At our last meeting we noticed the disquieting duality by which most of Dostoevsky’s characters are racked and driven, and which prompts Raskolnikov’s friend to say à propos of the hero of Crime and Punishment: “It really looks as if there were in him two opposite natures showing themselves in turn.”
And were these natures never visible but in turn, all would still be well, but we have seen how they often come to manifest themselves simultaneously. We have watched each of these contradictory impulses exhausted, depreciated, and inhibited by its own expression and manifestation, giving way to its opposite, and the hero is never nearer love than when he has just given exaggerated expression to his hatred, never nearer hatred than in the exaggeration of his love.
In all Dostoevsky’s creations, in his women characters especially, we detect an uneasy presentiment of their own instability. The dread of being unable to maintain for long the same mood or resolve drives them often to disconcertingly abrupt action. For instance, Lizaveta in The Possessed makes up her mind with great alacrity, because she knows from long experience that her resolutions never last more than a minute.
To-day I propose to study some of the results of this strange duality; but first of all let me ask whether this duality really exists, or whether Dostoevsky only imagines it? Does life provide him with any examples? Is it observed from Nature, or does he merely obligingly yield to his imaginative bent?
Nature, according to Oscar Wilde’s Intentions, copies the model set her by Art, and this apparent paradox he delights in illustrating by several specious insinuations, the gist of his argument being that Nature—“as you will not have failed to observe”—has taken to imitating Corot’s landscapes nowadays!
His meaning is undoubtedly that, accustomed to looking at Nature in a manner that is become conventional, we recognize only what Art has educated us to discern. When a painter essays to transmute and express in his work a personal vision, Nature’s new aspect seems at first brush paradoxal, insincere, freakish even. However, we speedily grow used to contemplating her with the bias given by this new method, and recognize only what the artist pointed out to us. Hence, to eyes unprejudiced, Nature would really seem to imitate Art.
What I have said about painting applies equally to novels and the intimate landscapes of psychology. We exist on given premises, and readily acquire the habit of seeing the world, not so much as it actually is, but as we have been told and persuaded it is. How many diseases were non-existent, so to speak, until diagnosed and described! How many strange, pathological, abnormal states we identify round us, aye, within us, once our eyes have been opened by reading Dostoevsky! Yes, I firmly believe he opens our eyes to certain phenomena;—I do not necessarily mean rare ones, but simply phenomena to which we had been so far blind.
Faced with the complexity almost every human being offers, the eye tends inevitably, spontaneously, unconsciously almost, to simplify to some extent.
Such is the French novelist’s instinctive effort. He singles out the chief elements in a character, tries to discern clear-cut lines in a figure and reproduce the contours unbroken. Whether Balzac or another, no matter: the desire, the need, even, for stylisation is all-important. None the less I believe it would be a gross mistake—one to which I fear many a foreigner is prone—to scorn and discredit the psychology of French literature on account of the sharp outlines it presents, the complete absence of indistinctness, and the lack of shading.
Remember that Nietzsche with rare perspicacity recognized and proclaimed the extraordinary superiority of our French psychologists, judging them—and to an even greater degree perhaps our moralists—Europe’s most eminent masters. True that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we had authors of unrivalled analytical powers: I have our moralists chiefly in mind. But I am not wholly satisfied that our present-day novelists are able to compete with them, for here in France we have an unfortunate habit of keeping to formulæ which soon become mechanical, and of resting content with them instead of pressing onwards.
I have already remarked elsewhere that La Rochefoucauld, while rendering splendid service to psychology, had in a measure arrested its development by reason of the very perfection of his Maxims. I must apologize for quoting myself, but I should find some difficulty in improving on these lines I wrote in 1910:
“When La Rochefoucauld bethought himself of reducing and ascribing every generous impulse of the human heart to the solicitations of personal vanity, I doubt whether it was not less a proof of rare insight than a check to further and more pertinent investigation. The formula, once found, was strictly adhered to, and for two hundred years people lived content with this interpretation. The most sceptical of psychologists passed as the most highly enlightened could he but detect in the noblest, most forgiving actions the hidden promptings of selfishness—losing sight thereby of all that is contradictory in the human soul. I do not make bold to criticize La Rochefoucauld’s impeachment of personal vanity, but I most definitely take exception to his limiting himself to this one consideration and believing that with amour propre the final word had been spoken. I blame still more his successors for carrying the question no further.”[78]
Throughout French literature we find a horror of the formless, a certain impatience with what is not yet formed. This is how I account for the very small place taken by the child in French novels as compared with English or Russian. Scarcely a child is to be met with in our novels, and such authors as do introduce children—all too infrequently at that—are conventional, dull, and awkward.
In Dostoevsky’s works children are numerous, and it is worth noting that the majority of his characters—and of these the most important—are still young, hardly set. It seems to be the genesis of feelings that interests him chiefly, for he depicts them as indistinct, in their larval state, so to speak.
He has a predilection for baffling cases that challenge accepted psychology and ethics. It is plain that in the midst of everyday morality and psychology he himself does not feel at his ease. His temperament clashes painfully with certain rules accepted as established, which neither please nor satisfy him.
We find a similar uneasiness and lack of satisfaction in Rousseau. We know that Dostoevsky was an epileptic and that Rousseau went mad. I shall dwell later on the function of the morbid state in shaping their thought. Let us rest content to-day with recognizing in this abnormal physiological condition an invitation, as it were, to rebel against the psychology and the ethics of the common herd.
In man are many things unexplained, aye, unexplainable maybe, but once we admit the duality I discussed a moment ago, we cannot but admire the logic with which Dostoevsky pursues its consequences. In the first place, note that nearly all Dostoevsky’s characters are polygamists; I mean that by way of satisfying, doubtless, the complexity of their natures, they are almost all capable of several attachments simultaneously. Another consequence, and, if I may use the term, corollary to this argument, is the practical impossibility of producing jealousy. These creatures simply do not know what jealousy means!
Consider, first of all, the cases of multiple attachments he puts before us. Prince Myshkin is divided between Aglaïa Epantchin and Nastasya Filippovna. “I love her with my whole heart,” he says, referring to Nastasya.
“And at the same time you have declared your love for Aglaïa Ivanovna?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
“How so? Then you must want to love both of them?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
“Upon my word, Prince, think what you are saying.... Do you know what, the most likely thing is that you have never loved either of them! And how can you love two at once? That’s interesting!”[79]
And each of the two heroines is likewise torn between two loves. Think too of Dmitri Karamazov between Grushenka and Natasya Ivanovna, and do not forget Versilov. Many another instance I could quote!
You may think one of their loves was of the flesh, the other of the spirit. Much too obvious a solution, I consider. Besides, on this score, Dostoevsky is never perfectly straightforward. He leads us on to numerous suppositions, then leaves us in the lurch. It was not until I was reading The Idiot for the fourth time that I became conscious of a fact now plain as daylight: all the whims and moods in Madame Epantchin’s attitude towards Prince Myshkin, all the hesitancy of Aglaïa, her daughter and the Prince’s betrothed, might well be due to the intuition these two women had (the mother in particular, of course) of some mystery in his character, and to their uncertainty whether he could prove an effectual husband. Dostoevsky lays stress several times on Prince Myshkin’s chastity, and doubtless this very chastity filled Madame Epantchin, his future mother-in-law, with uneasiness.
“There is no doubt that the mere fact he could come and see Aglaïa without hindrance, that he was allowed to talk to her, sit with her, walk with her, was the utmost bliss to him; and who knows, perhaps he would have been satisfied with that for the rest of his life. It was just this contentment that Lizaveta Prokofyevna (Madame Epantchin) secretly dreaded. She understood him; she dreaded many a thing in secret, which she could not have put into words herself.”[80]
And note what to me seems most important: in this instance, as indeed frequently, the less physical love is the stronger.
I have no wish to force Dostoevsky’s idea. I do not suggest that divided love and absence of jealousy open up the way to complaisant community of possession, at least not always, no, nor necessarily: they lead rather to renunciation. But, as I reminded you, Dostoevsky is not over frank on this subject....
The question of jealousy preoccupied Dostoevsky unceasingly. In one of his first books, Another Man’s Wife, we find this paradox: Othello must not be looked upon as a typical example of real jealousy. Perhaps it behoved us to see in this contention nothing more than an urgent desire to go against current opinion.
But later on Dostoevsky comes back to the point, and speaks again of Othello in A Raw Youth, one of this last books. “Versilov said once that Othello did not kill Desdemona and afterwards himself because he was jealous, but because he had been robbed of his ideal.”[81]
Is this really a paradox? I recently came across a similar assertion in Coleridge—the similarity is so marked that I wonder if Dostoevsky had not perchance been familiar with it.
“Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago.... Othello had no life but in Desdemona: the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart.... But yet the pity of it, Iago. Oh, Iago, the pity of it!”
Constitutionally incapable of jealousy, then, Dostoevsky’s heroes? Perhaps I am going a little too far, or, at least, it would be seemly to modify my statement slightly. It may be said that of jealousy these creatures know only the suffering it brings, a suffering which is not complicated by any feeling of hatred for their rivals: this point is of primary importance. If hatred there be, as in the Eternal Husband, which case we shall examine presently, the hatred is counterbalanced and restrained by a strange, imperious affection for the rival. But most frequently there is no suspicion of hatred, nor even suffering. And now we are venturing on a precipitous path where we have every chance of overtaking Jean-Jacques Rousseau, equably tolerating the favours shown by Madame de Warens to his rival, Claude Anet, or, his thoughts full of Madame d’Houdetot, writing in his Confessions:
“Anyway, no matter how ardent the passion I had conceived for her, I found it as sweet to be the confidant as to be the object of her affections, and never for a moment did I consider her lover as my rival, I always held him my friend. (He refers to Saint-Lambert.) People will say this is not love: maybe not, perhaps it is more than love.”
Similarly, in The Possessed, we are told that Stavrogin, far from feeling jealous, developed a great friendship for his rival.
At this point I propose a short detour to help us probe the question more deeply and grasp Dostoevsky’s conception. When I recently re-read most of his novels, I was fascinated by Dostoevsky’s manner of passing from one book to another. Undoubtedly it was natural that after The House of the Dead he should write Raskolnikov’s story in Crime and Punishment, the story of the crime that sent the latter to Siberia. More absorbing still to watch how the last pages of this novel lead up to The Idiot. You remember we left Raskolnikov in Siberia so completely regenerated in mind that he said the happenings of his past life had lost all importance for him: his crimes, his repentance, his martyrdom, even, seemed to him like the life-history of a stranger.
“He was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of feeling.”[82] This is the frame of mind in which we find Prince Myshkin at the beginning of The Idiot, a frame of mind which could be, and in Dostoevsky’s eyes doubtless was, the Christian state par excellence. I shall revert to this point.
Dostoevsky seems to establish in the human soul—or simply recognizes as already existing—a kind of stratification. I can distinguish in the characters of his novels three strata or regions. First the intellectual, remote from the soul and whence proceed the worst temptations. Therein dwells, according to Dostoevsky, the treacherous demonic element. For the moment I am concerned only with the second region, the region of passion, ravaged and desolated by storms; but tragic though the happenings be that these storms determine, the very soul of Dostoevsky’s characters is scarcely affected. There is a region deeper still, where passion exists not. This is the region that resurrection (and I grant the word the full significance bestowed on it by Tolstoy), re-birth, in Christ’s words, enables us to reach as Raskolnikov reached it. In this region Myshkin lives and moves.
The transition from The Idiot to the Eternal Husband is more interesting still. You surely remember that at the close of The Idiot we leave Prince Myshkin at the bedside of Nastasya Filippovna whom her lover Rogozhin, the prince’s rival, has just murdered. There stand the rivals, face to face, close to each other. Will they kill each other? No, indeed! They weep together, and spend a wakeful night stretched out side by side at the foot of Nastasya’s bed.
“Every time the delirious man (Rogozhin) broke into screaming or babble, he hastened to pass his trembling hand softly over his hair and cheeks, as though caressing and soothing him.”[83]
Almost the theme of The Eternal Husband! The Idiot dates from 1868, The Eternal Husband from 1870. Some men of letters—and as clever a critic as Marcel Schwob was amongst them—consider the latter novel Dostoevsky’s masterpiece. His masterpiece! Perhaps that is excessive. But, at any rate, it is a masterpiece, and it is interesting to hear what Dostoevsky himself had to say about the book.
“I have a story,” he wrote to his friend Strakhov on March 18, 1869, “not a very long one. I had already thought of writing it three or four years ago, the year my brother died, encouraged by some words of Apollon Gregoriev who, praising my Notes from Underground, said to me, ‘Just write something in this style.’ But it will be something quite different, as far as form goes: the foundation, however, will still be the same. My everlasting theme.... I can write the story very quickly, because there is not a word or line of it but what is clear to me. It is already written in my head, although nothing is down on paper so far.”[84]
And in a letter dated October 27, 1869, he continues:
“Two-thirds of the story are almost completely written and recopied. I’ve done my best to cut it down, but that was impossible. It is not a question, though, of quantity, but of quality. Of its quality I cannot speak, for I have no notion myself: others will decide that point.”[85]
And here is what the others have to say:
“Your short story,” writes Strakhov, “is making a very lively impression here, and will, in my opinion, have an unchallenged success. It is one of the best worked-out of your novels, and by reason of its subject, one of the most interesting you have ever written. I am speaking of Trusotsky: the majority will have difficulty in understanding this character, but the book is being read and will be read eagerly.”
Notes from Underground appeared a short time before this volume. I believe that with these Notes we reach the height of Dostoevsky’s career. I consider this book (and I am not alone in my belief) as the keystone of his entire works. But with it we return to the intellectual region, so I shall not speak further of it to-day. Let us linger with The Eternal Husband in the realm of passion. In this short tale there are but two characters, the husband and the lover. Concentration could be carried no further. The whole book responds to an ideal we should nowadays call classical: the action itself, or at least the initial fact that provokes the drama, had already taken place, like in one of Ibsen’s plays.
Velchaninov is come to that time of life when the past begins to look different to his eyes:
“Now that he was verging on the forties, the brightness and good humour were almost extinguished. These eyes, which were already surrounded by tiny wrinkles, had begun to betray the cynicism of a worn-out man of doubtful morals, a duplicity, an ever-increasing irony, and another shade of feeling, which was new: a shade of sadness and of pain—a sort of absent-minded sadness as though about nothing in particular, and yet acute. This sadness was specially marked when he was alone.”[86]
What is happening with Velchaninov? What does happen at this age, at this turning point in life? So far, we have had the joy out of life; but suddenly we realize that our actions, the happenings we have brought about, once separated from us and launched out into the world, like a skiff on the sea, continue a separate existence often unknown to us. George Eliot speaks admirably of this in Adam Bede. Yes, the events in his own past no longer appear to Velchaninov in quite the same light, because he suddenly realizes his responsibility. At this period he meets one whom he knew in bygone days, the husband of a woman who had been his mistress. This husband appears in rather whimsical fashion. It is impossible to decide whether he is avoiding Velchaninov or pursuing him. He seems to spring up without warning from between the very paving stones in the street. He wanders around mysteriously, haunting the vicinity of Velchaninov’s house, unrecognized at first.
I shall not attempt to recount the gist of the book, nor how after a late night visit from Pavel Pavlovitch Trusotsky, the husband, Velchaninov decides to call upon him. Their standpoints, obscure at first, become clearer:
“‘Tell me, Pavel Pavlovitch, you are not alone here, then? Whose little girl is that I found with you just now?’
“Pavel Pavlovitch was positively amazed and raised his eyebrows, but he looked frankly and pleasantly at Velchaninov.
“‘Whose little girl? Why, it’s Liza!’ he said, with an affable smile.
“‘What Liza?’ muttered Velchaninov, with a sort of inward tremor. The shock was too sudden. When he came in and saw Liza, just before, he was surprised, but had absolutely no presentiment of the truth, and thought nothing particular about her.
“‘Yes, our Liza, our daughter Liza!’ Pavel Pavlovitch smiled.
“‘Your daughter? Do you mean that you and Natalya Vassilyevna had children?’ Velchaninov asked timidly and mistrustfully in a very low voice.
“‘Why, of course! But there, upon my word, how should you have heard of it? What am I thinking about! It was after you went away God blessed us with her!’
“Pavel Pavlovitch positively jumped up from his chair, in some agitation, though it seemed agreeable too.
“‘I heard nothing about it,’ said Velchaninov, and he turned pale.
“‘To be sure, to be sure, from whom could you have heard it?’ said Pavel Pavlovitch, in a voice weak with emotion, ‘My poor wife and I had lost all hope, as no doubt you remember, and suddenly God sent us this blessing, and what it meant to me He only knows! Just a year after you went away, I believe. No, not a year, not nearly a year. Wait a bit—why, you left us, if my memory does not deceive me, in October or November, I believe.’
“‘I left T—— at the beginning of September, the twelfth of September, I remember it very well.’
“‘In September, was it? H’m! what was I thinking about?’ cried Pavel Pavlovitch, much surprised. ‘Well, if that’s so, let me see, you went away on the twelfth of September, and Liza was born on the eighth of May, so—September—October—November—December—January—February—March—April—a little over eight months! And if you only knew how my poor wife ...’
“‘Show me—call her,’ Velchaninov faltered in a breaking voice.”[87]
And thus Velchaninov learns that his passing whim, by which he had set so little store, has left its mark. At once the question presents itself—does the husband know? Almost to the very end of the book the reader is left in doubt. Dostoevsky keeps us undecided, and this very indecision tortures Velchaninov. He does not know where he is. Or rather, it seems to us early in the day that Pavel Pavlovitch knows, but feigns ignorance, precisely in order to torture the lover by the indecision he skilfully maintains in his mind.
Here is one way of considering this strange book. The Eternal Husband depicts the struggle between genuine and sincere feeling on one hand, and conventional feeling, accepted and current psychology on the other.
“There is but one way out—a duel,” cries Velchaninov. But you realize what a base issue that is, bringing satisfaction to no existing feeling, and simply pandering to an artificial conception of honour, one I touched on lately, a Western conception, for which we have no use here. We soon realize that, in his heart of hearts, Pavel Pavlovitch hugs his very jealousy. Yes, he positively loves and welcomes his suffering. This eagerness to suffer played already an important part in Notes from Underground.
In France, where the Russians are concerned, there has been much talk, in imitation of De Vogüé, of a religion of suffering. We French love to hear a formula, and to use one! It is one easy way of naturalizing an author and assigning him to his place in the show-case. Our mind likes precise data to hold fast by; and once satisfied, what need for thought or personal contact?—Nietzsche? Oh, yes! “The superman. Be ruthless. Live dangerously.”—Tolstoy? “Non-resistance to evil.”—Ibsen? “Northern mists.”—Darwin? “Man is descended from the monkey. The struggle for life.”—D’Annunzio? “The religion of beauty.” Woe betide the authors whose ideas refuse to be reduced to a formula! The bulk of the reading public simply cannot tolerate them (and Barrès realized this when to his merchandise he affixed the label: La Terre et Les Morts).
Yes, in France we tend to deceive ourselves with words, and believe that everything possible has been achieved and that it is time to apply the closure and pass on, once the formula has been found. In the same way we believed victory already in our grasp, thanks to Joffre and his “wearing down the enemy,” or to Russia and her “steam-roller advance.”
A religion of suffering ... let us eliminate at once the possibility of misinterpretation. It is not a question, or rather not solely a question, of vicarious suffering, the world-wide suffering before which Raskolnikov humbles himself to lie at Sonia the prostitute’s feet, or Father Zossima at Dmitri Karamazov the predestined parricide’s, but a theory of personal suffering.
Throughout the whole book, Velchaninov keeps asking himself whether Trusotsky is jealous or not, whether he knows all or nothing. The question is absurd: of course Trusotsky knows! Of course he is jealous, but with the jealousy he fosters and cherishes within himself. It is the torment of jealousy that Trusotsky desires and enjoys, just as we saw the attachment of the hero of the Underground to his toothache.
Of the hideous torment of the jealous husband we learn practically nothing. Dostoevsky reveals it only indirectly, by virtue of the cruel suffering Trusotsky inflicts on the creatures round about him, especially on the little girl whom he adores in spite of all. The child’s anguish helps us to measure the intensity of the father’s own suffering. Pavel Pavelovitch tortures the child, whom he loves passionately; he can no more hate her than he can hate his wife’s lover:
“‘Do you know what Liza has been to me?’—he suddenly recalled the drunkard’s exclamation and felt that that exclamation was sincere, not a pose, and that there was love in it. How could that monster be so cruel to a child whom he loved so much? Is it credible? But every time he made haste to dismiss that question, and, as it were, brush it aside; there was something awful in that question, something he could not bear and could not solve.”[88]
We may rest assured that the keenest of his suffering is due to his inability to become jealous: of jealousy he has only the suffering, and he cannot hate the man who was preferred to himself. The very sufferings he inflicts on his rival, those he would fain inflict upon him, the torments he inflicts on his little daughter, are a kind of mystic counterpart that he sets to the horror and the anguish in whose depths he is struggling. None the less, he dreams of revenge: not that he has any precise desire to avenge himself, but he tells himself that he must seek revenge, as perhaps the sole means of freeing himself from such awful torments.
“Habit is everything, even in love,” says Vauvenargues,[89] and you remember La Rochefoucauld’s maxim? “How many men would never have known love if they had never heard of love?” Are we not justified in asking: How many would never be jealous, if they did not hear jealousy spoken about, and had not persuaded themselves that it was imperative to be jealous?
Yes, convention is the great breeder of falsehood. How many are forced to play their life long a part strangely foreign to themselves? And how difficult it is to discern in ourselves a feeling not previously described, labelled, and present before us as a model! Man finds it easier to imitate everything than to invent anything. How many are content to live their lives warped by untruth, and find, none the less, in the very falsity of convention more comfort and less need for effort than in straightforward affirmation of their personal feelings! Such affirmation would require of them an effort of invention utterly beyond them.
“‘I’ll tell you a killing little anecdote, Alexey Ivanovitch,’ said Trusotsky. ‘I thought of it this morning in the carriage. I wanted to tell you of it then. You said just now “hangs on people’s necks.” You remember perhaps Semyon Petrovitch Livstov, he used to come and see us when you were in T——: well, his younger brother, who was also a young Petersburg swell, was in attendance on the Governor at V——, and he too was distinguished for various qualities. He had a quarrel with Gobulenko, a colonel, and considered himself insulted, but he swallowed the affront and concealed it, and meanwhile Gobulenko cut him out with the lady of his heart and made her an offer. And what do you think? This Livtsov formed a genuine friendship with Gobulenko, he quite made it up with him, and, what’s more, insisted on being his best man: he held the wedding crown and when they came out from under it, he went up to kiss and congratulate Gobulenko. And in the presence of the Governor and all the honourable company, with his swallow-tail coat, and his hair in curl, he sticks the bridegroom in the stomach with a knife—so that he rolled over! His own best man! What a disgrace! And, what’s more, when he’d stabbed him like that, he rushed about crying: “Alas, what have I done! Oh, what is it that I’ve done!” with floods of tears, trembling all over, flinging himself on people’s necks, even ladies. “Ah, what have I done!” he kept saying, “what have I done now!” He—he—he! he was killing. Though one feels sorry for Gobulenko, perhaps, but after all, he recovered.’
“‘I don’t see why you told me this story,’ observed Velchaninov, frowning sternly.
“‘Why, all because he stuck the knife in him, you know,’ Pavel Pavlovitch tittered....”[90]
And in similar fashion, Pavel Pavlovitch’s real spontaneous feeling expresses itself, when he is unexpectedly obliged to nurse Velchaninov, down with a liver complaint.
“The sick man fell asleep suddenly, a minute after lying down. The unnatural strain upon him that day, in the shattered state of his health, had brought on a sudden crisis, and he was as weak as a child. But the pain asserted itself again and weariness; and an hour later he woke up and painfully got up from the sofa. The storm had subsided, the room was full of tobacco smoke, on the table stood an empty bottle, and Pavel Pavlovitch was asleep on another sofa. He was lying on his back, with his head on the sofa cushion, fully dressed and with his boots on. His lorgnette had slipped out of his pocket, and was hanging down almost to the floor.”[91]
Strange how Dostoevsky, when leading us through the strangest by-paths of psychology, ever must needs add the most precise and infinitesimal of realistic details, in order to make more secure an edifice which otherwise would appear the extreme expression of phantasy and imagination.
Velchaninov is in great pain, and immediately Trusotsky applies every possible means of alleviating it.
“But Pavel Pavlovitch, goodness knows why, seemed beside himself as though it were a question of saving his own son. Without heeding Velchaninov’s protests, he insisted on the necessity of compresses and also of two or three cups of weak tea to be drunk on the spot, ‘and not simply hot, but boiling.’ He ran to Mavra, without waiting for permission, with her laid a fire in the kitchen, which always stood empty, and blew up the samovar; at the same time he succeeded in getting the sick man to bed, took off his clothes, wrapped him up in a quilt, and within twenty minutes had prepared tea and compresses.
“‘This is a hot plate, scalding hot!’ he said, almost ecstatically, applying the heated plate, wrapped up in a napkin, on Velchaninov’s aching chest. ‘There are no other compresses, and plates, I swear on my honour, will be even better; they were laid on Pyotr Kuzmitch, I saw it with my own eyes, and did it with my own hands. One may die of it, you know. Drink your tea, swallow it; never mind about scalding yourself! Life is too precious for one to be squeamish.’
“He quite flustered Mavra, who was half asleep; the plates were changed every two or three minutes. After the third plate, and the second cup of tea, swallowed at a gulp, Velchaninov felt a sudden relief.
“‘If once they’ve shifted the pain, thank God, it’s a good sign!’ said Pavel Pavlovitch, and he ran joyfully to fetch a fresh plate and a fresh cup of tea.
“‘If only we can ease the pain, if only we can keep it under!’ he kept repeating.
“Half an hour later the pain was much less, but the sick man was so exhausted that, in spite of Pavel Pavlovitch’s entreaties, he refused to put up with ‘just one more nice little plate.’ He was so weak that everything was dark before his eyes.
“‘Sleep, sleep!’ he repeated in a faint voice.
“‘To be sure,’ Pavel Pavlovitch assented.
“‘You’ll stay the night—what time is it?’
“‘It’s nearly two o’clock, it’s quarter to.’
“‘You’ll stay the night?’
“‘I will, I will.’
“A minute later the sick man called Pavel Pavlovitch again. ‘You, you,’ he muttered, when the latter had run up and was bending over him: ‘You are much better than I am! I understand it all—all.... Thank you.’
“‘Sleep, sleep,’ whispered Pavel Pavlovitch, and he hastened on tiptoe to his sofa.
“As he fell asleep, the invalid heard Pavel Pavlovitch noiselessly making a bed for himself, and taking off his clothes. Finally, putting out the candle, and almost holding his breath for fear of waking the patient, he stretched himself on his sofa.”[92]
And yet, a quarter of an hour later, Velchaninov catches Trusotsky, who believes him sound asleep, bending over him with intent to murder him.
“Pavel Pavlovitch wanted to kill him, but didn’t know he wanted to kill him! ‘It’s senseless, but that’s the truth,’ thought Velchaninov.”[93]
And yet he is not satisfied!
“‘And can it be that it was all true?’ he exclaimed again, suddenly raising his head from the pillow and opening his eyes. ‘All that madman told me yesterday about his love for me, when his chin quivered and he thumped himself on the breast with his fist?’
“‘It was the absolute truth,’ he decided, still pondering and analysing. ‘That quasimodo from T—— was quite sufficiently stupid and noble to fall in love with the lover of his wife, about whom he noticed nothing suspicious in twenty years! He had been thinking of me with respect, cherishing my memory and brooding over my “utterances” for nine years. Good Heavens! And I had no notion of it! He could not have been lying yesterday. But did he love me yesterday when he declared his feeling and said, “Let us settle our account!” Yes, it was from hatred that he loved me; that’s the strongest of all loves....
“‘... Only he didn’t know then whether he would end by embracing me or murdering me. Of course, it’s turned out that the best thing was to do both. A most natural solution’.”[94]
If I have lingered so long over this slender book, it is because it is more accessible than the rest of Dostoevsky’s novels, and helps us to win, beyond love and hate, to that wider region I spoke about not long since: a region where love is not, nor passion, so easily and so simply reached: the region Schopenhauer spoke of, the meeting-place of human brotherhood, where the limits of existence fade away, where the notion of the individual and of time is lost, the place wherein Dostoevsky sought—and found—the secret of happiness.