The Adolescent

“It’s not a bookish thought. However, perhaps it is. Here, though, everything comes together, for I did love your mama really, sincerely, not bookishly. If I hadn’t loved her so much, I wouldn’t have sent for her, but would have ‘made happy’ some passing German man or woman, once I had thought up the idea. And I would set it down as a commandment for any developed man to make at least one being happy in his life, unfailingly and in something, but to do it in practice, that is, in reality; just as I would set it down as a law or an obligation for every peasant to plant at least one tree in his life, in view of the deforestation of Russia; though one tree would be too little, he can be ordered to plant a tree every year. The superior and developed man, pursuing a superior thought, sometimes departs entirely from the essential, becomes ridiculous, capricious, and cold, I’d even simply say stupid, and not only in practical life, but, in the end, even stupid in his theories. Thus, the duty of occupying oneself with the practical, and of making at least one existing being happy, would in fact set everything right and refresh the benefactor himself. As a theory, it’s very funny; but if it became a practice and turned into a custom, it wouldn’t be stupid at all. I experienced it for myself: as soon as I began to develop this idea of a new commandment—at first, naturally, as a joke—I suddenly began to realize the full extent of my love for your mother, which lay hidden in me. Till then I had never realized that I loved her. While I lived with her I merely enjoyed her, while she had her good looks, but then I became capricious. Only in Germany did I realize that I loved her. It began with her sunken cheeks, which I could never remember and sometimes couldn’t even see without a pain in my heart—a literal pain, real, physical. There are painful memories, my dear, which cause actual pain; nearly everyone has them, only people forget them; but it happens that they suddenly remember later, even only some feature, and then they can’t get rid of it. I began to recall a thousand details of my life with Sonya; in the end they came to my memory of themselves, pouring in a mass, and all but tormented me while I waited for her. Most of all I was tormented by the memory of her eternal abasement before me, and of her eternally considering herself infinitely inferior to me in all respects—imagine, even the physical. She became ashamed and blushed when I sometimes looked at her hands and fingers, which were not at all aristocratic. And not her fingers only, she was ashamed of everything in herself, despite the fact that I loved her beauty. She had always been shy with me to the point of wildness, but the bad thing was that a glimpse of some sort of fear, as it were, showed in this shyness. In short, she considered herself a worthless or even almost indecent thing next to me. Truly, once in a while, at the beginning, I sometimes thought she still considered me her master and was afraid, but it wasn’t that at all. And yet I swear she was better able than anyone else to understand my shortcomings, and never in my life have I met a woman with such a subtle and discerning heart. Oh, how unhappy she was in the beginning, while she was still so good looking, when I demanded that she dress up. There was self-love in it, and also some other offended feeling: she realized that she could never be a lady, and that wearing clothes that weren’t for her only made her ridiculous. As a woman, she didn’t want to feel ridiculous in her clothes, and she realized that every woman had to wear dresses that were hers

—something that thousands and hundreds of thousands of women will never realize, so long as they’re dressed fashionably. She was afraid of my mocking look—that’s what it was! But it was especially sad for me to recall her deeply astonished look, which I often caught on me during all our time. It bespoke a perfect understanding of her fate and of the future in store for her, so that it even made me feel bad, though, I confess, I didn’t get into any conversations with her then, and treated it all somehow condescendingly. And, you know, she wasn’t always so timorous and wild as she is now; even now it happens that she suddenly gets as merry and pretty as a twenty-year-old; and then, when she was young, she sometimes liked very much to chatter and laugh, in her own company, of course—with the girls, with the women of the household; and how startled she’d be when I unexpectedly found her laughing sometimes, how quickly she’d blush and look at me timorously! Once, not long before I left for abroad, that is, almost on the eve of my unmarrying her, I came into her room and found her alone, at the little table, without any work, leaning her elbow on the table, and deep in thought. It almost never happened with her that she would sit like that, without work. By then I had long ceased to caress her. I managed to approach very softly, on tiptoe, and suddenly embrace and kiss her . . . She jumped up—and I’ll never forget that rapture, that happiness on her face, and suddenly it all changed quickly to a blush, and her eyes flashed. Do you know what I read in that flashing glance? ‘You’re giving me charity—that’s what!’ She sobbed hysterically, under the pretext that I had frightened her, but even then I fell to thinking. And in general, all such recollections are a very hard thing, my friend. It’s the same as how, in a great artist’s poems, there are sometimes such

painful

scenes that you remember them with pain all your life afterwards—for instance, Othello’s last monologue in Shakespeare, Evgeny at Tatyana’s feet, or the escaped convict meeting a child, a little girl, on a cold night, by a well, in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.³⁶ It pierces your heart once, and the wound remains forever after. Oh, how I waited for Sonya and how I wanted to embrace her quickly! I dreamed with convulsive impatience of a whole new program of life; I dreamed of destroying gradually, through methodical effort, this constant fear she had of me in her soul, of explaining her own worth to her and everything in which she was even superior to me. Oh, I knew only too well then that I always began to love your mother as soon as we parted, and always cooled towards her when we came together again; but here it wasn’t that, this time it wasn’t that.”