The Adolescent (13 page)

“Fakirism, the poetry of nonentity and impotence,” people will decide, “the triumph of untalentedness and mediocrity!” Yes, I admit that it’s partly the triumph of both untalentedness and mediocrity, but hardly of impotence. I liked terribly to imagine a being, precisely an untalented and mediocre one, standing before the world and telling it with a smile: you are Galileos and Copernicuses, Charlemagnes and Napoleons, you are Pushkins and Shakespeares, you are field marshals and hofmarshals, and here I am—giftlessness and illegitimacy, and all the same I’m superior to you, because you submit to it yourselves. I confess, I’ve pushed this fantasy to such a verge that I’ve even ruled out education. It seemed to me that it would be more beautiful if this person was even filthily uneducated. This already exaggerated dream even influenced my results then in the final grade of high school; I stopped studying precisely out of fanaticism: it was as if lack of education added beauty to the ideal. Now I’ve changed my convictions on this point; education doesn’t hurt.

Gentlemen, can it be that independence of mind, even the least bit of it, is so painful for you? Blessed is he who has his ideal of beauty, even if it’s a mistaken one! But I believe in mine. Only I’ve explained it improperly, clumsily, primitively. Ten years from now, of course, I’ll explain it better. And this I’ll keep as a memento.

IV

I’VE FINISHED THE “idea.” If the description is banal, superficial—I’m to blame, and not the “idea.” I’ve already warned you that the simplest ideas are the hardest to understand; I’ll now add that they are also the hardest to explain, the more so as I’ve described the “idea” still in its former shape. There is also an inverse law for ideas: banal, hasty ideas are understood extraordinarily quickly, and invariably by a crowd, invariably by the whole street; moreover, they are considered the greatest and most brilliant, but only on the day of their appearance. What’s cheap is not durable. Quick understanding is only a sign of the banality of what is understood. Bismarck’s idea was instantly regarded as brilliant, and Bismarck himself as a brilliant man;
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but this quickness is precisely suspicious: I wait for Bismarck ten years from now, and then we’ll see what’s left of his idea, and maybe of Mr. Chancellor himself. Of course, I haven’t introduced this highly extraneous and inappropriate observation for the sake of comparison, but also as a reminder. (An explanation for the overly crude reader.)

And now I’ll tell two anecdotes, so as to finish with the “idea” altogether, and not have it interfere in any way with the story.

In the summer, in July, two months before I came to Petersburg, and when I was already completely free, Marya Ivanovna asked me to go to Troitsky Posad to see a certain old maid who had settled there, on an errand too uninteresting to mention in detail. Coming back that same day, I noticed a certain puny young man on the train, not badly but uncleanly dressed, with blackheads, a dark-haired, dirtily swarthy type. He was distinguished by the fact that, at every station, large or small, he unfailingly got off and drank vodka. By the end of the journey, a merry little circle had formed around him—an utterly trashy company, incidentally. There was a shopkeeper, also slightly drunk, who was especially admiring of the young man’s ability to drink continuously while remaining sober. There was yet another very pleased young fellow, terribly stupid and terribly talkative, dressed in German fashion, who gave off a rather nasty smell—a lackey, as I learned later; this one even struck up a friendship with the drinking young man and, each time the train stopped, got him to his feet with the invitation, “Time now for some vodka”—and the two would go out in each other’s embrace. The drinking young man hardly said a word, but more and more interlocutors sat down around him; he merely listened to them all, grinning continuously with a slobbery titter and producing from time to time, but always unexpectedly, a sort of sound like “tir-lir-li!” and placing a finger on his nose in a very caricaturish way. It was this that delighted the merchant, and the lackey, and all of them, and they laughed extremely loudly and casually. It’s impossible to understand why people laugh sometimes. I, too, went over—and I don’t understand why I also found this young man likable, as it were; maybe by his all-too-spectacular violation of conventional and banalized proprieties; in short, I failed to discern the fool in him; anyhow, we were on familiar terms there and then, and as we got off the train, I learned from him that he would be coming to Tverskoy Boulevard that evening after eight. He turned out to be a former student. I went to the boulevard, and here’s what trick he taught me: we went around all the boulevards together, and later on, the moment we spotted a woman of a decent sort walking along, but so that there was no public close by, we’d immediately start pestering her. Without saying a word to her, we’d place ourselves, he on one side, I on the other, and with the most calm air, as if not noticing her at all, would begin a most indecent conversation between ourselves. We called things by their real names with a most unperturbed air, as if it was quite proper, and went into such details, explaining various vile and swinish things, as the dirtiest imagination of the dirtiest debaucher could not have thought up. (I, of course, had already acquired all this knowledge at school, even before high school, but only in words, not in deeds.) The woman would be very frightened and hurriedly walk away, but we would also quicken our pace and—go on with our thing. For the victim, of course, it was impossible to do anything; she couldn’t shout: there were no witnesses, and it would somehow be strange to complain. Some eight days were spent on these amusements; I don’t understand how I could have liked it; and in fact I didn’t like it, I just did it. At first I found it original, as if it went outside everyday trite conventions; besides, I can’t stand women. I once told the student that Jean-Jacques Rousseau admits in his Confessions
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that, as a youth, he liked to expose himself on the sly, from around the corner, uncovering the usually covered parts of the body, and waited like that for passing women. The student answered me with his tir-lir-li. I noticed that he was frightfully ignorant and interested in surprisingly little. There was no trace of the hidden idea I had hoped to find in him. Instead of originality, I found only an overwhelming monotony. I disliked him more and more. Finally it all ended quite unexpectedly. Once when it was already quite dark, we began to pester a girl who was walking quickly and timidly down the boulevard, a very young girl, maybe only sixteen or even less, dressed very neatly and modestly, who maybe lived by her own labor and was going home from work to her old mother, a poor widow with children; however, there’s no need to fall into sentimentality. The girl listened for some time, walking faster and faster, her head lowered and her face covered by a veil, afraid and trembling, but suddenly she stopped, threw back the veil from her very pretty, as far as I remember, but thin face, and with flashing eyes cried to us:

“Ah, what scoundrels you are!”

Maybe she would also have burst into tears here, but something else happened: she swung her small, skinny arm and planted a slap on the student’s face, than which a more deft has maybe never been given. What a smack! He cursed and rushed at her, but I held him back, and the girl had time to run away. Left there, we began quarreling at once. I told him everything that had been smoldering in me all that time; I said he was nothing but a pathetic giftlessness and ordinariness, and that there had never been the least sign of an idea in him. He called me a . . . (I had explained to him once about my being illegitimate), then we spat at each other, and I’ve never seen him since. That evening I was very vexed, the next day less so, the third day I almost forgot all about it. And so, though I sometimes remembered this girl afterwards, it was just by chance and fleetingly. It was only on arriving in Petersburg some two weeks later that I suddenly remembered that whole scene—remembered, and then felt so ashamed that tears of shame literally poured down my cheeks. I suffered all evening, all night, I’m partly suffering now as well. I couldn’t understand at first how it had been possible to fall so low and disgracefully then, and above all—to forget the incident, not to be ashamed of it, not to be repentant. Only now did I realize what was the matter: the “idea” was to blame. In short, I draw the direct conclusion that if you have in mind something fixed, perpetual, strong, something terribly preoccupying, it is as if you thereby withdraw from the whole world into a desert, and everything that happens takes place in passing, apart from the main thing. Even impressions are received wrongly. And besides that, the main thing is that you always have an excuse. However much I tormented my mother all that time, however much I neglected my sister: “Ah, I have my ‘idea,’ those are all trifles”—that’s what I seemed to say to myself. I’d get insulted myself, and painfully—I’d go out insulted and then suddenly say to myself, “Ah, I’m base, but all the same I have an ‘idea,’ and they don’t know about it.” The “idea” comforted me in my disgrace and nonentity; but all my abominations were also as if hiding under the idea; it eased everything, so to speak, but it also clouded everything over before me; and such a blurred understanding of events and things may, of course, even harm the “idea” itself, to say nothing of the rest.

Now the other anecdote.

On the first of April last year, Marya Ivanovna had a name-day party. In the evening some guests came, a very few. Suddenly Agrafena comes in, breathless, and announces that there’s a foundling baby squealing in the entry, by the kitchen door, and that she doesn’t know what to do. Excited by the news, we all went and saw a basket, and in the basket a three- or four-week-old squealing girl. I took the basket, brought it to the kitchen, and at once found a folded note: “Dear benefactors, render your well-wishing aid to the baptized girl Arina, and with her we will ever send up our tears to the throne of God for you, and we congratulate you on your angel’s day. People unknown to you.” Here Nikolai Semyonovich, whom I so respect, upset me very much: he made a very serious face and decided to send the girl to the orphanage immediately. I felt very sad. They lived very economically, but had no children, and Nikolai Semyonovich was always glad of it. I carefully took Arinochka out of the basket and held her up by her little shoulders; the basket gave off a sort of sour and sharp smell, as of a long-unwashed nursing baby. After some arguing with Nikolai Semyonovich, I suddenly announced to him that I was taking the girl at my own expense. He began to object with a certain severity, despite all his mildness, and though he ended with a joke, he left his intention about the orphanage in full force. It worked out my way, however: on the same courtyard, but in another wing, lived a very poor cabinetmaker, already an old man and a drunkard, but his wife, a very healthy woman and not old at all, had just lost her nursing baby, and above all her only one, who had been born after eight years of childless marriage, also a girl, and by strange luck also named Arinochka. I say luck, because as we were arguing in the kitchen, this woman, hearing about the incident, came running to see, and when she learned that it was Arinochka, her heart melted. Her milk was not gone yet; she opened her bodice and put the baby to her breast. I fell before her and began begging her to take Arinochka with her, and said I’d pay her monthly. She feared her husband wouldn’t allow it, but took her for the night. In the morning, the husband allowed it for eight roubles a month, and I counted them out to him for the first month in advance. He drank up the money at once. Nikolai Semyonovich, still smiling strangely, agreed to vouch for me to the cabinetmaker that the money, eight roubles a month, would be paid regularly. I tried to give Nikolai Semyonovich my sixty roubles in cash, by way of security, but he wouldn’t take it; however, he knew I had the money and trusted me. This delicacy on his part smoothed over our momentary quarrel. Marya Ivanovna said nothing, but was surprised at my taking on such a care. I especially appreciated their delicacy in that neither of them allowed themselves the slightest mockery of me, but, on the contrary, began to treat the matter with the proper seriousness. I ran by Darya Rodionovna’s every day, three times a day or so, and a week later I gave her personally, in her own hand, on the quiet from her husband, three more roubles. For another three I bought swaddling clothes and a little blanket. But ten days later, Rinochka suddenly got sick. I brought a doctor at once, he prescribed something, and we spent the whole night fussing about and tormenting the tiny thing with his nasty medicine, but the next day he declared that it was too late, and to my entreaties—though they seemed more like reproaches—he said with noble evasiveness, “I am not God.” The girl’s tongue, lips, and whole mouth got covered with a sort of fine white rash, and towards evening she died, gazing at me with her big dark eyes, as if she already understood. I don’t understand how it didn’t occur to me to take a photograph of her dead. Well, would you believe that I did not weep but simply howled that evening, something I had never allowed myself to do, and Marya Ivanovna was forced to comfort me—and again, totally without mockery either on her own or on his part. The cabinetmaker made a little coffin; Marya Ivanovna trimmed it with ruche and put a pretty little pillow in it, and I bought flowers and strewed them over the little baby; and so they took away my poor little wisp, whom, believe me, to this day I cannot forget. A while later, though, this whole almost unexpected occurrence even made me reflect a lot. Of course, Rinochka had not cost me much—thirty roubles in all, including the coffin, the burial, the doctor, the flowers, and the payments to Darya Rodionovna. I reimbursed myself for this money, as I was leaving for Petersburg, from the forty roubles Versilov had sent me for my trip, and by selling some things before I left, so that my whole “capital” remained intact. “But,” I thought, “if I can be sidetracked like that, I won’t get very far.” From the story with the student, it followed that the “idea” can fascinate one to the point of a blurring of impressions and distract one from the flow of actualities. From the story with Rinochka the opposite followed, that no “idea” can be so intensely fascinating (for me, at least) that I cannot stop suddenly before some overwhelming fact and sacrifice to it at once all that I had done for the idea during years of toil. Both conclusions were nonetheless correct.