The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

The Kreutzer Sonata

But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

MATTHEW 5:28 (RSV)

The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.” But he said to them, “Not all men can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.”

MATTHEW 19:10-12 (RSV)

I

IT WAS EARLY SPRING. We were traveling for the second day. Passengers going short distances entered and left the carriage, but three passengers, like myself, had been traveling from the very place of the train’s departure: an unattractive and no longer young lady, a smoker, with a worn-out face, in a coat of mannish cut and a hat; her acquaintance, a garrulous man of about forty, with neat new things; and another gentleman who kept himself apart, of medium height, with jerky movements, not yet old, but with obviously premature gray in his curly hair, and with unusually glittering eyes quickly darting from object to object. He was dressed in an old but expensively tailored coat with a lambskin collar and a tall lambskin hat. Under the coat, when he unbuttoned it, could be seen a jerkin and an embroidered Russian shirt. A peculiarity of this gentleman also consisted in the fact that he occasionally produced strange sounds, similar to a cough or laughter begun and broken off.

Throughout the trip, this gentleman carefully avoided communicating or becoming acquainted with the other passengers. To his neighbors’ attempts at conversation he responded briefly and curtly, and he either read, or smoked, looking out the window, or, taking provisions from his old bag, drank tea or ate a little something.

It seemed to me that he was weary of his solitude, and several times I was about to strike up a conversation with him, but each time our eyes met, which happened often, since we sat catercorner to each other, he turned away and took up a book or looked out the window.

During a stop, towards evening of the second day, at a large station, this nervous gentleman went to get some hot water and made tea for himself. The gentleman with neat new things, a lawyer, as I learned afterwards, and his neighbor, the smoking lady in the mannish coat, went to have tea at the station.

During the absence of the gentleman and lady, several new persons entered the carriage, among them a tall, clean-shaven, wrinkled old man, evidently a merchant, in a skunk-fur coat and a cloth cap with an enormous visor. The merchant sat down across from the places of the lady and the lawyer and at once got into conversation with a young man, a merchant’s clerk by the looks of him, who got into the carriage at the same station.

I was sitting catercorner to them and, as the train was not moving, I could hear snatches of their conversation when no one was passing by. The merchant began by saying that he was going to his estate, which was only one stop away; then, as usual, they got to talking first about prices, about trade, talked, as usual, about how trading was done in Moscow nowadays, then talked about the Nizhny Novgorod fair. The clerk started telling about how some rich merchant they both knew had been carousing at the fair, but the old man did not let him finish and himself started telling about the former carouses in Kunavin, which he himself had taken part in. He was obviously proud of having taken part in them, and with obvious delight told how he and that same acquaintance got drunk once in Kunavin and pulled such a stunt that it had to be told in a whisper, and the clerk guffawed for the whole carriage to hear, and the old man also laughed, baring two yellow teeth.

Not expecting to hear anything interesting, I got up to take a stroll on the platform before the train left. In the doorway I met the lawyer and the lady, who were discussing something animatedly as they went.

“You won’t have time,” said the gregarious lawyer, “it’s nearly the second bell.”

In fact, before I reached the end of the train, the bell rang. When I came back, the animated conversation between the lady and the lawyer was still going on. The old merchant sat silently across from them, looking sternly before him and from time to time chewing his lips with his teeth in disapproval.

“Then she informed her husband straight out,” the lawyer was saying, smiling, as I passed by them, “that she could not and would not live with him, because …”

And he started telling something further that I could not make out. After me more passengers came, the conductor came, a tradesman ran in, and there was noise for quite a while, which prevented me from hearing the conversation. When everything became quiet, and I could again hear the voice of the lawyer, the conversation had obviously gone on from a particular case to general considerations.

The lawyer was speaking about how the question of divorce now occupied public opinion in Europe and how with us such cases were appearing more and more often. Noticing that his was the only voice audible, the lawyer stopped talking and turned to the old man.

“There were no such things in the old days, isn’t that so?” he said, smiling pleasantly.

The old man was about to make some reply, but just then the train started, and the old man, taking off his visored hat, began to cross himself and recite a prayer in a whisper. The lawyer, looking away, waited politely. Having finished his prayer and crossed himself three times, the old man set his cap on straight, pulled it down low, settled back in his seat, and began to speak.

“They happened before as well, sir, only less,” he said. “These days it couldn’t be otherwise. They’ve got so very educated.”

The train, moving faster and faster, clattered over the joints, and it was hard for me to hear, but I was interested and moved closer. My neighbor, the nervous gentleman with the glittering eyes, obviously also became interested and tried to listen without moving from his place.

“What’s so bad about education?” the lady said with a barely noticeable smile. “Can it be better to marry as they did in the old days, when the bride and groom hadn’t even seen each other?” she went on, responding, as is the habit with many ladies, not to her interlocutor’s words, but to the words she thought he would say. “They didn’t know if they loved, if they could love, but married whoever happened along and suffered all their lives. Is that better, in your opinion?” she said, obviously addressing her speech to me and to the lawyer, and least of all to the old man with whom she was talking.

“They’ve got so very educated,” repeated the old man, looking at the lady with scorn and leaving her question unanswered.

“It would be desirable to know how you explain the connection between education and marital discord,” the lawyer said with a barely noticeable smile.

The merchant was about to say something, but the lady interrupted him.

“No, that time is past,” she said. But the lawyer stopped her.

“No, allow him to express his thought.”

“Education leads to foolishness,” the old man said resolutely.

“People marry who don’t love each other, and then they’re surprised that they live in discord,” the lady spoke hurriedly and kept glancing at the lawyer, at me, and even at the clerk, who got up from his seat and, leaning on the back, listened smilingly to the conversation. “It’s only animals that can be coupled as the owner likes, but people have their inclinations, their attachments,” she said, obviously wishing to sting the merchant.

“You oughtn’t to talk that way, madam,” the old man said. “Animals are brutes, but man’s been given the law.”

“Well, but how live with a person if there’s no love?” the lady hastened to voice her opinions, which probably seemed very new to her.

“That wasn’t gone into before,” the old man said in an impressive tone. “It’s only started now. There’s something, and she up and says: ‘I’m leaving you.’ Even among muzhiks this fashion’s caught on: ‘Here,’ she says, ‘take all your shirts and trousers, and I’ll go with Vanka, his hair’s curlier than yours.’ Well, go and talk after that. The first thing in a woman should be fear.”

The clerk looked at the lawyer, and at the lady, and at me, obviously holding back a smile and ready either to laugh or to approve of the merchant’s speech, depending on how it would be taken.

“What fear?” said the lady.

“This: that she fears her hu-u-usband!¹ That’s what fear.”

“Well, my dear man, that time has passed,” the lady said, even with a certain spite.

“No, madam, that time cannot pass. As she, Eve, a woman, was created out of her husband’s rib, so she’ll remain to the end of time,” said the old man, tossing his head so sternly and victoriously that the clerk at once decided that victory was on the merchant’s side and laughed loudly.

“It’s you men who reason that way,” said the lady, not surrendering and glancing at us. “You gave yourselves freedom, but you want to keep woman in her high chamber. And you permit yourselves everything all right.”

“Nobody’s got any permission, it’s only that a man doesn’t bring additions to the household, and a woman is a frail vessel,” the merchant went on imposing.

The imposingness of the merchant’s intonations was obviously winning the listeners over, and even the lady felt crushed, but still did not surrender.

“Yes, but I think you’ll agree that a woman is a human being and has feelings just as a man does. What is she to do if she doesn’t love her husband?”

“Doesn’t love him!” the merchant repeated menacingly, working his eyebrows and lips. “She’ll love him all right!”

This unexpected argument was especially to the clerk’s liking, and he produced an approving sound.

“Oh, no, she won’t,” the lady began, “and if there’s no love, it’s impossible to force it.”

“Well, and if a wife betrays her husband, what then?” said the lawyer.

“That’s not done,” said the old man, “you’ve got to see to that.”

“But if it happens, what then? It does occur.”

“With some it does, but not with us,” said the old man.

They all fell silent. The clerk stirred, moved closer, and, clearly not wishing to be left behind the others, smiled and began:

“Yes, sir, there was also a scandal with one of our fellows. It’s also very hard to decide. He also ended up with a loose sort of woman. And she started playing the devil. And he was a sober lad and with some development. First she went with an office clerk. He tried to talk it over nicely. She wouldn’t quiet down. Did all sorts of nastiness. Started stealing money from him. And he beat her. But she got worser still. Took up with one of the unbaptised, with a Jew, if I may say so. What was he to do? He dropped her altogether. So he lives as a bachelor, and she plays around.”

“Because he’s a fool,” said the old man. “If he hadn’t given way to her from the very start, if he’d really brought her up short, she’d live with him all right. Mustn’t give ’em freedom from the start. Never trust a horse in the field or a wife in the house.”

Just then the conductor came to ask for tickets to the next station. The old man gave him his ticket.

“Yes, sir, the female sex has got to be brought up short way before, or else it’s all lost.”

“Well, and how about you yourself telling just now how married men lived it up at the Kunavin fair?” I asked, unable to restrain myself.

“That’s another matter,” the merchant said and sank into silence.

When the whistle sounded, the merchant stood up, took his bag from under the seat, wrapped himself in his coat, and, tipping his cap, went out to the rear platform.

II

AS SOON AS the old man left, several voices rose in conversation.

“An Old Testament papa,” said the clerk.

“A living Domostroy,”² said the lady. “What a wild notion of women and marriage!”

“Yes, sir, we’re far from the European view of marriage,” said the lawyer.

“The main thing such people don’t understand,” said the lady, “is that marriage without love isn’t marriage, that only love sanctifies marriage, and that the only true marriage is one sanctified by love.”

The clerk listened and smiled, wishing to memorize as much of the intelligent conversation as he could for future use.

In the middle of the lady’s speech, a sound as of broken-off laughter or sobbing came from behind me, and, turning to look, we saw my neighbor, the solitary, gray-haired gentleman with the glittering eyes, who, during the conversation, which obviously interested him, had inconspicuously approached us. He stood, placing his hands on the back of a seat, and was obviously very agitated: his face was red, a muscle twitched on his cheek.

“What is this love … love … love … that sanctifies marriage?” he said, faltering.

Seeing the speaker’s agitated state, the lady tried to answer him as gently and circumstantially as she could.

“True love … If there is this love between a man and a woman, then marriage is possible,” said the lady.

“Yes, ma’am, but what is meant by true love?” said the gentleman with the glittering eyes, timidly and with an awkward smile.

“Everybody knows what love is,” said the lady, obviously wishing to break off her conversation with him.

“But I don’t,” said the gentleman. “You must define what you mean …”

“Why, it’s very simple,” the lady said, but fell to thinking. “Love? Love is an exclusive preference for one man or woman over all the rest,” she said.

“Preference for how long? For a month? For two days? For half an hour?” the gray-haired man said and laughed.

“No, excuse me, you’re obviously talking about something else.”

“No, ma’am, about the same thing.”

“Madam says,” the lawyer mixed in, pointing to the lady, “that marriage should proceed, first, from attachment—love, if you wish—and that if such is present, then only in that case does marriage present itself as something, so to speak, sacred. Hence any marriage which does not have at its base a natural attachment—love, if you wish—has nothing morally obligatory in itself. Is my understanding correct?” he turned to the lady.

The lady, nodding her head, expressed her approval of this explanation of her thought.

“Wherefore …” the lawyer went on with his speech, but the nervous gentleman, his eyes now burning with fire, was obviously restraining himself with difficulty and, not giving the lawyer his say, began:

“No, I’m talking about the same thing, about the preference for one man or woman over all others, only I ask: preference for how long?”

“For how long? For a long time, sometimes for a whole lifetime,” said the lady, shrugging her shoulders.

“Yes, but that happens only in novels, and never in life. In life this preference for one over others may last for years, but very rarely, more often for a few months or else weeks, days, hours,” he said, obviously knowing that he was astonishing everyone by his opinion, and pleased with that.

“Ah, how can you! No. No, excuse me,” all three of us started speaking in one voice. Even the clerk produced some sort of disapproving sound.

“Yes, sir, I know,” the gray-haired man outshouted us, “you’re speaking of how it’s considered to be, and I’m speaking of how it is. Every man experiences what you call love for every beautiful woman.”

“Ah, it’s terrible, what you’re saying; but isn’t there this feeling between people that is called love and that is given not for months or years, but for a whole lifetime?”

“No, there isn’t. Even if we allow that a man does prefer a certain woman for his whole life, the woman, in all probability, will prefer someone else, and that’s how it is and always has been in the world,” he said, took out a cigarette case, and began to light up.

“But it may also be mutual,” said the lawyer.

“No, sir, it may not,” the man objected, “any more than it may be that two marked peas lie side by side in a cartload of peas. And besides that, it’s not only a matter of improbability here, but most likely of satiety. To love one woman or one man for a whole lifetime is the same as to say that one candle will burn for a whole lifetime,” he said, inhaling greedily.

“But you keep talking about physical love. Don’t you allow for love based on a oneness of ideals, on spiritual affinity?” said the lady.

“Spiritual affinity! Oneness of ideals!” he repeated, producing his sound. “In that case there’s no need to sleep together (forgive the crudeness). And yet people go to bed together as a result of a oneness of ideals,” he said and laughed nervously.

“Excuse me,” said the lawyer, “but the facts contradict what you’re saying. We see that marriages do exist, that the whole of mankind or the majority of it lives in marriage, and many live honorably throughout a long married life.”

The gray-haired gentleman laughed again.

“First you say that marriage is based on love, and when I express doubt about the existence of any love except the sensual, you prove the existence of love by the fact that marriages exist. But in our time marriage is nothing but deceit!”

“No, sir, excuse me,” said the lawyer, “I say only that marriages did and do exist.”

“They do. Only why do they exist? They did and do exist among people who see something mysterious in marriage, a sacrament that’s binding before God. Among them they exist, but among us they don’t. Among us people marry, seeing nothing in marriage except copulation, and the result is either deceit or violence. If it’s deceit, it’s easier to bear. The husband and wife only deceive people that they live monogamously, but live polygamously on both sides. That’s vile, but still it goes over; but when, as most often happens, the husband and wife take upon themselves the external obligation to live together all their lives, and already hate each other after the second month, wish they were divorced, and still live together, then what comes of it is that terrible hell from which people drink themselves to death, shoot themselves, kill and poison themselves or each other,” he spoke more and more quickly, letting no one put in a word, and growing more and more heated. Everyone was silent. It was awkward.

“Yes, critical episodes undoubtedly do occur in married life,” said the lawyer, wishing to stop this indecently heated conversation.

“I see you’ve figured out who I am?” the gray-haired gentleman said softly and as if calmly.

“No, I don’t have that pleasure.”

“It’s no great pleasure. I’m Pozdnyshev, the one to whom that critical episode occurred which you alluded to, that episode in which he killed his wife,” he said, quickly glancing at each of us.

No one could find anything to say, and we all remained silent.

“Well, it makes no difference,” he said, producing his sound. “Anyhow, forgive me! Ah! … I won’t hamper you.”

“No, no, please …” said the lawyer, himself not knowing “please” what.

But Pozdnyshev, not listening to him, quickly turned and went to his seat. The gentleman and lady were whispering. I sat beside Pozdnyshev and was silent, unable to think of what to say. It was too dark to read, and therefore I closed my eyes and pretended that I wanted to sleep. So we rode on silently until the next station.

At the station, the gentleman and lady moved to another car, which they had arranged earlier with the conductor. The clerk settled himself on a seat and fell asleep. Pozdnyshev kept smoking and drinking the tea he had made at the last station.

When I opened my eyes and looked at him, he suddenly addressed me with resolution and irritation:

“It is probably unpleasant for you to sit with me, knowing who I am? In that case I can go away.”

“Oh, no, please.”

“Well, then, would you like some? Only it’s strong.” He poured me tea.

“They say … And it’s all lies …” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Always the same thing: this love of theirs and what it is. Don’t you want to sleep?”

“Not at all.”

“Then do you want me to tell you how I was led by that same love to what happened to me?”

“Yes, if it’s not too painful for you.”

“No, it’s painful for me to be silent. Drink your tea. Or is it too strong?”

The tea was in fact like beer, but I drank a glass. Just then the conductor passed. He silently followed him with angry eyes, and began only when the man was gone.

III

“WELL, then I’ll tell you … You really want me to?”

I repeated that I wanted it very much. He paused, rubbed his face with his hands, and began:

“If I’m to tell you, I must tell everything from the beginning: I must tell how and why I married, and what sort I was before marriage.

“Before marriage I lived as everyone does—that is, in our circle. I’m a landowner and a university graduate, and was marshal of the nobility.³ Before marriage I lived as everyone does, that is, in depravity, and, like all people of my circle, while living in depravity, I was sure I was living as one should. I thought of myself as a dear fellow and a completely moral person. I wasn’t a seducer, had no unnatural tastes, did not make it the chief aim of life, as many of my peers did, but gave myself to depravity soberly, decently, for the sake of health. I avoided women who might bind me by giving birth to a child or becoming attached to me. However, maybe there were children and attachments, but I made as if there weren’t any. And I not only considered that moral, but I was proud of it.”

He stopped, produced his sound, as he always did, evidently, when a new thought came to him.

“And in that lies the chief loathsomeness,” he cried. “Depravity does not lie in anything physical, no, depravity is no physical outrage; but depravity, true depravity, lies precisely in freeing oneself of moral relations to a woman with whom you enter into physical contact. But that freedom was just what I laid to my credit. I remember how I suffered once from not managing to pay a woman who, probably having fallen in love with me, had given herself to me. I calmed down only when I had sent her the money, showing thereby that I did not consider myself morally bound to her. Don’t nod your head as if you agree with me,” he suddenly shouted at me. “I know those tricks. You all—and you, you, too—at best, unless you’re a rare exception, have the same views I had then. Well, it makes no difference, forgive me,” he went on, “but the point is that it’s terrible, terrible, terrible!”

“What’s terrible?” I asked.

“That abyss of delusion we live in regarding women and our relations to them. No, sir, I cannot speak of it calmly, and not because this episode, as he put it, occurred with me, but because since that episode occurred with me, my eyes have been opened, and I see everything in quite a different light. Everything’s inside out, inside out! …”

He lit a cigarette and, leaning his elbows on his knees, began to speak.

I could not see his face in the darkness and only heard, through the rattling of the carriage, his impressive and pleasant voice.

IV

“YES, sir, only having suffered greatly, as I suffered, only thanks to that did I understand where the root of it all lies, understand what ought to be, and therefore see all the horror of what is.

“So kindly see how and when that which led up to my episode began. It began when I was going on sixteen. It happened when I was still in high school and my older brother was a first-year university student. I did not know women yet, but, like all the unfortunate children of our circle, I was already not an innocent boy: it was already the second year since I was corrupted by other boys; already woman, not this or that woman, but woman as something sweet, woman, any woman, woman’s nakedness, tormented me. My solitude was impure. I was tormented, as ninety-nine percent of our boys are tormented. I was horrified, I suffered, I prayed, and I fell. I was already depraved in imagination and in reality, but I had not yet taken the final step. I was perishing alone, but had not yet laid hands on another human being. But then a comrade of my brother’s, a student, a merrymaker, what’s known as a good fellow, that is, the greatest of scoundrels, who taught us to drink and play cards, persuaded us after a drinking party to go there. We went. My brother was also still innocent, and he fell that night. And I, a fifteen-year-old boy, defiled myself and contributed to defiling a woman, without any understanding of what I was doing. I had never heard from any older men that what I was doing was bad. Neither will anyone hear it from them now. True, it’s in the commandments, but the commandments are needed only for answering the priest at an examination,⁴ and then not very much needed, far less than the commandment about using ut in the Latin conditional.

“So I never heard from any older people, whose opinions I respected, that this was a bad thing. On the contrary, I heard from people I respected that it was a good thing. I heard that my struggles and sufferings would calm down after that, heard it and read it, and heard from older men that it would be good for my health; and from my schoolmates I heard that there was some sort of merit or valor in it. So that in general I could see nothing but good in it. The danger of illness? But even that had been foreseen. The solicitous government takes care of that. It keeps an eye on the correct functioning of brothels and furnishes depravity to schoolboys. And salaried doctors keep an eye on it. That’s how it should be. They maintain that depravity is good for one’s health, and they organize proper, well-regulated depravity. I know mothers who take care of their sons’ health in that sense. Science, too, sends them to brothels.”

“Why science?” I said.

“And what are doctors? Priests of science. Who corrupts young men, maintaining that it’s necessary for their health? They do. And then with terrible self-importance they treat syphilis.”

“But why shouldn’t they treat syphilis?”

“Because if one percent of the efforts spent on treating syphilis was spent on eradicating depravity, there would long since have been no syphilis to speak of. And yet the efforts are applied not to eradicating depravity, but to encouraging it, to ensuring its safety. Well, but that’s not the point. The point is that with me, and with ninety percent, if not more, not only of our class but of all, even peasants, that terrible thing happened, that I fell not because I yielded to the natural temptation of a certain woman’s charm. No, no woman tempted me; I fell because the milieu around me saw that fall, some as a most legitimate and healthful function, others as a most natural and not only forgivable but even innocent amusement for a young man. I did not understand that it was a fall, I simply began giving myself to those half pleasures, half needs, which are proper, as had been suggested to me, to a certain age, I began giving myself to depravity as I had begun to drink and smoke. And yet there was something special and touching in this first fall. I remember feeling sad at once, on the spot, before I left the room, so sad that I wanted to cry, to cry about the loss of my innocence, about my forever destroyed relation to women. Yes, sir, my natural, simple relation to women was destroyed forever. From then on I did not and could not have a pure relation to women. I became what’s known as a fornicator. To be a fornicator is a physical condition similar to the condition of a morphine addict, a drunkard, a smoker. As a morphine addict, a drunkard, a smoker is not a normal person, so a man who has known several women for his own pleasure is no longer normal, but is corrupted forever—a fornicator. As a drunkard or a morphine addict can be recognized at once by his face, his manner, so, too, a fornicator. A fornicator may abstain, struggle; but he will never have a simple, clear, pure, brotherly relation to women. You can recognize a fornicator at once by the way he eyes a young woman and looks her over. And I became a fornicator and remained one, and that’s what destroyed me.”

V

“THAT’S RIGHT, sir. Then it went further and further, there were all sorts of deviations. My God, when I remember all my loathsomeness in this respect, it’s horrible! That’s how I remember myself, who was laughed at by my comrades because of my so-called innocence. And when I hear about gilded youth, officers, Parisians! And all these gentlemen, and I, when we thirty-year-old debauchees, having hundreds of the most various and terrible crimes on our souls with regard to women, when we, scrubbed clean, shaven, scented, in clean linen, a tailcoat or a uniform, happen to enter a drawing room or a ballroom—the emblem of purity—how charming!

“Just think of what ought to be and what is. It ought to be that when such a gentleman enters the company of my sister or daughter, I, knowing his life, should go up to him, take him aside, and quietly say to him: ‘My dear fellow, I know how you live, how you spend your nights and with whom. This is no place for you. There are pure, innocent girls here. Go away!’ That’s how it ought to be; how it is, is that when such a gentleman appears and dances with my sister or my daughter, embracing her, we rejoice, if he’s rich and has connections. Perchance, after Rigol-boche,⁵ he will honor my daughter as well. Even if there are traces left, a bit of illness—never mind. Nowadays there are good treatments. Why, I know several parents in high society who were overjoyed to marry their daughters off to syphilitics. Oh, oh, loathsome! May there come a time when this loathsomeness and lying are exposed!”

And he produced his strange sounds several times and took his tea. The tea was awfully strong, there was no water to dilute it. I felt particularly agitated by the two glasses I had drunk. He, too, must have been affected by the tea, because he was becoming increasingly excited. His voice was growing more and more melodious and expressive. He constantly shifted his posture, took his hat off, put it on again, and his face kept changing strangely in the semi-darkness in which we were sitting.

“Well, that’s how I lived till the age of thirty, not for a moment abandoning the intention of marrying and setting up for myself the most lofty and pure family life, and to that end I was looking for a suitable girl,” he went on. “I wallowed in festering depravity and at the same time kept an eye out for girls whose purity would make them worthy of me. I rejected many precisely because they weren’t pure enough for me; at last I found one whom I deemed worthy. She was one of two daughters of a once very rich but now ruined landowner from Penza province.

“One evening, after we had gone for a boat ride and were returning home at night by moonlight, and I was sitting beside her and admiring her shapely figure in a close-fitting jersey and her tresses, I suddenly decided that she was the one. It seemed to me that evening that she understood everything, everything I felt and thought, and that I felt and thought the most lofty things. Essentially, it was only that the jersey was especially becoming, as were the tresses, and that after a day spent in closeness to her I desired still greater closeness.

“It’s an astonishing thing how complete the illusion can be that beauty is the good. A beautiful woman says stupid things, you listen and don’t see the stupidity, you see intelligence. She says and does vile things, and you see something sweet. And when she doesn’t say stupid or vile things, but is beautiful, you think she’s a marvel of intelligence and morality.

“I returned home in ecstasy and decided that she was the height of moral perfection and that therefore she was worthy to be my wife, and the next day I proposed.

“What a tangle it is! Of thousands of marrying men, not only among our kind, but unfortunately also among the people, there is hardly one who has not been married ten times already, or else a hundred, a thousand, like Don Juan, before his marriage. (True, there are, as I’ve heard and observed, pure young men, who feel and know that it’s not a joke but a great matter. God be with them! But in my time there wasn’t one like that in ten thousand.) And everybody knows it and pretends not to know. In all novels there are detailed descriptions of the heroes’ feelings, of the ponds and bushes they walk by; but, while his great love for some girl is described, nothing is said about what he, the interesting hero, did before: not a word about his visits to houses, about chambermaids, kitchen maids, other men’s wives. If there exist such improper novels, they are not put into the hands of those who most need to know—the young girls. First we pretend before young girls that the licentiousness that fills half the life of our cities and even villages, that this licentiousness doesn’t exist. Then we get so used to this pretense that finally, like the English, we ourselves begin sincerely to believe that we’re all moral people and live in a moral world. As for the girls, the poor things believe it in all seriousness. So my unfortunate wife also believed. I remember how, when I was already her fiancé, I showed her my diary, from which she could learn at least a little of my past, mainly about the last liaison I had, which she might have learned of from others, and of which I therefore felt it necessary to tell her. I remember her horror, despair, and bewilderment when she learned and understood. I saw that she wanted to drop me then. And why didn’t she!”

He produced his sound, paused, and took another sip of tea.

VI

“No, anyhow, it’s better, it’s better like this!” he cried. “It serves me right! But that’s not the thing. I wanted to say that it’s only the unfortunate girls who are deceived here. The mothers know it, especially mothers educated by their husbands, they know it very well. And while pretending to believe in the purity of men, in reality they act quite differently. They know what bait will catch men for themselves and their daughters.

“For it’s only we men who don’t know, and don’t know because we don’t want to know, while women know very well, that the most lofty, poetic love, as we call it, depends not on moral qualities, but on physical intimacy and, with that, on hairstyle, the color and cut of a dress. Ask an experienced coquette who has set herself the task of captivating a man which she would sooner risk: to be convicted, in the presence of the man she is trying to charm, of lying, cruelty, even licentiousness, or to appear before him in a poorly made and unattractive dress—she will always prefer the first. She knows that we men all lie about lofty feelings—we need only her body, and therefore we’ll forgive any vileness, but will not forgive an ugly, tasteless, bad-tone dress. A coquette knows that consciously, but every innocent girl knows it unconsciously, as animals know things.

“Hence those loathsome jerseys, those things slapped on behind, those bare shoulders, arms, all but bare breasts. Women, especially those who have gone through the men’s school, know very well that conversations about lofty matters are—conversations, but that a man needs their body and all that presents it in the most alluring light; and that’s what gets done. If only we cast off the habit of this outrage, which has become second nature to us, and look at the life of our upper classes as it is, with all its shamelessness, it’s one continuous brothel. You don’t agree? Allow me to prove it,” he went on, interrupting me. “You say that women in our society live by other interests than women in brothels, and I say no, and I’ll prove it. If people differ in their goals in life, in the inner content of their life, that difference will inevitably be reflected in externals as well, and externally they will be different. But look at those unfortunate despised ones and at ladies of the highest society: the same outfits, the same fashions, the same perfumes, the same bared arms, shoulders, breasts, and tight-fitting, thrust-out behinds, the same passion for little stones, for expensive, glittering things, the same amusements, dancing, and music, and singing. As those use every means to allure, so do these. No difference. To define it strictly, one need only say that the short-term prostitutes are usually despised, the long-term prostitutes respected.”

VII

“YES, so it was these jerseys, and tresses, and slapped-on bits that caught me. To catch me was easy, because I had been raised in conditions in which amorous young men are forced like hotbed cucumbers. For our stimulating, excessive food, along with total physical idleness, is nothing other than a systematic exciting of lust. Surprising or not, it’s true. And I myself saw none of it until recently. But now I’ve seen it. That’s why it pains me that nobody knows it, and they say stupid things, like that lady.

“Yes, sir, this spring some muzhiks were working on a railway embankment near me. Ordinary food for a peasant lad is bread, kvass, and onion; he’s alive, vigorous, healthy, and does light field work. He goes to work on the railway, here his grub is kasha and a pound of meat. But then he gets rid of that meat working sixteen hours a day with a thousand-pound cart. And so it’s just right for him. Well, but we who consume two pounds of meat, game, and all sorts of strong food and drink—where does all that go? Into sensual excesses. And if it does go there, and the safety valve is open, everything’s fine; but close the valve, as I did temporarily, and at once you get an excitement which, passing through the prism of our artificial life, will express itself in a love of the purest water, sometimes even platonic. And I fell in love as everybody does. It was all there: the raptures, the tenderness, the poetry. But in fact this love of mine was the product, on the one hand, of the activity of the mama and the dressmakers, and, on the other, of the excess of food I consumed in my idle life. If, on the one hand, there had been no boat rides, no dressmakers with their tight waists, and so on, and my wife had been dressed in a shapeless housecoat and sitting at home, while I, on the other hand, had been living in normal human conditions, consuming as much food as was needed for my work, and if my safety valve had been open—because it somehow chanced to be closed at that time—I wouldn’t have fallen in love, and nothing would have happened.”

VIII

“WELL, but this time it all fell together: my condition, and a pretty dress, and a successful boat ride. Twenty times it hadn’t succeeded, but this time it did. Like a trap. I’m not laughing. Marriages are set up that way now, like traps. Isn’t it only natural? The wench is ripe, she must get married. It seems so simple, when the wench is not ugly and there are men who wish to marry. That’s how it was done in the old days. The girl comes of age, the parents arrange the marriage. That’s how it was done and is done in all mankind: among the Chinese, the Hindus, the Mohammedans, among our folk; that’s how it’s done in at least ninety-nine percent of the human race. Only one percent or less of us, the profligates, found it no good and invented something new. And what is this new thing? The new thing is that the girls sit there, and the men, as in a market place, walk about and choose. And the wenches wait and think, but don’t dare to say: ‘Me, dear man! No, me. Not her, but me: look what shoulders I’ve got, and other things.’ And we men stroll about, look them over, and are very pleased: ‘I know, I won’t fall for that.’ They stroll about, they look them over, very pleased that it’s all set up for them. Watch out, don’t get careless—snap, that’s it!”

“Then how should it be?” I said. “Should the woman make the proposal?”

“I really don’t know how; only if it’s equality, then it’s equality. If they think matchmaking is humiliating, this is a thousand times more so. There the rights and chances are equal, but here the woman is either a slave in a marketplace or bait in a trap. Tell some mother or the girl herself the truth, that the only thing she’s busy with is snaring a husband. God, what an insult! Yet they all do only that, and there’s nothing else for them to do. And the terrible thing is to see quite young, poor, innocent girls sometimes busy with it. And again, if it was done openly, but it’s all deceit. ‘Ah, the origin of species, how interesting! Ah, Liza’s so interested in painting! Will you be at the exhibition? How instructive! And troika rides, and the theater, and the symphony! Ah, how wonderful! My Liza’s mad about music. Why don’t you share these convictions? And boating! …’ And just one thought: ‘Take, take me, my Liza! No, me! Well, try at least! …’ Oh, the loathsomeness! the lies!” he concluded, and finishing the last of his tea, he began to put away the cups and plates.

IX

“YOU KNOW,” he began, putting the tea and sugar in his bag, “the domination of women from which the world suffers—it all comes from this.”

“How do you mean, the domination of women?” I said. “The rights and advantages are on the men’s side.”

“Yes, yes, that’s just it,” he interrupted me. “That’s just what I want to tell you, that’s what explains the extraordinary phenomenon that, on the one hand, it is completely correct that woman is reduced to the lowest degree of humiliation, and, on the other hand, that she dominates. Just the same as the Jews, as they pay back for their oppression by monetary power, so with women. ‘Ah, you want us to be merchants only. Very well, we merchants will own you,’ say the Jews. ‘Ah, you want us to be objects of sensuality only. Very well, as objects of sensuality we will enslave you,’ say the women. The absence of women’s rights is not in the fact that she cannot vote or be a judge—to be occupied with such things does not constitute any sort of right—but in the fact that, to be equal to man in sexual relations, she must have the right to use the man or abstain from him as she wishes, to choose a man as she wishes and not to be chosen. You say that’s outrageous. Very well. Then a man should not have those rights either. But now a woman is deprived of the right the man has. And so, to make up for that right, she acts upon the man’s sensuality, through sensuality she so subjects him that his choice is merely formal, and in reality it is she who chooses. And once she possesses this means, she misuses it and acquires terrible power over people.”

“But where is this special power?” I asked.

“Where? Everywhere, in everything. Go through the shops in any big city. There are millions there, the human labor invested there is inestimable, but look at ninety percent of these shops—is there anything in them for the use of men? All the luxury of life is required and maintained by women. Count up all the factories. A huge number of them make useless adornments, carriages, furniture, trinkets for women. Millions of people, generations of slaves perish at this hard labor in the factories only for women’s whims. Women, like queens, keep ninety percent of the human race in the bondage of slavery and hard labor. And all because they’ve been humiliated, deprived of equal rights with men. And so in revenge they act upon our sensuality, they catch us in their nets. Yes, it’s all from that. Women have made of themselves such an instrument for arousing sensuality that a man cannot deal with a woman calmly. As soon as a man approaches a woman, he succumbs to her spell and gets befuddled. Even before, I always felt awkward, eerie, when I saw a woman decked out in a ball gown, but now I’m downright scared, I see something downright dangerous for people and against the law, I want to call the police, to ask for protection against the danger, to demand that the dangerous object be taken away, removed.

“Yes, you laugh!” he shouted at me. “But this is not a joke. I’m sure the time will come, and maybe very soon, when people will understand it and will be surprised at the existence of a society which allowed for acts so disturbing to the public peace as those bodily adornments downright provoking of sensuality which women are allowed in our society. It’s the same as setting all sorts of traps along paths and promenades—even worse! Why is gambling forbidden, while women in prostitutionous, sensuality-arousing costumes are not? They’re a thousand times more dangerous!”

X

“WELL, so that’s how I got caught. I was, as it’s called, in love. I not only imagined her to be the height of perfection, I also imagined, during the time of my engagement, that I, too, was the height of perfection. For there’s no scoundrel who, if he searches, can’t find some scoundrels worse than himself in some respect, and who, therefore, can’t find a reason to feel proud and be pleased with himself. So it was with me: I didn’t marry money—gain had nothing to do with it—unlike the majority of my acquaintances, who married for money or connections. I was rich, she was poor. That’s one thing. Another, which I was proud of, was that others married with the intention of continuing in the future to live in the same polygamy they had lived in before marriage; while I had the firm intention of keeping to monogamy after the wedding, and there were no limits to the pride I took in that. Yes, I was a terrible swine and imagined that I was an angel.

“The time of my engagement did not last long. I cannot recall that time now without shame! What vileness! It’s supposed to be a time of spiritual love, not sensual. Well, if love is spiritual, a spiritual communion, then that spiritual communion should be expressed in words, conversation, dialogue. There was none of that. It used to be terribly difficult to speak when we were left by ourselves. Like some sort of labor of Sisyphus. You think up something to say, say it, and again must be silent and think. There was nothing to talk about. Everything that could be said about the life ahead of us, the arrangements, the plans, had already been said, and what then? If we had been animals, we would simply have known that we weren’t supposed to talk; but here, on the contrary, talking was necessary and yet pointless, because we were concerned with something not to be resolved in conversation. And with that there’s also this hideous custom of eating candy, crude gluttony on sweets and all these loathsome preparations for the wedding: talk about the apartment, the bedroom, bed linen, coats, dressing gowns, underwear, costumes. You must understand that, if people marry according to the Domostroy, as that old man said, then the featherbeds, the dowry, the linen are only details accompanying the sacrament. But with us, when out of ten men who marry there’s scarcely one who not only believes in the sacrament but also believes that there’s a certain obligation in what he is doing, when out of a hundred men there’s scarcely one who wasn’t married before, and out of fifty one who wasn’t preparing beforehand to betray his wife on every convenient occasion, when the majority looks at the trip to church only as a particular condition for possessing a certain woman—think what a terrible significance all these details acquire from that. It turns out that that’s the whole thing. It turns out as something like a purchase. An innocent girl is sold to a debauchee, and the purchase is surrounded by certain formalities.”

XI

“THAT’S HOW everybody marries, and that’s how I married, too, and the much-praised honeymoon began. The name alone is so base!” he hissed spitefully. “I once went around all the shows in Paris and stopped to look at one advertising a bearded lady and a water dog. It turned out to be nothing more than a man in a woman’s low-cut dress and a dog stuck into a walrus skin and swimming in a tub of water. It was all of very little interest; but as I was leaving, the showman politely saw me out and, addressing the public at the entrance, pointed to me and said: ‘Here, ask the gentleman whether it’s worth seeing. Come in, come in, one franc per person!’ I was ashamed to say it wasn’t worth seeing, and the showman was probably counting on that. It’s probably the same with those who have experienced all the loathsomeness of a honeymoon and don’t want to disappoint others. I also did not disappoint anyone, but now I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell the truth. I even think it’s necessary to tell the truth about it. Awkward, shameful, vile, pitiful, and, above all, dull, impossibly dull! It was something like what I experienced when I was learning to smoke, when I wanted to throw up, and the saliva flowed, and I swallowed and made it look as if I found it pleasant. The enjoyment of smoking, as of the other, comes later, if it comes at all: the spouses must educate themselves in this vice in order to derive enjoyment from it.”

“Why vice?” I said. “Aren’t you talking about the most natural human property?”

“Natural?” he said. “Natural? No, I’ll tell you, on the contrary, I’ve come to the conviction that it’s un … natural. Yes, absolutely un … natural. Ask children, ask an uncorrupted girl. My sister was married very young to a man twice her age and a debauchee. I remember how surprised we were on her wedding night when she ran away from him, pale and in tears, and, shaking all over, said she would not for anything, not for anything, that she couldn’t even speak of what he wanted from her.

“Natural, you say! It’s natural to eat. And from the very beginning eating is delightful, easy, pleasant, and not shameful; but this is loathsome, and shameful, and painful. No, it’s unnatural! And an unspoiled girl, I’ve become convinced, always hates it.”

“How then,” I asked, “how then is the human race to go on?”

“Yes, so long as the human race doesn’t perish!” he said with spiteful irony, as if expecting this familiar and unfair objection. “Preach abstention from childbearing in the name of letting English lords go on with their gluttony—that you can do. Preach abstention from childbearing in the name of having more pleasure—that you can do; but stammer something about abstaining from childbearing in the name of morality—good heavens, what an outcry! It’s as if the human race may come to an end because a dozen or two want to stop being swine. But forgive me. I find this light unpleasant, may I shade it?” he said, pointing to the lamp.

I said it made no difference to me, and hastily, as he did everything, he climbed up on the seat and drew the woolen curtain over the lamp.

“All the same,” I said, “if everybody recognized it as their law, the human race would come to an end.”

He did not reply at once.

“You say, how will the human race go on?” he said, sitting down again across from me, with his legs spread wide and his elbows resting low on them. “Why should it go on, this human race?” he said.

“Why? If it didn’t we wouldn’t exist.”

“And why should we exist?”

“Why? In order to live.”

“And why live? If there’s no goal at all, if life is given for the sake of life, there’s no need to live. And if so, then the Schopenhauers, and the Hartmanns, and all the Buddhists⁶ are perfectly right. Well, but if there is a goal in life, it’s clear that life should come to an end once that goal is achieved. And that’s how it turns out,” he said with visible excitement, obviously cherishing his thought greatly. “That’s how it turns out. Note that if the goal of mankind—goodness, kindness, love, as you wish—if the goal of mankind is what is said in the prophecies, that all men will be united by love, that spears will be beaten into pruning hooks, and so on, what is it that hinders the achieving of that goal? Passions hinder it. Among the passions the strongest, and most evil, and most stubborn is sexual, carnal love, and therefore, if the passions are annihilated, including the ultimate, the strongest of them, carnal love, then the prophecy will be fulfilled, people will be united, the goal of mankind will be achieved, and it will have nothing to live for. As long as mankind lives, an ideal stands before it, and, of course, not the ideal of rabbits or pigs, which is to multiply as much as possible, and not of simians or Parisians, which is to enjoy the pleasures of sexual passion with the greatest possible refinement, but the ideal of the good, achieved through temperance and purity. People have always striven and still strive for it. And see how it turns out.

“It turns out that carnal love is a safety valve. If the generation of mankind living now has not achieved its goal, then it hasn’t achieved it only because there are passions in it, including the strongest of them—the sexual. But if there is sexual passion, then there will be a new generation, meaning that there is the possibility of achieving the goal in the next generation. If the next one doesn’t achieve it, again there’s the next one, and so on until the goal is achieved, the prophecy is fulfilled, and people are united together. Otherwise how would it turn out? Let’s allow that God created people for the achievement of a certain goal, and created them mortal, without sexual passion, or eternal. If they were mortal, but without sexual passion, how would it turn out? They would live for a time and die without achieving the goal; and for the goal to be achieved, God would have to create new people. If they were eternal (though it’s more difficult for the same people than for new generations to correct mistakes and approach perfection), then suppose that after many thousands of years they achieved the goal—what use would they be then? What to do with them? It’s best of all precisely the way it is … But maybe you don’t like this form of expression? Maybe you’re an evolutionist? Then, too, it turns out the same. The highest breed of animals—people—in order to hold out in the struggle with other animals, should join together, like a hive of bees, and not multiply endlessly; just like the bees, it should raise sexless ones, that is, again, should strive for continence, and by no means for the inflaming of lust, towards which the whole order of our life is directed.” He paused. “The human race will come to an end? But can anyone, however he looks at the world, question that? It’s as unquestionable as death. According to all the teachings of the Church, the end of the world will come, and according to all scientific teachings, it is inevitably the same. Why is it strange, then, that for moral teaching it turns out the same?”

He was silent for a long time after that, drank more tea, finished smoking his cigarette, and, taking new ones from his bag, put them into his old, soiled cigarette case.

“I understand your thinking,” I said. “The Shakers maintain something similar.”

“Yes, yes, and they’re right,” he said. “Sexual passion, whatever its circumstances, is an evil, a terrible evil, which must be fought, not encouraged, as with us. The words of the Gospel, that whoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery, refer not only to other men’s wives, but precisely—and above all—to one’s own.”

XII

“YET IN OUR WORLD it’s just the reverse: even if a man still thought of continence while a bachelor, once married they all think that now continence is no longer necessary. These trips after the wedding, the secluded places the young people go to with parental permission—why, it’s nothing else but a permission for debauchery. But the moral law avenges itself once it’s violated. Hard as I tried to arrange the honeymoon for myself, nothing came of it. The whole time was vile, shameful, and dull. But very soon it also became painfully oppressive. That started very soon. I think on the third or fourth day I found my wife looking dull, began asking her why, began to embrace her, which in my opinion was all she could have wished for, but she pushed my arm away and burst into tears. About what? She couldn’t say. But she felt sad, oppressed. Probably her exhausted nerves urged upon her the truth about the vileness of our relations; but she couldn’t say it. I began to question her, she said something about feeling sad without her mother. I thought it wasn’t true. I started reassuring her, ignoring her mother. I didn’t understand that she simply felt oppressed, and her mother was only an excuse. But she became offended at once that I passed over her mother in silence, as if I didn’t believe her. She said she could see I didn’t love her. I reproached her for being capricious, and suddenly her face changed completely, instead of sadness it expressed irritation, and she began to reproach me for egoism and cruelty in the most venomous words. I looked at her. Her whole face expressed the utmost coldness and hostility, almost hatred towards me. I remember how horrified I was to see it. ‘How? What?’ I thought. ‘Love is the union of souls, and instead of that there’s this! No, it can’t be, it’s not her!’ I tried to soften her, but ran into such an impenetrable wall of cold, venomous hostility that, before I could turn around, the irritation had seized me, too, and we said a heap of unpleasant things to each other. The impression of that first quarrel was terrible. I’ve called it a quarrel, but it wasn’t a quarrel, it was only the uncovering of the abyss that actually lay between us. Amorousness had been exhausted by the satisfaction of sensuality, and we were left facing each other in our actual relation to each other, that is, two egoists totally alien to each other, wishing to get as much pleasure as possible each from the other. I’ve called what happened between us a quarrel; but it was not a quarrel, it was only the uncovering of our actual relation to each other as a result of the cessation of sensuality. I didn’t understand that this cold and hostile relation was our normal relation, did not understand it because this hostile relation of the first days was very soon concealed from us again by a newly arisen ‘rectified’ sensuality, that is, amorousness.

“And I thought that we had quarreled and made peace and that it wouldn’t happen any more. But during this same first honeymoon the period of satiety came again, and again we ceased to need each other, and again there was a quarrel. This second quarrel struck me more painfully than the first. So the first wasn’t accidental, and this is how it has to be and will be, I thought. The second quarrel struck me the more in that it arose from the most impossible cause. It was something about money, of which I am never sparing and really could not be sparing with my wife. I remember only that she somehow turned the matter in such a way that some remark of mine came out as the expression of my wish to dominate her through money, which I supposedly declared to be my exclusive right—something impossible, stupid, base, unnatural both to me and to her. I became irritated, started reproaching her for indelicacy, and she me, and off it went again. In her words and in the expression of her face and eyes I saw again the same cruel, cold hostility that had so struck me before. I remember quarreling with my brother, my friends, my father, but there had never been that peculiar, venomous spite between us that there was here. But some time went by, and again this mutual hatred was hidden by amorousness, that is, sensuality, and I still comforted myself with the thought that these two quarrels were mistakes that could be corrected. But then came a third, a fourth quarrel, and I realized that this was not accidental, but that it had to be and would be that way, and I was horrified at what faced me. With that I was also tormented by the terrible thought that I alone had such a bad life, so unlike what I had expected with my wife, while for other married couples it was not that way. I didn’t know then that this was the common lot, but that, like me, they all thought it was their exclusive misfortune, and concealed this exclusive, shameful misfortune not only from each other, but from themselves, not admitting it to themselves.

“It began with the first days and went on the whole time, and kept growing more intense and embittered. In the depths of my soul I felt from the first weeks that I was caught, that what had turned out was not what I had expected, that marriage is not only not happiness, but something very oppressive, yet, like everyone else, I did not want to admit it to myself (I wouldn’t even now if it weren’t for how it ended) and concealed it not only from others, but from myself. I am astonished now that I did not see my real situation. I could have seen it, if only because the quarrels began from such causes that afterwards, when they were over, it was impossible to remember what they were. Reason had no time to fit sufficient causes to the constantly existing hostility towards each other. But still more striking was the insufficiency of the pretexts for reconciliation. Sometimes there were words, explanations, even tears, but sometimes—oh! it’s vile to remember it now—after the cruelest words to each other, suddenly there were silent looks, smiles, kisses, embraces … Pah, loathsome! How could I not see all the vileness of it then …”

XIII

TWO PASSENGERS CAME IN and started settling themselves on a seat far from us. He was silent while they settled themselves, but as soon as they quieted down, he went on, obviously not losing the thread of his thought for a minute.

“What is filthy above all,” he began, “is that it’s supposed in theory that love is something ideal, lofty, but in practice love is something loathsome, swinish, which it is even loathsome and shameful to speak of or remember. There must be some reason why nature made it loathsome and shameful. But if it’s loathsome and shameful, that’s how it should be understood. But here, on the contrary, people pretend that the loathsome and shameful is beautiful and lofty. What were the first signs of my love? That I gave myself to animal excesses not only without being ashamed of them, but for some reason taking pride in the possibility of these physical excesses, and that without giving the least thought not only to her spiritual life, but even to her physical life. I wondered where our anger against each other came from, yet the thing was perfectly clear: that anger was nothing other than the protest of human nature against the animal that was overwhelming it.

“I was astonished at our hatred for each other. But it couldn’t have been otherwise. That hatred was nothing other than the mutual hatred of accomplices in a crime—both for instigating and for sharing in the crime. How could it not be a crime, when she, the poor thing, became pregnant in the very first month, and our swinish intercourse continued. You think I’m digressing from my story? Not in the least! I’m telling you all about how I killed my wife. They asked me at the trial how and with what I killed my wife. Fools! They think I killed her then, with a knife, on the fifth of October. I didn’t kill her then, but much earlier. Just as they all kill now, all, all …”

“But with what?” I asked.

“That’s the astonishing thing, that nobody wants to know something that’s so clear and obvious, something that doctors should know and preach, but are silent about. It’s a terribly simple thing. Man and woman are created like the animals, so that after carnal love pregnancy begins, then nursing—conditions in which carnal love is harmful for the woman as well as for her child. There are an equal number of women and men. What follows from that? It seems clear. It takes no great wisdom to draw the conclusion from it that animals draw, that is, continence. But no. Science has gone so far as to find some sort of leukocytes that run in the blood, and all sorts of other useless nonsense, but this it’s been unable to understand. At least you don’t hear it said.

“And so there are only two ways out for a woman: one is to make herself into a freak, to destroy or keep on destroying in herself, as need be, the capacity for being a woman, that is, a mother, so that the man can calmly and continuously enjoy himself; or the other way out, even not a way out, but a simple, crude, outright violation of the laws of nature, which takes place in all so-called honest families. Namely, that the woman, contrary to her nature, should be at the same time pregnant, and a nurse, and a lover—should be that which no animal descends to. And she may not have strength enough. Hence the hysterics and bad nerves in our life, and among the people—shriekers.⁷ Note that among young girls, among pure ones, there are no shriekers, but only among peasant women, and among peasant women, it’s those who live with their husbands. So it is with us. And it’s exactly the same in Europe. The hospitals are all filled with hysterical women who violate the law of nature. But the shriekers and Charcot’s patients⁸ are completely disabled, while the world is filled with half-crippled women. Just think what a great thing is being accomplished in a woman when she conceives or nurses the child born to her. That which will continue and replace us is growing. And this sacred thing is violated—by what? It’s dreadful to think! And they talk about the freedom and rights of women. It’s the same as if cannibals fattened up their captives for eating and along with that assured them that they were concerned with their rights and freedom.”

All this was new and I was struck by it.

“But how then? If that’s so,” I said, “then it turns out that a man can make love to his wife only once in two years, but for a man …”

“For a man it’s necessary,” he picked up. “Again our dear priests of science have persuaded everybody. I’d order these magicians to perform the duties of the women who, in their opinion, are necessary to men. What would they say then? Impress it upon a man that vodka, tobacco, opium are necessary to him, and it will all be necessary. It turns out that God didn’t understand what was needed, and therefore, without asking the magicians, arranged it all badly. Kindly note that the thing just doesn’t jibe. Man has the need and the necessity, so they decided, of satisfying his lust, and here childbearing and nursing go mixing in, interfering with the satisfying of that want. What to do? Turn to the magicians, they’ll arrange it. And they came up with something. Oh, when will these magicians and their deceptions be dethroned? It’s high time! It’s gone so far that people lose their minds and shoot themselves, and all because of that. How could it be otherwise? Animals seem to know that their offspring continue their kind and keep to a certain law in that respect. Only man doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know it. And he’s concerned only with having as much pleasure as possible. And who is he? Man, the king of nature. Note that animals couple only when they can produce offspring, but the filthy king of nature—any time, just for the pleasure of it. And what’s more, he exalts this apelike occupation into the pearl of creation, love. And in the name of this love, that is, this muck, he ruins—what?—half of the human race. Of all women, who should be helpers in mankind’s movement towards truth and goodness, he, in the name of his pleasure, makes not helpers, but enemies. Look, what slows mankind’s forward movement everywhere? Women. And why so? Only because of that. Yes, sir, yes,” he repeated several times and began to stir, took out his cigarettes and smoked, obviously wishing to calm down a little.

XIV

“THAT’S THE SORT of swine I was,” he went on again in his former tone. “Worst of all was that, living that nasty life, I imagined that, since I wasn’t tempted by other women, I was therefore living an honest family life, that I was a moral person, and was to blame for nothing, and that if we had quarrels, then she, her character, was to blame.

“The one to blame was, of course, not she. She was the same as everybody, as the majority. She had been brought up as the position of women in our society demanded, and therefore as all women of the well-to-do classes, without exception, are brought up, and cannot help but be brought up. There’s talk of some sort of new women’s education. All empty words: the education of women is exactly what it should be under the existing—not feigned, but real—general view of women.

“And the education of women will always correspond to men’s view of them. We all know how a man looks at a woman: ‘Wein, Weiber und Gesang,’* and so poets speak in verses. Take all poetry, take all painting and sculpture, beginning with love poetry and naked Venuses and Phrynes, and you’ll see that woman is an instrument of pleasure, so she is on the Truba and on the Grachevka,⁹ and at the court ball. And note the devil’s cunning: well, enjoyment, pleasure, so then let it be known that it’s pleasure, that woman is a sweet morsel. No, at first the knights assert that they deify woman (deify, but still look at her as an instrument of enjoyment). Now they assert that they respect woman. Some yield a seat to her, pick up a handkerchief; others acknowledge her right to occupy all posts, to participate in the government, and so on. They do all that, but the view of her is still the same. She is an instrument of enjoyment. Her body is a means of enjoyment. And she knows it. It’s the same as slavery. Slavery is nothing other than the use by a few of the forced labor of many. And therefore, to be rid of slavery, people should stop wanting to use the forced labor of others, considering it sinful or shameful. Yet meanwhile they abolish the external form of slavery, arrange it so that it’s no longer possible to purchase slaves, and imagine and persuade themselves that there is no more slavery, and they don’t see and don’t want to see that slavery continues to exist, because people, just as before, like and regard as good and just the use of the labor of others. And once they regard it as good, people will always be found who are stronger or more cunning than others and will be able to do it. The same with the emancipation of woman. The slavery of woman consists only in that people wish, and regard it as a very good thing, to use her as an instrument of enjoyment. Well, and so they liberate woman, give her various rights equal to man’s, but go on looking at her as an instrument of enjoyment, and educate her as such from childhood and by public opinion. And so she is still the same humiliated, depraved slave, and man is still the same depraved slave owner.

“They liberate woman in schools and law courts, but look at her as an object of enjoyment. Teach her, as she is taught among us, to see herself in the same way, and she will forever remain an inferior being. Either she will prevent the conception of a fetus, with the help of scoundrelly doctors, that is, will be an outright prostitute, who has descended not to the level of an animal, but to the level of a thing, or she will be what in most cases she is—mentally ill, hysterical, and wretched, which is in fact the case, with no possibility of spiritual development.

“Schools and courses cannot change it. It can be changed only by a change in men’s view of women and women’s of themselves. It will change only when women regard the state of virginity as the highest state, and not as now, when the highest condition of a human being is shame and disgrace. As long as that’s not so, the ideal of every girl, whatever her education, will be to attract as many men, as many males, as possible, so as to have the possibility of choice.

“And the fact that one of them knows a little more mathematics and another can play the harp changes nothing. A woman is happy and achieves everything she can desire when she enchants a man. And therefore a woman’s chief task is to know how to enchant him. That’s how it has been and will be. That’s how it is in a girl’s life in our world, that’s how it continues to be in her married life. In a girl’s life it’s necessary for the sake of choice, in married life for the sake of power over the husband.

“One thing that stops or at least suppresses this for a time is children, and then only if the woman is not a freak, that is, if she nurses them herself. But here again there are the doctors.

“With my wife, who wanted to nurse herself and did nurse the next five children, it happened that the first baby was unwell. These doctors, who cynically undressed her and palpated her everywhere, for which I had to thank them and pay them money—these dear doctors discovered that she ought not to nurse, and in that first time she was deprived of the sole means that could save her from coquetry. The baby was nursed by a wet nurse, that is, we took advantage of this woman’s poverty, need, and ignorance, we lured her away from her own baby to ours, and for that put a kokoshnik¹⁰ with gold braid on her head. But that’s not the thing. The thing is that at that time of freedom from pregnancy and nursing, the previously dormant feminine coquetry awakened in her with particular force. And, correspondingly, there appeared in me with particular force the pangs of jealousy, which tormented me ceaselessly throughout my married life, as they cannot but torment all husbands who live with their wives as I did, that is, immorally.”

XV

“THROUGHOUT MY MARRIED LIFE, I never ceased to experience the torments of jealousy. But there were periods when I suffered from it especially sharply. And one of those periods was when the doctors forbade her to nurse after the first child. I was especially jealous at that time, first, because my wife then experienced that specific maternal restlessness which must be provoked by the causeless disruption of the regular course of life; second, because, seeing how easily she cast aside the moral duty of a mother, I concluded, correctly though unconsciously, that it would be as easy for her to cast aside her marital duty, the more so as she was perfectly healthy and, despite the prohibition of the dear doctors, nursed the succeeding children herself and nursed them perfectly well.”

“Anyhow, you don’t like doctors,” I said, noticing the especially spiteful expression in his voice every time he so much as mentioned them.

“It’s not a matter of liking or not liking. They ruined my life, as they have ruined and are ruining the lives of thousands, of hundreds of thousands of people, and I can’t help connecting effects with causes. I understand that they want to make money, just as lawyers and others do; I would willingly give them half my income, and anyone, if he understood what they do, would willingly give them half his property, only so that they not interfere in your family life, so that they never come near you. I haven’t gathered information, but I know dozens of cases—there’s no end of them—when they have either killed the child in a mother’s womb, insisting that the mother was unable to deliver, though afterwards the mother delivered perfectly well, or killed the mother under the pretext of some sort of surgery. No one counts up these murders, just as no one counted up the murders of the Inquisition, because it was supposed to be for the good of mankind. There is no counting the crimes they commit. But these crimes are all nothing compared to the moral depravity of materialism that they introduce into the world, especially through women. I’m not even talking about the fact that, if they only follow their directions, then, owing to the infections everywhere, in everything, people must go not towards unity, but towards disunity: according to their teaching, everyone must sit separately and never take the carbolic acid sprayer out of their mouths (though they’ve discovered that that, too, is no good). But that, too, is nothing. The main poison is the corruption of people, especially women.

“Nowadays it’s impossible to say: ‘You live badly, live better’—impossible to say it to yourself or to anyone else. If you live badly, the cause is an abnormality of the nervous functions, and so forth. And you must go to them, and they prescribe you thirty-five kopecks’ worth of medicine at the pharmacy, and you take it. You’ll feel still worse, then there’ll be more medicine and more doctors. An excellent trick!

“But the thing isn’t that. I only said that she nursed the children perfectly well herself and that only this bearing and nursing of children saved me from the torment of jealousy. If it hadn’t been for that, it all would have happened sooner. The children saved me and her. In eight years she bore five children. And she nursed them all herself.”

“And where are your children now?” I asked.

“My children?” he repeated fearfully.

“Excuse me, perhaps it’s a painful memory for you?”

“No, never mind. My sister-in-law and her brother took them. They wouldn’t let me have them. I gave them my fortune, but they wouldn’t let me have them. I’m something like a madman. I’m coming from them now. I saw them, but they wouldn’t let me have them. Because I’d bring them up so that they wouldn’t be like their parents. But they must be like them. Well, what to do! It’s clear that they won’t let me have them and won’t trust me. And I don’t know if I’d be able to raise them. I think not. I’m a ruin, a cripple. There’s just one thing in me. I know. Yes, it’s true, I know something that people will not learn soon.

“Yes, my children are alive and growing up to be the same savages as everyone around them. I’ve seen them, three times I’ve seen them. There’s nothing I can do for them. Nothing. I’m going to my place in the south now. I have a little house and garden there.

“Yes, it won’t be soon that people learn what I know. How much iron and what sort of metals there are in the sun and stars—that may soon be learned; but as for what exposes our swinishness, that is difficult, terribly difficult …

“You at least listen, and I’m grateful for that.”

XVI

“YOU’VE JUST BROUGHT children to mind. Again, what terrible lying goes on about children. Children are God’s blessing, children are a joy. That’s all a lie. Once it was all so, but now there’s nothing like that. Children are a torment, and nothing more. The majority of mothers feel that directly and sometimes inadvertently say it directly. Ask the majority of mothers of our circle of well-to-do people, they’ll tell you that they don’t want to have children for fear their children might get sick and die, do not want to nurse them once they’re born, so as not to become attached to them and suffer. The delight afforded them by a child’s charm, by those little hands, the little feet, the whole little body, the pleasure afforded by a child is less than the suffering they experience—to say nothing of the illness or loss of a child—simply from fear alone of the possibility of illness and death. On weighing the advantages and disadvantages, it turns out that it is disadvantageous and therefore undesirable to have children. They say it directly, boldly, imagining that these feelings in them come from their love for children, a good and praiseworthy feeling which they are proud of. They don’t notice that by this reasoning they reject love outright and assert only their own egoism. For them the pleasure of a child’s charm is less than the suffering from fear for it, and therefore they don’t want a child they would love. They don’t sacrifice themselves for the sake of a loved being, but a being to be loved for themselves.

“Clearly this is not love, but egoism. But one cannot raise a hand to condemn them, the mothers from well-to-do families, for this egoism, when one remembers what they suffer over their children’s health, again owing to those same doctors, in our upper-class life. When I so much as remember, even now, my wife’s life and state in the early days, when there were three or four children, and she was entirely taken up by them—it’s terrible. There was no life of our own at all. It was some eternal danger, salvation from it, again imminent danger, again desperate efforts, and again salvation—constantly a situation like that of a sinking ship. Sometimes it seemed to me that she was doing it on purpose, that she was pretending to worry about the children in order to defeat me. So tempting it was, so simply it resolved all questions in her favor. It sometimes seemed to me that everything she did and said on those occasions, she did and said on purpose. But no, she herself suffered terribly and constantly accused herself on account of the children, their health and illnesses. It was a torture for her and for me also. And she couldn’t help suffering. For the attachment to her children, the animal need to feed, pamper, and protect them, was the same as in the majority of women, but what animals have—the lack of imagination and reason—was not there. A hen is not afraid of what may happen to her chick, she doesn’t know all the illnesses that may befall it, does not know all the means that people imagine may save it from illnesses and death. And children for her, for a hen, are not a torment. She does for her children what is fitting and joyful for her to do; her children are a joy for her. And when a chick falls ill, her cares are well defined: she keeps it warm, feeds it. And in doing that, she knows she’s doing all that’s needed. If the chick drops dead, she doesn’t ask herself why it died or where it has gone, she clucks a little, then stops and goes on with her life as before. But for our wretched women and for my wife it was not so. To say nothing of illnesses and how to treat them, she heard and read on all sides endlessly varied and constantly changing rules about how to raise and educate children. Feed them like this or that; no, not this, not that, but like this; how to dress, give to drink, bathe, put to bed, take for a walk, give fresh air—we, mostly she, learned new rules about it all every week. As if children began to be born yesterday. And if a child is not properly fed, not properly bathed, or at the wrong time, and falls ill, it turns out that she is to blame for not doing what had to be done.

“That’s while they’re healthy. And it’s a torment even so. But if the child falls ill, that’s the end. Perfect hell. It’s supposed that illness can be treated and that there is this science, there are these people—doctors—and they know how. Not all, but the best of them know how. And here the child is sick, and one must hit upon this very best, that is, the one who can save, and then the child is saved; but if you can’t get hold of this doctor or you don’t live in the same place where this doctor lives—the child is lost. And this faith is not exclusively hers, it is the faith of all the women of her circle, and on all sides she hears only this: Ekaterina Semyonovna’s two children died, because they did not call Ivan Zakharych in time, but Marya Ivanovna’s older girl was saved by Ivan Zakharych; and the Petrovs followed the doctor’s advice in time and separated their children in different hotels, and they stayed alive, but with those who didn’t separate them, the children died. And this woman had a weak child, they moved to the south on the doctor’s advice—and saved the child. How can she not be tormented and worried all her life, if the lives of her children, to whom she has an animal attachment, depend on her learning in time what Ivan Zakharych says about it? And what Ivan Zakharych is going to say nobody knows, least of all he himself, because he knows very well that he knows nothing and cannot help in any way, and only shifts about at random, only so that they don’t stop believing that he knows something. For if she were wholly an animal, she would not be so tormented; and if she were wholly a human being, then she would have faith in God, and she would speak and think as believing peasant women do: ‘God gave, and God has taken away, there is no escape from God.’ She would think that the life and death of all people, as well as of her children, is beyond the power of people, and in the power of God alone, and she would not be tormented by thinking it is within her power to prevent the illness and death of her children, but that was not what she did. Her situation was this: she was given these most fragile, weak beings, subject to countless calamities. For these beings she feels a passionate, animal attachment. Besides, these beings are entrusted to her, and at the same time the means of preserving these beings are hidden from us and revealed to total strangers, whose services and advice can be obtained only for a lot of money, and not always then.

“Our whole life with the children was for my wife, and therefore for me, not a joy but a torment. How could she not be tormented? She was tormented constantly. It would happen that we had only just calmed down after some scene of jealousy or simply a quarrel, and thought we could live, and read, and think; I would start doing something, and suddenly the news would come that Vasya was throwing up, or Masha had blood in her stool, or Andryusha had a rash, and, of course, life was over. Where to gallop, for which doctor, how to isolate the child? Enemas, thermometers, mixtures, and doctors would begin. Before it was all over, something else would begin. There was no regular, firm family life. There was, as I’ve said, a constant attempt at salvation from imaginary and real dangers. That is so in the majority of families now. In my family it was especially pronounced. My wife was child-loving and gullible.

“So the presence of children not only did not improve our life, but poisoned it. Besides that, the children were yet another occasion of discord for us. Ever since there were children, and the more so as they grew up, the more often did the children themselves become the means and object of discord. Not only the object of discord, but they were tools of struggle; we fought each other, as it were, using the children. Each of us had a favorite child—a tool for fighting. I fought more using Vasya, the older boy; she using Liza. Besides, when the children began to grow up and their characters defined themselves, they became allies, whom we drew each to his own side. They suffered terribly from it, poor things, but we, in our constant war, never got around to thinking of them. The girl was on my side; the eldest boy, who resembled my wife and was her favorite, was often hateful to me.”

XVII

“WELL, sir, that’s how we lived. Our relations grew more and more hostile. And we finally reached the point where it was no longer discord that produced hostility, but hostility that produced discord: whatever she said, I disagreed with in advance, and she did just the same.

“In the fourth year it was somehow decided by itself on both sides that we could not understand each other or agree with each other. We now stopped all attempts at talking things over to the end. About the simplest things, especially about the children, we inevitably remained each with his own opinion. As I now recall, the opinions I defended were not at all so dear to me that I couldn’t have given them up; but she was of the opposite opinion, and to yield meant to yield to her. And that I could not do. Nor could she. She probably always considered herself completely in the right before me, and I, in my own eyes, was always a saint before her. Together we were almost condemned to silence or to such conversation as I’m sure animals can conduct between themselves: ‘What time is it? Time for bed. What’s for dinner today? Where shall we go? What’s in the newspapers? Send for the doctor. Masha has a sore throat.’ It was enough to step a hair’s breadth outside this impossibly narrow circle of conversation for irritation to flare up. There were confrontations and expressions of hatred about the coffee, the tablecloth, the droshky, a game of vint¹¹—all things that could not have any significance for either of us. I, at least, often seethed with terrible hatred for her! I sometimes watched how she poured tea, swung her leg, or put a spoon to her mouth and slurped, sucking in the liquid, and hated her precisely for that, as for the worst of actions. I didn’t notice then that the periods of anger arose in me with perfect logic and regularity in correspondence to the periods of what we called love. A period of love—a period of anger; an energetic period of love—a long period of anger; a weaker show of love—a short period of anger. We didn’t understand then that this love and anger were one and the same animal feeling, only from different ends. To live that way would have been terrible if we had understood our situation; but we didn’t understand or see it. In that lies both the salvation and the punishment of man, that, when he doesn’t live in the right way, he can befog himself so as not to see the grievousness of his situation. That was what we did. She tried to forget herself in intense, always hurried cares of the household, decoration, clothing, her own and the children’s, their studies, their health. I had my own drunkenness—the drunkenness of work, hunting, cards. We were both constantly busy. We both felt that the busier we were, the angrier we could be at each other. ‘It’s fine for you to make faces,’ I’d think, ‘you tormented me with scenes all night, and I have a meeting.’ ‘That’s fine for you,’ she not only thought but said, ‘but I stayed up all night with the baby.’

“That’s how we lived, in a perpetual fog, not seeing the situation we were in. And if what happened hadn’t happened, I would have lived the same way into old age and thought, at my death, that I had lived a good life, not very good, but not bad either, just like everybody else; I would not have understood the abyss of unhappiness and vile lies in which I wallowed.

“We were two convicts, hating each other, bound by one chain, poisoning each other’s life, and trying not to see it. I didn’t know then that ninety-nine percent of all married couples live in the same hell I did and that it cannot be otherwise. I didn’t know it then either about others or about myself.

“It’s astonishing what coincidences occur in a regular and even in an irregular life! Just when the parents make life unbearable for each other, city conditions become necessary for educating the children. And the need to move to the city appears.”

He fell silent and once or twice produced his strange sounds, which now were very much like restrained sobs. We were approaching a station.

“What time is it?” he asked.

I looked. It was two o’clock.

“You’re not tired?” he asked.

“No, but you are.”

“I’m suffocating. Excuse me, I’ll take a walk and drink some water.”

And he walked unsteadily through the carriage. I sat alone, going over all he had told me, and so deep in thought that I did not notice he had come back by the other door.

XVIII

“YES, I keep getting carried away,” he began. “I’ve thought over many things, I look at many things differently, and I want to tell it all. Well, so we started living in the city. Unhappy people live better in the city. In a city a man can live for a hundred years and not notice that he died and rotted long ago. There’s no time to sort things out for yourself, you’re always busy. Business, social relations, health, art, the children’s health, their upbringing. Now we must receive these and those, visit these and those; now we must look at her, hear him or her. For in a city at any given moment there is one celebrity, or else two or three at once, who can’t be missed. Now you must have yourself treated, or this one or that one, then there are teachers, tutors, governesses, but life is as empty as can be. Well, that’s how we lived, and the pain of our common life was less felt. Besides that, at first we had a wonderful occupation—getting settled in a new city, in a new apartment, and another occupation—going from the city to the country and from the country to the city.

“We lived through one winter, and the next winter the following circumstance occurred, inconspicuous and seemingly insignificant, but which produced all that happened later. She was unwell, and the scoundrels told her not to have children and taught her the means. To me it seemed disgusting. I fought against it, but she, with light-minded stubbornness, stood her ground, and I gave in: the last justification of our swinish life—children—was taken away, and life became still more vile.

“A muzhik, a workman, needs children. It’s hard for him to feed them, but he needs them, and therefore his marital relations are justified. But for people like us, who have children, more children aren’t needed—extra care, expense, co-inheritors, they’re a burden. And for us there’s no justification for our swinish life. We either get rid of the children artificially, or look upon them as a misfortune, the result of carelessness, which is still more vile. There’s no justification. But we’re so fallen morally that we don’t even see the need for justification. The majority of today’s educated world is given to this depravity without the slightest remorse of conscience.

“There can be no remorse, because there is no conscience in our life, apart from, if it may be called so, the conscience of public opinion and criminal law. And here neither the one nor the other is violated. There’s no sense in being conscience-stricken before society: everybody does it, both Marya Pavlovna and Ivan Zakharych. Why breed paupers or deprive oneself of the opportunity of social life? To be conscience-stricken before criminal law or afraid of it is also senseless. It’s outrageous wenches and soldiers’ wives who throw babies into ponds and wells; they, to be sure, should be put in jail, but with us it’s all done in a timely and clean way.

“We lived like that for another two years. The treatment the scoundrels gave her obviously began to work; she throve physically and grew pretty as the last beauty of summer. She sensed it and looked after herself. In her there developed a sort of provocative beauty that disturbed people. She was in the full vigor of a well-nourished, excited woman of thirty who is not bearing children. Her appearance was disturbing. When she passed among men, she drew their eyes. She was like a stable-bound, well-nourished harness horse whose bridle has been taken off. There was no bridle at all, just as with ninety-nine percent of our women. And I sensed it and was frightened.”

XIX

HE SUDDENLY GOT UP and moved over to the window.

“Excuse me,” he said and, turning his eyes to the window, sat silently like that for some three minutes. Then he sighed deeply and again sat down facing me. His face had become quite different, his eyes were pathetic, and some strange almost-smile puckered his lips. “I’m a little tired, but I’ll tell it to you. There’s still a long time, it’s not daybreak yet. Yes, sir,” he began again, lighting a cigarette. “She had gained weight since she stopped giving birth, and this illness—the eternal suffering over the children—began to go away; not exactly go away, but it was as if she recovered from a drinking bout, came to her senses, and saw that there was the whole of God’s world with its joys, which she had forgotten about, but which she didn’t know how to live in, God’s world, which she had never understood. ‘Don’t miss it! Time is passing, it won’t come back!’ That’s my notion of what she thought, or rather felt, and it was impossible for her to think or feel otherwise: she had been brought up to think that there is only one thing worthy of attention in the world—love. She had married, had gotten something of that love, but not only far from what had been promised, what was expected, but also many disappointments, sufferings, and then an unexpected torment—the children! That torment wore her out. And here, thanks to the obliging doctors, she learned that she could do without children. She was glad, tried it, and came alive again for the one thing she knew—love. But love with a husband befouled by jealousy and all sorts of anger was not the right thing. She began to imagine some other, clean, new love, or at least so I thought. And so she began looking around, as if expecting something. I saw it and couldn’t help being alarmed. Time and again it would happen that, talking to me, as usual, by means of others, that is, talking with outsiders but addressing her speech to me, she would boldly declare, not aware that an hour before she had said the opposite, would declare half seriously that maternal cares were a deception, that it’s not worthwhile giving your life to children when you’re young and can enjoy life. She occupied herself less with the children, not as desperately as before, but more and more with herself, her appearance, though she tried to conceal it, and her pleasures, and even her accomplishments. She again enthusiastically took up the piano, which before had been completely abandoned. This was the beginning of it all.”

He again turned his weary gaze to the window, but, clearly making an effort with himself, went on again at once.

“Yes, sir, this man appeared.” He hesitated and produced his peculiar sounds a couple of times through his nose.

I could see that it was tormenting for him to mention this man, to remember him, to speak of him. But he made an effort and, as if tearing through the obstacle that hindered him, resolutely went on:

“In my eyes, in my estimation, he was a trashy little man. And not because of the significance he took on in my life, but because he really was so. Anyhow, the fact that he was no good only served as proof of how unreasoning she was. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else.” He again fell silent. “Yes, sir, he was a musician, a violinist; not a professional musician, but a semi-professional, semi-society man.

“His father was a landowner, my father’s neighbor. He—his father—was ruined, and the children—three boys—all got taken care of; this one, the youngest, was sent to his godmother in Paris. There he was sent to the conservatory, because he had a talent for music, and he came out of it a violinist and played in concerts. As a human being, he was …” He was obviously going to say something bad about him, checked himself, and said quickly: “Well, I don’t really know how he lived, I only know that he came to Russia that year and came to me.

“Moist, almond-shaped eyes, red smiling lips, a little waxed mustache, hair done in the latest fashion, the face of a banal prettiness, the sort women refer to as not bad, weakly built, though not ugly, with an especially developed behind, as with women, as with the Hottentots, so they say. They say they’re also musical. Tending towards familiarity as far as possible, but sensitive and always ready to stop at the slightest resistance, with an observance of his external dignity, and with high-buttoned shoes of that special Parisian shade, and bright-colored neckties, and other things that foreigners adopt in Paris, and that in their singularity and novelty always work with women. In his manners an affected, external gaiety. That manner, you know, of speaking of everything in hints and fragments, as if you know it all, remember it, and can fill in the rest yourself.

“So he and his music were the cause of everything. At the trial the case was presented as if it had all happened out of jealousy. By no means; that is, not by no means, but it was and wasn’t so. At the trial it was decided that I was a deceived husband and that I had killed in defense of my insulted honor (that’s what they call it). And that’s why I was acquitted. At the trial I tried to explain the meaning of the thing, but they took it as if I was trying to rehabilitate my wife’s honor.

“Her relations with this musician, whatever they were, had no meaning for me, nor for her either. What has meaning is what I’ve told you about, that is, my swinishness. It all came about because between us there was that terrible abyss I told you about, that terrible intensity of mutual hatred, in which the first occasion was enough to produce a crisis. The quarrels between us had recently become something dreadful, and were especially striking in that they also gave way to intense animal passion.

“If he hadn’t shown up, someone else would have. If the pretext hadn’t been jealousy, it would have been something else. I insist that all husbands who live as I did must either become profligate, or separate, or kill themselves or their wives, as I did. If there are some with whom this hasn’t happened, it’s a rare exception. For before I ended as I did, I was on the verge of suicide several times, and she also tried to poison herself.”

XX

“YES, that’s how it was, and not long before the end.

“We lived as if in peace, and there was no reason at all to disturb it. Suddenly a conversation begins about how such-and-such a dog won a medal at a show, I say. She says: ‘Not a medal, but an honorable mention.’ An argument begins. There begins a jumping from one subject to another, reproaches: ‘Well, yes, we’ve known that for a long time, it’s always that way: you said …’ ‘No, I didn’t.’ ‘In other words, I’m lying! …’ You feel that that terrible sort of quarrel is about to begin in which you want to kill either yourself or her. You know it’s going to begin, and you fear it like fire and want to restrain yourself, but anger takes possession of your whole being. She is in the same state, even worse, she deliberately misconstrues your every word, giving it a perverse meaning; each of her words is soaked with venom; she needles just where she knows it will hurt me most. And the further it goes, the worse it gets. I shout: ‘Shut up!’ or something like that. She rushes out of the room and runs towards the nursery. I try to hold her back, to finish talking, to prove something, and I seize her by the arm. She pretends I’ve hurt her and shouts: ‘Children, your father is beating me!’ I shout: ‘Don’t lie!’ ‘It’s not the first time!’ she shouts, or something like that. The children rush to her. She calms them down. I say: ‘Don’t pretend!’ She says: ‘For you everything’s a pretense. You’d kill a man and say he’s pretending. Now I understand you. That’s what you want!’ ‘Oh, why don’t you drop dead!’ I shout. I remember how horrified I was by those awful words. I never expected I could say such awful, crude words, and I’m astonished that they could just leap out of me. I shout these awful words, run to my study, sit down and smoke. I hear her go to the front hall on her way out. I ask where she’s going. She doesn’t answer. ‘Well, to hell with her,’ I say to myself, go back to the study, lie down again and smoke. Thousands of different plans of how to take revenge on her and get rid of her, and how to set it all to rights and make it as if nothing had happened, come to my head. I think about it all and smoke, smoke, smoke. I think of running away from her, hiding, going to America. I reach the point of dreaming of how I get rid of her, and how wonderful it will be, and I will become intimate with another beautiful woman, a completely new one. I’ll get rid of her by her dying, or my divorcing her, and I try to think how to do it. I see that I’m confused, that I’m not thinking what I should, but it’s for that, so as not to see that I’m not thinking what I should, that I smoke.

“And life at home goes on. The governess comes and asks, ‘Where is madame? When will she be back?’ A servant asks whether tea should be served. I come out to the dining room; the children, especially the eldest, Liza, who already understands, look at me questioningly and with hostility. We have tea in silence. She’s not home yet. The whole evening goes by, she doesn’t come, and two feelings alternate in my soul: anger against her for tormenting me and all the children by her absence, which is bound to end by her coming back, and fear that she won’t and will do something to herself. I could go looking for her. But where? At her sister’s? But it’s stupid to come and ask. God be with her; if she wants to torment, let her be tormented herself. Because that’s what she expects me to do. And the next time it will be worse still. And what if she’s not with her sister, but is doing something or has already done something to herself? … Eleven, twelve, one o’clock. I don’t go to the bedroom, it’s stupid to lie there alone and wait, yet I lie down right here. Then I want to do something, to write letters, to read; I can’t do anything. I’m sitting alone in my study, tormented, angry, and listening. Three, four o’clock—she’s still not here. I fall asleep towards morning. I wake up—she’s not here.

“Everything in the house goes on as before, but they’re all bewildered and look at me questioningly and reproachfully, supposing it’s all because of me. And in me there is the same struggle—between anger at her for tormenting me, and anxiety over her.

“Around eleven her sister comes as an ambassador from her. And the usual thing begins: ‘She’s in a terrible state. Well, what is it!’ ‘But nothing’s happened.’ I say she has an impossible character and I haven’t done anything.

“‘But it can’t be left like this,’ says the sister.

“‘It’s all her doing, not mine,’ I say. ‘I won’t make the first step. If it’s separation, it’s separation.’

“My sister-in-law leaves with nothing. I had said boldly that I wouldn’t make the first step, but once she’s gone and I come out and see the children, pathetic, frightened, I’m now ready to make the first step. I’d be glad to make it, but I don’t know how. Again I pace, smoke, drink vodka and wine at lunch, and achieve what I subconsciously desire: I don’t see the stupidity, the meanness of my position.

“At around three she arrives. Meeting me, she says nothing. I imagine she’s giving in, I begin to say that I felt challenged by her reproaches. She, with the same stern and terribly pained face, says she did not come to discuss things, but to take the children, that we cannot live together. I begin to say that it’s not my fault, that she drove me out of my wits. She looks at me sternly, solemnly, and then says:

“‘Don’t say any more, you’ll regret it.’

“I say that I can’t stand comedies. Then she exclaims something I can’t make out and runs to her room. The key clicks behind her: she’s locked herself in. I shove at the door, there’s no response, and I walk away angrily. Half an hour later Liza comes running in tears.

“What? Has something happened?”

“I can’t hear mama.”

We go. I pull at the door as hard as I can. The door is not well bolted, and the two halves open. I go over to the bed. She’s lying awkwardly on the bed, in her petticoats and high boots, unconscious. On the table an empty phial of opium. We bring her back to consciousness. More tears and, finally, reconciliation. Not even reconciliation: in the soul of each of us there is the same old anger against the other, with the added irritation of the pain caused by this quarrel, which each of us lays to the other’s account. But it all has to be ended somehow, and life goes on as before. Such quarrels and worse happened constantly, once a week, or once a month, or every day. It was always the same thing. One time I had already obtained a passport to go abroad—the quarrel had lasted for two days—but then there was again a half talk, half reconciliation—and I stayed.”

XXI

“SO THAT’S the sort of relations we had when this man appeared. He—his name was Trukhachevsky¹²—came to Moscow and appeared at my place. It was in the morning. I received him. We had once been on familiar terms. He tried to address me somewhere between formally and familiarly, tending towards the familiar, but I straightaway set a formal tone, and he submitted at once. I disliked him intensely from the first glance. But, strangely, some sort of strange, fatal force drew me, not to spurn him, not to keep him at a distance, but, on the contrary, to become closer to him. What could have been simpler than to talk with him coldly, say good-bye, not introduce him to my wife? But no, as if on purpose, I began to speak about his playing, said I had been told that he had abandoned the violin. He said that, on the contrary, he now played more than ever. He began to recall that I used to play. I said that I no longer played, but that my wife played well.

“Amazing thing! My relations with him from the first day, from the first hour of my meeting him, were such as they could have been only after what was to happen. There was something strained in my relations with him: I noticed every word, every phrase spoken by him or myself, and ascribed significance to them.

“I introduced him to my wife. They at once struck up a conversation about music, and he offered his services in playing with her. My wife, as always lately, was very elegant and alluring, disturbingly beautiful. She clearly liked him from the first glance. Besides, she was glad that she would have the pleasure of playing with a violin, which she liked so much that she had even hired a violinist from the theater, and this joy was expressed on her face. But, seeing me, she at once understood my feeling and changed her expression, and the game of mutual deception began. I smiled pleasantly, pretending I was very pleased. He, looking at my wife as all fornicators look at beautiful women, pretended that he was interested only in the subject of the conversation—precisely that which no longer interested him at all. She tried to appear indifferent, but my falsely smiling jealous man’s expression, so familiar to her, and his lascivious gaze obviously aroused her. I saw that from the very first meeting her eyes began to glitter in a special way, and, probably owing to my jealousy, something like an electric current was at once established between them, giving rise to a similarity of expressions, gazes, and smiles. She blushed—and he blushed; she smiled—he smiled. We talked about music, Paris, various trifles. He got up to leave and, smiling, stood with his hat on his twitching thigh, looking now at her, now at me, as if waiting for what we would do. I remember that moment precisely because, at that moment, I might not have invited him, and then nothing would have happened. But I glanced at him, at her. ‘Don’t go thinking I’m jealous over you,’ I mentally said to her, ‘or that I’m afraid of you,’ I said mentally to him, and invited him to bring his violin some evening so as to play with my wife. She glanced at me in astonishment, flushed, and, as if frightened, began to refuse, saying that she didn’t play well enough. This refusal of hers irritated me still more, and I insisted still more. I remember the strange feeling with which I looked at his nape, at his white neck, in contrast to his black hair brushed forward on both sides, when he left us with his hopping, somehow birdlike gait. I couldn’t help admitting to myself that this man’s presence tormented me. ‘It’s up to me,’ I thought, ‘to make it so that I never see him.’ But to do so would mean acknowledging that I’m afraid of him. No, I’m not afraid of him! That would be too humiliating, I said to myself. And just then, in the front hall, knowing that my wife could hear me, I insisted that he come that same evening with his violin. He promised and left.

“In the evening he came with his violin and they played. But it took them a while to get started, they didn’t have the scores they needed, and those they did have my wife couldn’t play without preparation. I loved music very much and sympathized with their playing, set up the music stand, turned the pages. And they played this and that, some songs without words and a little Mozart sonata. He played excellently, and he had in the highest degree what’s known as tone. And fine, noble taste besides, not at all in keeping with his character.

“He was, to be sure, much better than my wife, and helped her, and at the same time politely praised her playing. He bore himself very well. My wife seemed to be interested only in the music and was very simple and natural. While I, though pretending to be interested in the music, suffered constantly from jealousy all evening.

“From the first moment that his eyes met my wife’s, I saw that the beast who was sitting in them both, outside all conventions of position and society, asked, ‘Possible?’—and replied, ‘Oh, yes, very much so.’ I saw that he had never expected to meet such an attractive woman in my wife, a Moscow lady, and he was very glad. Because he had no doubt at all that she would agree. The whole question was only whether the obnoxious husband would be a hindrance. If I had been a pure man, I wouldn’t have understood that, but I, like the majority of men, had thought that way about women before I married, and therefore I could read his soul like an open book. I was especially tormented because I saw unquestionably that she had no other feelings for me than a constant irritation, only rarely interrupted by habitual sensuality, and that this man with his external elegance and novelty, and, above all, with his unquestionable musical talent, with the intimacy that comes from playing together, with the influence that music produces on impressionable natures, especially the violin—that this man was bound not only to please her, but unquestionably, without the slightest hesitation, to conquer her, crush her, twist her, tie her in knots, do whatever he wanted with her. I couldn’t help seeing it, and I suffered terribly. But, despite that, or maybe owing to it, some power forced me against my will to be not only especially polite, but even amiable with him. Whether I was doing it for my wife’s sake or for his, to show that I wasn’t afraid of him, or for my own, so as to deceive myself—I don’t know, only from my first relations with him I couldn’t be simple. In order to resist the desire to kill him right then, I had to be amiable with him. I served him expensive wine at supper, I admired his music, I talked to him with an especially amiable smile and invited him to dine with us the next Sunday and play more with my wife. I said I’d invite some of my acquaintances, music lovers, to listen to him. And so it ended.”

And in strong agitation, Pozdnyshev shifted his position and produced his special sound.

“It was strange how the presence of this man affected me,” he began again, obviously making an effort to be calm. “I return home from an exhibition two or three days after that, come into the front hall, and suddenly feel something heavy, like a stone, press down on my heart, and I can’t figure out what it is. This something was that, in passing through the front hall, I noticed something that reminded me of him. Only in my study did I realize what it was, and I went back to the front hall to check. Yes, I was not mistaken: it was his overcoat. You know, a fashionable overcoat. (I noted with extraordinary attention everything that concerned him, though I didn’t realize it.) I ask—it’s so, he’s here. I pass, not through the drawing room, but through the schoolroom, to the reception room. Liza, my daughter, is sitting over a book, and the nanny is standing by the table with the baby, spinning some sort of lid. The door to the reception room is closed, and through it I hear the measured sounds of an arpeggio and voices, his and hers. I listen but can’t make anything out. Obviously, the sounds of the piano are purposely meant to drown out their words, maybe their kisses. My God, what rose up in me then! When I merely remember the beast that lived in me then, I’m horrified. My heart was suddenly wrung, stopped, then began to pound like a hammer. The main thing, as always in any anger, was pity for myself. ‘In front of the children, of the nanny!’ I thought. I must have looked frightful, because even Liza looked at me with strange eyes. ‘What am I to do?’ I asked myself. ‘Go in? I can’t, God knows what I’ll do.’ But I can’t go away either. The nanny looks at me as if she understands my position. ‘It’s impossible not to go in,’ I said to myself and quickly opened the door. He was sitting at the piano, making those arpeggios with his big, white, upturned fingers. She was standing at the curve of the grand, over some open scores. She was the first to see or hear, and she glanced at me. Either she was frightened and pretended not to be, or she was in fact not frightened, but she did not stir or give a start, but only blushed, and that later.

“‘I’m so glad you’ve come; we haven’t decided what to play on Sunday,’ she said in a tone in which she would not have spoken to me if we had been alone. That and the fact that she said ‘we’ about herself and him made me indignant. I greeted him silently.

“He shook my hand and at once, with a smile that seemed downright mocking to me, began to explain that he had brought some scores to prepare for Sunday and now there was a disagreement between them about what to play: a more difficult and classical thing, namely, a Beethoven sonata for violin, or some small pieces? It was all so natural and simple that it was impossible to find fault with it, but at the same time I was certain that it was all untrue, that they had been arranging how to deceive me.

“One of the most tormenting relations for a jealous man (and in our social life all men are jealous) is certain social conventions which allow for the greatest and most dangerous closeness between a man and a woman. One would make oneself a laughingstock among people if one objected to closeness at balls, the closeness of doctors with their lady patients, closeness in the making of art—painting and, above all, music. Two people are taken up with the most noble of arts, music; for that a certain closeness is required, and there is nothing reprehensible in that closeness, and only a stupid, jealous husband could see something undesirable in it. And yet everybody knows that it is precisely by means of these same occupations, especially music, that the greater share of adulteries occur in our society. I obviously embarrassed them by the embarrassment that showed in me: for a long time I couldn’t say anything. I was like an upended bottle from which the water will not pour because it’s too full. I wanted to curse at him, to throw him out, but I felt that again I had to be polite and amiable with him. And so I was. I pretended that I approved of everything and again, following that strange feeling that made me treat him the more amiably the more painful his presence was for me, I told him that I relied on his taste and advised her to do the same. He stayed a while longer, as long as it took to smooth over the unpleasant impression I had made by suddenly coming into the room with a frightened face and then saying nothing—and left, pretending that it was now decided what to play the next day. I was fully convinced that, compared with what preoccupied them, the question of what to play was a matter of complete indifference.

“I saw him to the front hall with particular politeness (how can one not see off a man who has come to disturb the peace and destroy the happiness of a whole family!). I pressed his soft, white hand with particular affection.”

XXII

“FOR THAT WHOLE DAY I didn’t speak to her; I couldn’t. Her closeness called up such hatred for her in me that I feared for myself. Over dinner, in front of the children, she asked me when I was leaving. I had to go to a district session the next week. I told her when. She asked if I needed anything for the road. I said nothing and sat silently at the table, then silently went to my study. Lately she never came to my room, especially at that time. I was lying in my study and feeling angry. Suddenly I heard familiar footsteps. And the frightful, monstrous thought comes to my head that she, like Uriah’s wife,¹³ wanted to conceal the sin she had already committed, and that was why she was coming to see me at such an inopportune hour. ‘Can it be she’s coming to me?’ I thought, listening to her approaching footsteps. If it’s to me, it means I’m right. And an inexpressible hatred for her rises in my soul. Closer and closer the footsteps. Can it be she won’t pass by and go to the reception room? No, the door creaked, and in the doorway her tall, handsome figure, and in her face, in her eyes—timidity and fawning, which she wants to conceal, but which I see and the meaning of which I know. I held my breath so long that I nearly suffocated, and, continuing to look at her, I seized the cigarette case and began to smoke.

“‘Well, what is it, I come to sit with you, and you start smoking’—and she sat down close to me on the sofa, leaning against me.

“I drew back so as not to touch her.

“‘I see you’re displeased that I want to play on Sunday,’ she said.

“‘I’m not at all displeased,’ I said.

“‘As if I don’t see!’

“‘Well, I congratulate you on seeing. I see nothing, except that you’re behaving like a cocotte …’

“‘If you’re going to swear like a trooper, I’ll leave.’

“‘Leave then; only know that, if you don’t value the honor of the family, then I don’t value you (devil take you), but I do the honor of the family.’

“‘But what is it, what is it?’

“‘Clear out, for God’s sake, clear out!’

“Either she was pretending that she didn’t understand what it was about, or she really didn’t understand, but she became offended and angry. She got up, yet didn’t leave, but stood in the middle of the room.

“‘You’ve become decidedly impossible,’ she began. ‘Such a character even an angel couldn’t get along with.’ And, as always, trying to sting me as painfully as possible, she reminded me of how I had behaved with my sister (there had been an occasion when I had lost my temper and said all sorts of rude things to my sister; she knew it tormented me and needled me on that spot). ‘After that nothing from you would surprise me,’ she said.

“‘Yes, insult me, humiliate me, disgrace me, and put all the blame on me,’ I said to myself, and suddenly such terrible anger against her came over me as I had never yet experienced.

“For the first time I wanted to express that anger physically. I jumped up and moved towards her; but just as I jumped up, I remember becoming aware of that anger and asking myself if it was good to give way to that feeling, and at once answered myself that it was good, that it would frighten her, and at once, instead of resisting that anger, I began to heat it up in myself and rejoiced that it blazed more and more in me.

“‘Clear out or I’ll kill you!’ I shouted, going up to her and seizing her by the arm. I consciously intensified the angry tone of my voice as I said it. And I must have been frightening, because she grew so timid that she couldn’t even leave, and only repeated:

“‘Vasya, what is it, what’s the matter with you?’

“‘Get out!’ I roared still louder. ‘Only you can drive me into a rage. I can’t answer for myself!’

“Having given free rein to my rage, I reveled in it, and I wanted to do something extraordinary, showing the extreme degree of this rage of mine. I wanted terribly to beat her, to kill her, but knew it was impossible, and therefore, to unleash my rage, I seized a paperweight from the desk and, shouting, ‘Get out!’ once more, hurled it to the floor, missing her. I had aimed very well so as to miss. Then she started out of the room, but stopped in the doorway. And right then, while she could still see (I did it so that she could see), I began taking things from the desk—candlesticks, an inkstand—and throwing them on the floor, continuing to shout:

“‘Get out! clear off! I can’t answer for myself!’

“She left—and I stopped at once.

“An hour later the nanny came and said that my wife was in hysterics. I went; she was sobbing, laughing, couldn’t say anything, and was shaking all over. She wasn’t pretending, she was genuinely ill.

“Towards morning she calmed down, and we made peace under the influence of the feeling we called love.

“In the morning, when I confessed to her, after our reconciliation, that I was very jealous of Trukhachevsky, she was not embarrassed in the least and laughed quite naturally. It even seemed so strange to her, so she said, the possibility of fancying such a man.

“‘Could a decent woman possibly feel anything towards such a man apart from the pleasure afforded by music? If you like, I’m prepared never to see him. Even on Sunday, though everybody’s invited. Write to him that I’m unwell, and that’s the end. It’s only disgusting that anyone, mainly he himself, might think he’s dangerous. And I’m too proud to allow that to be thought.’

“And she wasn’t lying, she believed what she said; she hoped to call up scorn for him in herself by these words and to protect herself from him that way, but she didn’t succeed. Everything went against her, especially that cursed music. So it all ended, and on Sunday the guests assembled, and they played again.”

XXIII

“I THINK it’s superfluous to say that I was very vain: if you’re not vain, then there’s nothing to live by in our ordinary life. Well, so on Sunday I began tastefully organizing the dinner and the evening with music. I myself bought the things for dinner and invited the guests.

“By six o’clock the guests had assembled, and he, too, had appeared in a tailcoat with diamond studs in bad tone. He behaved casually, replied hastily to everything with a little smile of agreement and understanding, you know, with that particular expression that whatever you say or do is exactly what he expected. All that was improper in him I now noticed with particular pleasure, because it was all supposed to calm me down and prove that he stood on such a low level for my wife that, as she said, she could not lower herself to it. Now I no longer allowed myself to be jealous. First, I had already suffered through that torment and needed a rest; second, I wanted to believe my wife’s assurances and did believe them. But, though I wasn’t jealous, I was still unnatural with him and with her during dinner and the first half of the evening, before the music began. I still followed the movements and glances of them both.

“The dinner was like all dinners, dull, affected. The music began rather early. Ah, how well I remember all the details of that evening; I remember how he brought the violin, opened the case, took off a cover some lady had embroidered for him, took out the violin, and started tuning up. I remember how my wife sat down with an affectedly indifferent look, behind which I could see she was concealing great timidity—timidity mostly to do with her own skill—sat down at the grand with an affected look, and there began the usual A on the piano, the pizzicato of the violin, the setting up of the scores. Then I remember how they glanced at each other, looked around at the people taking their seats, said something to each other, and it began. He struck the first chord. His face became serious, stern, sympathetic, and, listening to his own sounds, he carefully plucked the strings with his fingers, and the grand answered him. And it began …”

He stopped and produced his sounds several times in a row. He was about to start speaking, but snuffed his nose and stopped again.

“They played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. Do you know the first presto? Do you?!” he cried. “Ohh! … That sonata is a fearful thing. Precisely that part. And music generally is a fearful thing. What is it? I don’t understand. What is music? What does it do? And why does it do what it does? They say music has an elevating effect on the soul—nonsense, lies! It affects one, affects one fearfully, I’m speaking of myself, but not at all in a soul-elevating way. It affects the soul neither in an elevating nor in an abasing way, but in a provoking way. How shall I put it? Music makes me forget myself, my true situation, it transports me to some other situation not my own; under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what, in fact, I do not feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. I explain it by the fact that music works like yawning, like laughter; I’m not sleepy, but I yawn looking at a yawning man, I have no reason to laugh, but I laugh hearing someone else laugh.

“It, music, at once, transports me directly into the inner state of the one who wrote the music. I merge with him in my soul and, together with him, am transported from one state to another, but why I do that I don’t know. The man who wrote, let’s say, the Kreutzer Sonata—Beethoven—knew why he was in such a state. That state led him to certain actions, and therefore that state had meaning for him, while for me it has none. And therefore music only provokes, it doesn’t conclude. Well, they play a military march, soldiers march to it, the music achieves its end; they play a dance tune, I dance, the music achieves its end; they sing a mass, I take communion, the music also achieves its end; while here there’s only provocation, but what’s to follow from that provocation isn’t there. And that’s why music sometimes has such a fearful, such a terrible effect. In China music is a state affair. And that’s how it should be. As if it can be allowed that anyone who likes should hypnotize another or many others and then do what he likes with them. And, above all, that this hypnotist should be the first immoral man who comes along.

“Otherwise it’s a terrible means in the hands of anyone who comes along. Take, for instance, this Kreutzer Sonata, the first presto. How can that presto be played in a drawing room among ladies in décolleté? It’s played, they applaud a little, and then eat ice cream and talk about the latest scandal. These things can be played only in certain important, significant circumstances, and when there’s a demand to accomplish certain important actions in accordance with that music. Play it and do what the music attunes you to. Otherwise the calling up of an energy, a feeling, that accords neither with the place, nor with the time, that is not manifest in anything, can only have a pernicious effect. On me, at least, this thing had a terrible effect; it seemed to me as if completely new feelings, new possibilities, which I hadn’t known until then, were revealed to me. It was as if something were saying in my soul, ‘So it’s like that, not at all as I thought and lived before, but like that.’ What this new thing was that I had learned, I couldn’t explain to myself, but the consciousness of this new state was very joyful. All those same persons, including my wife and him, appeared in quite a new light.

“After that presto they went on to play a beautiful but ordinary, not new, andante, with banal variations and quite a weak finale. Then, at the request of the guests, they went on to play Ernst’s Elegy, then various little things. It was all good, but it didn’t produce one hundredth of the impression on me that the first piece produced. It all occurred against the background of the impression produced by the first piece. I felt light and gay all evening. As for my wife, I had never seen her the way she was that evening. Those shining eyes, that severity and significance of expression while she played, and that complete melting away, the weak, pathetic, and blissful smile after they finished. I saw it all, but I ascribed no other significance to it than that she was experiencing the same things as I, and that to her, as to me, new, never experienced feelings had been revealed, or as if recalled. The evening ended well, and everybody went home.

“Knowing that in two days I was to go to a session, Trukhachevsky, on taking his leave, said that he hoped on his next visit to the city to repeat the pleasure of that evening. From that I could conclude that he did not consider it possible to come to my house in my absence, and that pleased me. It turned out that, as I would not return before his departure, we would not see any more of each other.

“For the first time I shook his hand with genuine pleasure and thanked him for the pleasure. He also took leave of my wife. The way they said good-bye seemed to me most natural and proper. Everything was fine. My wife and I were very pleased with the evening.”

XXIV

“TWO DAYS LATER I left for the district, having said good-bye to my wife in the best and calmest of moods. In the district there was always no end of business and a totally special life, a special little world. For two days I spent ten hours a day in the office. On the second day a letter from my wife was brought to me in the office. I read it on the spot. She wrote about the children, the uncle, the nanny, some purchases, and among other things, as if of a most ordinary thing, that Trukhachevsky had come, brought the promised scores, and promised to play more, but that she had refused. I didn’t remember him promising to bring scores: it seemed to me that he had said his final good-bye, and therefore it struck me unpleasantly. But there was so much business that there was no time for thinking, and only in the evening, on returning to my place, did I reread the letter. Besides the fact that Trukhachevsky had come once more in my absence, the whole tone of the letter seemed strained to me. The enraged beast of jealousy growled in its kennel and wanted to leap out, but I was afraid of that beast and quickly locked it up. ‘What a vile feeling jealousy is!’ I said to myself. ‘What could be more natural than what she writes?’

“And I went to bed and began to think about the business ahead of me tomorrow. It always took me a long time to fall asleep during these sessions, in a new place, but this time I fell asleep very soon. And as it happens, you know, suddenly there’s an electric shock and you wake up. So I woke up, and woke up with the thought of her, of my carnal love for her, and of Trukhachevsky, and of how they had concluded it between them. Horror and anger wrung my heart. But I started reasoning with myself. ‘What nonsense,’ I said to myself, ‘there are no grounds, there’s nothing and never was. How can I so humiliate her and myself by supposing such horrible things. Some sort of hired fiddler, known to be a trashy fellow, and suddenly an honorable woman, the respected mother of a family, my wife! How preposterous!’ presented itself to me on one side. ‘How else could it be?’ presented itself to me on the other. How could there not be that same simple and understandable thing in the name of which I married her, that same thing in the name of which I lived with her, which was the one thing I wanted from her and which others, therefore, also wanted, including this musician? He’s an unmarried man, healthy (I remembered him crunching on the gristle in a cutlet and putting his red lips greedily to a glass of wine), well-nourished, smooth, and not only without principles, but obviously with the principle of availing himself of such pleasures as come along. And between them the connection of music, that most refined lust of the senses. What could hold him back? Nothing. On the contrary, everything entices him. She? Who is she? She’s a mystery, as she was, so she is. I don’t know her. I know her only as an animal. And nothing can, nothing should hold back an animal.

“Only now did I remember their faces that evening, when, after the Kreutzer Sonata, they played some passionate little thing, I don’t recall by whom, some piece sensual to the point of obscenity. ‘How could I leave?’ I said to myself, remembering their faces. ‘Wasn’t it clear that everything had been accomplished between them that evening? And wasn’t it obvious that already that evening there not only was no barrier between them, but that they both, and mainly she, experienced a certain shame after what had happened with them?’ I remember how she smiled weakly, pathetically, and blissfully, wiping the sweat from her flushed face, when I went up to the piano. Already then they avoided looking at each other, and only at supper, when he poured water for her, did they glance at each other and smile slightly. I now remembered with horror that glance of theirs that I had intercepted with its barely perceptible smile. ‘Yes, it’s all concluded,’ one voice said to me, and at once another voice said something quite different. ‘It’s something that’s come over you, it can’t be,’ said that other voice. It felt eerie to me lying there in the dark, I lit a match, and it felt somehow frightening to me in that little room with yellow wallpaper. I lit a cigarette and, as always happens when you turn around in the same circle of unresolved contradictions—you smoke, and so I smoked one cigarette after another, in order to befog myself and see no contradictions.

“I didn’t sleep all night, and at five o’clock, deciding that I couldn’t remain in this tension any longer and would leave at once, I got up, woke the caretaker who served me, and sent him for horses. To the meeting I sent a note saying that I had been summoned to Moscow on urgent business and therefore asked to be replaced by another member. At eight o’clock I got into the tarantass and drove off.”

XXV

THE CONDUCTOR CAME IN and, noticing that our candle had burned down, put it out, not replacing it with a new one. Outside it was growing light. Pozdnyshev was silent, sighing deeply all the while the conductor was in the carriage. He went on with his story only when the conductor was gone and in the semi-dark of the moving carriage only the rattle of the windows and the regular snoring of the clerk could be heard. In the half-light of dawn I could no longer see him at all. I could hear only his more and more agitated and suffering voice.

“I had to go twenty miles by carriage and eight hours by rail. The carriage ride was wonderful. It was a frosty autumn with bright sun. You know that season, when horseshoes imprint themselves on the butterlike roadway. The roads are smooth, the light bright, and the air invigorating. It was good to be riding in a tarantass. When it grew light and I set out, I felt easier. Looking at the horses, at the fields, at the passersby, I would forget where I was going. Sometimes it seemed to me that I was simply riding, and that nothing of what had called me back existed. It was especially joyful for me to forget myself like that. When I did remember where I was going, I said to myself: ‘Don’t think, we’ll see later.’ On top of that, an event occurred midway that held up my journey and distracted me still more: the tarantass broke down and had to be repaired. This breakdown had great significance in that it made it so that I arrived in Moscow not at five o’clock, as I had planned, but at midnight, and at home towards one o’clock, since I did not catch the express and had to go by regular passenger train. Going for a cart, the repairs, the payment, tea at the inn, talking with the innkeeper—all that distracted me still more. Towards evening everything was ready, and I set off again, and it was still better riding by night than by day. There was a young moon, a little frost, again a beautiful road, horses, a merry driver, and I rode along and enjoyed it, almost not thinking at all about what awaited me, or especially enjoying it precisely because I knew what awaited me and was bidding farewell to the joys of life. But this calm state, the ability to suppress my feelings, ended with that ride. As soon as I got on the train, something quite different began. That eight-hour train trip was something terrible for me, which I won’t forget all my life. Either because, on settling in the carriage, I vividly imagined myself arriving, or because the railroad has such a stirring effect on people, once I sat down in the carriage, I could no longer control my imagination, and it began ceaselessly painting for me, with an extraordinary vividness, pictures that inflamed my jealousy, one after another, and one more cynical than the other, all about the same thing, about what was happening there without me, and how she was betraying me. I burned with indignation, anger, and some peculiar feeling of intoxication with my humiliation, as I contemplated those pictures, and I couldn’t tear myself away from them; I couldn’t help looking at them, couldn’t erase them, couldn’t help evoking them. Not only that, but the more I contemplated those imaginary pictures, the more I believed in their reality. It was as if the vividness with which those pictures presented themselves to me served as proof that what I imagined was a reality. Some devil, as if against my will, invented and urged upon me the most terrible considerations. A longpast conversation with Trukhachevsky’s brother came to my mind, and in a sort of ecstasy I tore my heart with that conversation, referring it to Trukhachevsky and my wife.

“It was very long ago, but I remembered it. Trukhachevsky’s brother, I remembered, once replied to the question of whether he visited brothels by saying that a respectable man wouldn’t start going where he might get sick, and where it was dirty and vile, when he can always find a respectable woman. And so he, his brother, found my wife. ‘True, she’s no longer in her first youth, there’s a tooth missing on one side, and there’s a certain puffiness’—I was thinking for him—‘but no help for it, one must avail oneself of what’s there.’ ‘Yes, he’s condescending to her in taking her as his mistress,’ I said to myself. ‘Besides, she’s safe.’ ‘No, it’s impossible! What am I thinking!’ I said to myself in horror. ‘There’s nothing, nothing like that. And there aren’t even any grounds for supposing anything like that. Didn’t she say to me that even the thought that I could be jealous of him was humiliating for her? Yes, but she’s lying, it’s all a lie!’ I cried—and it started again … There were only two other passengers in our carriage—an old lady and her husband, both very untalkative—and they got off at one station, and I remained alone. I was like a beast in a cage: now I jumped up, went to the windows, then, staggering, I began to pace, trying to speed up the carriage; but the carriage, with all its seats and windows, went rattling along just like ours …”

And Pozdnyshev jumped up, took a few steps, and sat down again.

“Oh, I’m afraid, I’m afraid of railway carriages, terror comes over me. Yes, it’s terrible!” he went on. “I said to myself: ‘I’ll think about other things. Well, say, about the owner of the inn where I had tea.’ Well, so, in the eyes of my imagination appears the innkeeper with his long beard and his grandson—a boy the same age as my Vasya. My Vasya! He’ll see the musician kiss his mother. What will that do to his poor soul? But what is it to her! She’s in love … And the same thing rose up. No, no … Well, I’ll think about the inspection of the hospital. Yes, how that patient yesterday complained about a doctor. The doctor had a mustache like Trukhachevsky’s. And how insolently he … They deceived me when he said he was leaving. And again it began. Everything I thought about had a connection with him. I suffered terribly. The suffering lay mainly in ignorance, in doubts, in splitting apart, in not knowing whether I must love her or hate her. My sufferings were so intense that I remember having a thought that I liked very much, of getting out on the way, lying down on the rails under the carriage, and ending it. Then at least you won’t hesitate and doubt any longer. The one thing that kept me from doing it was pity for myself, which at once immediately called up hatred for her. Towards him there was some strange feeling of both hatred and consciousness of my humilation and his victory, but towards her a terrible hatred. ‘I can’t put an end to myself and leave her; she must suffer if only a little, if only to understand what I’ve suffered,’ I said to myself. I got out at every station in order to distract myself. At one station I saw people drinking in the buffet, and I at once drank some vodka myself. Next to me stood a Jew, also drinking. He got to talking, and, only so as not to remain alone, I went with him to a dirty, smoke-filled third-class carriage strewn with the shells of sunflower seeds. I sat beside him there, and he chattered a lot and told anecdotes. I listened to him, but couldn’t understand what he was saying, because I went on thinking my own thoughts. He noticed it and started demanding that I pay attention to him; then I got up and went back to my carriage. ‘I must think over,’ I said to myself, ‘whether what I think is true, and whether I have grounds for tormenting myself.’ I sat down, wishing to think it over calmly, but, instead of calmly thinking it over, the same thing began again: instead of reasoning—pictures and imaginings. ‘So many times I’ve been tormented like this,’ I said to myself (I remembered similar fits of jealousy in the past), ‘and it all ended in nothing. So now, too, maybe, even certainly, I’ll find her peacefully asleep; she’ll wake up, be glad to see me, and by her words, her glance, I’ll feel that there was nothing and it was all nonsense. Oh, how good that would be!’ ‘But, no, that’s happened too often, and now it will no longer be so,’ some voice said to me, and it began again. Yes, here’s where the punishment lay! I wouldn’t take a young man to a syphilis clinic to rid him of the desire for women, but to my own soul, to look at the devils that were tearing it apart! The terrible thing was that I recognized for myself the full, unquestionable right over her body, as if it were my body, and at the same time I felt that I couldn’t own that body, that it was not mine, and that she could dispose of it as she wished, and she wished to dispose of it not as I wished. And I could do nothing either to him or to her. Like Vanka the Steward at the foot of the gallows,¹⁴ he’ll sing a little song about how he kissed her sugary lips and so on. And he’s on top. And still less can I do anything with her. If she hasn’t done it but wants to, and I know it, then it’s worse still: it would be better if she had done it, so that I knew it, so that there’d be no uncertainty. I couldn’t have said what I wanted. I wanted her not to wish for what she must wish for. It was total madness!”

XXVI

“AT THE NEXT to last station, when the conductor came to take our tickets, I gathered up my things and went out to the rear platform, and the consciousness that it was close, that the resolution was here, increased my agitation still more. I was cold, and my jaws trembled so much that my teeth chattered. I left the station mechanically with the crowd, hired a cab, got in and drove away. I rode along looking at the rare passersby, and the yard porters, and the shadows cast by the street lamps and my droshky, now in front, now behind, without thinking about anything. After going half a mile, my feet felt cold, and it occurred to me that I had taken off my woolen socks on the train and put them in my bag. Where’s the bag? Is it here? It is. But where’s the wicker trunk? I remembered that I had forgotten all about my baggage, but remembering and taking out the check, I decided that it wasn’t worth going back and rode on.

“Hard as I try now, I simply can’t remember my state then: what was I thinking? what did I want? I know nothing. I remember only being conscious that something frightening and very important in my life was being prepared. Whether the important thing came about because I thought that way, or because I had a foreboding of it—I don’t know. It may also be that, after what happened, all the moments leading up to it took on a dark shade in my memory. I drove up to the porch. It was past midnight. Several cabs stood near the porch, expecting customers because of the lighted windows (the lighted windows were in our apartment, in the reception room and drawing room). Not accounting to myself for why there was still light in our windows so late, in the same state of expecting something dreadful, I went up the steps and rang. Our footman—the kind, assiduous, and very stupid Egor—opened the door. The first thing that caught my eye, hanging among other clothes on the stand in the front hall, was his overcoat. I should have been astonished, but I wasn’t, it was just what I expected. ‘That’s it,’ I said to myself. When I asked Egor who was there and he named Trukhachevsky, I asked if there was anybody else. He said:

“‘No one, sir.’

“I remember him saying it with such an intonation as if he wished to make me happy and disperse my doubts about there being anyone else. ‘No one, sir. So, so,’ I seemed to say to myself.

“‘And the children?’

“‘They’re well, thank God. Asleep long ago, sir.’

“I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t stop the trembling of my jaws. ‘Well, so it’s not as I thought: before I thought it was a misfortune, but it would all turn out well, as formerly. Now, though, it’s not as formerly, now it’s everything I imagined to myself, and thought I was only imagining it, but here it all is in reality. Here it is …’

“I almost burst into sobs, but at once the devil prompted me: ‘Cry, turn sentimental, and they’ll quietly part, there’ll be no evidence, and you’ll doubt and suffer forever.’ And at once the sensitivity towards myself vanished and a strange feeling appeared—you won’t believe it—a feeling of joy that my torment was now over, that now I could punish her, could rid myself of her, could give vent to my anger. And I gave vent to it—I became a beast, an angry and cunning beast.

“‘Don’t, don’t,’ I said to Egor, who was about to go to the drawing room. ‘Here’s what to do: quickly take a cab and go; here’s my baggage check, fetch my things. Off with you.’

“He went down the corridor for his coat. Fearing he might frighten them off, I went to his little room with him and waited while he got ready. From the drawing room, two rooms away, came the sounds of talking and of knives against plates. They were eating and hadn’t heard the bell. ‘If only they don’t come out now,’ I thought. Egor put on his coat trimmed with Astrakhan lamb and left. I let him out and locked the door behind him, and it was eerie for me when I felt that I was left alone and that I had to act at once. How—I didn’t know yet. I only knew that it was all over now, that there could be no doubt of her guilt, and that I would punish her at once and end my relations with her.

“Before I had been hesitant, I had said to myself: ‘Maybe it’s not true, maybe I’m mistaken’—now it was no longer so. It was all decided irrevocably. In secret from me, alone with him, at night! This was a complete forgetting of everything. Or worse still: such deliberate daring, such boldness in crime, so that the boldness served as a sign of innocence. It was all clear. There was no doubt. I feared only one thing, that they might make a run for it, invent yet another deception, and thus deprive me of obvious evidence and the possibility of punishment. And, so as to catch them the sooner, I went on tiptoe to the reception room, where they were sitting, not through the drawing room, but through the corridor and the nurseries.

“In the first nursery the boys were asleep. In the second nursery the nanny stirred, was about to wake up, and I imagined what she would think when she learned everything, and was so overcome with self-pity at this thought that I couldn’t hold back my tears, and, so as not to wake the children, I ran out on tiptoe to the corridor and to my study, collapsed on the sofa, and burst into sobs.

“I—an honorable man, I—my parents’ son, I—who all my life dreamed of the happiness of family life, I—a man who has never betrayed her … And look! Five children, and she embraces a musician, all because he has red lips! No, she’s not a human being! She’s a bitch, a loathsome bitch! In the next room from her children, whom she has pretended to love all her life! And to write what she wrote to me! And to throw herself on his neck so insolently! But what do I know? Maybe it’s been this way all the while. Maybe it’s with lackeys that she’s been making all those children that are considered mine. And I’d come tomorrow, and she, with her hair done up, with that waist of hers and her lazy, graceful movements (I’ve seen all of her attractive, hateful face), would meet me, and this beast of jealousy would forever be sitting in my heart and tearing it to pieces. What will the nanny think? And Egor? And poor Lizochka! She already understands certain things. And this insolence! and this lie! and this animal sensuality, which I know so well,’ I said to myself.

“I wanted to get up, but I couldn’t. My heart was pounding so hard that I couldn’t keep on my feet. Yes, I’ll die of a stroke. She’ll kill me. That’s what she wants. Well, so, should she kill me? No, that would be too much to her advantage, I won’t afford her such pleasure. Yes, and I’m sitting here, and they’re eating and laughing there, and … Yes, despite the fact that she’s no longer in her first freshness, he didn’t scorn her: anyhow she’s not bad, and, above all, she’s at least safe for his precious health. ‘Why didn’t I strangle her then?’ I said to myself, remembering the moment a week ago when I pushed her out of my study and then smashed things. I vividly remembered the state I was in then; not only remembered it, but felt the same need to smash, to destroy, that I had felt then. I remember how I wanted to act and how all considerations except those needed for action left my head. I got into the state of a beast or a man under the influence of physical excitement at a time of danger, when a man acts precisely, unhurriedly, but without losing a moment, and all only with one definite goal.”

XXVII

“THE FIRST THING I did, I took off my boots and, in my stocking feet, went up to the wall above the sofa, where I had guns and daggers hanging, and took a curved Damascus dagger, which had never been used and was terribly sharp. I drew it out of the scabbard. I remember the scabbard falling behind the sofa and remember saying to myself: ‘I must find it afterwards, otherwise it will get lost.’ Then I took off my coat, which I had had on all the while, and, stepping softly in just my stockings, went there.

“And stealing up quietly, I suddenly opened the door. I remember the expression on their faces. I remember that expression, because that expression gave me a tormenting joy. It was an expression of terror. That was just what I wanted. I’ll never forget the expression of desperate terror that appeared in the first second on both their faces when they saw me. He had been sitting at the table, I believe, but on seeing or hearing me, he jumped to his feet and stood back to the cupboard. On his face there was the quite unquestionable expression of terror alone. On her face there was the same expression of terror, but there was something else as well. If there had been only the one, maybe what happened wouldn’t have happened; but in the expression of her face, or at least it seemed so to me in the first moment, there was also chagrin, displeasure, that her amorous passion and happiness with him had been disrupted. As if she needed nothing now except that her happiness not be interfered with. The one expression and the other remained on their faces only for an instant. The expression of terror on his face was replaced at once by the expression of a question: Can we lie or not? If we can, we’d better begin. If not, something else will begin. But what? He looked at her questioningly. On her face, when she looked at him, the expression of vexation and chagrin was replaced, as it seemed to me, by a concern for him.

“I stood in the doorway for a moment, holding the dagger behind my back. At the same moment, he smiled and in a ridiculously indifferent tone, began:

“‘And we’ve been making music …’

“‘This is a surprise,’ she began at the same time, submitting to his tone.

“But neither of them finished what they were saying: the same rage I had experienced a week ago came over me. Again I experienced that need for destruction, violence, and the ecstasy of rage, and gave myself up to it.

“Neither finished what they were saying … That other thing which he had been afraid of began, at once breaking off all that they were saying. I rushed at her, still hiding the dagger so that he wouldn’t prevent me from striking her in the side under the breast. I had chosen that spot from the beginning. The moment I rushed at her, he saw and—something I never expected from him—seized me by the arm, shouting:

“Come to your senses! What are you doing! Help!’

“I tore my arm free and silently turned on him. His eyes met mine, he suddenly went white as a sheet, even his lips, his eyes flashed somehow peculiarly, and—something I also never expected from him—he darted under the piano and through the door. I rushed after him, but there was a weight hanging on my left arm. It was she. I gave a jerk. She hung on even more heavily and wouldn’t let go. This unexpected hindrance, the weight, and her loathsome contact with me inflamed me still more. I felt that I was totally enraged and must be frightening, and I was glad of it. I swung my left arm as hard as I could, and my elbow struck her right in the face. She cried out and let go of my arm. I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it would be ridiculous to go running after my wife’s lover in my stocking feet, and I didn’t want to be ridiculous, I wanted to be frightening. Despite the terrible rage I was in, I was aware all the time of the impression I was making on others, and that impression even partly guided me. I turned to her. She had fallen on the sofa and, holding her hand to the eyes I had hurt, was looking at me. In her face were fear and hatred of me, of her enemy, as in a rat when you pick up the trap it’s caught in. At least I saw nothing in her except that fear and hatred of me. It was a fear and hatred of me that must be caused by her love for another man. But I might still have restrained myself and not have done what I did, if she had kept silent. But she suddenly began to speak and snatch with her hand at my hand holding the dagger.

“‘Come to your senses! What are you doing? What’s the matter with you? There’s nothing, nothing, nothing … I swear!’

“I might have delayed longer, but those last words, from which I concluded the opposite, that is, all that had happened, called for a response. And the response had to correspond to the mood I had driven myself into, which was steadily in crescendo and had to go on rising in the same way. Rage also has its laws.

“‘Don’t lie, loathsome woman!’ I screamed and seized her arm with my left hand, but she tore herself free. Then, still holding the dagger, I seized her by the throat with my left hand, threw her on her back, and began to strangle her. What a tough neck it was … She seized my hand with both hands, trying to tear it from her throat, and, as if that was just what I was waiting for, I struck her as hard as I could with the dagger in the left side below the ribs.

“When people say they’re not aware of what they’re doing in a fit of rage—it’s nonsense, not true. I was aware of everything and never for a second ceased to be aware. The more I turned up the steam of my rage, the more brightly the light of consciousness glowed in me, in which I couldn’t help seeing all that I was doing. I knew what I was doing every second. I can’t say I knew beforehand what I was going to do, but in the second when I was doing it, even, I think, a little before, I knew what I was doing, as if to make repentance possible, as if to be able to tell myself that I could have stopped. I knew I was striking below the ribs and that the dagger would go in. At the moment I was doing it, I knew I was doing something horrible, such as I had never done before, and which would have horrible consequences. But that consciousness flashed like lightning, and the act followed immediately after that consciousness. And the act became conscious with an extraordinary vividness. I felt and remember the momentary resistance of her corset and something else, and then the knife sinking into something soft. She seized the dagger with her hands, cut them, but couldn’t hold it back. For a long time afterwards, in prison, after the moral turnabout was accomplished in me, I thought of that moment, remembering what I could, and reflecting. I remember for an instant, only for an instant, preceding the act, the terrible awareness that I was killing and had killed a woman, a defenseless woman, my wife. I remember the horror of that awareness, and therefore I conclude and even vaguely remember that, having stuck in the dagger, I immediately pulled it out, wishing to repair what I had done and stop it. For a second I stood motionless, waiting to see what would happen and whether it could be repaired. She jumped to her feet and cried:

“‘Nanny! He’s killed me!’

“The nanny, who had heard the noise, was standing in the doorway. I went on standing there, waiting and not believing it. But then blood gushed from under her corset. Only then did I understand that it couldn’t be repaired, and at once I decided that there was no need, that this was the very thing I wanted and the very thing that had to be done. I waited until she fell and the nanny rushed to her crying, ‘Good God!’ and only then did I throw the dagger aside and walk out of the room.

“‘I mustn’t get agitated, I must know what I’m doing,’ I said to myself, not looking at her or the nanny. The nanny cried out, calling the maid. I went down the corridor and, having sent the maid, went to my study. ‘What must I do now?’ I asked myself and at once knew what. Going into the study, I went straight to the wall, took down a revolver, examined it—it was loaded—and put it on the table. Then I got the scabbard from behind the sofa and sat down on the sofa.

“I sat like that for a long time. I didn’t think of anything, didn’t remember anything. I heard them fussing with something there. I heard someone come, then someone else. Then I heard and even saw Egor bring my wicker trunk to the study. As if anybody needed it!

“‘Have you heard what happened?’ I said. ‘Tell the yard porter to inform the police.’

“He said nothing and left. I got up, locked the door, and, taking out cigarettes and a match, began to smoke. I hadn’t finished smoking before sleep seized me and overpowered me. I must have slept for two hours. I remember dreaming that she and I were friends, quarreled, but made peace, and that something interfered slightly, but we were friends. I was awakened by a knock on the door. ‘It’s the police,’ I thought, waking up. ‘I did kill, it seems. But maybe it’s she, and nothing has happened.’ There was another knock on the door. I didn’t respond, I was settling the question of whether it had happened or not. Yes, it had. I remembered the resistance of the corset and the knife sinking in, and a chill ran down my spine. ‘Yes, it did. Yes, now I must kill myself as well,’ I said to myself. But I knew as I was saying it that I wouldn’t kill myself. However, I got up and took the revolver in my hands again. But, strange thing: I remember how I had been close to suicide many times in the past, how that day even, on the train, it had seemed easy to me, easy precisely because I was thinking how struck she’d be by it. Now I not only couldn’t kill myself, but couldn’t even think about it. ‘Why should I?’ I asked myself, and there was no answer. There was more knocking on the door. ‘Yes, first I must find out who’s knocking. I still have time.’ I put down the revolver and covered it with a newspaper. I went to the door and slid back the bolt. It was my wife’s sister, a kindly, stupid widow.

“‘Vasya, what is it?’ she said, and poured out her ever-ready tears.

“‘What do you want?’ I asked rudely. I saw there was no need or reason to be rude with her, but I couldn’t come up with any other tone.

“‘Vasya, she’s dying! Ivan Zakharych said so.’ Ivan Zakharych was the doctor, her doctor and adviser.

“‘So he’s here?’ I said, and all my anger against her rose up again. ‘Well, what of it?’

“‘Vasya, go to her. Ah, it’s so terrible,’ she said.

“‘Shall I go to her?’ I put the question to myself. And at once replied that I should go to her, that it’s probably always done that way, that when a husband kills his wife, as I had done, he’s obliged to go to her. ‘If that’s how it’s done, I must go,’ I said to myself. ‘Yes, if need be, I’ll always have time,’ I thought about my intention to shoot myself, and followed after her. ‘Now there’ll be phrases, grimaces, but I won’t give in to that,’ I said to myself.

“‘Wait,’ I said to her sister. ‘It’s stupid without boots, let me at least put on my slippers.’”

XXVIII

“AND, amazing thing! Again, when I left my study and walked through the familiar rooms, again the hope appeared in me that nothing had happened, but the smell of that medical muck—iodine, carbolic acid—struck me. No, it had all happened. Going down the corridor past the nursery, I saw Lizonka. She looked at me with frightened eyes. It even seemed to me that all five children were there and they were all looking at me. I went up to the door, and the maid opened it for me from inside and stepped out. The first thing that caught my eye was her light gray dress on the chair, all dark with blood. She was lying with her knees drawn up on our double bed, on my side even, because it was easier to get to. She was lying slightly propped on pillows, in an unbuttoned bed jacket. The wounded place had been covered with something. There was a heavy smell of iodine in the room. First and most of all I was struck by her swollen face, with blue bruises on part of the nose and under the eye. That was the result of the blow of my elbow, when she had tried to hold me back. Of beauty there was none, but it seemed to me that there was something vile in her. I stopped in the doorway.

“‘Go, go to her,’ said her sister.

“‘She probably wants to repent,’ I thought. ‘Should I forgive her? Yes, she’s dying, and I can forgive her,’ I thought, trying to be magnanimous. I went up close. With difficulty she raised her eyes to me, one of which was bruised, and with difficulty, faltering, said:

“‘So you’ve done it, you’ve killed …’ And her face, through physical suffering and even the proximity of death, expressed the same old, familiar, cold, animal hatred. ‘But the children … I won’t … let you have … She (her sister) will take …’

“Of what was the main thing for me, of her guilt, her betrayal, she seemed to consider it not worth making mention.

“‘Yes, admire what you’ve done,’ she said, glancing at the door, and she sobbed. In the doorway stood her sister with the children. ‘Yes, this is what you’ve done.’

“I looked at the children, at her bruised, swollen face, and for the first time I forgot myself, my rights, my pride, for the first time I saw in her a human being. And all that had offended me, all my jealousy, seemed so insignificant to me, and so significant what I had done, that I wanted to press my face to her hand and say, ‘Forgive me!’—but I didn’t dare.

“She fell silent, closing her eyes, obviously unable to speak further. Then her disfigured face quivered and winced. She pushed me away weakly.

“‘Why did all this happen? Why?’

“‘Forgive me,’ I said.

“‘Forgive? That’s all nonsense! … Only let me not die! …’ she cried, raised herself slightly, and turned her feverishly glittering eyes to me. “Yes, you’ve done it! … I hate you! … Aie! Ah!’ she cried, obviously in delirium, frightened at something. ‘Well, kill, kill, I’m not afraid … Only all of them, all of them, and him, too. He’s gone, he’s gone!’

“Her delirium continued from then on. She didn’t recognize anyone. That same day, towards noon, she died. Before that, at eight o’clock, I was taken to the police station and from there to prison. And there, sitting for eleven months awaiting trial, I thought over myself and my past and understood it. I began to understand on the third day. On the third day I was taken there …”

He wanted to say something, but, unable to hold back his sobbing any longer, he stopped. Then, gathering his forces, he went on:

“I began to understand only when I saw her in the coffin …” He sobbed, but at once hastened on: “Only when I saw her dead face did I understand all that I’d done. I understood that I, I had killed her, that it was from my doing that she who was once alive, moving, warm, and had now become motionless, waxen, cold, and that never, nowhere, nothing could repair that. No one who hasn’t lived through that can understand it … Ohh! ohh! ohh!” he cried several times and quieted down.

We sat for a long time in silence. He kept sobbing and shaking silently in front of me.

“Well, forgive me …”

He turned away from me and lay down on the seat, covering himself with a plaid. At the station where I was to get out—this was at eight o’clock in the morning—I went over to him to say good-bye. He was either asleep or pretending, but he didn’t stir. I touched him with my hand. He uncovered himself, and it was clear that he had not been asleep.

“Good-bye,” I said, giving him my hand.

He gave me his and smiled faintly, but so pitifully that I wanted to weep.

“Yes, forgive me,” he repeated the same word with which he had ended his whole story.

1889

* Wine, women, and song.