lowest grade presenting his essay on "the sunrise," or they will say that I may have wanted to speak something out, but despite all my wishes I was unable to . . . "develop."
But, nevertheless, I will add that in any ingenious or new human thought, or even simply in any serious human thought born in someone's head, there always remains something which it is quite impossible to convey to other people, though you may fill whole volumes with writing and spend thirty-five years trying to explain your thought; there always remains something that absolutely refuses to leave your skull and will stay with you forever; you will die with it, not having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps most important in your idea.
But if I also fail now to convey all that has been tormenting me for these six months, people will at least understand that, having reached my present "ultimate conviction," I may have paid too dearly for it; it is this that I have considered it necessary, for my own purposes, to set forth in my
"Explanation."
However, I continue.
VI
I do not want to lie: reality kept catching me on its hook for these six months, and I sometimes got so carried away that I forgot about my sentence or, better, did not want to think about it and even started doing things.
Incidentally, about my situation then.
When I became very ill about eight months ago, I broke off all my former relations and dropped all my former comrades.
As I had always been a rather sullen man, my comrades easily forgot me; of course, they would have forgotten me even without this circumstance.
My situation at home, that is, "in the family," was also solitary.
Some five months before, I had locked myself in once and for all and separated myself completely from the family rooms.
I was always obeyed, and no one dared to enter my room except at a certain hour to tidy up and bring me my dinner.
My mother trembled before my orders and did not even dare to whimper in my presence, when I occasionally decided to let her in.
She constantly beat the children on my account, for fear they would make noise and bother me; I often complained about their shouting; I can imagine how they must love me now!
I think I also tormented "faithful Kolya," as I called him, quite a bit.
Lately he has tormented me as well: all that is quite natural, people are created to torment each other.
But I noticed that he put up with my irritability as if he had promised himself beforehand to spare the sick man.
Naturally, that irritated me; but it seems he had decided to imitate the prince in his "Christian humility," which was slightly ridiculous.
He is a young and ardent boy and, of course, imitates every- body; but it sometimes seems to me that it is time he lived by his own reason.
I love him very much.
I also tormented Surikov, who lived over us and ran around from morning till night on other people's errands; I was constantly proving to him that he himself was to blame for his poverty, so that he finally got frightened and stopped coming to see me.
He is a very humble man, the humblest of beings (NB.
They say that humility is an awesome force; I must ask the prince about that, it's his expression); but when, in the month of March, I went up to his place, to see how, in his words, they had "frozen" the baby, and unintentionally smiled over his infant's body, because I again began explaining to Surikov that "he himself was to blame," the runt's lips suddenly trembled and, seizing me by the shoulder with one hand, he showed me the door with the other, and softly, that is, almost in a whisper, said to me: "Go, sir!"
I went out, and I liked it very much, liked it right then, even at the very moment when he was leading me out; but for a long time afterwards, in my memory, his words made the painful impression of a sort of strange, contemptuous pity for him, which I did not want to feel at all.