Of course not, and it is even unnatural.
In an abstract love for mankind, one almost always loves oneself.
It is impossible for us, but you are another matter: how could there be anyone you do not love, when you cannot compare yourself with anyone and when you are above any offense, above any personal indignation?
You alone can love without egoism, you alone can love not for yourself but for the one you love.
Oh, how bitter it would be for me to learn that you feel shame or wrath because of me!
That would be the ruin of you: you would at once become equal to me .. .
"Yesterday, after meeting you, I came home and thought up a painting.
Artists all paint Christ according to the Gospel stories; I would paint him differently: I would portray him alone—the disciples did sometimes leave him alone.
I would leave only a small child with him.
The child would be playing beside him, perhaps telling him something in his child's language. Christ had been listening to him, but now he has become pensive; his hand has inadvertently, forgetfully, remained on the child's blond head.
He gazes into the distance, at the horizon; a thought as great as the whole world reposes in his eyes; his face is sad.
The child has fallen silent, leaning his elbow on his knees, and, his cheek resting on his hand, has raised his little head and pensively, as children sometimes become pensive, gazes intently at him.
The sun is setting . . . That is my painting!
You are innocent, and all your perfection is in your innocence.
Oh, remember only that!
What do you care about my passion for you?
You are mine now, I shall be near you all my life ... I shall die soon."
Finally, in the very last letter there was:
"For God's sake, do not think anything about me; do not think, also, that I humiliate myself by writing to you like this or that I am one of those who take pleasure in humiliating themselves, even though it is only out of pride.
No, I have my own consolations; but it is hard for me to explain that to you.
It would be hard for me to say it clearly even to myself, though it torments me.
But I know that I cannot humiliate myself even in a fit of pride.
Nor am I capable of self-humiliation out of purity of heart.
And that means I do not humiliate myself at all.
"Why do I want to unite the two of you: for your sake or for my own?
For my own, naturally, then everything will be resolved for me, I told myself that long ago ... I have heard that your sister Adelaida once said of my portrait that one could overturn the world with such beauty.
But I have renounced the world; do you find it funny to hear that from me, meeting me in lace and diamonds, with drunkards and scoundrels?
Pay no attention to that, I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.
I read that every day in two terrible eyes that constantly look at me, even when they are not before me.
Those eyes are silent now (they are always silent), but I know their secret.
His house is gloomy, dreary, and there is a secret in it.
I am sure that hidden in a drawer he has a razor, wound in silk, like the one that Moscow murderer had; that one also lived in the same house with his mother and also tied silk around his razor in order to cut a certain throat.
All the while I was in their house, it seemed to me that somewhere, under the floorboards, maybe even hidden by his father, there was a dead man wrapped in oilcloth, like the one in Moscow, and surrounded in the same way by bottles of Zhdanov liquid,30 I could even show you the corner.
He is always silent; but I know he loves me so much that by now he cannot help hating me.
Your wedding and my wedding will come together: that is how he and I have decided it.
I have no secrets from him.
I could kill him out of fear . . . But he will kill me first... he laughed just now and says I'm raving. He knows I'm writing to you."
And there was much, much more of the same sort of raving in these letters.
One of them, the second, was on two sheets of stationery, of large format, in small handwriting.
The prince finally left the somber park, in which he had wandered for a long time, as he had the day before.
The bright, transparent night seemed brighter than usual to him. "Can it be so early?" he thought. (He had forgotten to take his watch.) Music reached him from somewhere far away. "In the vauxhall, it must be," he thought again, "of course, they didn't go there today."
Realizing that, he saw that he was standing right by their dacha; he simply knew he would have to end up there, finally, and with a sinking heart he went onto the terrace.
No one met him, the terrace was deserted.
He waited a while and then opened the door to the drawing room.
"They never close this door," flashed in him, but the drawing room, too, was deserted; it was almost totally dark.
He stood perplexed in the middle of the room.
Suddenly the door opened and Alexandra Ivanovna came in carrying a candle.
Seeing the prince, she was surprised and stopped in front of him as if questioningly.
It was obvious that she was only passing through the room, from one door to the other, not thinking at all of finding anyone there.
"How did you end up here?" she said at last.