Humiliated and Insulted
Page 1
Humiliated and Insulted
“The real nineteenth-century prophet was
Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.”
Albert Camus
“Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss!”
Albert Einstein
“The only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Goethe once had to delay the completion of one of his novels till experience had furnished him with new situations, but almost before he had arrived at manhood Dostoevsky knew life in its most real forms; poverty and suffering, pain and misery, prison, exile and love were soon familiar to him, and by the lips of Vanya he had told his own story. This note of personal feeling, this harsh reality of actual experience, undoubtedly gives Humiliated and Insulted something of its strange fervour and terrible passion, yet it has not made it egotistic; we see things from every point of view, and we feel not that action has been trammelled by fact, but that fact itself has become ideal and imaginative.”
Oscar Wilde
“The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.”
Virginia Woolf
Humiliated and Insulted
From the Notes of an Unsuccessful Author
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated and presented by Ignat Avsey
ALMA CLASSICS
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Humiliated and Insulted first published in Russian as Униженные и оскорблённые in 1861
This edition first published by Alma Classics Limited (previously Oneworld Classics Limited) in 2008
Reprinted 2011
This new edition first published by Alma Classics Limited in 2012
English Translation © Ignat Avsey, 2008
Extra material © Ignat Avsey, 2008
Cover Image: Getty Images
isbn: 978-1-84749-269-2
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
Contents
Humiliated and Insulted
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Epilogue
Extra Material
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Life
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Works
Select Bibliography
Translator’s Note
Appendix
Opening Pages of Humiliated and Insulted in Russian
Acknowledgements
Humiliated and Insulted
Principal Characters
Alexandra Semyonovna: Masloboyev’s mistress
Alexander Petrovich: Vanya’s publisher
Alyosha, Alexei, Alexei Petrovich: Prince Valkovsky’s son
Anna Andreyevna: Ikhmenev’s wife
Arkhipov: a debauchee and paedophile
Bubnova, Anna Trifonovna: a brothel keeper and landlady
Count Nainsky: Prince Valkovsky’s relative, a St Petersburg grandee
Countess Zinaida Fyodorovna: Prince Valkovsky’s mistress
Ikhmenev, Nikolai Sergeich: a landowner, owner of Ikhmenevka
Katya, Katerina Fyodorovna Filimonova: the Countess’s step-daughter
Masloboyev, Filip Filipych: Vanya’s old school friend and sleuth
Matryona: Ikhmenevs’ maidservant
Mavra: Natasha’s maidservant
Natasha, Natalya Nikolayevna: Ikhmenevs’ daughter
Nelly, Yelena, Lenochka: Smith’s granddaughter
Prince Valkovsky, Pyotr Alexandrovich: owner of Vasilevskoye
Sizobryukhov, Stepan Terentych: Arkhipov’s companion
Jeremiah Smith: an impoverished industrialist
Vanya, Ivan Petrovich: the narrator, a young author
Part One
1
Last year, on the evening of 22nd March, I had a most unusual experience. All day I’d been tramping the city in search of lodgings. The place I was then living in was very damp, and I was already starting to develop a nasty cough. I’d been meaning to move the previous autumn, but ended up putting it off till spring. I couldn’t find anything suitable. First, I wanted self-contained accommodation, not a room in someone else’s house – and secondly, even if it were only a single room, it would definitely have to be a large one and, it goes without saying, as cheap as possible. I have noticed that in a cramped space one’s thoughts too tend to be cramped. Also, while planning my novels, I like to pace up and down the room. Incidentally, I’ve always found mulling over my compositions and imagining how they are likely to turn out more enjoyable than actually committing them to paper, and not just out of laziness. I wonder why that is!
I had been feeling unwell since morning, and by evening I was distinctly worse, with a fever coming on. Besides, I had been on my feet all day and was tired. Evening came, and just before dusk I happened to be walking along Voznesensky Prospect. I love the sun, especially the setting March sun in St Petersburg on a clear frosty evening. The whole street is suddenly bathed in brilliant light. All the houses glow. For a time, the grey, yellow and dull-green façades lose their drabness; there’s a sense of euphoria, of awakening, as though someone had poked you in the ribs. A new vista, new ideas… marvellous what a single ray of sunshine can do to a man’s soul!
But the sun’s rays vanished. The frost was getting sharper and beginning to numb my nose. Dusk was falling. Up and down the street the gas lamps were being lit in the shop windows. As I drew level with Müller’s coffee house I came to a dead halt and gazed across the street as though expecting something out of the ordinary to occur, and at that very instant I caught sight of the old man and his dog on the opposite side. I recall very well that my heart sank with some awful presentiment – but of what, for the life of me I couldn’t fathom.
I’m not a mystic; I’m no believer in premonitions or fortune-telling. However, possibly like everyone else, I have experienced incidents in my life that were somewhat inexplicable. Take this old man for instance. Why did I, seeing him on that occasion, immediately feel that something rather unusual would happen to me that night? Mind you, I was ill, and feverish impressions are nearly always deceptive.
The stooped old man, with his slow, faltering gait, moved his almost rigid legs like stilts, tapping the paving stones lightly with his stick as he approached the coffee house. In all my life, I’ve never met such a strange and incongruous figure. Even before this particular occasion, when
we happened to come across each other at Müller’s, he had never failed to give me a feeling of unease. His tall frame, his crooked back, his cadaverous octogenarian face, his shabby old coat coming apart at the seams, his crumpled twenty-year-old stovepipe hat barely covering his bald head – on the back of which a single tuft of, well, not even grey but yellowish-white hair still survived – his movements which seemed to be performed mechanically, as if by clockwork – all this could not fail to astonish anyone who met him for the first time. It was really strange to see such a decrepit figure on his own, without anyone to help him, especially since he had the look of a mental patient who had fled from his carers. I also couldn’t get over how extraordinarily thin he was. There was hardly any flesh on him – his skin appeared to be stretched tight over his bones. His large rheumy eyes circled by dark blue rings were always staring fixedly ahead, never deviating and totally unseeing – of that I’m certain – even if he was looking at you, he went on walking straight at you as if you weren’t there. I had observed this several times. It was only quite recently that he had begun to frequent Müller’s, appearing from goodness knows where, and always accompanied by his dog. Nobody in the coffee house dared to engage him in conversation, nor did he himself ever speak to anyone.
“Why on earth does he keep going to Müller’s? What’s the attraction?” I wondered as I stood on the opposite side of the street staring at him compulsively. A kind of despondency – the effect of illness and fatigue – was welling up inside me. “What’s he thinking about?” I kept asking myself. “What’s on his mind – that is, if he’s got anything at all on his mind?” His face was so lifeless that it expressed absolutely nothing. And where did he get that wretched dog which stuck to him like a limpet and was so much like him?
The miserable animal must have been about eighty itself; yes, that surely was the case. To begin with, it looked old like no other dog in the world – moreover, why was it that as soon as I set eyes on it, I immediately sensed that it was like no other dog; that it was an extraordinary dog; that there must be something fantastical, something enchanted about it; that it was some kind of a Mephistopheles* in canine form and that its fate was in some inexplicable manner linked to its master’s? Looking at it, you would have immediately concluded that it must have been about twenty years since it had last had anything to eat. It was as emaciated as a skeleton or, to go no further, as its master. It had lost its fur almost everywhere – including its tail, which dangled like a stick, always drawn tightly between its legs; its head, with ears drooping, hung despondently down. I had never in my life seen a more repugnant beast. When the two of them were walking along the street – master in front, and dog behind – its nose would be touching the hem of his coat as though glued to it. Both their gait and their general appearance seemed almost to be saying, “How old, O God, how old we both are!”
I seem to remember thinking that the old man and his dog had somehow stepped out of a Gavarni illustration to a tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann,* wandering the world like perambulating publishers’ advertisements. I crossed the street and followed the old man into the coffee house.
There the old man always behaved rather oddly, and lately the proprietor had begun to screw up his face disapprovingly from behind the counter every time the unwelcome customer entered his premises. For a start, the strange visitor never ordered anything. He would always go straight to the corner by the stove and sit down. If that place was taken, he would stand for a time in dumb consternation in front of the person sitting there, after which he would move off, seeming deeply puzzled, to another corner by the window. There he would pick a chair, lower himself slowly onto it, take off his hat, place it and his stick on the floor nearby, and then, leaning back, sit almost motionless for the next three or four hours. He had never been known to take up a newspaper, say a single word or even utter a sound. He would just sit there, staring straight ahead, but with such lifeless, expressionless eyes that one might have confidently wagered he neither saw nor heard anything around him. The dog, after turning around once or twice on the spot, would settle disconsolately at his feet, stick its muzzle between his boots, breathe deeply and stretch out to its full length, oblivious of all the world. These two might have been lying stone dead somewhere all day, and come to life at dusk merely to visit Müller’s coffee house, to act out some mysterious ritual. After sitting for his customary three or four hours, the old man would suddenly rise, pick up his hat and make for home – wherever that might be. The dog too would get up and, as always, head hung low and tail between its legs, automatically follow him at a slow pace. In the end the regulars began to avoid the old man as much as possible; they wouldn’t even sit near him, as though he produced a feeling of revulsion in them. He himself remained completely unaware of it all.
The regulars were predominantly German. They gathered there from the whole of Voznesensky Prospect; all of them had their own businesses – locksmiths, bakers, painters, milliners, saddlers – every one a patrician in the German sense of the word;* generally speaking, respectability was the thing at Müller’s. Not infrequently the proprietor himself would come over to his acquaintances, join them at their table, and a good quantity of punch would be consumed. His dogs and children would sometimes join them too, and the customers would pat them, both dogs and children. They all knew one another, and there was an atmosphere of mutual respect. And when the customers settled down to read German newspapers, the strains of ‘Ach, du lieber Augustin!’* could be heard from the adjoining room, played on a tinkly upright piano by the proprietor’s eldest daughter, a curly fair-haired wisp of a German girl who bore a close resemblance to a white mouse. The waltz was a great favourite. I was in the habit of going to Müller’s at the beginning of each month to read the Russian magazines that were available there.
When I entered the coffee house that March evening, I saw that the old man was already seated at the window, with the dog as usual stretched out at his feet. I took a seat in the corner, wondering to myself, “Why on earth did I come here? There was absolutely no need. I’m ill and ought to be off home to have a glass of tea and go to bed! Did I really come here just to stare at this old man?” I was suddenly irritated. “Why should I care about him?” I thought, recalling the strange feeling of disgust that I’d felt towards him while we were still outside. “And why should I bother about all these tedious Germans? Why this feeling of unreality? Why this groundless, pointless anxiety I’ve lately been aware of within myself and which has been plaguing me and – a point that had already been made by a deeply perceptive critic in a scathing review of my latest novel – preventing me from seeing things in their true light?” But even as I was fretfully turning all this over in my mind, I made no attempt to move; meanwhile my fever was rising so violently that in the end I was simply unwilling to leave the warmth of the room. I picked up a Frankfurt newspaper, read a couple of lines, and dozed off. The presence of the Germans did not bother me. They went on reading and smoking, and only occasionally, about every half-hour, would exchange with one another, in a hushed, disjointed manner, some snippet of Frankfurt news or some aphorism or joke by the famous wit Saphir* – after which they would again immerse their German selves in their reading, with a redoubled sense of national propriety.
I had been dozing for about half an hour and woke up shivering with cold. I really had to be getting home. But at that moment a dumb scene took place in the room, riveting my attention once more. I have already mentioned that as soon as the old man settled in his chair he would immediately fix his gaze on some object and hold it there the whole evening. Sometimes he would stare at me too in this mindlessly persistent, totally undiscerning manner, which gave me a most unpleasant sensation bordering on the unbearable, and I would hurriedly change my seat. This time the old man’s victim was a diminutive, stocky and very smartly dressed German with an upturned stiffly starched collar and an extraordinarily florid complexion. He was a trader who had just arrived from Riga, re
joicing in the name of Adam Ivanych Schulz – as I discovered later, a close friend of Müller’s, but who did not yet know the old man or many of the clientele. Happily engrossed in the pages of The Illustrated Village Barber and sipping his punch, he suddenly looked up and met the old man’s stare. This nonplussed him. Adam Ivanych was very touchy and uncompromising, as all self-respecting Germans are. It struck him as peculiarly offensive to be subjected to such close and unceremonious scrutiny. But, suppressing his indignation, he averted his eyes from the insistent gaze, mumbled something under his breath, and lapsed into silent refuge behind his paper. However, he was unable to resist peering suspiciously round the paper a couple of minutes later, only to meet the same steadfast gaze, the same absurd scrutiny. Adam Ivanych said nothing this time either. But when the whole thing was repeated a third time, he took umbrage and, in order to uphold the name of the fair city of Riga – of which he probably considered himself to be the rightful representative – and defend his own dignity, he braced himself for battle before this worthy gathering. He threw down his paper in annoyance and rapped the table sharply with the cane to which it was attached. Then, bursting with self-importance and crimson-faced – as much from the punch as from his sense of outrage – he fixed his small bloodshot eyes upon this disturbing old man. It seemed the two were trying to outstare each other, to see which one would be the first to lose his nerve and look away. The rap of the cane and the oddity of Adam Ivanych’s bearing attracted the attention of the other customers, who immediately stopped whatever they were doing and looked expectantly and in respectful silence at the two adversaries. The scene was becoming very comical. But the intensity of the flushed Adam Ivanych’s provocative gaze was totally wasted. The old man, oblivious of everything around him, continued to look straight at the furious Herr Schulz, and seemed quite unaware that he had become the centre of general attention; the man before him might as well have been on the moon. Adam Ivanych’s patience finally snapped, and he gave vent to his emotions.