Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

I AM writing a history of yesterday, not because yesterday was in any way remarkable, or could even be called remarkable, but because I have long desired to tell the story of the intimate side of a single day. God alone knows how many varied and interesting impressions, and thoughts aroused by those impressions (obscure and ill-defined but nonetheless intelligible to our own soul) occur in the course of a single day. If it were possible to recount them in such a way as to make it easy for me to read my own self, and for others to read me as I really am, the result would be a really instructive and absorbing book – a book indeed for which the world could not provide enough ink for the writing, or printers for the publishing of it. —But to business.—

Yesterday I got up late, at a quarter to ten, and that was simply because I had gone to bed after midnight the night before. (I long ago set myself the rule of not going to bed later than twelve o’clock, but all the same I find myself doing so some three times each week); however there are certain circumstances in which I would class this not as a crime but rather as a minor lapse: such circumstances are of many kinds, and how it was yesterday I shall now explain.

Here I must beg your indulgence for recounting things which occurred the day before yesterday, but as you are well aware, novelists are given to writing whole histories about their heroes’ immediate forebears.

I was playing cards, but certainly not from any passionate liking for cards, however it may appear. As regards the love of card-playing, it is rather like the case of those people who dance the polka just because they enjoy the exercise. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among the many suggestions he made which no one agreed with, advocated playing with a cup-and-ball [bilboquet] in society in order to give one’s hands something to do; but that does not go far enough, for in society the head too needs to be occupied, or at least it needs some sort of activity about which people can either talk or remain silent.—In our country such an activity has in fact been devised – card-playing.—Persons born in the last century complain that ‘there is no conversation whatever to be had nowadays’. I do not know what people were like in the last century (it seems to me, though, that they have always been pretty much the same); however, genuine conversation is never a real possibility. Conversation merely as a pastime is the stupidest of inventions. It is not because of intellectual inadequacy that there is no conversation, but because of egoism. Everyone wants to speak about himself or about what concerns him; and if one person talks and the other listens, that is not conversation, but lecturing. And even if two people agree to concentrate on the same topic, it only takes the addition of a third person for the whole thing to be ruined: he intervenes, they must do their best to accommodate him, and the conversation goes to the devil.

There are also conversations where two people are interested in the same thing and nobody interferes with them, yet here the situation is even worse. Each of them talks about the same thing, but from his own point of view, measuring everything by his own yardstick, and the longer the conversation goes on, the farther each of them gets from the other, until each realizes that he has ceased to converse, but is preaching with a freedom no one else could equal, setting himself up as an example, and the other person is not really listening, but doing likewise. Have you ever engaged in rolling Easter eggs during Holy Week? You set in motion two identical hard-boiled eggs along the same strip of bast matting, but each egg has in fact a slight irregularity in its side. They may start rolling in the same direction, but then each egg begins to roll in a direction dictated by its own tiny irregularity. In conversation, as in egg-rolling, there are the shlyupiks¹ which roll noisily and not very far, and there are the sharp-ended ones which get carried away goodness knows where; but there are no two eggs, shlyupiks apart, which are likely to roll in exactly the same direction. Each one has its own particular irregularity.

I am not referring to those conversations which occur because it would be improper not to say something, in the same way that it would be improper not to wear a necktie. One party is thinking: ‘You realize of course that it is no matter to me what I talk about, but I have to do so’; and the other is thinking: ‘Talk on, talk on, you poor fellow, – I accept that it is necessary.’ This is not conversation, but rather – like black tail-coats, visiting cards and gloves – a matter of propriety.

That is why I say that card-playing is an excellent invention. During the game it is possible to converse a little and flatter one’s self-esteem, to let fall some charming little mot, without being obliged to continue in the same vein, as one would have to do in a society where there was nothing but conversation available.

It is essential to keep back your final volley of wit for the last circle of acquaintances you encounter that evening, just as you are taking your hat: this is the moment to squander all the reserves you have been holding on to. Like a horse in the final straight going all out to win. Otherwise you will appear feeble and colourless; and I have noticed that people who are not merely clever, but capable of shining in society, have failed because they have misjudged the level of their remarks. If you say something in the heat of the moment before anyone has had time to get tired of you, and then, feeling bored, you do not wish to converse further, that is how you will be seen as you depart: the final impression is the one which will stick, and people will say ‘How difficult he is …’ But when a card-game is going on no such thing can happen. One is allowed to remain silent without being censured for it.

Besides, if women (young women) are playing, there begins to be something better to aim at – to spend two or three hours in close proximity to the right woman.—And of course if the right woman simply happens to be there, then that is already satisfaction enough.

So there I was playing cards, sitting now on her right, now on her left, now opposite her, and wherever I sat it was all wonderful.

This mode of entertainment went on until a quarter to twelve. Three rubbers had been completed. Why does this woman love me? – how I should like to be able to write that! but I must write instead – Why does this woman love to put me in embarrassing situations? And that apart, I am already hardly in command of myself when I am in her presence: at one moment it seems to me that my hands are really dirty, at another that I am sitting awkwardly, at another that I am tormented by a pimple on my cheek precisely on the side where she can see it.

However, I feel that none of this is her fault – I never feel quite myself when I am with people whom I either dislike or love very much. Why should this be? It is surely because one wants to show one person that one does not like them, and to show another that one loves them, but to show what one wants to show is very difficult. In my case it always comes out the wrong way round: you wish to appear chilly, but then you feel you are overdoing it, and you make yourself too affable; and although being with people you really and truly love is delightful, the idea that they may think you love them in a dishonourable way confounds you, and you end up making your manner curt and abrupt.

She is the woman for me because she possesses those sweet qualities which compel me to love them, or better still, to love her, for I do love her; but not because she would be capable of giving herself to a lover. That thought does not enter my head. She has the unpleasing habit of billing and cooing with her husband in the presence of others, but that is no business of mine; it would be all the same to me if she were to choose to kiss the stove or the table – she is simply playing with her husband, as a swallow might play with a wisp of fluff, because she has a kindly soul and this makes her cheerful.—

She is a coquette; no, not a coquette, but she does enjoy being liked, and turning men’s heads. I would not call her a coquette, because either the word itself is bad, or the connotations attached to it are bad. People apply the term ‘coquetry’ to the display of bare flesh, or falseness in love – this is not coquetry, but insolent and ill-bred behaviour.—No, but the desire to please and to turn heads is a fine and attractive thing, it harms no one, because there are no Werthers here, and it gives her and others innocent pleasure. Here am I, for example, utterly content that she pleases me and desiring nothing further. And then there is intelligent coquetry and stupid coquetry: the intelligent sort is when the coquetry is unobtrusive and there is no villain to be caught red-handed; the stupid sort is just the opposite, where nothing is concealed. And this is how it finds expression: ‘I may not be particularly beautiful in myself, but just look what pretty feet I have! Just look: do you see? Well, do you like them?’—Your feet are perhaps pretty, but I did not take any notice of your feet, because you deliberately made a display of them.—Intelligent coquetry says: ‘It is all one and the same to me whether you look at me or you don’t, but I feel warm, so I have taken off my hat.’—I look at you all the time.—‘And why should I mind?’ Hers is the innocent and intelligent sort.

I glanced at my watch and got up. It is astonishing: except when I am speaking to her I have never seen her glance resting on me, and yet she sees my every movement.—‘Oh, what a lovely rose-tinted watch-face he has!’—I was greatly offended that anyone should comment on my Bréguet time-piece being rose-coloured, in the same way that I should be annoyed to be told that I was wearing a pink waistcoat. I must have looked visibly embarrassed, because when I said that it was actually an extremely fine watch, she in her turn looked embarrassed. No doubt she regretted having said something which put me in an awkward position. We both realized the absurdity of it, and smiled. A stupid thing, but we were sharing in it.—I adore these secret relationships which express themselves by an unobtrusive little smile and by the expression of the eyes, and which cannot be openly declared. It is not that one of us has suddenly understood the other, but each understands that the other understands that he or she is understood, etc., etc.

Whether she wanted to put an end to this conversation which I found so pleasant, or to watch me refuse to stay, or to know whether I would refuse, or simply to go on playing, – the fact was that she glanced at the numbers written on the card table, ran the chalk across its surface, drew some kind of figure unrecognized in mathematics or in painting, looked first at her husband and then from him to me, and said: ‘Let us play three more rubbers.’ I was so absorbed in watching, not these movements but the whole phenomenon known as charme, which it is impossible to describe, that my imagination was far, far away and my mind was unable to clothe my words in any appropriate form; I simply said ‘No, I cannot.’ No sooner had I managed to say this, than I started to regret it, – that is to say, not all of me, but just one part of me.—There is no action which some little part of the soul would not condemn; on the other hand there is always some part to be found which will say approvingly: What does it matter if you get to bed after twelve, and anyway, how do you know if you will ever have such a successful evening again? Evidently this part of me spoke up most eloquently and persuasively (though I am unable to convey just what it said), for I became alarmed and began to seek for excuses.—In the first place, there won’t be much enjoyment in it, I said to myself: you don’t really like her at all and you are in an awkward position; and then you have already said that you can’t stay, and you have lost face …

‘Comme il est aimable, ce jeune homme.’²

This sentence, following straight after mine, interrupted my reflections.—I began to apologize for not being able to stay, but as this required no thought, I went on arguing with myself: How I love her referring to me in the third person. In German it’s rude, but I should love it, even in German. And why can’t she find a suitable form of address for me? It’s obvious that she is uncomfortable calling me by my Christian name, or by my surname and title. Can it possibly be because I … ‘Do stay and have some supper,’ said her husband. Since I was busy pondering the matter of third person forms of address, I failed to notice that my body, having made the politest possible excuses for being unable to stay, had put down my hat again and sunk calmly into an armchair. It was evident that the intellectual side of me was taking no part in this folly. I began to feel extremely vexed, and was just starting to take myself to task when I was diverted by a most agreeable development. She was sketching something with great attention, what it was I could not see, then she raised the piece of chalk slightly higher than necessary and put it down on the table. Then, resting her arms on the sofa she was sitting on and shifting herself from one side to the other, she drew herself up against the back of the sofa and raised her charming little head – her head with the delicately curving profile of her face and her dark, half-closed yet animated eyes, her slender and so, so sharp little nose, and a mouth that, with her eyes, composed a unity and at every moment seemed to convey something quite new. How could one say what, at that instant, it expressed? There was pensiveness, mockery, fragility, the desire not to laugh, self-importance, capriciousness, intelligence, stupidity, passion, apathy, and who knows what else in that expression.—A few moments later her husband went out, no doubt to order supper to be served.

When I am left alone with her I always become nervous and clumsy. As I follow with my eyes the people leaving the room I feel as ill at ease as in the fifth figure of the quadrille, when I see my partner crossing to the far side, condemning me to be left alone. I am sure Napoleon did not feel so wretched when the Saxons went over to the enemy at Waterloo, as I did in my early youth when I contemplated this cruel manoeuvre. The tactic I use in dancing the quadrille, I now use in this situation too: I try to give the impression that I have not noticed I am alone. Now even the conversation which had begun before his exit had come to a halt; I repeated the last words I had spoken, adding only: ‘So it had to be,’ and she repeated her previous words, adding ‘Yes’. But alongside this there began at once a second, inaudible conversation.

She: ‘I know why you are repeating what you have already said: you feel embarrassed to be alone with me, and you can see I am embarrassed too – so to appear interested you had to say something. I am grateful to you for your consideration, but you might have said something a bit more intelligent.’—I: ‘That is true, your remark is accurate, but I don’t know why you should feel embarrassed; can you be thinking that if you are alone with me I may start saying the kind of things which you would find unacceptable? Just to prove to you how ready I am to sacrifice my own satisfactions for your benefit, however delightful our present conversation may be to me, I shall now start to speak aloud. Or perhaps you would like to start.’ She: ‘Well then, let us do so!’

I was still composing my mouth to say something of the kind which allows one to be thinking one thing while conversing about something else, when she launched into a conversation out loud which gave the impression that it might go on for some time; but in this sort of situation even the most significant topics fall flat, because that other conversation is still going on. Having produced a sentence each, we fell silent, attempted once more to speak, then lapsed again into silence. The other conversation:—I: ‘No, it is quite impossible to converse. Since I can see that you are embarrassed, it would be preferable if your husband came back.’ She (aloud): ‘Boy, where is Ivan Ivanovich? Go and ask him to come here.’ If anyone did not believe that such secret conversations do exist, I hope this example will convince them.

‘I am very glad we are alone now,’ I continued in the same mode. ‘I have already remarked to you that you often upset me by your lack of trust in me. If I accidentally touch your foot with mine, you at once hasten to apologize, and do not give me time to apologize first, while I, having made sure that it was your foot I touched, wanted simply to apologize. I cannot keep up with you in these matters, yet you still think that I lack delicacy.’

Her husband came back. We sat down to supper and chatted, and I returned home at half-past midnight.

In the sledge

It is spring now, the twenty-fifth of March. The night is still and clear; the new moon has come into view from behind the red roof of the big white house opposite; the snow has mostly melted.

‘Let’s be off, driver!…’

My night-service sledge was the only one waiting near the house porch and Dmitry had evidently heard me coming out without waiting for any shouted summons from the footman, for the smacking noise he made with his lips was audible, as though he were kissing someone in the darkness: a sound which I suppose was meant to tell the little horse to pull the sledge off the stone roadway, on which the runners screeched and scraped unpleasantly. At length the sledge drew up. The obliging footman took my elbow and guided me towards the seat; had he not supported me I should have jumped straight into the sledge, but now, so as not to offend him, I made my way more cautiously and broke through the layer of thin ice on a puddle, wetting my feet. ‘Thank you, my man.’—‘Dmitry, is it freezing?’—‘As well as you could wish for, sir; at this time of the year you still get a good light frost any night, sir.’

—How stupid! Why am I asking him?—No, that’s not true, there’s nothing stupid about it: you have an urge to talk, to make contact with people, because you are in a cheerful mood. So why am I cheerful? If I had got into the sledge at any time in the past half-hour I would not have started chatting. It is because you spoke really rather well before taking your leave, and because her husband came out to see you off and said ‘When shall we be seeing one another again?’ And because as soon as the footman caught sight of you he immediately roused himself, and for all that his breath smelt strongly of parsley, he attended to you with such enthusiasm. I once gave him fifty copecks. In all our memories the central part gets lost, but the first and last impressions remain, especially the last. Hence the delightful custom whereby the master of the house sees a guest to the door where, generally standing there with his legs twined together in semi-embarrassment, he cannot avoid saying something kind to his guest: no matter how short the acquaintance may have been, this rule cannot be neglected. Thus, for example, ‘When shall we be seeing each other again?’ means nothing, but the guest out of self-esteem translates it so: when means ‘Please let it be soon’; we means ‘my wife and I, for my wife too greatly enjoys seeing you’; again means ‘We have only just finished spending this evening together, but in your company no one could possibly be bored’; be seeing one another means ‘Please do us the pleasure once more’. And the guest departs with an agreeable impression. It is likewise essential, particularly in less well organized houses where not all the servants, especially the doorman (he is a most important person because he provides one’s first and last impressions) are courteous, to give them some money. They meet you and they see you off just as if you were one of the household, and their obligingness, which may well be the result of a fifty-copeck piece, can be translated so:—‘Everyone here likes you and respects you, and so we try, just as we oblige our masters, to oblige you too.’ Perhaps it is only the footman himself who does really like and respect you, but all the same it is very pleasant. What harm is there if you should be mistaken? If there were no such thing as illusion, that would not mean that …

‘If he hasn’t gone clean out of his wits!… De-evil take him!…’

Dmitry and I had been driving very gently and very carefully along some boulevard or other, keeping to the thin covering of ice on the right-hand side of the carriageway, when some ‘wood demon’ (as Dmitry afterwards referred to him) with a carriage and pair had run into us. We extricated ourselves, and when we were already a dozen or so paces safely distant from them Dmitry said: ‘See there, the wood demon doesn’t know his right from his left!’

Do not assume that Dmitry was a timid fellow or slow to respond. No, quite the reverse: although short in stature and beardless (but still with a moustache) he was deeply conscious of his own worth, and scrupulous in carrying out his duties. The cause of his apparent weakness in this instance was twofold. First, Dmitry was accustomed to driving carriages which inspired respect, whereas now we were travelling in an insignificant little sledge behind a small horse in extremely long shafts, so that even with the length of the whip it was quite hard to reach the animal, and the horse in question was pathetically unsteady in the hind legs and liable to call forth ridicule from passers-by who saw it: so that this incident was particularly awkward for Dmitry, sufficiently so to cancel out his customary feeling of dignity. Second, my question ‘Is it freezing?’ probably reminded him of the same sort of question I would ask when going out with him on hunting trips in the autumn. He is a sportsman, and a sportsman has plenty of material for daydreaming – which may even make him forget to curse appropriately a driver who does not keep to the right. Among coachmen as with everyone else, that man is in the right who shouts at the other driver first and with the greater conviction. There are exceptions: for example, a poor droshky-driver cannot possibly shout at a carriage, and a man on his own, even if he is a bit of a dandy, is hard put to it to shout at a team of four horses; in fact everything turns on the nature of the particular circumstances, and chiefly on the personality of the coachman and the direction he is travelling in. In Tula I once witnessed a striking example of the effect one man can produce on others by sheer audacity.

It was a Shrove Tuesday and everyone was out driving: sledges and pairs, four-in-hands, carriages, trotters, ladies in silk coats – all parading in a row along Kiev Street – hordes of pedestrians too. Suddenly there was a shout from a street which crossed the main one at right-angles: ‘Hey, hold him there, hold that horse back! Hey, give way there!’ in a thoroughly self-confident tone. Involuntarily the pedestrians stood aside and the fours all reined in. What do you think? A ragged cabman standing upright on a ramshackle sledge drawn by a wretched jade and brandishing the reins above his head, was forcing his way through by dint of shouting, to the opposite side of the street, while nobody realized what was going on. Even the policemen on duty were bursting out laughing when they saw it.

Although Dmitry is a man ready to take a chance and one who enjoys a bit of cursing, he has a good heart and is kind to animals. He uses the whip not as a means of compulsion, but of correction, that is to say, he does not urge the horse on with the whip: for him this would be quite incompatible with the dignity of a city coachman; but if a trotter should refuse to stand at a house entrance, he will ‘give him a touch or two’. I had occasion to see this presently: turning out of one street into another, our little horse was having difficulty in pulling us round, and from the agitated movements of Dmitry’s back and arms and the smacking noises he was making with his lips, it was clear to me that he was in a difficult position. Would he resort to the whip? It was against his habit to do so. But what if the horse should just stop still? He could not tolerate that, even though here there was no cause to worry about some joker who might say ‘Suppose you tried giving him something to eat?’ This seems to me a demonstration of the fact that Dmitry acts more from an awareness of principle than from vanity.

I reflected further on the great variety of relations between coachmen themselves, their mentality, their resourcefulness and their pride. No doubt when many coachmen are gathered together in one place they recognize one another, including those drivers they have been in collisions with, and they progress from hostile to peaceable relations. All human beings in this world are of interest, and particularly fascinating are the attitudes and relationships of those classes to which we do not ourselves belong.

When the two carriages involved in an incident are travelling in the same direction, any disagreement is usually more protracted: the man who has given offence tries to drive off or to drop back, and the other driver may manage to show that the first driver was in the wrong, and to gain the upper hand; however, when both parties are travelling the same way the advantage is on the side of the driver whose horses are swifter. All these attitudes are readily applicable to the relations one encounters in everyday life as a whole. I am equally intrigued by the attitudes of gentlemen to one another and to coachmen, in encounters of this sort.—‘Where d’you think you’re rushing off to, you load of rubbish?’ When this condemnation is addressed to the whole carriage, the passenger cannot help trying to appear serious, or merry, or carefree – in a word, to appear different from what he was the moment before: he would plainly be only too pleased if the whole thing had happened the other way round. I have observed that gentlemen with moustaches are particularly sensitive to insults hurled at their own carriages.—

—‘Who goes there?’

This was the shout of a policeman, a man I had happened to see only that morning being insulted by another coachman. Near the house entrance just opposite this very policeman’s box there had been a carriage standing. The splendid red-bearded coachman had tucked the reins under him, and propping his elbows on his knees, was warming his back in the sun, evidently with great enjoyment, for his eyes were almost closed. Across the road from him the policeman was pacing up and down the area in front of his sentry-box and with the end of his halberd was straightening a plank which bridged a puddle in front of his platform. Suddenly he looked displeased, perhaps because there was a carriage standing there, or because he felt envious of the coachman sunning himself so happily, or just because he wanted a bit of a chat: he walked along his little platform, glanced up the side-street, and then with a thump of his halberd on the plank, began: ‘Hey, you, what are you waiting there for? You’re blocking up the road.’ The coachman opened his left eye a crack, looked at the policeman, and shut it again.—‘Move along, do you hear?’ No sign of any attention whatever.—‘So you can’t hear me, eh? Get off the road, I tell you!’ The policeman, seeing that he was not getting any response, walked along his platform and took another look up the side-street, clearly getting ready to say something that would really strike home. At that moment the coachman sat up, adjusted the reins, and turning with sleepy eyes towards the policeman, said: ‘What are you gawping at? They didn’t stick a rifle in your hands, you old fool, but you bellow just the same!’

—‘Get moving!’

The coachman roused himself and got moving.

I glanced at the policeman: he was muttering something and gave me an angry look. He evidently did not like my listening to him and looking at him. I know that there is no more effective way of offending a man than by making it obvious that you have noticed him but that you have no intention of speaking to him; and so I was embarrassed, and feeling sorry for the policeman went on my way.

Another thing I like about Dmitry is his ability to give someone the right name straight off: I find this most amusing. ‘Give way, fur hat,—Let’s have some service there, beardy, Give way, you toboggan, Give way, laundress, Give way, horse-doctor,—Give way, you fine figure, Give way, Monsieur’. It is amazing how a Russian manages to find the right abusive term for another man whom he is seeing for the very first time, and not just for the person, but for his social status: the petty bourgeois is ‘cat-dealer’, as if the lower middle classes go about purloining cats; a footman is ‘flunkey, dish-licker’; a peasant is, why I do not know, ‘Ryurik’; a coachman is ‘cart-driver’, and so forth – there are too many of these terms to count. If a Russian gets into a squabble with someone he has just seen for the first time, he immediately bestows on him a nickname which will cut him to the quick: crooknose, cross-eyed devil, rubber-lipped rogue, snubnose. One needs to experience it to know how truly and accurately these names always hit the right tender spot. I shall never forget an insult which I received in my absence. A certain Russian man said of me: ‘Oh, he’s an old gap-tooth!’ It must be admitted that my teeth are indeed exceptionally bad, decayed, and widely-spaced.—

At home

I arrived home. Dmitry jumped down to open the main gates, and so did I, to try to get through the wicket gate before he could get through the others. This is how it always happens: I hurry to get in because that is my custom, and he hurries to bring me right up to the house steps, because that is his custom.—For some time I could get no reply to my ringing of the door-bell; inside, the tallow candle was in serious need of snuffing and Prov, my little old manservant, was asleep. While I was ringing this is what I was thinking: Why do I dislike coming home, wherever and in whatever circumstances I happen to be living? Why do I dislike seeing the same old Prov in the same place, the same candle, the same stains on the wallpaper, the same pictures, so that I even begin to feel quite depressed?—

I am particularly tired of the wallpaper and the pictures, because they purport to give you variety, yet you only need to look at them for two days for them to be worse than a blank wall. This disagreeable feeling on getting home must be due to the fact that I was not designed to be living as a bachelor at the age of twenty-two. How much better it would be if I could ask Prov (who has jumped up, and with a great clatter of his boots, no doubt to show that he has been alert and listening for me for ages, is opening the door): ‘Is the mistress asleep?’ ‘Not at all, sir, she is reading a book.’ How much better it would be: I should clasp her dear head in my hands and hold it for a moment, and look at her and kiss her, and look at her again and kiss her again; and I should not feel at all gloomy about returning home. But as things are, the one question I can ask Prov, to show him I have noticed that he never goes to sleep while I am out, is: ‘Did anyone call?’ ‘No one.’ Whenever this sort of question is put to him Prov invariably answers in a pathetic tone, and every time I feel like saying to him: ‘Oh why do you speak in that pathetic tone of voice? I am delighted that no one has called.’ But I restrain myself: Prov might take offence, and he is a man worthy of some consideration.—

In the evening I usually write my diary, and a journal after the style of Benjamin Franklin, and do my daily accounts. On this particular day I had not spent anything, because there was not even a single half-copeck in my purse, thus there was nothing to write in my account book.—

The diary and the journal are another matter: I really ought to write in them, but it is late, so I put it off until the morrow.—

I have often chanced to hear the remark: ‘He is an empty fellow, he leads an aimless life’; and I too have often used these words and still do, not to echo someone else’s opinion but because I feel in my soul that this is a bad thing, and that one ought to have an aim in life.

But how do you set about being ‘a whole man, with an aim in living’? To set yourself such an aim is quite impossible.—I have attempted it so many times, and it has never worked out. You must not so much try to invent an aim, as to find one which conforms to your own personal leanings, one which was already in existence, and which you have but to recognize. It seems to me that I have actually found an aim of that kind: the all-round cultivation and development of my abilities. One of the principal and most widely acknowledged means to that end is the keeping of a diary and a Franklin journal.—In the diary I confess every day all the wrong things I have done. In the journal my weaknesses are listed in columns – laziness, lying, gluttony, indecisiveness, showing off, sensuality, insufficient fierté, and other such mean and petty passions: I then transfer all my transgressions from the diary to this journal by putting little crosses in the appropriate columns.

I began to get undressed and thought: ‘Where is this all-round cultivation and development of your abilities, where are your virtues, and is this route really going to lead you to virtue? Where is this journal getting you? It serves you only as an index of your weaknesses, which are unending, and getting more numerous every day; and even if you did succeed in eliminating them you would not attain to virtue by this means. You are merely deceiving yourself, and amusing yourself with all this like a child with a plaything. Could it ever be sufficient for an artist just to know what things not to do, in order to be an artist? Can it be possible negatively, simply by refraining from harmful actions, to achieve anything worthwhile? It is not enough for the peasant farmer to weed his field, he must also plough it and sow it. Make yourself some rules of virtue and follow them.’—All this was said by that part of my mind which specializes in being critical.

I fell to thinking. Can it be enough to destroy the cause of evil, that good may then exist? Good is something positive, not negative. From that it follows clearly and demonstrably that good is positive and evil is negative; evil is capable of destroying, but good is not. There is always some good in our souls, and the soul itself is good; but evil is implanted in us. If there is no evil present, the good will develop. The comparison with the peasant farmer will not do; he has to sow and plough his land, but in his own soul the good is already sown. The artist needs to practise, and he will attain the creation of art, provided he does not adopt negative principles, but he must avoid arbitrariness. For practice in virtue, there is no need of exercises: the exercise is life itself.

Cold is the absence of warmth. Darkness is the absence of light. Evil is the absence of good. Why does man love warmth, light and good? Because they are natural. There is an origin of warmth, light and good – the sun, God; but there is no sun of cold and darkness, no God of evil. We see the light and the rays of light, we seek their cause and we say that the sun exists: our proof is both the light and heat, and the law of gravity. This is in the physical world. In the moral world we see the good, see its rays, and we see that there is the same law of attraction of the good towards something higher which is its source – God.—

Remove the rough outer crust from a diamond, and inside there will be – brightness; discard the envelope of human weaknesses, and you will have – virtue. But can it be only those trivialities and weaknesses you record in your journal which are preventing you from being good? Are there not also some great passions? And how is it that this host of weaknesses increases with every day that passes?: now self-deception, now cowardice, etc., and that there is never any lasting improvement, and in many instances no way forward? (It is once again the part of me devoted to criticism which has observed all this.) True, all these weaknesses I have noted down can be reduced to three types, but since all of them can be found at many different levels, their combinations may be countless. The three categories are: (1) pride, (2) weakness of will, (3) lack of intelligence. But it is impossible to attribute all these weaknesses individually to one of the three types, for they arise from combinations of them. The first two types have diminished, but the last, as a separate element, can only make progress over time. For example, today I told a lie, quite clearly without any apparent reason: I was called to dinner and I declined to come, then said that I could not because I was due to have a lesson.—What sort of a lesson?—English (whereas in fact it was a gymnastics lesson). The causes were: (1) lack of intelligence, in that I suddenly failed to see how stupid it is to lie; (2) lack of resolution, in that I did not explain why; (3) a silly kind of pride, in supposing that English might be a more suitable excuse than gymnastics.

Can virtue really consist in freeing yourself from the weaknesses which are harmful to you in life, so that virtue would seem to be identical with selflessness?—Not so. Virtue brings happiness, because happiness brings virtue.—Every time I write something honestly in my diary, I feel no vexation with myself for my weaknesses: it seems to me that if I have owned up to having them, then they are no longer there.

A pleasant thought. I said my prayers and got into bed. I pray better at night than in the morning. I have a better understanding of what I am saying, and even of what I feel; at the end of the day I am not anxious for myself, but in the morning I am – there is so much ahead of me in the coming day. What a wonderful thing is sleep in all its stages: getting ready for it, going to sleep, sleep itself. As soon as I had lain down I thought: What delight to escape into this growing warmth and presently to forget myself entirely; but hardly had I begun to fall asleep than I recollected that it was pleasant to fall asleep, and woke up again. All the pleasures of the body are destroyed by consciousness of them. One must avoid being conscious: but I was conscious that I was conscious, and so it went on and on, and I could not sleep. Oh, the vexation of it! What did God give us consciousness for, when it serves merely as a barrier to living? He did so because our moral pleasures, unlike the physical ones, are felt more deeply when we are conscious of them. Reasoning in this fashion I turned over on to my other side, and the bedclothes fell off. What an unpleasant sensation it is to lose your bedclothes in the dark. One always feels: someone or something may come and grab me, or lay a cold or a hot hand on my uncovered leg. I hastened to cover myself up, tucked the blanket under me on both sides, hid my head in the covers, and began to fall asleep, thinking to myself as follows.

<‘Morpheus, take me into your embrace.’ Morpheus is a god whose devotee I would most gladly be. Do you recall that young lady who was so offended when someone said to her: ‘Quand je suis passé chez vous, vous étiez encore dans les bras de Morphée’?³ She thought that Morpheus [Morfei] was some man called Andrei Malafei. What a ridiculous name!… But it’s a wonderful expression: dans les bras; I can imagine so vividly and gracefully the position dans les bras – and particularly vividly the bras themselves – arms bare to the shoulder with little dimples and little folds, and a white nightdress indiscreetly open.—How lovely women’s arms are, specially if there is just one little dimple! I stretched myself out in bed. Do you remember, St Thomas⁴ was always telling us it was bad form to stretch. Just like Diedrichs. The two of them were riding along together. The sport was excellent and just behind them I was riding along too, tally-hoing to my dog Angel, and my other dog Raider was catching enough game for them all, it was a regular slaughter. And wasn’t Seriozha furious!—He was with his sister.—What a charmer Masha is – and what a wife she’d make for someone! Morpheus would make a fine old hunter, if he could cope with a bit of bareback riding, and he might even find you a wife into the bargain.—Phew, just look how St Thomas is bowling along there – and there’s the young lady charging along behind them all; it’s no use just stretching out, though it is really nice dans les bras. At this point I must have fallen asleep properly.—I dreamt that I was trying to catch up with the lady, when suddenly there was a mountain in front of us and I was pushing her, pushing her up it with my hands – but she fell down to the bottom (I had pushed my pillow off the bed), and I rode home to dinner. It was not ready: why not? Vasily started to throw his weight about and to bluster (which made the lady of the house who was on the other side of the partition ask to know what all the noise was about, so the chambermaid explained – I could hear it all, because that too was part of my dream). Vasily came in and everyone was trying to ask him why the dinner wasn’t ready, but they could see – Vasily was wearing a camisole, and a ribbon across his shoulder. I felt scared, and fell to my knees weeping and kissing his feet; I enjoyed this just as much as if I had been kissing her feet – in fact more so. Vasily ignored me and asked: ‘Is it loaded?’ Diedrichs, the pastry-cook from Tula, replied ‘Ready!’—Very well, fire!—And they fired a volley (the shutter banged).—and then there we were walking down Polskaya Street, Vasily and I, but it was no longer Vasily but she. Suddenly, horrors! I noticed that my trousers were so short that my bare knees were showing. I cannot describe how awful I felt (my bare knees had come out of the bedclothes); in my dream I spent a long time trying to cover them up and at last succeeded. But there was more to come: now we were going down Polskaya Street again and the Queen of Württemberg was there; but suddenly I was dancing a Ukrainian kazachok. Why? Because I couldn’t help it. At length someone brought me an overcoat and a pair of boots; but now it was even worse – there were no trousers at all. Of course none of this could be happening in reality: I was most likely asleep and dreaming. I woke up.—And began to drop off again, thinking, then ran out of thoughts and began to see pictures in my imagination, and my imaginings were quite coherent, picturesque even, but then my imagination itself went to sleep, and all that remained were obscure and confused notions; and then my body too fell asleep. A dream is always composed of first and last impressions.>

It seemed to me that now, underneath this blanket, nothing and no one could possibly get at me.—Sleep is a state of our existence in which we completely lose the consciousness of ourselves; but since a man falls asleep by degrees, he also loses consciousness by degrees.—Consciousness is another name for what we call our soul; but the word soul denotes something which is a unity, whereas there are as many consciousnesses as there are different elements which make up a human being. As I see it there are three of these: (1) the mind, (2) the emotions, (3) the body. (1) is the highest of the three, and this type of consciousness is confined to developed human beings – brute beasts and brutish humans do not possess it; this is the first element to fall asleep. (2) The consciousness of emotion is also the property of human beings alone, and it goes to sleep after the first sort of consciousness. (3) The consciousness of the body goes to sleep last of all, and almost never completely. This gradualness of falling asleep is not to be found in animals, nor in human beings who become unconscious as a result of some powerful shock, or of drunkenness. The consciousness of being asleep is liable to wake us up again at once.

Our remembrance of the time we spend asleep is not derived from the same source as our remembrance of real life – from memory, the capacity to recall our impressions – but from the capacity to group our impressions together. At the moment of waking we bring together all the impressions we have had while going to sleep and while sleeping (a man is hardly ever completely asleep) into a unity under the influence of the particular impression which contributed to our waking up – and waking up, like going to sleep, proceeds by degrees, from the lowest level to the highest.—This operation takes place so swiftly that it is hard to be completely aware of it, and being accustomed as we are to the sequential nature of things and to the mould of time in which life reveals itself to us, we accept this aggregate of impressions as the remembrance of the time we have spent asleep.—How are you to explain the fact that you may have a long dream which ends with precisely that circumstance which has woken you up? You dream that you are going out hunting, you load your rifle, spring the game, take aim and fire; and the noise you took for the gunshot was actually the water carafe which you have upset on to the floor in your sleep. Or again, you arrive at your friend N.’s house and you are waiting to see him; at length a servant appears and announces that N. has just come in; but in the real world it is your own servant who is talking to you in order to wake you up. In recognizing the truth of this, God forbid that you should believe in all those dreams related to you by people who have invariably seen something in them, and what is more, something both meaningful and important.

These people, from their habit of drawing conclusions from dreams on the basis of guesses, have provided themselves with a particular form to which they reduce everything: they make up any deficiencies from their own imagination, and reject anything which refuses to fit into the given form. For example, a mother will tell you how she dreamed that she saw her daughter flying off into the heavens and saying ‘Goodbye, dearest Mamma, I shall pray for you!’ Whereas she actually dreamed that her daughter was climbing on to the house roof, not saying anything, and that this daughter, as she climbed higher and higher, suddenly turned into Ivan the cook and said ‘You can’t climb up here.’

And perhaps by the power of habit, what they relate has actually taken that shape in their imagination: if so, that is further evidence for my theory of dreams …

If you want to confirm it, try the experiment on yourself: recall the thoughts and imaginings you had while going to sleep and waking up, and if anyone else saw you asleep and can tell you all the circumstances which may have affected you, you will then be able to understand why you had that particular dream and not some other. There are so many of these circumstances, depending on people’s bodily constitution, on their digestion, and on other physical causes, that they are past enumerating. Yet there is a saying that when we dream that we are flying or swimming, it means that we are growing. If you can observe what makes you dream on one occasion that you are swimming, and on another flying, and if you are able to recall it all, you will quite easily arrive at an explanation.

If my dream had been dreamt by one of those people who, as I have said, are accustomed to interpreting dreams, this is how the account of it (by a lady) might have run: ‘I dreamt that St Thomas was running and running for a very long time, and I seemed to be asking him “Why are you running?” and he said to me “I am looking for a bride.”—So you see, either he is getting married, or I shall soon be receiving a letter from him …’

Note also that in memories there is no gradation of time. If you are able to recall your dream, then you know you have already dreamt it.