You read her letters, eh?"
"But can you really have read them?" asked the prince, astounded by the thought.
"What else; she showed me each letter herself.
Remember about the razor? Heh, heh!"
"She's insane!" cried the prince, wringing his hands.
"Who knows, maybe she's not," Rogozhin said softly, as if to himself.
The prince did not answer.
"Well, good-bye," said Rogozhin, "I'm leaving tomorrow, too; don't think ill of me!
And how come, brother," he added, turning quickly, "how come you didn't say anything in answer to her?
Are you happy or not?' "
"No, no, no!" the prince exclaimed with boundless sorrow.
"As if you'd say 'yes!'" Rogozhin laughed spitefully and walked off without looking back.
PART FOUR
I
About a week went by after the two persons of our story met on the green bench.
One bright morning, around half-past ten, Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyn, having gone out to visit some of her acquaintances, returned home in great and rueful pensiveness.
There are people of whom it is difficult to say anything that would present them at once and fully, in their most typical and characteristic aspect; these are those people who are usually called "ordinary" people, the "majority," and who indeed make up the vast majority in any society.
Writers in their novels and stories for the most part try to take social types and present them graphically and artistically—types which in their full state are met with extremely rarely in reality and which are nonetheless almost more real than reality itself.
Podkolesin1 in his typical aspect may well be an exaggeration, but he is by no means an impossibility.
What a host of intelligent people, having learned about Podkolesin from Gogol, at once began to find that dozens and hundreds of their good acquaintances and friends were terribly like Podkolesin.
They knew before Gogol that these friends were like Podkolesin, they simply did not know yet precisely what their name was.
In reality it is terribly rare that bridegrooms jump out of windows before their weddings, because, to say nothing else, it is even inconvenient; nonetheless, how many bridegrooms, even worthy and intelligent people, in the depths of their conscience, have been ready before marriage to acknowledge themselves as Podkolesins.
Nor does every husband cry at each step:
"Tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin!"*2 But, God, how many millions and billions of times have the husbands of the whole world repeated this heartfelt cry after their honeymoon, and, who knows, maybe even the day after the wedding.
And so, without going into more serious explanations, we shall say only that in reality the typicality of persons is watered down, as it were, and all these Georges Dandins and Podkolesins really *You asked for it, Georges Dandin! exist, scurry and run around in front of us daily, but as if in a somewhat diluted state.
Having mentioned, finally, for the sake of the complete truth, that the full Georges Dandin, as Moliere created him, may also be met with in reality, though rarely, we shall therewith end our discourse, which is beginning to resemble a critical article in some journal.
Nonetheless, a question remains before us all the same: what is a novelist to do with ordinary, completely "usual" people, and how can he present them to the reader so as to make them at least somewhat interesting?
To bypass them altogether in a story is quite impossible, because ordinary people are constantly and for the most part the necessary links in the chain of everyday events; in bypassing them we would thus violate plausibility.
To fill novels with nothing but types or even simply, for the sake of interest, with strange and nonexistent people, would be implausible—and perhaps uninteresting as well.
In our opinion, the writer should try to seek out interesting and instructive nuances even among ordinary people.
And when, for instance, the very essence of certain ordinary people consists precisely in their permanent and unchanging ordinariness, or, better still, when, despite all the extreme efforts of these people to get out of the rut of the usual and the routine, they end up all the same by remaining unchangingly and eternally in one and the same routine, then such people even acquire a kind of typicality—as that ordinariness which refuses to remain what it is and wants at all costs to become original and independent, but has not the slightest means of achieving independence.
To this category of "usual" or "ordinary" people belong certain persons of our story, who till now (I admit it) have been little explained to the reader.
Such, namely, are Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyn, her husband, Mr. Ptitsyn, and Gavrila Ardalionovich, her brother.
Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of one's own, to be decidedly "like everybody else."
There is wealth, but not a Rothschild's; an honorable family, but which has never distinguished itself in any way; a decent appearance, but very little expression; a proper education, but without knowing what to apply it to; there is intelligence, but with no ideas of one's own; there is a heart, but with no magnanimity, etc., etc., in all respects.
There are a great many such people in the world and even far more than it seems; they are divided, as all people are, into two main categories: one limited, the other "much cleverer."
The first are happier.
For the limited "usual" man, for instance, there is nothing easier than to imagine himself an unusual and original man and to revel in it without any hesitation.
As soon as some of our young ladies cut their hair, put on blue spectacles, and called themselves nihilists, they became convinced at once that, having put on the spectacles, they immediately began to have their own "convictions."
As soon as a man feels in his heart just a drop of some sort of generally human and kindly feeling for something or other, he immediately becomes convinced that no one else feels as he does, that he is in the forefront of general development.
As soon as a man takes some thought or other at its word or reads a little page of something without beginning or end, he believes at once that these are "his own thoughts" and were conceived in his own brain.
The impudence of naivety, if one may put it so, goes so far in such cases as to be astonishing; all this is incredible, but one meets with it constantly.
This impudence of naivety, this stupid man's unquestioningness of himself and his talent, is excellently portrayed by Gogol in the astonishing type of Lieutenant Pirogov.3 Pirogov never even doubts that he is a genius, even higher than any genius; he is so far from doubting it that he never even asks himself about it; anyhow, questions do not exist for him.
The great writer was finally forced to give him a whipping, for the satisfaction of his reader's offended moral sense, but, seeing that the great man merely shook himself and, to fortify himself after his ordeal, ate a puff pastry, he spread his arms in amazement and thus left his readers.
I have always regretted that Gogol bestowed such low rank on the great Pirogov, because Pirogov is so given to self-satisfaction that there would be nothing easier for him than to imagine himself, while his epaulettes grow thicker and more braided as the years pass and "according to his rank," as being, for instance, a great commander; not even to imagine it, but simply to have no doubt of it: he has been made a general, why not a commander?
And how many of them later cause a terrible fiasco on the battlefield?
And how many Pirogovs have there been among our writers, scholars, propagandists?
I say "have there been," but, of course, there still are . . .
One character figuring in our story, Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category of people who are "much cleverer," though he was all infected, from head to foot, with the desire to be original.
But this category, as we have already noted above, is much more unhappy than the first.