I know positively from several hands that my mother was not a beauty, though I haven’t seen her portrait from that time, which exists somewhere. That means it was impossible to fall in love with her at first sight. For mere “amusement,” Versilov could have chosen another girl, and there was one like that, and unmarried besides, Anfisa Konstantinovna Sapozhkov, a house maid. And a man who arrived with Anton the Wretch and, on the basis of his rights as a landowner, violated the sacredness of marriage, even though it was of his household serf, would be very ashamed in his own eyes, because, I repeat, no more than a few months ago, that is, twenty years later, he spoke extremely seriously of this Anton the Wretch. Yet Anton only had a horse taken from him, and here it’s a wife! It means something very peculiar happened, and that was why Mlle. Sapozhkov lost (or won, in my opinion). I bothered him with all these questions a couple of times last year, when it was possible to talk with him (because it was not always possible to talk with him), and I noticed that, despite all his worldliness and the space of twenty years, he somehow made an extremely wry face. But I insisted. At least I remember him once murmuring somehow strangely, with that air of worldly squeamishness he repeatedly allowed himself with me, that my mother was a person of the defenseless sort, whom you don’t really fall in love with—on the contrary, not at all—but for some reason suddenly fall to pitying, for their meekness, is it, or for what, anyhow? No one ever knows, but you go on pitying for a long time; you pity and grow attached . . . “In short, my dear, it sometimes so happens that you cannot even rid yourself of it.” That’s what he told me; and if it really was so, then I’m forced to regard him as less of a stupid pup at that time than he gives himself out to have been. And that was just what I needed.
Anyhow, he started assuring me then that my mother fell in love with him out of “lowliness”: he might just as well have said out of serfdom! He lied in order to show off, lied against conscience, against honor and nobility!
I’ve said all this, of course, in some sort of praise of my mother, and yet I’ve already stated that I knew nothing about how she was then. Moreover, I precisely know all the imperviousness of that milieu and of those pathetic notions in which she had hardened since childhood and in which she remained afterwards for the rest of her life. Nevertheless, the harm was done. Incidentally, I must correct myself: having soared into the clouds, I forgot about the fact which, on the contrary, ought to have been put forward first of all—namely, that it started between them directly with the harm. (I hope the reader will not put on airs to the extent of not understanding at once what I mean to say.) In short, it started between them precisely in a landowner’s way, even though Mlle. Sapozhkov was bypassed. But here I’ll step in and state beforehand that I am by no means contradicting myself. For what, O Lord, what could a man like Versilov possibly have talked about at that time with a person like my mother, even in the event of the most irresistible love? I’ve heard from depraved people that very often, when a man comes together with a woman, he starts in complete silence, which, of course, is the height of monstrosity and nausea; nevertheless, Versilov, even if he had wanted to, would have been unable to start in any other way with my mother. Could he have started by explaining Polinka Sachs to her? And moreover, they couldn’t be bothered with Russian literature; on the contrary, according to his own words (he got carried away once), they hid in the corners, waited for each other on stairways, bounced away from each other like rubber balls, red-faced, if somebody passed by, and the “tyrant landowner” trembled before the least washer-woman, despite all his serf-owning rights. But though it started in a landowner’s way, it turned out to be not quite so, and, essentially, it’s still impossible to explain anything. There’s even more darkness. The sheer dimensions to which their love developed already constitute a riddle, because the first condition of men like Versilov is to drop the girl immediately once the goal is achieved. That, however, is not how it turned out. For a depraved “young pup” (and they were all depraved, all of them to a man—both progressives and retrogrades) to sin with a pretty, flirtatious serving girl (and my mother was not flirtatious) was not only possible but inevitable, especially considering his novelistic status as a young widower, and his idleness. But to fall in love for one’s whole life—that is too much. I can’t guarantee that he loved her, but that he dragged her with him all his life is quite true.
I’ve posed many questions, but there is one most important question which, I’ll note, I’ve never dared to ask my mother directly, though I’ve become quite close to her over the last year and, moreover, as a crude and ungrateful pup who finds them guilty before him, have been quite unceremonious with her. The question is the following: How could she, she herself, already married for half a year, and crushed, too, by all the notions of the legitimacy of marriage, crushed like a strengthless fly, she, who respected her Makar Ivanovich as nothing less than some sort of God, how could she, in a matter of two weeks, go so far as such a sin? For my mother wasn’t a depraved woman, was she? On the contrary, I’ll say now beforehand, that it is even difficult to imagine anyone being purer in soul, and that for all her life afterwards. The only possible explanation is that she did it unawares, that is, not in the sense that lawyers now affirm about their murderers and thieves, but under that strong impression which, given a certain simpleheartedness in the victim, takes over fatally and tragically. Who knows, maybe she fell desperately in love . . . with the fashion of his clothes, with the Parisian parting of his hair, with his French talk, precisely French, of which she understood not a sound, that romance he sang at the piano, fell in love with something she had never seen or heard before (and he was very handsome), and at the same time fell in love, to the point of prostration, with all of him, with all his fashions and romances. I’ve heard that that sometimes happened with serving girls in the time of serfdom, and with the most honest of them. I understand that, and he’s a scoundrel who explains it by serfdom and “lowliness” alone! And so it means that this young man could have enough of that direct and seductive power in him to attract a being hitherto so pure and, above all, a being so completely different from himself, from a totally different world and different land, and to such obvious ruin? That it was to ruin—that I hope my mother has always understood; only when she went to it, she wasn’t thinking of ruin at all; but it’s always like that with these “defenseless” ones: they know it’s ruin, and yet they get into it.
Having sinned, they immediately confessed. He wittily recounted to me how he had sobbed on Makar Ivanovich’s shoulder, summoning him to his study on purpose for the occasion, and she—at the time she was lying unconscious somewhere in her maid’s closet . . .
VI
BUT ENOUGH OF questions and scandalous details. Versilov, having bought out my mother from Makar Ivanovich, soon left, and since then, as I have already written above, began dragging her with him almost everywhere, except on those occasions when he was away for a long time; then he most often left her in the custody of the aunt, that is, Tatyana Pavlovna Prutkov, who always turned up from somewhere on such occasions. They lived in Moscow, lived in various other villages and cities, even abroad, and finally in Petersburg. Of all that later, if it’s worth it. I’ll say only that a year after Makar Ivanovich, I came into the world, then a year later my sister, and then, ten or eleven years later—a sickly boy, my younger brother, who died after a few months. The painful delivery of this child put an end to my mother’s beauty, or so at least I was told: she quickly began to age and weaken.
But, all the same, connections with Makar Ivanovich were never broken off. Wherever the Versilovs were, whether they lived in one place for several years or moved about, Makar Ivanovich never failed to inform “the family” of himself. Some sort of strange relations took shape, somewhat solemn and almost serious. Among the gentry, something comical would inevitably have mixed into such relations, I know that; but here it didn’t happen. Letters were sent twice a year, neither more nor less, and they were extremely like on
e another. I’ve seen them; there was little of anything personal in them; on the contrary, they contained, as far as possible, only solemn news about the most general events and the most general feelings, if one can say that about feelings: news of his own health first of all, then questions about health, then good wishes, solemn regards and blessings—that’s all. This generality and impersonality seem precisely to constitute all the propriety of tone and all the highest knowledge of behavior in that milieu. “To my dearly beloved and esteemed spouse Sofya Andreevna I send my humblest salutations . . .” “To our beloved children I send my eternally steadfast parental blessing.” The children would all be listed by name, as they accumulated, and I was there, too. I will note in this regard that Makar Ivanovich was clever enough never to refer to “his honor the most esteemed master Andrei Petrovich” as his “benefactor,” though he invariably sent his humblest salutations, asking for his good favor and for God’s blessing upon him. Replies were quickly sent to Makar Ivanovich by my mother, and were always written in exactly the same vein. Versilov, naturally, did not participate in this correspondence. Makar Ivanovich wrote from various ends of Russia, from towns and monasteries, in which he sometimes stayed for long stretches of time. He became what’s known as a wanderer. He never asked for anything; on the other hand, about once every three years he unfailingly came home for a while and stayed right at my mother’s, who, as always happened, had her own apartment separate from Versilov’s apartment. I’ll have to speak about that later, but here I’ll only note that Makar Ivanovich did not sprawl on a sofa in the drawing room, but modestly settled somewhere behind a partition. He never stayed long—five days, a week.
I forgot to say that he was terribly fond and respectful of his last name, “Dolgoruky.” Naturally, that was ridiculously stupid. The stupidest thing was that he liked his last name precisely because there were princes named Dolgoruky. An odd notion, completely upside down.
If I said the whole family was always together, that was without me, naturally. I was like an outcast and had been placed with other people almost from birth. But there was no special intention here, it simply turned out that way for some reason. When my mother gave birth to me, she was still young and beautiful, and that meant he needed her, and a howling baby would naturally have been a hindrance to everything, especially when traveling. That’s why it happened that until I was twenty I saw almost nothing of my mother, except for two or three fleeting occasions. It came about not from my mother’s feelings, but from Versilov’s contempt for people.
VII
NOW ABOUT SOMETHING quite different.
A month earlier, that is, a month before the nineteenth of September, in Moscow, I decided to renounce them all and go into my own idea for good. I set it down like that: “go into my own idea,” because this expression may signify almost my whole main thought—what I live for in the world. Of what this “my own idea” is, all too much will be said later. In the solitary dreaming of my many years of Moscow life, it took shape in me, from the sixth class of high school on, and since then has perhaps not left me for a moment. It swallowed up my whole life. I lived in dreams even before that, lived ever since childhood in a dreamlike realm of a certain hue; but with the appearance of this main idea that swallowed up everything in me, my dreams consolidated and all at once molded themselves into a certain form; from stupid they became reasonable. School did not interfere with dreams; nor did it interfere with the idea. I’ll add, however, that I did poorly in the last year, whereas up to the seventh grade I had always been one of the first, and it happened owing to the same idea, owing to a conclusion, maybe a false one, that I drew from it. So it was not school that interfered with the idea, but the idea that interfered with school. It also interfered with the university. Having finished high school, I immediately intended not only to break radically with everyone, but, if need be, even with the whole world, though I was then only nineteen. I wrote to those I had to, through those I had to, in Petersburg, saying they should leave me in peace for good, not send me any more money for my keep, and, if possible, forget me entirely (that is, naturally, in case they remembered me at all), and finally—that I wouldn’t go to the university, “not for anything.” I was faced with an irrefutable dilemma: either the university and further education, or postpone putting the “idea” to work for another four years; I stood intrepidly for the idea, for I was mathematically convinced. Versilov, my father, whom I had seen only once in my life, for a moment, when I was only ten years old (and who in that one moment had managed to impress me), Versilov, in answer to my letter, which, incidentally, was not sent to him, summoned me to Petersburg himself in a letter written with his own hand, promising me a private post. This summons from a dry and proud man, contemptuous and negligent in my regard, who until now, having produced me and thrown me among strangers, not only did not know me at all, but never even repented of it (who knows, maybe he had a vague and imprecise notion of my very existence, because it turned out later that it was not he who paid for my upkeep in Moscow but others), a summons from this man, I say, who so suddenly remembered me and deigned to write to me in his own hand—this summons enticed me and decided my fate. Strangely, one of the things I liked in his little letter (one small page of small format) was that he didn’t say a word about the university, did not ask me to alter my decision, did not reproach me for not wanting to study, in short, did not produce any parental folderol of that sort, as usually happens, and yet that was precisely bad on his part, in the sense that it testified still more to his negligence about me. I also decided to go because it didn’t interfere in the least with my main dream: “I’ll see what comes of it,” I reasoned, “in any case, I’ll be connected with him only for a time, maybe a very short time. But the moment I see that this step, even if it’s conditional and small, still moves me further away from the main thing, I’ll immediately break with them, drop everything, and withdraw into my shell.” Precisely into a shell! “I’ll hide in it like a turtle”—the comparison pleased me very much. “I won’t be alone,” I went on calculating, going around in a fuddle all those last days in Moscow, “I’ll never be alone now as I was for all those terrible years before: I’ll have my idea with me, which I’ll never betray, even in the event that I like them all there, and they give me happiness, and I live with them for ten years!” It was this impression, I’ll note beforehand, it was precisely this doubleness of my plans and aims, that was already determined in Moscow and that never left me for a moment in Petersburg (for I don’t know if there was a single day in Petersburg that I didn’t set up as my final date for breaking with them and going away)—this doubleness, I say, was also, it seems, one of the main reasons for my many imprudences committed that year, many abominations, even many low acts and, naturally, stupid ones.
Of course, a father had suddenly appeared, whom I had never had before. This thought intoxicated me both while I was packing in Moscow and on the train. The fact of a father was nothing, and I disliked tender feelings, but this man did not want to know me and humiliated me, while all those years I had dreamed long and hard of him (if one can say that about dreaming). Each of my dreams since childhood had echoed with him, had hovered around him, had in the final result come down to him. I don’t know whether I hated or loved him, but he filled all my future, all my reckoning in life, with himself—and that happened on its own, it went together with my growing up.
Yet another powerful circumstance influenced my departure from Moscow, yet another temptation, which even then, three months before leaving (that is, when there had not yet been any mention of Petersburg), made my heart heave and pound! I was also drawn into this unknown ocean because I could enter it directly as the lord and master even of other people’s destinies, and what people! But it was magnanimous and not despotic feelings that seethed in me—I warn you beforehand, so there will be no mistaking my words. Versilov might think (if he deigned to think about me) that this was a little boy coming, a recent high-school student, an adol
escent, for whom the whole world was a marvel. And yet I already knew all his innermost secrets and had a most important document on me, for which (now I know it for certain) he would have given several years of his life, if I had revealed the whole secret to him then. However, I notice that I’m setting a lot of riddles. Feelings can’t be described without facts. Besides, more than enough will be said about all that in its place; that’s why I’ve taken up the pen. And to write this way is like raving or a cloud.
The Adolescent Page 4
