The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, by graf Leo Tolstoy

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Title: The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories

Author: Leo Tolstoi

Release Date: March 18, 2006 [EBook #689]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KREUTZER SONATA ***




Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger





THE KREUTZER SONATA AND OTHER STORIES

By Count Leo Tolstoi


Author of "Resurrection," "Life is Worth Living," "Ivan the Fool," Etc.



CONTENTS.


TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

KREUTZER SONATA.

IVAN THE FOOL.

A LOST OPPORTUNITY.

POLIKUSHKA

THE CANDLE.





TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

On comparing with the original Russian some English translations of
Count Tolstoi's works, published both in this country and in England, I
concluded that they were far from being accurate. The majority of them
were retranslations from the French, and I found that the respective
transitions through which they had passed tended to obliterate many of
the beauties of the Russian language and of the peculiar characteristics
of Russian life. A satisfactory translation can be made only by one who
understands the language and SPIRIT of the Russian people. As Tolstoi's
writings contain so many idioms it is not an easy task to render them
into intelligible English, and the one who successfully accomplishes
this must be a native of Russia, commanding the English and Russian
languages with equal fluency.

The story of "Ivan the Fool" portrays Tolstoi's communistic ideas,
involving the abolition of military forces, middlemen, despotism, and
money. Instead of these he would establish on earth a kingdom in which
each and every person would become a worker and producer. The author
describes the various struggles through which three brothers passed,
beset as they were by devils large and small, until they reached the
ideal state of existence which he believes to be the only happy one
attainable in this world.

On reading this little story one is surprised that the Russian censor
passed it, as it is devoted to a narration of ideas quite at variance
with the present policy of the government of that country.

"A Lost Opportunity" is a singularly true picture of peasant life, which
evinces a deep study of the subject on the part of the writer. Tolstoi
has drawn many of the peculiar customs of the Russian peasant in a
masterly manner, and I doubt if he has given a more comprehensive
description of this feature of Russian life in any of his other works.
In this story also he has presented many traits which are common to
human nature throughout the world, and this gives an added interest to
the book. The language is simple and picturesque, and the characters are
drawn with remarkable fidelity to nature. The moral of this tale points
out how the hero Ivan might have avoided the terrible consequences of a
quarrel with his neighbor (which grew out of nothing) if he had lived in
accordance with the scriptural injunction to forgive his brother's sins
and seek not for revenge.

The story of "Polikushka" is a very graphic description of the life led
by a servant of the court household of a certain nobleman, in which the
author portrays the different conditions and surroundings enjoyed by
these servants from those of the ordinary or common peasants. It is a
true and powerful reproduction of an element in Russian life but little
written about heretofore. Like the other stories of this great writer,
"Polikushka" has a moral to which we all might profitably give heed. He
illustrates the awful consequences of intemperance, and concludes that
only kind treatment can reform the victims of alcohol.

For much valuable assistance in the work of these translations, I am
deeply indebted to the bright English scholarship of my devoted wife.




THE KREUTZER SONATA.



CHAPTER I.

Travellers left and entered our car at every stopping of the train.
Three persons, however, remained, bound, like myself, for the farthest
station: a lady neither young nor pretty, smoking cigarettes, with
a thin face, a cap on her head, and wearing a semi-masculine outer
garment; then her companion, a very loquacious gentleman of about forty
years, with baggage entirely new and arranged in an orderly manner;
then a gentleman who held himself entirely aloof, short in stature, very
nervous, of uncertain age, with bright eyes, not pronounced in color,
but extremely attractive,--eyes that darted with rapidity from one
object to another.

This gentleman, during almost all the journey thus far, had entered into
conversation with no fellow-traveller, as if he carefully avoided all
acquaintance. When spoken to, he answered curtly and decisively, and
began to look out of the car window obstinately.

Yet it seemed to me that the solitude weighed upon him. He seemed to
perceive that I understood this, and when our eyes met, as happened
frequently, since we were sitting almost opposite each other, he turned
away his head, and avoided conversation with me as much as with the
others. At nightfall, during a stop at a large station, the gentleman
with the fine baggage--a lawyer, as I have since learned--got out with
his companion to drink some tea at the restaurant. During their absence
several new travellers entered the car, among whom was a tall old man,
shaven and wrinkled, evidently a merchant, wearing a large heavily-lined
cloak and a big cap. This merchant sat down opposite the empty seats of
the lawyer and his companion, and straightway entered into conversation
with a young man who seemed like an employee in some commercial house,
and who had likewise just boarded the train. At first the clerk had
remarked that the seat opposite was occupied, and the old man had
answered that he should get out at the first station. Thus their
conversation started.

I was sitting not far from these two travellers, and, as the train was
not in motion, I could catch bits of their conversation when others were
not talking.

They talked first of the prices of goods and the condition of business;
they referred to a person whom they both knew; then they plunged into
the fair at Nijni Novgorod. The clerk boasted of knowing people who were
leading a gay life there, but the old man did not allow him to continue,
and, interrupting him, began to describe the festivities of the previous
year at Kounavino, in which he had taken part. He was evidently proud
of these recollections, and, probably thinking that this would detract
nothing from the gravity which his face and manners expressed, he
related with pride how, when drunk, he had fired, at Kounavino, such a
broadside that he could describe it only in the other's ear.

The clerk began to laugh noisily. The old man laughed too, showing two
long yellow teeth. Their conversation not interesting me, I left the car
to stretch my legs. At the door I met the lawyer and his lady.

"You have no more time," the lawyer said to me. "The second bell is
about to ring."

Indeed I had scarcely reached the rear of the train when the bell
sounded. As I entered the car again, the lawyer was talking with his
companion in an animated fashion. The merchant, sitting opposite them,
was taciturn.

"And then she squarely declared to her husband," said the lawyer with a
smile, as I passed by them, "that she neither could nor would live with
him, because" . . .

And he continued, but I did not hear the rest of the sentence, my
attention being distracted by the passing of the conductor and a new
traveller. When silence was restored, I again heard the lawyer's
voice. The conversation had passed from a special case to general
considerations.

"And afterward comes discord, financial difficulties, disputes between
the two parties, and the couple separate. In the good old days that
seldom happened. Is it not so?" asked the lawyer of the two merchants,
evidently trying to drag them into the conversation.

Just then the train started, and the old man, without answering, took
off his cap, and crossed himself three times while muttering a prayer.
When he had finished, he clapped his cap far down on his head, and said:

"Yes, sir, that happened in former times also, but not as often. In the
present day it is bound to happen more frequently. People have become
too learned."

The lawyer made some reply to the old man, but the train, ever
increasing its speed, made such a clatter upon the rails that I could
no longer hear distinctly. As I was interested in what the old man was
saying, I drew nearer. My neighbor, the nervous gentleman, was evidently
interested also, and, without changing his seat, he lent an ear.

"But what harm is there in education?" asked the lady, with a smile that
was scarcely perceptible. "Would it be better to marry as in the old
days, when the bride and bridegroom did not even see each other before
marriage?" she continued, answering, as is the habit of our ladies, not
the words that her interlocutor had spoken, but the words she believed
he was going to speak. "Women did not know whether they would love or
would be loved, and they were married to the first comer, and suffered
all their lives. Then you think it was better so?" she continued,
evidently addressing the lawyer and myself, and not at all the old man.

"People have become too learned," repeated the last, looking at the lady
with contempt, and leaving her question unanswered.

"I should be curious to know how you explain the correlation between
education and conjugal differences," said the lawyer, with a slight
smile.

The merchant wanted to make some reply, but the lady interrupted him.

"No, those days are past."

The lawyer cut short her words:--

"Let him express his thought."

"Because there is no more fear," replied the old man.

"But how will you marry people who do not love each other? Only
animals can be coupled at the will of a proprietor. But people have
inclinations, attachments," the lady hastened to say, casting a glance
at the lawyer, at me, and even at the clerk, who, standing up
and leaning his elbow on the back of a seat, was listening to the
conversation with a smile.

"You are wrong to say that, madam," said the old man. "The animals are
beasts, but man has received the law."

"But, nevertheless, how is one to live with a man when there is no
love?" said the lady, evidently excited by the general sympathy and
attention.

"Formerly no such distinctions were made," said the old man, gravely.
"Only now have they become a part of our habits. As soon as the least
thing happens, the wife says: 'I release you. I am going to leave your
house.' Even among the moujiks this fashion has become acclimated.
'There,' she says, 'here are your shirts and drawers. I am going off
with Vanka. His hair is curlier than yours.' Just go talk with them. And
yet the first rule for the wife should be fear."

The clerk looked at the lawyer, the lady, and myself, evidently
repressing a smile, and all ready to deride or approve the merchant's
words, according to the attitude of the others.

"What fear?" said the lady.

"This fear,--the wife must fear her husband; that is what fear."

"Oh, that, my little father, that is ended."

"No, madam, that cannot end. As she, Eve, the woman, was taken from
man's ribs, so she will remain unto the end of the world," said the old
man, shaking his head so triumphantly and so severely that the clerk,
deciding that the victory was on his side, burst into a loud laugh.

"Yes, you men think so," replied the lady, without surrendering, and
turning toward us. "You have given yourself liberty. As for woman, you
wish to keep her in the seraglio. To you, everything is permissible. Is
it not so?"

"Oh, man,--that's another affair."

"Then, according to you, to man everything is permissible?"

"No one gives him this permission; only, if the man behaves badly
outside, the family is not increased thereby; but the woman, the wife,
is a fragile vessel," continued the merchant, severely.

His tone of authority evidently subjugated his hearers. Even the lady
felt crushed, but she did not surrender.

"Yes, but you will admit, I think, that woman is a human being, and has
feelings like her husband. What should she do if she does not love her
husband?"

"If she does not love him!" repeated the old man, stormily, and knitting
his brows; "why, she will be made to love him."

This unexpected argument pleased the clerk, and he uttered a murmur of
approbation.

"Oh, no, she will not be forced," said the lady. "Where there is no
love, one cannot be obliged to love in spite of herself."

"And if the wife deceives her husband, what is to be done?" said the
lawyer.

"That should not happen," said the old man. "He must have his eyes about
him."

"And if it does happen, all the same? You will admit that it does
happen?"

"It happens among the upper classes, not among us," answered the old
man. "And if any husband is found who is such a fool as not to rule his
wife, he will not have robbed her. But no scandal, nevertheless. Love
or not, but do not disturb the household. Every husband can govern his
wife. He has the necessary power. It is only the imbecile who does not
succeed in doing so."

Everybody was silent. The clerk moved, advanced, and, not wishing to lag
behind the others in the conversation, began with his eternal smile:

"Yes, in the house of our employer, a scandal has arisen, and it is very
difficult to view the matter clearly. The wife loved to amuse herself,
and began to go astray. He is a capable and serious man. First, it was
with the book-keeper. The husband tried to bring her back to reason
through kindness. She did not change her conduct. She plunged into all
sorts of beastliness. She began to steal his money. He beat her, but
she grew worse and worse. To an unbaptized, to a pagan, to a Jew (saving
your permission), she went in succession for her caresses. What could
the employer do? He has dropped her entirely, and now he lives as a
bachelor. As for her, she is dragging in the depths."

"He is an imbecile," said the old man. "If from the first he had not
allowed her to go in her own fashion, and had kept a firm hand upon her,
she would be living honestly, no danger. Liberty must be taken away from
the beginning. Do not trust yourself to your horse upon the highway. Do
not trust yourself to your wife at home."

At that moment the conductor passed, asking for the tickets for the next
station. The old man gave up his.

"Yes, the feminine sex must be dominated in season, else all will
perish."

"And you yourselves, at Kounavino, did you not lead a gay life with the
pretty girls?" asked the lawyer with a smile.

"Oh, that's another matter," said the merchant, severely. "Good-by,"
he added, rising. He wrapped himself in his cloak, lifted his cap, and,
taking his bag, left the car.

CHAPTER II.

Scarcely had the old man gone when a general conversation began.

"There's a little Old Testament father for you," said the clerk.

"He is a Domostroy,"* said the lady. "What savage ideas about a woman
and marriage!"

     *The Domostroy is a matrimonial code of the days of Ivan the
     Terrible.

"Yes, gentlemen," said the lawyer, "we are still a long way from the
European ideas upon marriage. First, the rights of woman, then free
marriage, then divorce, as a question not yet solved." . . .

"The main thing, and the thing which such people as he do not
understand," rejoined the lady, "is that only love consecrates marriage,
and that the real marriage is that which is consecrated by love."

The clerk listened and smiled, with the air of one accustomed to store
in his memory all intelligent conversation that he hears, in order to
make use of it afterwards.

"But what is this love that consecrates marriage?" said, suddenly, the
voice of the nervous and taciturn gentleman, who, unnoticed by us, had
approached.

He was standing with his hand on the seat, and evidently agitated. His
face was red, a vein in his forehead was swollen, and the muscles of his
cheeks quivered.

"What is this love that consecrates marriage?" he repeated.

"What love?" said the lady. "The ordinary love of husband and wife."

"And how, then, can ordinary love consecrate marriage?" continued the
nervous gentleman, still excited, and with a displeased air. He seemed
to wish to say something disagreeable to the lady. She felt it, and
began to grow agitated.

"How? Why, very simply," said she.

The nervous gentleman seized the word as it left her lips.

"No, not simply."

"Madam says," interceded the lawyer indicating his companion, "that
marriage should be first the result of an attachment, of a love, if
you will, and that, when love exists, and in that case only, marriage
represents something sacred. But every marriage which is not based on
a natural attachment, on love, has in it nothing that is morally
obligatory. Is not that the idea that you intended to convey?" he asked
the lady.

The lady, with a nod of her head, expressed her approval of this
translation of her thoughts.

"Then," resumed the lawyer, continuing his remarks.

But the nervous gentleman, evidently scarcely able to contain himself,
without allowing the lawyer to finish, asked:

"Yes, sir. But what are we to understand by this love that alone
consecrates marriage?"

"Everybody knows what love is," said the lady.

"But I don't know, and I should like to know how you define it."

"How? It is very simple," said the lady.

And she seemed thoughtful, and then said:

"Love . . . love . . . is a preference for one man or one woman to the
exclusion of all others. . . ."

"A preference for how long? . . . For a month, two days, or half an
hour?" said the nervous gentleman, with special irritation.

"No, permit me, you evidently are not talking of the same thing."

"Yes, I am talking absolutely of the same thing. Of the preference
for one man or one woman to the exclusion of all others. But I ask: a
preference for how long?"

"For how long? For a long time, for a life-time sometimes."

"But that happens only in novels. In life, never. In life this
preference for one to the exclusion of all others lasts in rare cases
several years, oftener several months, or even weeks, days,
hours. . . ."

"Oh, sir. Oh, no, no, permit me," said all three of us at the same time.

The clerk himself uttered a monosyllable of disapproval.

"Yes, I know," he said, shouting louder than all of us; "you are talking
of what is believed to exist, and I am talking of what is. Every man
feels what you call love toward each pretty woman he sees, and very
little toward his wife. That is the origin of the proverb,--and it is
a true one,--'Another's wife is a white swan, and ours is bitter
wormwood."'

"Ah, but what you say is terrible! There certainly exists among human
beings this feeling which is called love, and which lasts, not for
months and years, but for life."

"No, that does not exist. Even if it should be admitted that Menelaus
had preferred Helen all his life, Helen would have preferred Paris; and
so it has been, is, and will be eternally. And it cannot be otherwise,
just as it cannot happen that, in a load of chick-peas, two peas marked
with a special sign should fall side by side. Further, this is not only
an improbability, but it is certain that a feeling of satiety will come
to Helen or to Menelaus. The whole difference is that to one it comes
sooner, to the other later. It is only in stupid novels that it is
written that 'they loved each other all their lives.' And none but
children can believe it. To talk of loving a man or woman for life is
like saying that a candle can burn forever."

"But you are talking of physical love. Do you not admit a love based
upon a conformity of ideals, on a spiritual affinity?"

"Why not? But in that case it is not necessary to procreate together
(excuse my brutality). The point is that this conformity of ideals is
not met among old people, but among young and pretty persons," said he,
and he began to laugh disagreeably.

"Yes, I affirm that love, real love, does not consecrate marriage, as we
are in the habit of believing, but that, on the contrary, it ruins it."

"Permit me," said the lawyer. "The facts contradict your words. We
see that marriage exists, that all humanity--at least the larger
portion--lives conjugally, and that many husbands and wives honestly end
a long life together."

The nervous gentleman smiled ill-naturedly.

"And what then? You say that marriage is based upon love, and when I
give voice to a doubt as to the existence of any other love than sensual
love, you prove to me the existence of love by marriage. But in our day
marriage is only a violence and falsehood."

"No, pardon me," said the lawyer. "I say only that marriages have
existed and do exist."

"But how and why do they exist? They have existed, and they do exist,
for people who have seen, and do see, in marriage something sacramental,
a sacrament that is binding before God. For such people marriages exist,
but to us they are only hypocrisy and violence. We feel it, and, to
clear ourselves, we preach free love; but, really, to preach free love
is only a call backward to the promiscuity of the sexes (excuse me,
he said to the lady), the haphazard sin of certain raskolniks. The old
foundation is shattered; we must build a new one, but we must not preach
debauchery."

He grew so warm that all became silent, looking at him in astonishment.

"And yet the transition state is terrible. People feel that haphazard
sin is inadmissible. It is necessary in some way or other to regulate
the sexual relations; but there exists no other foundation than the old
one, in which nobody longer believes? People marry in the old fashion,
without believing in what they do, and the result is falsehood,
violence. When it is falsehood alone, it is easily endured. The husband
and wife simply deceive the world by professing to live monogamically.
If they really are polygamous and polyandrous, it is bad, but
acceptable. But when, as often happens, the husband and the wife have
taken upon themselves the obligation to live together all their lives
(they themselves do not know why), and from the second month have
already a desire to separate, but continue to live together just the
same, then comes that infernal existence in which they resort to drink,
in which they fire revolvers, in which they assassinate each other, in
which they poison each other."

All were silent, but we felt ill at ease.

"Yes, these critical episodes happen in marital life. For instance,
there is the Posdnicheff affair," said the lawyer, wishing to stop the
conversation on this embarrassing and too exciting ground. "Have you
read how he killed his wife through jealousy?"

The lady said that she had not read it. The nervous gentleman said
nothing, and changed color.

"I see that you have divined who I am," said he, suddenly, after a
pause.

"No, I have not had that pleasure."

"It is no great pleasure. I am Posdnicheff."

New silence. He blushed, then turned pale again.

"What matters it, however?" said he. "Excuse me, I do not wish to
embarrass you."

And he resumed his old seat.



CHAPTER III.

I resumed mine, also. The lawyer and the lady whispered together. I was
sitting beside Posdnicheff, and I maintained silence. I desired to talk
to him, but I did not know how to begin, and thus an hour passed until
we reached the next station.

There the lawyer and the lady went out, as well as the clerk. We were
left alone, Posdnicheff and I.

"They say it, and they lie, or they do not understand," said
Posdnicheff.

"Of what are you talking?"

"Why, still the same thing."

He leaned his elbows upon his knees, and pressed his hands against his
temples.

"Love, marriage, family,--all lies, lies, lies."

He rose, lowered the lamp-shade, lay down with his elbows on the
cushion, and closed his eyes. He remained thus for a minute.

"Is it disagreeable to you to remain with me, now that you know who I
am?"

"Oh, no."

"You have no desire to sleep?"

"Not at all."

"Then do you want me to tell you the story of my life?"

Just then the conductor passed. He followed him with an ill-natured
look, and did not begin until he had gone again. Then during all the
rest of the story he did not stop once. Even the new travellers as they
entered did not stop him.

His face, while he was talking, changed several times so completely
that it bore positively no resemblance to itself as it had appeared just
before. His eyes, his mouth, his moustache, and even his beard, all were
new. Each time it was a beautiful and touching physiognomy, and these
transformations were produced suddenly in the penumbra; and for five
minutes it was the same face, that could not be compared to that of five
minutes before. And then, I know not how, it changed again, and became
unrecognizable.


CHAPTER IV.

"Well, I am going then to tell you my life, and my whole frightful
history,--yes, frightful. And the story itself is more frightful than
the outcome."

He became silent for a moment, passed his hands over his eyes, and
began:--

"To be understood clearly, the whole must be told from the beginning. It
must be told how and why I married, and what I was before my marriage.
First, I will tell you who I am. The son of a rich gentleman of the
steppes, an old marshal of the nobility, I was a University pupil, a
graduate of the law school. I married in my thirtieth year. But before
talking to you of my marriage, I must tell you how I lived formerly,
and what ideas I had of conjugal life. I led the life of so many other
so-called respectable people,--that is, in debauchery. And like the
majority, while leading the life of a debauche, I was convinced that I
was a man of irreproachable morality.

"The idea that I had of my morality arose from the fact that in my
family there was no knowledge of those special debaucheries, so common
in the surroundings of land-owners, and also from the fact that my
father and my mother did not deceive each other. In consequence of this,
I had built from childhood a dream of high and poetical conjugal
life. My wife was to be perfection itself, our mutual love was to be
incomparable, the purity of our conjugal life stainless. I thought thus,
and all the time I marvelled at the nobility of my projects.

"At the same time, I passed ten years of my adult life without hurrying
toward marriage, and I led what I called the well-regulated and
reasonable life of a bachelor. I was proud of it before my friends,
and before all men of my age who abandoned themselves to all sorts of
special refinements. I was not a seducer, I had no unnatural tastes,
I did not make debauchery the principal object of my life; but I found
pleasure within the limits of society's rules, and innocently believed
myself a profoundly moral being. The women with whom I had relations did
not belong to me alone, and I asked of them nothing but the pleasure of
the moment.

"In all this I saw nothing abnormal. On the contrary, from the fact
that I did not engage my heart, but paid in cash, I supposed that I was
honest. I avoided those women who, by attaching themselves to me, or
presenting me with a child, could bind my future. Moreover, perhaps
there may have been children or attachments; but I so arranged matters
that I could not become aware of them.

"And living thus, I considered myself a perfectly honest man. I did not
understand that debauchery does not consist simply in physical
acts, that no matter what physical ignominy does not yet constitute
debauchery, and that real debauchery consists in freedom from the moral
bonds toward a woman with whom one enters into carnal relations, and I
regarded THIS FREEDOM as a merit. I remember that I once tortured myself
exceedingly for having forgotten to pay a woman who probably had given
herself to me through love. I only became tranquil again when, having
sent her the money, I had thus shown her that I did not consider myself
as in any way bound to her. Oh, do not shake your head as if you were
in agreement with me (he cried suddenly with vehemence). I know these
tricks. All of you, and you especially, if you are not a rare exception,
have the same ideas that I had then. If you are in agreement with me, it
is now only. Formerly you did not think so. No more did I; and, if I had
been told what I have just told you, that which has happened would not
have happened. However, it is all the same. Excuse me (he continued):
the truth is that it is frightful, frightful, frightful, this abyss
of errors and debaucheries in which we live face to face with the real
question of the rights of woman." . . .

"What do you mean by the 'real' question of the rights of woman?"

"The question of the nature of this special being, organized otherwise
than man, and how this being and man ought to view the wife. . . ."



CHAPTER V.

"Yes: for ten years I lived the most revolting existence, while dreaming
of the noblest love, and even in the name of that love. Yes, I want
to tell you how I killed my wife, and for that I must tell you how I
debauched myself. I killed her before I knew her.

"I killed THE wife when I first tasted sensual joys without love, and
then it was that I killed MY wife. Yes, sir: it is only after having
suffered, after having tortured myself, that I have come to understand
the root of things, that I have come to understand my crimes. Thus you
will see where and how began the drama that has led me to misfortune.

"It is necessary to go back to my sixteenth year, when I was still at
school, and my elder brother a first-year student. I had not yet known
women but, like all the unfortunate children of our society, I was
already no longer innocent. I was tortured, as you were, I am sure, and
as are tortured ninety-nine one-hundredths of our boys. I lived in a
frightful dread, I prayed to God, and I prostrated myself.

"I was already perverted in imagination, but the last steps remained to
be taken. I could still escape, when a friend of my brother, a very
gay student, one of those who are called good fellows,--that is, the
greatest of scamps,--and who had taught us to drink and play cards, took
advantage of a night of intoxication to drag us THERE. We started.
My brother, as innocent as I, fell that night, and I, a mere lad of
sixteen, polluted myself and helped to pollute a sister-woman, without
understanding what I did. Never had I heard from my elders that what I
thus did was bad. It is true that there are the ten commandments of
the Bible; but the commandments are made only to be recited before
the priests at examinations, and even then are not as exacting as the
commandments in regard to the use of ut in conditional propositions.

"Thus, from my elders, whose opinion I esteemed, I had never heard
that this was reprehensible. On the contrary, I had heard people whom
I respected say that it was good. I had heard that my struggles and my
sufferings would be appeased after this act. I had heard it and read it.
I had heard from my elders that it was excellent for the health, and my
friends have always seemed to believe that it contained I know not what
merit and valor. So nothing is seen in it but what is praiseworthy.
As for the danger of disease, it is a foreseen danger. Does not the
government guard against it? And even science corrupts us."

"How so, science?" I asked.

"Why, the doctors, the pontiffs of science. Who pervert young people
by laying down such rules of hygiene? Who pervert women by devising and
teaching them ways by which not to have children?

"Yes: if only a hundredth of the efforts spent in curing diseases were
spent in curing debauchery, disease would long ago have ceased to exist,
whereas now all efforts are employed, not in extirpating debauchery,
but in favoring it, by assuring the harmlessness of the consequences.
Besides, it is not a question of that. It is a question of this
frightful thing that has happened to me, as it happens to nine-tenths,
if not more, not only of the men of our society, but of all societies,
even peasants,--this frightful thing that I had fallen, and not because
I was subjected to the natural seduction of a certain woman. No, no
woman seduced me. I fell because the surroundings in which I found
myself saw in this degrading thing only a legitimate function, useful
to the health; because others saw in it simply a natural amusement, not
only excusable, but even innocent in a young man. I did not understand
that it was a fall, and I began to give myself to those pleasures
(partly from desire and partly from necessity) which I was led to
believe were characteristic of my age, just as I had begun to drink and
smoke.

"And yet there was in this first fall something peculiar and touching. I
remember that straightway I was filled with such a profound sadness that
I had a desire to weep, to weep over the loss forever of my relations
with woman. Yes, my relations with woman were lost forever. Pure
relations with women, from that time forward, I could no longer have.
I had become what is called a voluptuary; and to be a voluptuary is a
physical condition like the condition of a victim of the morphine habit,
of a drunkard, and of a smoker.

"Just as the victim of the morphine habit, the drunkard, the smoker, is
no longer a normal man, so the man who has known several women for
his pleasure is no longer normal? He is abnormal forever. He is a
voluptuary. Just as the drunkard and the victim of the morphine habit
may be recognized by their face and manner, so we may recognize a
voluptuary. He may repress himself and struggle, but nevermore will he
enjoy simple, pure, and fraternal relations toward woman. By his way of
glancing at a young woman one may at once recognize a voluptuary; and I
became a voluptuary, and I have remained one."



CHAPTER VI.

"Yes, so it is; and that went farther and farther with all sorts of
variations. My God! when I remember all my cowardly acts and bad deeds,
I am frightened. And I remember that 'me' who, during that period, was
still the butt of his comrades' ridicule on account of his innocence.

"And when I hear people talk of the gilded youth, of the officers, of
the Parisians, and all these gentlemen, and myself, living wild lives
at the age of thirty, and who have on our consciences hundreds of
crimes toward women, terrible and varied, when we enter a parlor or a
ball-room, washed, shaven, and perfumed, with very white linen, in dress
coats or in uniform, as emblems of purity, oh, the disgust! There
will surely come a time, an epoch, when all these lives and all this
cowardice will be unveiled!

"So, nevertheless, I lived, until the age of thirty, without abandoning
for a minute my intention of marrying, and building an elevated conjugal
life; and with this in view I watched all young girls who might suit me.
I was buried in rottenness, and at the same time I looked for virgins,
whose purity was worthy of me! Many of them were rejected: they did not
seem to me pure enough!

"Finally I found one that I considered on a level with myself. She was
one of two daughters of a landed proprietor of Penza, formerly very rich
and since ruined. To tell the truth, without false modesty, they pursued
me and finally captured me. The mother (the father was away) laid all
sorts of traps, and one of these, a trip in a boat, decided my future.

"I made up my mind at the end of the aforesaid trip one night, by
moonlight, on our way home, while I was sitting beside her. I admired
her slender body, whose charming shape was moulded by a jersey, and her
curling hair, and I suddenly concluded that THIS WAS SHE. It seemed to
me on that beautiful evening that she understood all that I thought and
felt, and I thought and felt the most elevating things.

"Really, it was only the jersey that was so becoming to her, and her
curly hair, and also the fact that I had spent the day beside her, and
that I desired a more intimate relation.

"I returned home enthusiastic, and I persuaded myself that she realized
the highest perfection, and that for that reason she was worthy to be my
wife, and the next day I made to her a proposal of marriage.

"No, say what you will, we live in such an abyss of falsehood, that,
unless some event strikes us a blow on the head, as in my case, we
cannot awaken. What confusion! Out of the thousands of men who marry,
not only among us, but also among the people, scarcely will you find
a single one who has not previously married at least ten times. (It is
true that there now exist, at least so I have heard, pure young people
who feel and know that this is not a joke, but a serious matter. May God
come to their aid! But in my time there was not to be found one such in
a thousand.)

"And all know it, and pretend not to know it. In all the novels are
described down to the smallest details the feelings of the characters,
the lakes and brambles around which they walk; but, when it comes to
describing their GREAT love, not a word is breathed of what HE, the
interesting character, has previously done, not a word about
his frequenting of disreputable houses, or his association with
nursery-maids, cooks, and the wives of others.

"And if anything is said of these things, such IMPROPER novels are not
allowed in the hands of young girls. All men have the air of believing,
in presence of maidens, that these corrupt pleasures, in which EVERYBODY
takes part, do not exist, or exist only to a very small extent. They
pretend it so carefully that they succeed in convincing themselves of
it. As for the poor young girls, they believe it quite seriously, just
as my poor wife believed it.

"I remember that, being already engaged, I showed her my 'memoirs,' from
which she could learn more or less of my past, and especially my last
liaison which she might perhaps have discovered through the gossip of
some third party. It was for this last reason, for that matter, that I
felt the necessity of communicating these memoirs to her. I can still
see her fright, her despair, her bewilderment, when she had learned and
understood it. She was on the point of breaking the engagement. What a
lucky thing it would have been for both of us!"

Posdnicheff was silent for a moment, and then resumed:--

"After all, no! It is better that things happened as they did, better!"
he cried. "It was a good thing for me. Besides, it makes no difference.
I was saying that in these cases it is the poor young girls who are
deceived. As for the mothers, the mothers especially, informed by their
husbands, they know all, and, while pretending to believe in the purity
of the young man, they act as if they did not believe in it.

"They know what bait must be held out to people for themselves and their
daughters. We men sin through ignorance, and a determination not to
learn. As for the women, they know very well that the noblest and most
poetic love, as we call it, depends, not on moral qualities, but on the
physical intimacy, and also on the manner of doing the hair, and the
color and shape.

"Ask an experienced coquette, who has undertaken to seduce a man, which
she would prefer,--to be convicted, in presence of the man whom she is
engaged in conquering, of falsehood, perversity, cruelty, or to appear
before him in an ill-fitting dress, or a dress of an unbecoming color.
She will prefer the first alternative. She knows very well that we
simply lie when we talk of our elevated sentiments, that we seek only
the possession of her body, and that because of that we will forgive her
every sort of baseness, but will not forgive her a costume of an ugly
shade, without taste or fit.

"And these things she knows by reason, where as the maiden knows them
only by instinct, like the animal. Hence these abominable jerseys, these
artificial humps on the back, these bare shoulders, arms, and throats.

"Women, especially those who have passed through the school of marriage,
know very well that conversations upon elevated subjects are only
conversations, and that man seeks and desires the body and all that
ornaments the body. Consequently, they act accordingly? If we reject
conventional explanations, and view the life of our upper and lower
classes as it is, with all its shamelessness, it is only a vast
perversity. You do not share this opinion? Permit me, I am going to
prove it to you (said he, interrupting me).

"You say that the women of our society live for a different interest
from that which actuates fallen women. And I say no, and I am going
to prove it to you. If beings differ from one another according to
the purpose of their life, according to their INNER LIFE, this will
necessarily be reflected also in their OUTER LIFE, and their exterior
will be very different. Well, then, compare the wretched, the despised,
with the women of the highest society: the same dresses, the same
fashions, the same perfumeries, the same passion for jewelry, for
brilliant and very expensive articles, the same amusements, dances,
music, and songs. The former attract by all possible means; so do the
latter. No difference, none whatever!

"Yes, and I, too, was captivated by jerseys, bustles, and curly hair."



CHAPTER VII.

"And it was very easy to capture me, since I was brought up under
artificial conditions, like cucumbers in a hothouse. Our too abundant
nourishment, together with complete physical idleness, is nothing but
systematic excitement of the imagination. The men of our society are
fed and kept like reproductive stallions. It is sufficient to close the
valve,--that is, for a young man to live a quiet life for some
time,--to produce as an immediate result a restlessness, which, becoming
exaggerated by reflection through the prism of our unnatural life,
provokes the illusion of love.

"All our idyls and marriage, all, are the result for the most part of
our eating. Does that astonish you? For my part, I am astonished that
we do not see it. Not far from my estate this spring some moujiks
were working on a railway embankment. You know what a peasant's food
is,--bread, kvass,* onions. With this frugal nourishment he lives, he is
alert, he makes light work in the fields. But on the railway this bill
of fare becomes cacha and a pound of meat. Only he restores this meat by
sixteen hours of labor pushing loads weighing twelve hundred pounds.

     *Kvass, a sort of cider.

"And we, who eat two pounds of meat and game, we who absorb all sorts
of heating drinks and food, how do we expend it? In sensual excesses.
If the valve is open, all goes well; but close it, as I had closed it
temporarily before my marriage, and immediately there will result an
excitement which, deformed by novels, verses, music, by our idle and
luxurious life, will give a love of the finest water. I, too, fell in
love, as everybody does, and there were transports, emotions, poesy; but
really all this passion was prepared by mamma and the dressmakers. If
there had been no trips in boats, no well-fitted garments, etc., if
my wife had worn some shapeless blouse, and I had seen her thus at her
home, I should not have been seduced."



CHAPTER VIII.

"And note, also, this falsehood, of which all are guilty; the way in
which marriages are made. What could there be more natural? The young
girl is marriageable, she should marry. What simpler, provided the young
person is not a monster, and men can be found with a desire to marry?
Well, no, here begins a new hypocrisy.

"Formerly, when the maiden arrived at a favorable age, her marriage was
arranged by her parents. That was done, that is done still, throughout
humanity, among the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Mussulmans, and among our
common people also. Things are so managed in at least ninety-nine per
cent. of the families of the entire human race.

"Only we riotous livers have imagined that this way was bad, and have
invented another. And this other,--what is it? It is this. The young
girls are seated, and the gentlemen walk up and down before them, as in
a bazaar, and make their choice. The maidens wait and think, but do
not dare to say: 'Take me, young man, me and not her. Look at these
shoulders and the rest.' We males walk up and down, and estimate the
merchandise, and then we discourse upon the rights of woman, upon the
liberty that she acquires, I know not how, in the theatrical halls."

"But what is to be done?" said I to him. "Shall the woman make the
advances?"

"I do not know. But, if it is a question of equality, let the equality
be complete. Though it has been found that to contract marriages through
the agency of match-makers is humiliating, it is nevertheless a thousand
times preferable to our system. There the rights and the chances are
equal; here the woman is a slave, exhibited in the market. But as she
cannot bend to her condition, or make advances herself, there begins
that other and more abominable lie which is sometimes called GOING INTO
SOCIETY, sometimes AMUSING ONE'S SELF, and which is really nothing but
the hunt for a husband.

"But say to a mother or to her daughter that they are engaged only in a
hunt for a husband. God! What an offence! Yet they can do nothing else,
and have nothing else to do; and the terrible feature of it all is to
see sometimes very young, poor, and innocent maidens haunted solely by
such ideas. If only, I repeat, it were done frankly; but it is always
accompanied with lies and babble of this sort:--

"'Ah, the descent of species! How interesting it is!'

"'Oh, Lily is much interested in painting.'

"'Shall you go to the Exposition? How charming it is!'

"'And the troika, and the plays, and the symphony. Ah, how adorable!'

"'My Lise is passionately fond of music.'

"'And you, why do you not share these convictions?'

"And through all this verbiage, all have but one single idea: 'Take me,
take my Lise. No, me! Only try!"'


CHAPTER IX.

"Do you know," suddenly continued Posdnicheff, "that this power of women
from which the world suffers arises solely from what I have just spoken
of?"

"What do you mean by the power of women?" I said. "Everybody, on the
contrary, complains that women have not sufficient rights, that they are
in subjection."

"That's it; that's it exactly," said he, vivaciously. "That is just what
I mean, and that is the explanation of this extraordinary phenomenon,
that on the one hand woman is reduced to the lowest degree of
humiliation and on the other hand she reigns over everything. See the
Jews: with their power of money, they avenge their subjection, just
as the women do. 'Ah! you wish us to be only merchants? All right;
remaining merchants, we will get possession of you,' say the Jews. 'Ah!
you wish us to be only objects of sensuality? All right; by the aid of
sensuality we will bend you beneath our yoke,' say the women.

"The absence of the rights of woman does not consist in the fact that
she has not the right to vote, or the right to sit on the bench, but in
the fact that in her affectional relations she is not the equal of man,
she has not the right to abstain, to choose instead of being chosen.
You say that that would be abnormal. Very well! But then do not let man
enjoy these rights, while his companion is deprived of them, and finds
herself obliged to make use of the coquetry by which she governs, so
that the result is that man chooses 'formally,' whereas really it is
woman who chooses. As soon as she is in possession of her means, she
abuses them, and acquires a terrible supremacy."

"But where do you see this exceptional power?"

"Where? Why, everywhere, in everything. Go see the stores in the large
cities. There are millions there, millions. It is impossible to estimate
the enormous quantity of labor that is expended there. In nine-tenths
of these stores is there anything whatever for the use of men? All the
luxury of life is demanded and sustained by woman. Count the factories;
the greater part of them are engaged in making feminine ornaments.
Millions of men, generations of slaves, die toiling like convicts simply
to satisfy the whims of our companions.

"Women, like queens, keep nine-tenths of the human race as prisoners of
war, or as prisoners at hard labor. And all this because they have been
humiliated, because they have been deprived of rights equal to those
which men enjoy. They take revenge for our sensuality; they catch us in
their nets.

"Yes, the whole thing is there. Women have made of themselves such a
weapon to act upon the senses that a young man, and even an old man,
cannot remain tranquil in their presence. Watch a popular festival, or
our receptions or ball-rooms. Woman well knows her influence there. You
will see it in her triumphant smiles.

"As soon as a young man advances toward a woman, directly he falls under
the influence of this opium, and loses his head. Long ago I felt ill at
ease when I saw a woman too well adorned,--whether a woman of the people
with her red neckerchief and her looped skirt, or a woman of our own
society in her ball-room dress. But now it simply terrifies me. I see in
it a danger to men, something contrary to the laws; and I feel a desire
to call a policeman, to appeal for defence from some quarter, to demand
that this dangerous object be removed.

"And this is not a joke, by any means. I am convinced, I am sure, that
the time will come--and perhaps it is not far distant--when the world
will understand this, and will be astonished that a society could exist
in which actions as harmful as those which appeal to sensuality by
adorning the body as our companions do were allowed. As well set traps
along our public streets, or worse than that."


CHAPTER X.

"That, then, was the way in which I was captured. I was in love, as
it is called; not only did she appear to me a perfect being, but I
considered myself a white blackbird. It is a commonplace fact that there
is no one so low in the world that he cannot find some one viler than
himself, and consequently puff with pride and self-contentment. I was in
that situation. I did not marry for money. Interest was foreign to the
affair, unlike the marriages of most of my acquaintances, who married
either for money or for relations. First, I was rich, she was poor.
Second, I was especially proud of the fact that, while others married
with an intention of continuing their polygamic life as bachelors, it
was my firm intention to live monogamically after my engagement and the
wedding, and my pride swelled immeasurably.

"Yes, I was a wretch, convinced that I was an angel. The period of
my engagement did not last long. I cannot remember those days without
shame. What an abomination!

"It is generally agreed that love is a moral sentiment, a community of
thought rather than of sense. If that is the case, this community of
thought ought to find expression in words and conversation. Nothing of
the sort. It was extremely difficult for us to talk with each other.
What a toil of Sisyphus was our conversation! Scarcely had we thought of
something to say, and said it, when we had to resume our silence and try
to discover new subjects. Literally, we did not know what to say to each
other. All that we could think of concerning the life that was before us
and our home was said.

"And then what? If we had been animals, we should have known that we had
not to talk. But here, on the contrary, it was necessary to talk, and
there were no resources! For that which occupied our minds was not a
thing to be expressed in words.

"And then that silly custom of eating bon-bons, that brutal gluttony
for sweetmeats, those abominable preparations for the wedding, those
discussions with mamma upon the apartments, upon the sleeping-rooms,
upon the bedding, upon the morning-gowns, upon the wrappers, the linen,
the costumes! Understand that if people married according to the old
fashion, as this old man said just now, then these eiderdown coverlets
and this bedding would all be sacred details; but with us, out of ten
married people there is scarcely to be found one who, I do not say
believes in sacraments (whether he believes or not is a matter of
indifference to us), but believes in what he promises. Out of a hundred
men, there is scarcely one who has not married before, and out of fifty
scarcely one who has not made up his mind to deceive his wife.

"The great majority look upon this journey to the church as a condition
necessary to the possession of a certain woman. Think then of the
supreme significance which material details must take on. Is it not a
sort of sale, in which a maiden is given over to a debauche, the sale
being surrounded with the most agreeable details?"


CHAPTER XI.

"All marry in this way. And I did like the rest. If the young people who
dream of the honeymoon only knew what a disillusion it is, and always a
disillusion! I really do not know why all think it necessary to conceal
it.

"One day I was walking among the shows in Paris, when, attracted by a
sign, I entered an establishment to see a bearded woman and a water-dog.
The woman was a man in disguise, and the dog was an ordinary dog,
covered with a sealskin, and swimming in a bath. It was not in the least
interesting, but the Barnum accompanied me to the exit very courteously,
and, in addressing the people who were coming in, made an appeal to my
testimony. 'Ask the gentleman if it is not worth seeing! Come in, come
in! It only costs a franc!' And in my confusion I did not dare to answer
that there was nothing curious to be seen, and it was upon my false
shame that the Barnum must have counted.

"It must be the same with the persons who have passed through the
abominations of the honeymoon. They do not dare to undeceive their
neighbor. And I did the same.

"The felicities of the honeymoon do not exist. On the contrary, it is a
period of uneasiness, of shame, of pity, and, above all, of ennui,--of
ferocious ennui. It is something like the feeling of a youth when he is
beginning to smoke. He desires to vomit; he drivels, and swallows his
drivel, pretending to enjoy this little amusement. The vice of marriage
. . ."

"What! Vice?" I said. "But you are talking of one of the most natural
things."

"Natural!" said he. "Natural! No, I consider on the contrary that it
is against nature, and it is I, a perverted man, who have reached this
conviction. What would it be, then, if I had not known corruption? To
a young girl, to every unperverted young girl, it is an act extremely
unnatural, just as it is to children. My sister married, when very
young, a man twice her own age, and who was utterly corrupt. I remember
how astonished we were the night of her wedding, when, pale and covered
with tears, she fled from her husband, her whole body trembling, saying
that for nothing in the world would she tell what he wanted of her.

"You say natural? It is natural to eat; that is a pleasant, agreeable
function, which no one is ashamed to perform from the time of his birth.
No, it is not natural. A pure young girl wants one thing,--children.
Children, yes, not a lover." . . .

"But," said I, with astonishment, "how would the human race continue?"

"But what is the use of its continuing?" he rejoined, vehemently.

"What! What is the use? But then we should not exist."

"And why is it necessary that we should exist?"

"Why, to live, to be sure."

"And why live? The Schopenhauers, the Hartmanns, and all the Buddhists,
say that the greatest happiness is Nirvana, Non-Life; and they are right
in this sense,--that human happiness is coincident with the annihilation
of 'Self.' Only they do not express themselves well. They say that
Humanity should annihilate itself to avoid its sufferings, that its
object should be to destroy itself. Now the object of Humanity cannot
be to avoid sufferings by annihilation, since suffering is the result
of activity. The object of activity cannot consist in suppressing its
consequences. The object of Man, as of Humanity, is happiness, and, to
attain it, Humanity has a law which it must carry out. This law consists
in the union of beings. This union is thwarted by the passions. And
that is why, if the passions disappear, the union will be accomplished.
Humanity then will have carried out the law, and will have no further
reason to exist."

"And before Humanity carries out the law?"

"In the meantime it will have the sign of the unfulfilled law, and
the existence of physical love. As long as this love shall exist, and
because of it, generations will be born, one of which will finally
fulfil the law. When at last the law shall be fulfilled, the Human Race
will be annihilated. At least it is impossible for us to conceive of
Life in the perfect union of people."


CHAPTER XII.

"Strange theory!" cried I.

"Strange in what? According to all the doctrines of the Church, the
world will have an end. Science teaches the same fatal conclusions.
Why, then, is it strange that the same thing should result from moral
Doctrine? 'Let those who can, contain,' said Christ. And I take this
passage literally, as it is written. That morality may exist between
people in their worldly relations, they must make complete chastity
their object. In tending toward this end, man humiliates himself. When
he shall reach the last degree of humiliation, we shall have moral
marriage.

"But if man, as in our society, tends only toward physical love, though
he may clothe it with pretexts and the false forms of marriage, he will
have only permissible debauchery, he will know only the same immoral
life in which I fell and caused my wife to fall, a life which we call
the honest life of the family. Think what a perversion of ideas must
arise when the happiest situation of man, liberty, chastity, is looked
upon as something wretched and ridiculous. The highest ideal, the best
situation of woman, to be pure, to be a vestal, a virgin, excites fear
and laughter in our society. How many, how many young girls sacrifice
their purity to this Moloch of opinion by marrying rascals that they
may not remain virgins,--that is, superiors! Through fear of finding
themselves in that ideal state, they ruin themselves.

"But I did not understand formerly, I did not understand that the words
of the Gospel, that 'he who looks upon a woman to lust after her has
already committed adultery,' do not apply to the wives of others, but
notably and especially to our own wives. I did not understand this, and
I thought that the honeymoon and all of my acts during that period
were virtuous, and that to satisfy one's desires with his wife is an
eminently chaste thing. Know, then, that I consider these departures,
these isolations, which young married couples arrange with the
permission of their parents, as nothing else than a license to engage in
debauchery.

"I saw, then, in this nothing bad or shameful, and, hoping for great
joys, I began to live the honeymoon. And very certainly none of these
joys followed. But I had faith, and was determined to have them,
cost what they might. But the more I tried to secure them, the less
I succeeded. All this time I felt anxious, ashamed, and weary. Soon I
began to suffer. I believe that on the third or fourth day I found my
wife sad and asked her the reason. I began to embrace her, which in my
opinion was all that she could desire. She put me away with her hand,
and began to weep.

"At what? She could not tell me. She was filled with sorrow, with
anguish. Probably her tortured nerves had suggested to her the truth
about the baseness of our relations, but she found no words in which to
say it. I began to question her; she answered that she missed her absent
mother. It seemed to me that she was not telling the truth. I sought to
console her by maintaining silence in regard to her parents. I did not
imagine that she felt herself simply overwhelmed, and that her parents
had nothing to do with her sorrow. She did not listen to me, and I
accused her of caprice. I began to laugh at her gently. She dried her
tears, and began to reproach me, in hard and wounding terms, for my
selfishness and cruelty.

"I looked at her. Her whole face expressed hatred, and hatred of me. I
cannot describe to you the fright which this sight gave me. 'How? What?'
thought I, 'love is the unity of souls, and here she hates me? Me? Why?
But it is impossible! It is no longer she!'

"I tried to calm her. I came in conflict with an immovable and cold
hostility, so that, having no time to reflect, I was seized with keen
irritation. We exchanged disagreeable remarks. The impression of this
first quarrel was terrible. I say quarrel, but the term is inexact. It
was the sudden discovery of the abyss that had been dug between us. Love
was exhausted with the satisfaction of sensuality. We stood face to
face in our true light, like two egoists trying to procure the greatest
possible enjoyment, like two individuals trying to mutually exploit each
other.

"So what I called our quarrel was our actual situation as it appeared
after the satisfaction of sensual desire. I did not realize that this
cold hostility was our normal state, and that this first quarrel would
soon be drowned under a new flood of the intensest sensuality. I thought
that we had disputed with each other, and had become reconciled, and
that it would not happen again. But in this same honeymoon there came a
period of satiety, in which we ceased to be necessary to each other, and
a new quarrel broke out.

"It became evident that the first was not a matter of chance. 'It was
inevitable,' I thought. This second quarrel stupefied me the more,
because it was based on an extremely unjust cause. It was something like
a question of money,--and never had I haggled on that score; it was even
impossible that I should do so in relation to her. I only remember that,
in answer to some remark that I made, she insinuated that it was my
intention to rule her by means of money, and that it was upon money
that I based my sole right over her. In short, something extraordinarily
stupid and base, which was neither in my character nor in hers.

"I was beside myself. I accused her of indelicacy. She made the same
accusation against me, and the dispute broke out. In her words, in the
expression of her face, of her eyes, I noticed again the hatred that
had so astonished me before. With a brother, friends, my father, I had
occasionally quarrelled, but never had there been between us this fierce
spite. Some time passed. Our mutual hatred was again concealed beneath
an access of sensual desire, and I again consoled myself with the
reflection that these scenes were reparable faults.

"But when they were repeated a third and a fourth time, I understood
that they were not simply faults, but a fatality that must happen again.
I was no longer frightened, I was simply astonished that I should be
precisely the one to live so uncomfortably with my wife, and that the
same thing did not happen in other households. I did not know that in
all households the same sudden changes take place, but that all,
like myself, imagine that it is a misfortune exclusively reserved for
themselves alone, which they carefully conceal as shameful, not only to
others, but to themselves, like a bad disease.

"That was what happened to me. Begun in the early days, it continued and
increased with characteristics of fury that were ever more pronounced.
At the bottom of my soul, from the first weeks, I felt that I was in a
trap, that I had what I did not expect, and that marriage is not a joy,
but a painful trial. Like everybody else, I refused to confess it (I
should not have confessed it even now but for the outcome). Now I am
astonished to think that I did not see my real situation. It was so easy
to perceive it, in view of those quarrels, begun for reasons so trivial
that afterwards one could not recall them.

"Just as it often happens among gay young people that, in the absence of
jokes, they laugh at their own laughter, so we found no reasons for our
hatred, and we hated each other because hatred was naturally boiling
up in us. More extraordinary still was the absence of causes for
reconciliation.

"Sometimes words, explanations, or even tears, but sometimes, I
remember, after insulting words, there tacitly followed embraces and
declarations. Abomination! Why is it that I did not then perceive this
baseness?"



CHAPTER XIII.

"All of us, men and women, are brought up in these aberrations of
feeling that we call love. I from childhood had prepared myself for this
thing, and I loved, and I loved during all my youth, and I was joyous in
loving. It had been put into my head that it was the noblest and highest
occupation in the world. But when this expected feeling came at last,
and I, a man, abandoned myself to it, the lie was pierced through and
through. Theoretically a lofty love is conceivable; practically it is
an ignoble and degrading thing, which it is equally disgusting to
talk about and to remember. It is not in vain that nature has made
ceremonies, but people pretend that the ignoble and the shameful is
beautiful and lofty.

"I will tell you brutally and briefly what were the first signs of my
love. I abandoned myself to beastly excesses, not only not ashamed of
them, but proud of them, giving no thought to the intellectual life of
my wife. And not only did I not think of her intellectual life, I did
not even consider her physical life.

"I was astonished at the origin of our hostility, and yet how clear it
was! This hostility is nothing but a protest of human nature against the
beast that enslaves it. It could not be otherwise. This hatred was the
hatred of accomplices in a crime. Was it not a crime that, this poor
woman having become pregnant in the first month, our liaison should have
continued just the same?

"You imagine that I am wandering from my story. Not at all. I am always
giving you an account of the events that led to the murder of my wife.
The imbeciles! They think that I killed my wife on the 5th of October.
It was long before that that I immolated her, just as they all kill now.
Understand well that in our society there is an idea shared by all
that woman procures man pleasure (and vice versa, probably, but I know
nothing of that, I only know my own case). Wein, Weiber und Gesang. So
say the poets in their verses: Wine, women, and song!

"If it were only that! Take all the poetry, the painting, the sculpture,
beginning with Pouschkine's 'Little Feet,' with 'Venus and Phryne,' and
you will see that woman is only a means of enjoyment. That is what she
is at Trouba,* at Gratchevka, and in a court ball-room. And think of
this diabolical trick: if she were a thing without moral value, it might
be said that woman is a fine morsel; but, in the first place, these
knights assure us that they adore woman (they adore her and look upon
her, however, as a means of enjoyment), then all assure us that they
esteem woman. Some give up their seats to her, pick up her handkerchief;
others recognize in her a right to fill all offices, participate in
government, etc., but, in spite of all that, the essential point remains
the same. She is, she remains, an object of sensual desire, and
she knows it. It is slavery, for slavery is nothing else than the
utilization of the labor of some for the enjoyment of others. That
slavery may not exist people must refuse to enjoy the labor of others,
and look upon it as a shameful act and as a sin.

     *A suburb of Moscow.

"Actually, this is what happens. They abolish the external form, they
suppress the formal sales of slaves, and then they imagine and assure
others that slavery is abolished. They are unwilling to see that it
still exists, since people, as before, like to profit by the labor of
others, and think it good and just. This being given, there will always
be found beings stronger or more cunning than others to profit thereby.
The same thing happens in the emancipation of woman. At bottom feminine
servitude consists entirely in her assimilation with a means of
pleasure. They excite woman, they give her all sorts of rights equal to
those of men, but they continue to look upon her as an object of sensual
desire, and thus they bring her up from infancy and in public opinion.

"She is always the humiliated and corrupt serf, and man remains always
the debauched Master. Yes, to abolish slavery, public opinion must admit
that it is shameful to exploit one's neighbor, and, to make woman free,
public opinion must admit that it is shameful to consider woman as an
instrument of pleasure.

"The emancipation of woman is not to be effected in the public courts or
in the chamber of deputies, but in the sleeping chamber. Prostitution is
to be combated, not in the houses of ill-fame, but in the family. They
free woman in the public courts and in the chamber of deputies, but she
remains an instrument. Teach her, as she is taught among us, to look
upon herself as such, and she will always remain an inferior being.
Either, with the aid of the rascally doctors, she will try to prevent
conception, and descend, not to the level of an animal, but to the
level of a thing; or she will be what she is in the great majority of
cases,--sick, hysterical, wretched, without hope of spiritual progress."
. . .

"But why that?" I asked.

"Oh! the most astonishing thing is that no one is willing to see this
thing, evident as it is, which the doctors must understand, but which
they take good care not to do. Man does not wish to know the law of
nature,--children. But children are born and become an embarrassment.
Then man devises means of avoiding this embarrassment. We have not
yet reached the low level of Europe, nor Paris, nor the 'system of two
children,' nor Mahomet. We have discovered nothing, because we have
given it no thought. We feel that there is something bad in the two
first means; but we wish to preserve the family, and our view of woman
is still worse.

"With us woman must be at the same time mistress and nurse, and her
strength is not sufficient. That is why we have hysteria, nervous
attacks, and, among the peasants, witchcraft. Note that among the young
girls of the peasantry this state of things does not exist, but only
among the wives, and the wives who live with their husbands. The reason
is clear, and this is the cause of the intellectual and moral decline of
woman, and of her abasement.

"If they would only reflect what a grand work for the wife is the period
of gestation! In her is forming the being who continues us, and
this holy work is thwarted and rendered painful . . . by what? It is
frightful to think of it! And after that they talk of the liberties and
the rights of woman! It is like the cannibals fattening their prisoners
in order to devour them, and assuring these unfortunates at the same
time that their rights and their liberties are guarded!"

All this was new to me, and astonished me very much.

"But if this is so," said I, "it follows that one may love his wife only
once every two years; and as man" . . .

"And as man has need of her, you are going to say. At least, so the
priests of science assure us. I would force these priests to fulfil the
function of these women, who, in their opinion, are necessary to man. I
wonder what song they would sing then. Assure man that he needs brandy,
tobacco, opium, and he will believe those poisons necessary. It follows
that God did not know how to arrange matters properly, since, without
asking the opinions of the priests, he has combined things as they are.
Man needs, so they have decided, to satisfy his sensual desire, and here
this function is disturbed by the birth and the nursing of children.

"What, then, is to be done? Why, apply to the priests; they will arrange
everything, and they have really discovered a way. When, then, will
these rascals with their lies be uncrowned! It is high time. We have had
enough of them. People go mad, and shoot each other with revolvers, and
always because of that! And how could it be otherwise?

"One would say that the animals know that descent continues their race,
and that they follow a certain law in regard thereto. Only man does not
know this, and is unwilling to know it. He cares only to have as much
sensual enjoyment as possible. The king of nature,--man! In the name of
his love he kills half the human race. Of woman, who ought to be his aid
in the movement of humanity toward liberty, he makes, in the name of his
pleasures, not an aid, but an enemy. Who is it that everywhere puts a
check upon the progressive movement of humanity? Woman. Why is it so?

"For the reason that I have given, and for that reason only."



CHAPTER XIV.

"Yes, much worse than the animal is man when he does not live as a man.
Thus was I. The horrible part is that I believed, inasmuch as I did not
allow myself to be seduced by other women that I was leading an
honest family life, that I was a very mortal being, and that if we had
quarrels, the fault was in my wife, and in her character.

"But it is evident that the fault was not in her. She was like everybody
else, like the majority. She was brought up according to the principles
exacted by the situation of our society,--that is, as all the young
girls of our wealthy classes, without exception, are brought up, and
as they cannot fail to be brought up. How many times we hear or read
of reflections upon the abnormal condition of women, and upon what
they ought to be. But these are only vain words. The education of women
results from the real and not imaginary view which the world entertains
of women's vocation. According to this view, the condition of women
consists in procuring pleasure and it is to that end that her education
is directed. From her infancy she is taught only those things that are
calculated to increase her charm. Every young girl is accustomed to
think only of that.

"As the serfs were brought up solely to please their masters, so woman
is brought up to attract men. It cannot be otherwise. But you will say,
perhaps, that that applies only to young girls who are badly brought up,
but that there is another education, an education that is serious, in
the schools, an education in the dead languages, an education in the
institutions of midwifery, an education in medical courses, and in other
courses. It is false.

"Every sort of feminine education has for its sole object the attraction
of men.

"Some attract by music or curly hair, others by science or by civic
virtue. The object is the same, and cannot be otherwise (since no other
object exists),--to seduce man in order to possess him. Imagine courses
of instruction for women and feminine science without men,--that
is, learned women, and men not KNOWING them as learned. Oh, no! No
education, no instruction can change woman as long as her highest ideal
shall be marriage and not virginity, freedom from sensuality. Until
that time she will remain a serf. One need only imagine, forgetting the
universality of the case, the conditions in which our young girls are
brought up, to avoid astonishment at the debauchery of the women of our
upper classes. It is the opposite that would cause astonishment.

"Follow my reasoning. From infancy garments, ornaments, cleanliness,
grace, dances, music, reading of poetry, novels, singing, the theatre,
the concert, for use within and without, according as women listen, or
practice themselves. With that, complete physical idleness, an excessive
care of the body, a vast consumption of sweetmeats; and God knows how
the poor maidens suffer from their own sensuality, excited by all these
things. Nine out of ten are tortured intolerably during the first period
of maturity, and afterward provided they do not marry at the age of
twenty. That is what we are unwilling to see, but those who have
eyes see it all the same. And even the majority of these unfortunate
creatures are so excited by a hidden sensuality (and it is lucky if it
is hidden) that they are fit for nothing. They become animated only
in the presence of men. Their whole life is spent in preparations for
coquetry, or in coquetry itself. In the presence of men they become too
animated; they begin to live by sensual energy. But the moment the man
goes away, the life stops.

"And that, not in the presence of a certain man, but in the presence of
any man, provided he is not utterly hideous. You will say that this is
an exception. No, it is a rule. Only in some it is made very evident, in
other less so. But no one lives by her own life; they are all dependent
upon man. They cannot be otherwise, since to them the attraction of the
greatest number of men is the ideal of life (young girls and married
women), and it is for this reason that they have no feeling stronger
than that of the animal need of every female who tries to attract the
largest number of males in order to increase the opportunities for
choice. So it is in the life of young girls, and so it continues
during marriage. In the life of young girls it is necessary in order to
selection, and in marriage it is necessary in order to rule the
husband. Only one thing suppresses or interrupts these tendencies for
a time,--namely, children,--and then only when the woman is not a
monster,--that is, when she nurses her own children. Here again the
doctor interferes.

"With my wife, who desired to nurse her own children, and who did nurse
six of them, it happened that the first child was sickly. The doctors,
who cynically undressed her and felt of her everywhere, and whom I had
to thank and pay for these acts,--these dear doctors decided that she
ought not to nurse her child, and she was temporarily deprived of
the only remedy for coquetry. A nurse finished the nursing of this
first-born,--that is to say, we profited by the poverty and ignorance of
a woman to steal her from her own little one in favor of ours, and for
that purpose we dressed her in a kakoschnik trimmed with gold lace.
Nevertheless, that is not the question; but there was again awakened in
my wife that coquetry which had been sleeping during the nursing period.
Thanks to that, she reawakened in me the torments of jealousy which I
had formerly known, though in a much slighter degree."



CHAPTER XV.

"Yes, jealousy, that is another of the secrets of marriage known to all
and concealed by all. Besides the general cause of the mutual hatred of
husbands and wives resulting from complicity in the pollution of a human
being, and also from other causes, the inexhaustible source of marital
wounds is jealousy. But by tacit consent it is determined to conceal
them from all, and we conceal them. Knowing them, each one supposes in
himself that it is an unfortunate peculiarity, and not a common destiny.
So it was with me, and it had to be so. There cannot fail to be jealousy
between husbands and wives who live immorally. If they cannot sacrifice
their pleasures for the welfare of their child, they conclude therefrom,
and truly, that they will not sacrifice their pleasures for, I will not
say happiness and tranquillity (since one may sin in secret), but even
for the sake of conscience. Each one knows very well that neither admits
any high moral reasons for not betraying the other, since in their
mutual relations they fail in the requirements of morality, and from
that time distrust and watch each other.

"Oh, what a frightful feeling of jealousy! I do not speak of that real
jealousy which has foundations (it is tormenting, but it promises an
issue), but of that unconscious jealousy which inevitably accompanies
every immoral marriage, and which, having no cause, has no end. This
jealousy is frightful. Frightful, that is the word.

"And this is it. A young man speaks to my wife. He looks at her with a
smile, and, as it seems to me, he surveys her body. How does he dare to
think of her, to think of the possibility of a romance with her? And how
can she, seeing this, tolerate him? Not only does she tolerate him, but
she seems pleased. I even see that she puts herself to trouble on his
account. And in my soul there rises such a hatred for her that each of
her words, each gesture, disgusts me. She notices it, she knows not what
to do, and how assume an air of indifferent animation? Ah! I suffer!
That makes her gay, she is content. And my hatred increases tenfold, but
I do not dare to give it free force, because at the bottom of my soul
I know that there are no real reasons for it, and I remain in my seat,
feigning indifference, and exaggerating my attention and courtesy to
HIM.

"Then I get angry with myself. I desire to leave the room, to leave them
alone, and I do, in fact, go out; but scarcely am I outside when I am
invaded by a fear of what is taking place within my absence. I go in
again, inventing some pretext. Or sometimes I do not go in; I remain
near the door, and listen. How can she humiliate herself and humiliate
me by placing me in this cowardly situation of suspicion and espionage?
Oh, abomination! Oh, the wicked animal! And he too, what does he think
of you? But he is like all men. He is what I was before my marriage. It
gives him pleasure. He even smiles when he looks at me, as much as to
say: 'What have you to do with this? It is my turn now.'

"This feeling is horrible. Its burn is unendurable. To entertain this
feeling toward any one, to once suspect a man of lusting after my wife,
was enough to spoil this man forever in my eyes, as if he had been
sprinkled with vitriol. Let me once become jealous of a being, and
nevermore could I re-establish with him simple human relations, and my
eyes flashed when I looked at him.

"As for my wife, so many times had I enveloped her with this moral
vitriol, with this jealous hatred, that she was degraded thereby. In the
periods of this causeless hatred I gradually uncrowned her. I covered
her with shame in my imagination.

"I invented impossible knaveries. I suspected, I am ashamed to say, that
she, this queen of 'The Thousand and One Nights,' deceived me with my
serf, under my very eyes, and laughing at me.

"Thus, with each new access of jealousy (I speak always of causeless
jealousy), I entered into the furrow dug formerly by my filthy
suspicions, and I continually deepened it. She did the same thing. If
I have reasons to be jealous, she who knew my past had a thousand times
more. And she was more ill-natured in her jealousy than I. And the
sufferings that I felt from her jealousy were different, and likewise
very painful.

"The situation may be described thus. We are living more or less
tranquilly. I am even gay and contented. Suddenly we start a
conversation on some most commonplace subject, and directly she finds
herself disagreeing with me upon matters concerning which we have been
generally in accord. And furthermore I see that, without any necessity
therefor, she is becoming irritated. I think that she has a nervous
attack, or else that the subject of conversation is really disagreeable
to her. We talk of something else, and that begins again. Again she
torments me, and becomes irritated. I am astonished and look for a
reason. Why? For what? She keeps silence, answers me with monosyllables,
evidently making allusions to something. I begin to divine that the
reason of all this is that I have taken a few walks in the garden with
her cousin, to whom I did not give even a thought. I begin to
divine, but I cannot say so. If I say so, I confirm her suspicions. I
interrogate her, I question her. She does not answer, but she sees that
I understand, and that confirms her suspicions.

"'What is the matter with you?' I ask.

"'Nothing, I am as well as usual,' she answers.

"And at the same time, like a crazy woman, she gives utterance to the
silliest remarks, to the most inexplicable explosions of spite.

"Sometimes I am patient, but at other times I break out with anger. Then
her own irritation is launched forth in a flood of insults, in charges
of imaginary crimes and all carried to the highest degree by sobs,
tears, and retreats through the house to the most improbable spots. I
go to look for her. I am ashamed before people, before the children, but
there is nothing to be done. She is in a condition where I feel that she
is ready for anything. I run, and finally find her. Nights of torture
follow, in which both of us, with exhausted nerves, appease each other,
after the most cruel words and accusations.

"Yes, jealousy, causeless jealousy, is the condition of our debauched
conjugal life. And throughout my marriage never did I cease to feel it
and to suffer from it. There were two periods in which I suffered most
intensely. The first time was after the birth of our first child,
when the doctors had forbidden my wife to nurse it. I was particularly
jealous, in the first place, because my wife felt that restlessness
peculiar to animal matter when the regular course of life is interrupted
without occasion. But especially was I jealous because, having seen
with what facility she had thrown off her moral duties as a mother, I
concluded rightly, though unconsciously, that she would throw off as
easily her conjugal duties, feeling all the surer of this because she
was in perfect health, as was shown by the fact that, in spite of the
prohibition of the dear doctors, she nursed her following children, and
even very well."

"I see that you have no love for the doctors," said I, having noticed
Posdnicheff's extraordinarily spiteful expression of face and tone of
voice whenever he spoke of them.

"It is not a question of loving them or of not loving them. They have
ruined my life, as they have ruined the lives of thousands of beings
before me, and I cannot help connecting the consequence with the cause.
I conceive that they desire, like the lawyers and the rest, to make
money. I would willingly have given them half of my income--and any one
would have done it in my place, understanding what they do--if they had
consented not to meddle in my conjugal life, and to keep themselves at a
distance. I have compiled no statistics, but I know scores of cases--in
reality, they are innumerable--where they have killed, now a child in
its mother's womb, asserting positively that the mother could not give
birth to it (when the mother could give birth to it very well), now
mothers, under the pretext of a so-called operation. No one has counted
these murders, just as no one counted the murders of the Inquisition,
because it was supposed that they were committed for the benefit of
humanity. Innumerable are the crimes of the doctors! But all these
crimes are nothing compared with the materialistic demoralization which
they introduce into the world through women. I say nothing of the fact
that, if it were to follow their advice,--thanks to the microbe which
they see everywhere,--humanity, instead of tending to union, would
proceed straight to complete disunion. Everybody, according to their
doctrine, should isolate himself, and never remove from his mouth a
syringe filled with phenic acid (moreover, they have found out now that
it does no good). But I would pass over all these things. The supreme
poison is the perversion of people, especially of women. One can no
longer say now: 'You live badly, live better.' One can no longer say
it either to himself or to others, for, if you live badly (say the
doctors), the cause is in the nervous system or in something similar,
and it is necessary to go to consult them, and they will prescribe
for you thirty-five copecks' worth of remedies to be bought at the
drug-store, and you must swallow them. Your condition grows worse? Again
to the doctors, and more remedies! An excellent business!

"But to return to our subject. I was saying that my wife nursed her
children well, that the nursing and the gestation of the children, and
the children in general, quieted my tortures of jealousy, but that, on
the other hand, they provoked torments of a different sort."



CHAPTER XVI.

"The children came rapidly, one after another, and there happened
what happens in our society with children and doctors. Yes, children,
maternal love, it is a painful thing. Children, to a woman of our
society, are not a joy, a pride, nor a fulfilment of her vocation, but
a cause of fear, anxiety, and interminable suffering, torture. Women say
it, they think it, and they feel it too. Children to them are really a
torture, not because they do not wish to give birth to them, nurse them,
and care for them (women with a strong maternal instinct--and such was
my wife--are ready to do that), but because the children may fall sick
and die. They do not wish to give birth to them, and then not love them;
and when they love, they do not wish to feel fear for the child's health
and life. That is why they do not wish to nurse them. 'If I nurse it,'
they say, 'I shall become too fond of it.' One would think that they
preferred india-rubber children, which could neither be sick nor die,
and could always be repaired. What an entanglement in the brains of
these poor women! Why such abominations to avoid pregnancy, and to avoid
the love of the little ones?

"Love, the most joyous condition of the soul, is represented as a
danger. And why? Because, when a man does not live as a man, he is
worse than a beast. A woman cannot look upon a child otherwise than as
a pleasure. It is true that it is painful to give birth to it, but what
little hands! . . . Oh, the little hands! Oh, the little feet! Oh, its
smile! Oh, its little body! Oh, its prattle! Oh, its hiccough! In a
word, it is a feeling of animal, sensual maternity. But as for any idea
as to the mysterious significance of the appearance of a new human being
to replace us, there is scarcely a sign of it.

"Nothing of it appears in all that is said and done. No one has any
faith now in a baptism of the child, and yet that was nothing but a
reminder of the human significance of the newborn babe.

"They have rejected all that, but they have not replaced it, and there
remain only the dresses, the laces, the little hands, the little
feet, and whatever exists in the animal. But the animal has neither
imagination, nor foresight, nor reason, nor a doctor.

"No! not even a doctor! The chicken droops its head, overwhelmed, or the
calf dies; the hen clucks and the cow lows for a time, and then these
beasts continue to live, forgetting what has happened.

"With us, if the child falls sick, what is to be done, how to care for
it, what doctor to call, where to go? If it dies, there will be no more
little hands or little feet, and then what is the use of the sufferings
endured? The cow does not ask all that, and this is why children are a
source of misery. The cow has no imagination, and for that reason cannot
think how it might have saved the child if it had done this or that, and
its grief, founded in its physical being, lasts but a very short time.
It is only a condition, and not that sorrow which becomes exaggerated
to the point of despair, thanks to idleness and satiety. The cow has not
that reasoning faculty which would enable it to ask the why. Why endure
all these tortures? What was the use of so much love, if the little
ones were to die? The cow has no logic which tells it to have no more
children, and, if any come accidentally, to neither love nor nurse them,
that it may not suffer. But our wives reason, and reason in this way,
and that is why I said that, when a man does not live as a man, he is
beneath the animal."

"But then, how is it necessary to act, in your opinion, in order to
treat children humanly?" I asked.

"How? Why, love them humanly."

"Well, do not mothers love their children?"

"They do not love them humanly, or very seldom do, and that is why they
do not love them even as dogs. Mark this, a hen, a goose, a wolf, will
always remain to woman inaccessible ideals of animal love. It is a rare
thing for a woman to throw herself, at the peril of her life, upon an
elephant to snatch her child away, whereas a hen or a sparrow will not
fail to fly at a dog and sacrifice itself utterly for its children.
Observe this, also. Woman has the power to limit her physical love for
her children, which an animal cannot do. Does that mean that, because of
this, woman is inferior to the animal? No. She is superior (and even to
say superior is unjust, she is not superior, she is different), but she
has other duties, human duties. She can restrain herself in the matter
of animal love, and transfer her love to the soul of the child. That is
what woman's role should be, and that is precisely what we do not see in
our society. We read of the heroic acts of mothers who sacrifice their
children in the name of a superior idea, and these things seem to us
like tales of the ancient world, which do not concern us. And yet I
believe that, if the mother has not some ideal, in the name of which she
can sacrifice the animal feeling, and if this force finds no employment,
she will transfer it to chimerical attempts to physically preserve her
child, aided in this task by the doctor, and she will suffer as she does
suffer.

"So it was with my wife. Whether there was one child or five, the
feeling remained the same. In fact, it was a little better when there
had been five. Life was always poisoned with fear for the children, not
only from their real or imaginary diseases, but even by their simple
presence. For my part, at least, throughout my conjugal life, all my
interests and all my happiness depended upon the health of my children,
their condition, their studies. Children, it is needless to say, are a
serious consideration; but all ought to live, and in our days parents
can no longer live. Regular life does not exist for them. The whole life
of the family hangs by a hair. What a terrible thing it is to suddenly
receive the news that little Basile is vomiting, or that Lise has a
cramp in the stomach! Immediately you abandon everything, you forget
everything, everything becomes nothing. The essential thing is the
doctor, the enema, the temperature. You cannot begin a conversation but
little Pierre comes running in with an anxious air to ask if he may eat
an apple, or what jacket he shall put on, or else it is the servant who
enters with a screaming baby.

"Regular, steady family life does not exist. Where you live, and
consequently what you do, depends upon the health of the little ones,
the health of the little ones depends upon nobody, and, thanks to the
doctors, who pretend to aid health, your entire life is disturbed. It is
a perpetual peril. Scarcely do we believe ourselves out of it when a new
danger comes: more attempts to save. Always the situation of sailors
on a foundering vessel. Sometimes it seemed to me that this was done on
purpose, that my wife feigned anxiety in order to conquer me, since that
solved the question so simply for her benefit. It seemed to me that all
that she did at those times was done for its effect upon me, but now I
see that she herself, my wife, suffered and was tortured on account of
the little ones, their health, and their diseases.

"A torture to both of us, but to her the children were also a means of
forgetting herself, like an intoxication. I often noticed, when she was
very sad, that she was relieved, when a child fell sick, at being able
to take refuge in this intoxication. It was involuntary intoxication,
because as yet there was nothing else. On every side we heard that Mrs.
So-and-so had lost children, that Dr. So-and-so had saved the child
of Mrs. So-and-so, and that in a certain family all had moved from the
house in which they were living, and thereby saved the little ones. And
the doctors, with a serious air, confirmed this, sustaining my wife in
her opinions. She was not prone to fear, but the doctor dropped some
word, like corruption of the blood, scarlatina, or else--heaven help
us--diphtheria, and off she went.

"It was impossible for it to be otherwise. Women in the old days had the
belief that 'God has given, God has taken away,' that the soul of the
little angel is going to heaven, and that it is better to die innocent
than to die in sin. If the women of to-day had something like this
faith, they could endure more peacefully the sickness of their children.
But of all that there does not remain even a trace. And yet it is
necessary to believe in something; consequently they stupidly believe in
medicine, and not even in medicine, but in the doctor. One believes in
X, another in Z, and, like all believers, they do not see the idiocy of
their beliefs. They believe quia absurdum, because, in reality, if they
did not believe in a stupid way, they would see the vanity of all that
these brigands prescribe for them. Scarlatina is a contagious disease;
so, when one lives in a large city, half the family has to move away
from its residence (we did it twice), and yet every man in the city is a
centre through which pass innumerable diameters, carrying threads of all
sorts of contagions. There is no obstacle: the baker, the tailor, the
coachman, the laundresses.

"And I would undertake, for every man who moves on account of contagion,
to find in his new dwelling-place another contagion similar, if not the
same.

"But that is not all. Every one knows rich people who, after a case of
diphtheria, destroy everything in their residences, and then fall sick
in houses newly built and furnished. Every one knows, likewise, numbers
of men who come in contact with sick people and do not get infected. Our
anxieties are due to the people who circulate tall stories. One woman
says that she has an excellent doctor. 'Pardon me,' answers the other,
'he killed such a one,' or such a one. And vice versa. Bring her
another, who knows no more, who learned from the same books, who treats
according to the same formulas, but who goes about in a carriage, and
asks a hundred roubles a visit, and she will have faith in him.

"It all lies in the fact that our women are savages. They have no belief
in God, but some of them believe in the evil eye, and the others in
doctors who charge high fees. If they had faith they would know that
scarlatina, diphtheria, etc., are not so terrible, since they cannot
disturb that which man can and should love,--the soul. There can result
from them only that which none of us can avoid,--disease and death.
Without faith in God, they love only physically, and all their energy is
concentrated upon the preservation of life, which cannot be preserved,
and which the doctors promise the fools of both sexes to save. And from
that time there is nothing to be done; the doctors must be summoned.

"Thus the presence of the children not only did not improve our
relations as husband and wife, but, on the contrary, disunited us. The
children became an additional cause of dispute, and the larger they
grew, the more they became an instrument of struggle.

"One would have said that we used them as weapons with which to combat
each other. Each of us had his favorite. I made use of little Basile
(the eldest), she of Lise. Further, when the children reached an age
where their characters began to be defined, they became allies, which we
drew each in his or her own direction. They suffered horribly from this,
the poor things, but we, in our perpetual hubbub, were not clear-headed
enough to think of them. The little girl was devoted to me, but the
eldest boy, who resembled my wife, his favorite, often inspired me with
dislike."



CHAPTER XVII.

"We lived at first in the country, then in the city, and, if the final
misfortune had not happened, I should have lived thus until my old age
and should then have believed that I had had a good life,--not too good,
but, on the other hand, not bad,--an existence such as other people
lead. I should not have understood the abyss of misfortune and ignoble
falsehood in which I floundered about, feeling that something was not
right. I felt, in the first place, that I, a man, who, according to my
ideas, ought to be the master, wore the petticoats, and that I could not
get rid of them. The principal cause of my subjection was the children.
I should have liked to free myself, but I could not. Bringing up the
children, and resting upon them, my wife ruled. I did not then realize
that she could not help ruling, especially because, in marrying, she was
morally superior to me, as every young girl is incomparably superior to
the man, since she is incomparably purer. Strange thing! The ordinary
wife in our society is a very commonplace person or worse, selfish,
gossiping, whimsical, whereas the ordinary young girl, until the age of
twenty, is a charming being, ready for everything that is beautiful
and lofty. Why is this so? Evidently because husbands pervert them, and
lower them to their own level.

"In truth, if boys and girls are born equal, the little girls find
themselves in a better situation. In the first place, the young girl is
not subjected to the perverting conditions to which we are subjected.
She has neither cigarettes, nor wine, nor cards, nor comrades, nor
public houses, nor public functions. And then the chief thing is that
she is physically pure, and that is why, in marrying, she is superior
to her husband. She is superior to man as a young girl, and when she
becomes a wife in our society, where there is no need to work in order
to live, she becomes superior, also, by the gravity of the acts of
generation, birth, and nursing.

"Woman, in bringing a child into the world, and giving it her bosom,
sees clearly that her affair is more serious than the affair of man, who
sits in the Zemstvo, in the court. She knows that in these functions the
main thing is money, and money can be made in different ways, and for
that very reason money is not inevitably necessary, like nursing a
child. Consequently woman is necessarily superior to man, and must rule.
But man, in our society, not only does not recognize this, but, on
the contrary, always looks upon her from the height of his grandeur,
despising what she does.

"Thus my wife despised me for my work at the Zemstvo, because she gave
birth to children and nursed them. I, in turn, thought that woman's
labor was most contemptible, which one might and should laugh at.

"Apart from the other motives, we were also separated by a mutual
contempt. Our relations grew ever more hostile, and we arrived at that
period when, not only did dissent provoke hostility, but hostility
provoked dissent. Whatever she might say, I was sure in advance to hold
a contrary opinion; and she the same. Toward the fourth year of
our marriage it was tacitly decided between us that no intellectual
community was possible, and we made no further attempts at it. As to
the simplest objects, we each held obstinately to our own opinions. With
strangers we talked upon the most varied and most intimate matters, but
not with each other. Sometimes, in listening to my wife talk with others
in my presence, I said to myself: 'What a woman! Everything that she
says is a lie!' And I was astonished that the person with whom she was
conversing did not see that she was lying. When we were together; we
were condemned to silence, or to conversations which, I am sure, might
have been carried on by animals.

"'What time is it? It is bed-time. What is there for dinner to-day?
Where shall we go? What is there in the newspaper? The doctor must be
sent for, Lise has a sore throat.'

"Unless we kept within the extremely narrow limits of such conversation,
irritation was sure to ensue. The presence of a third person relieved
us, for through an intermediary we could still communicate. She probably
believed that she was always right. As for me, in my own eyes, I was a
saint beside her.

"The periods of what we call love arrived as often as formerly. They
were more brutal, without refinement, without ornament; but they were
short, and generally followed by periods of irritation without cause,
irritation fed by the most trivial pretexts. We had spats about the
coffee, the table-cloth, the carriage, games of cards,--trifles, in
short, which could not be of the least importance to either of us. As
for me, a terrible execration was continually boiling up within me. I
watched her pour the tea, swing her foot, lift her spoon to her mouth,
and blow upon hot liquids or sip them, and I detested her as if these
had been so many crimes.

"I did not notice that these periods of irritation depended very
regularly upon the periods of love. Each of the latter was followed
by one of the former. A period of intense love was followed by a long
period of anger; a period of mild love induced a mild irritation. We did
not understand that this love and this hatred were two opposite faces
of the same animal feeling. To live thus would be terrible, if one
understood the philosophy of it. But we did not perceive this, we did
not analyze it. It is at once the torture and the relief of man that,
when he lives irregularly, he can cherish illusions as to the miseries
of his situation. So did we. She tried to forget herself in sudden and
absorbing occupations, in household duties, the care of the furniture,
her dress and that of her children, in the education of the latter, and
in looking after their health. These were occupations that did not arise
from any immediate necessity, but she accomplished them as if her life
and that of her children depended on whether the pastry was allowed
to burn, whether a curtain was hanging properly, whether a dress was a
success, whether a lesson was well learned, or whether a medicine was
swallowed.

"I saw clearly that to her all this was, more than anything else, a
means of forgetting, an intoxication, just as hunting, card-playing, and
my functions at the Zemstvo served the same purpose for me. It is true
that in addition I had an intoxication literally speaking,--tobacco,
which I smoked in large quantities, and wine, upon which I did not get
drunk, but of which I took too much. Vodka before meals, and during
meals two glasses of wine, so that a perpetual mist concealed the
turmoil of existence.

"These new theories of hypnotism, of mental maladies, of hysteria are
not simple stupidities, but dangerous or evil stupidities. Charcot, I
am sure, would have said that my wife was hysterical, and of me he would
have said that I was an abnormal being, and he would have wanted to
treat me. But in us there was nothing requiring treatment. All this
mental malady was the simple result of the fact that we were living
immorally. Thanks to this immoral life, we suffered, and, to stifle
our sufferings, we tried abnormal means, which the doctors call the
'symptoms' of a mental malady,--hysteria.

"There was no occasion in all this to apply for treatment to Charcot
or to anybody else. Neither suggestion nor bromide would have been
effective in working our cure. The needful thing was an examination of
the origin of the evil. It is as when one is sitting on a nail; if you
see the nail, you see that which is irregular in your life, and you
avoid it. Then the pain stops, without any necessity of stifling it. Our
pain arose from the irregularity of our life, and also my jealousy,
my irritability, and the necessity of keeping myself in a state of
perpetual semi-intoxication by hunting, card-playing, and, above all,
the use of wine and tobacco. It was because of this irregularity that my
wife so passionately pursued her occupations. The sudden changes of her
disposition, from extreme sadness to extreme gayety, and her babble,
arose from the need of forgetting herself, of forgetting her life, in
the continual intoxication of varied and very brief occupations.

"Thus we lived in a perpetual fog, in which we did not distinguish our
condition. We were like two galley-slaves fastened to the same ball,
cursing each other, poisoning each other's existence, and trying to
shake each other off. I was still unaware that ninety-nine families out
of every hundred live in the same hell, and that it cannot be otherwise.
I had not learned this fact from others or from myself. The coincidences
that are met in regular, and even in irregular life, are surprising. At
the very period when the life of parents becomes impossible, it becomes
indispensable that they go to the city to live, in order to educate
their children. That is what we did."

Posdnicheff became silent, and twice there escaped him, in the
half-darkness, sighs, which at that moment seemed to me like suppressed
sobs. Then he continued.



CHAPTER XVIII.

"So we lived in the city. In the city the wretched feel less sad. One
can live there a hundred years without being noticed, and be dead a long
time before anybody will notice it. People have no time to inquire into
your life. All are absorbed. Business, social relations, art, the health
of children, their education. And there are visits that must be received
and made; it is necessary to see this one, it is necessary to hear that
one or the other one. In the city there are always one, two, or three
celebrities that it is indispensable that one should visit.

"Now one must care for himself, or care for such or such a little one,
now it is the professor, the private tutor, the governesses, . . . and
life is absolutely empty. In this activity we were less conscious of the
sufferings of our cohabitation. Moreover, in the first of it, we had a
superb occupation,--the arrangement of the new dwelling, and then, too,
the moving from the city to the country, and from the country to the
city.

"Thus we spent a winter. The following winter an incident happened to us
which passed unnoticed, but which was the fundamental cause of all that
happened later. My wife was suffering, and the rascals (the doctors)
would not permit her to conceive a child, and taught her how to avoid
it. I was profoundly disgusted. I struggled vainly against it, but
she insisted frivolously and obstinately, and I surrendered. The last
justification of our life as wretches was thereby suppressed, and life
became baser than ever.

"The peasant and the workingman need children, and hence their conjugal
relations have a justification. But we, when we have a few children,
have no need of any more. They make a superfluous confusion of expenses
and joint heirs, and are an embarrassment. Consequently we have no
excuses for our existence as wretches, but we are so deeply degraded
that we do not see the necessity of a justification. The majority of
people in contemporary society give themselves up to this debauchery
without the slightest remorse. We have no conscience left, except, so to
speak, the conscience of public opinion and of the criminal code. But in
this matter neither of these consciences is struck. There is not a being
in society who blushes at it. Each one practices it,--X, Y, Z, etc. What
is the use of multiplying beggars, and depriving ourselves of the joys
of social life? There is no necessity of having conscience before the
criminal code, or of fearing it: low girls, soldiers' wives who throw
their children into ponds or wells, these certainly must be put
in prison. But with us the suppression is effected opportunely and
properly.

"Thus we passed two years more. The method prescribed by the rascals had
evidently succeeded. My wife had grown stouter and handsomer. It was the
beauty of the end of summer. She felt it, and paid much attention to her
person. She had acquired that provoking beauty that stirs men. She was
in all the brilliancy of the wife of thirty years, who conceives no
children, eats heartily, and is excited. The very sight of her was
enough to frighten one. She was like a spirited carriage-horse that has
long been idle, and suddenly finds itself without a bridle. As for my
wife, she had no bridle, as for that matter, ninety-nine hundredths of
our women have none."



CHAPTER XIX.

Posdnicheff's face had become transformed; his eyes were pitiable; their
expression seemed strange, like that of another being than himself; his
moustache and beard turned up toward the top of his face; his nose was
diminished, and his mouth enlarged, immense, frightful.

"Yes," he resumed "she had grown stouter since ceasing to conceive,
and her anxieties about her children began to disappear. Not even
to disappear. One would have said that she was waking from a long
intoxication, that on coming to herself she had perceived the entire
universe with its joys, a whole world in which she had not learned to
live, and which she did not understand.

"'If only this world shall not vanish! When time is past, when old age
comes, one cannot recover it.' Thus, I believe, she thought, or rather
felt. Moreover, she could neither think nor feel otherwise. She had been
brought up in this idea that there is in the world but one thing worthy
of attention,--love. In marrying, she had known something of this love,
but very far from everything that she had understood as promised her,
everything that she expected. How many disillusions! How much suffering!
And an unexpected torture,--the children! This torture had told upon
her, and then, thanks to the obliging doctor, she had learned that it
is possible to avoid having children. That had made her glad. She had
tried, and she was now revived for the only thing that she knew,--for
love. But love with a husband polluted by jealousy and ill-nature was no
longer her ideal. She began to think of some other tenderness; at least,
that is what I thought. She looked about her as if expecting some event
or some being. I noticed it, and I could not help being anxious.

"Always, now, it happened that, in talking with me through a third party
(that is, in talking with others, but with the intention that I should
hear), she boldly expressed,--not thinking that an hour before she had
said the opposite,--half joking, half seriously, this idea that maternal
anxieties are a delusion; that it is not worth while to sacrifice one's
life to children. When one is young, it is necessary to enjoy life. So
she occupied herself less with the children, not with the same intensity
as formerly, and paid more and more attention to herself, to her
face,--although she concealed it,--to her pleasures, and even to her
perfection from the worldly point of view. She began to devote herself
passionately to the piano, which had formerly stood forgotten in the
corner. There, at the piano, began the adventure.

"The MAN appeared."

Posdnicheff seemed embarrassed, and twice again there escaped him that
nasal sound of which I spoke above. I thought that it gave him pain to
refer to the MAN, and to remember him. He made an effort, as if to
break down the obstacle that embarrassed him, and continued with
determination.

"He was a bad man in my eyes, and not because he has played such an
important role in my life, but because he was really such. For the
rest, from the fact that he was bad, we must conclude that he was
irresponsible. He was a musician, a violinist. Not a professional
musician, but half man of the world, half artist. His father, a country
proprietor, was a neighbor of my father's. The father had become ruined,
and the children, three boys, were all sent away. Our man, the youngest,
was sent to his godmother at Paris. There they placed him in the
Conservatory, for he showed a taste for music. He came out a violinist,
and played in concerts."

On the point of speaking evil of the other, Posdnicheff checked himself,
stopped, and said suddenly:

"In truth, I know not how he lived. I only know that that year he came
to Russia, and came to see me. Moist eyes of almond shape, smiling red
lips, a little moustache well waxed, hair brushed in the latest fashion,
a vulgarly pretty face,--what the women call 'not bad,'--feebly built
physically, but with no deformity; with hips as broad as a woman's;
correct, and insinuating himself into the familiarity of people as far
as possible, but having that keen sense that quickly detects a false
step and retires in reason,--a man, in short, observant of the external
rules of dignity, with that special Parisianism that is revealed in
buttoned boots, a gaudy cravat, and that something which foreigners pick
up in Paris, and which, in its peculiarity and novelty, always has
an influence on our women. In his manners an external and artificial
gayety, a way, you know, of referring to everything by hints, by
unfinished fragments, as if everything that one says you knew already,
recalled it, and could supply the omissions. Well, he, with his music,
was the cause of all.

"At the trial the affair was so represented that everything seemed
attributable to jealousy. It is false,--that is, not quite false, but
there was something else. The verdict was rendered that I was a deceived
husband, that I had killed in defence of my sullied honor (that is the
way they put it in their language), and thus I was acquitted. I tried to
explain the affair from my own point of view, but they concluded that I
simply wanted to rehabilitate the memory of my wife. Her relations with
the musician, whatever they may have been, are now of no importance
to me or to her. The important part is what I have told you. The whole
tragedy was due to the fact that this man came into our house at a time
when an immense abyss had already been dug between us, that frightful
tension of mutual hatred, in which the slightest motive sufficed to
precipitate the crisis. Our quarrels in the last days were something
terrible, and the more astonishing because they were followed by a
brutal passion extremely strained. If it had not been he, some other
would have come. If the pretext had not been jealousy, I should have
discovered another. I insist upon this point,--that all husbands
who live the married life that I lived must either resort to outside
debauchery, or separate from their wives, or kill themselves, or kill
their wives as I did. If there is any one in my case to whom this does
not happen, he is a very rare exception, for, before ending as I ended,
I was several times on the point of suicide, and my wife made several
attempts to poison herself."



CHAPTER XX.

"In order that you may understand me, I must tell you how this happened.
We were living along, and all seemed well. Suddenly we began to talk
of the children's education. I do not remember what words either of us
uttered, but a discussion began, reproaches, leaps from one subject to
another. 'Yes, I know it. It has been so for a long time.' . . . 'You
said that.' . . . 'No, I did not say that.' . . . 'Then I lie?' etc.

"And I felt that the frightful crisis was approaching when I should
desire to kill her or else myself. I knew that it was approaching; I
was afraid of it as of fire; I wanted to restrain myself. But rage
took possession of my whole being. My wife found herself in the same
condition, perhaps worse. She knew that she intentionally distorted each
of my words, and each of her words was saturated with venom. All that
was dear to me she disparaged and profaned. The farther the quarrel
went, the more furious it became. I cried, 'Be silent,' or something
like that.

"She bounded out of the room and ran toward the children. I tried to hold
her back to finish my insults. I grasped her by the arm, and hurt her.
She cried: 'Children, your father is beating me.' I cried: 'Don't lie.'
She continued to utter falsehoods for the simple purpose of irritating
me further. 'Ah, it is not the first time,' or something of that sort.
The children rushed toward her and tried to quiet her. I said: 'Don't
sham.' She said: 'You look upon everything as a sham. You would kill a
person and say he was shamming. Now I understand you. That is what you
want to do.' 'Oh, if you were only dead!' I cried.

"I remember how that terrible phrase frightened me. Never had I thought
that I could utter words so brutal, so frightful, and I was stupefied at
what had just escaped my lips. I fled into my private apartment. I sat
down and began to smoke. I heard her go into the hall and prepare to go
out. I asked her: 'Where are you going? She did not answer. 'Well, may
the devil take you!' said I to myself, going back into my private room,
where I lay down again and began smoking afresh. Thousands of plans of
vengeance, of ways of getting rid of her, and how to arrange this, and
act as if nothing had happened,--all this passed through my head. I
thought of these things, and I smoked, and smoked, and smoked. I thought
of running away, of making my escape, of going to America. I went so far
as to dream how beautiful it would be, after getting rid of her, to love
another woman, entirely different from her. I should be rid of her if
she should die or if I should get a divorce, and I tried to think how
that could be managed. I saw that I was getting confused, but, in order
not to see that I was not thinking rightly, I kept on smoking.

"And the life of the house went on as usual. The children's teacher came
and asked: 'Where is Madame? When will she return?'

"The servants asked if they should serve the tea. I entered the
dining-room. The children, Lise, the eldest girl, looked at me with
fright, as if to question me, and she did not come. The whole evening
passed, and still she did not come. Two sentiments kept succeeding each
other in my soul,--hatred of her, since she tortured myself and the
children by her absence, but would finally return just the same, and
fear lest she might return and make some attempt upon herself. But where
should I look for her? At her sister's? It seemed so stupid to go to ask
where one's wife is. Moreover, may God forbid, I hoped, that she should
be at her sister's! If she wishes to torment any one, let her torment
herself first. And suppose she were not at her sister's.

"Suppose she were to do, or had already done, something.

"Eleven o'clock, midnight, one o'clock. . . . I did not sleep. I did not
go to my chamber. It is stupid to lie stretched out all alone, and to
wait. But in my study I did not rest. I tried to busy myself, to write
letters, to read. Impossible! I was alone, tortured, wicked, and
I listened. Toward daylight I went to sleep. I awoke. She had not
returned. Everything in the house went on as usual, and all looked at
me in astonishment, questioningly. The children's eyes were full of
reproach for me.

"And always the same feeling of anxiety about her, and of hatred because
of this anxiety.

"Toward eleven o'clock in the morning came her sister, her ambassadress.
Then began the usual phrases: 'She is in a terrible state. What is
the matter?' 'Why, nothing has happened.' I spoke of her asperity of
character, and I added that I had done nothing, and that I would not
take the first step. If she wants a divorce, so much the better! My
sister-in-law would not listen to this idea, and went away without
having gained anything. I was obstinate, and I said boldly and
determinedly, in talking to her, that I would not take the first
step. Immediately she had gone I went into the other room, and saw the
children in a frightened and pitiful state, and there I found myself
already inclined to take this first step. But I was bound by my word.
Again I walked up and down, always smoking. At breakfast I drank brandy
and wine, and I reached the point which I unconsciously desired, the
point where I no longer saw the stupidity and baseness of my situation.

"Toward three o'clock she came. I thought that she was appeased, or
admitted her defeat. I began to tell her that I was provoked by her
reproaches. She answered me, with the same severe and terribly downcast
face, that she had not come for explanations, but to take the children,
that we could not live together. I answered that it was not my fault,
that she had put me beside myself. She looked at me with a severe and
solemn air, and said: 'Say no more. You will repent it.' I said that I
could not tolerate comedies. Then she cried out something that I did not
understand, and rushed toward her room. The key turned in the lock,
and she shut herself up. I pushed at the door. There was no response.
Furious, I went away.

"A half hour later Lise came running all in tears. 'What! Has anything
happened? We cannot hear Mamma!' We went toward my wife's room. I pushed
the door with all my might. The bolt was scarcely drawn, and the door
opened. In a skirt, with high boots, my wife lay awkwardly on the bed.
On the table an empty opium phial. We restored her to life. Tears and
then reconciliation! Not reconciliation; internally each kept the hatred
for the other, but it was absolutely necessary for the moment to end
the scene in some way, and life began again as before. These scenes, and
even worse, came now once a week, now every month, now every day. And
invariably the same incidents. Once I was absolutely resolved to fly,
but through some inconceivable weakness I remained.

"Such were the circumstances in which we were living when the MAN came.
The man was bad, it is true. But what! No worse than we were."



CHAPTER XXI.

"When we moved to Moscow, this gentleman--his name was
Troukhatchevsky--came to my house. It was in the morning. I received
him. In former times we had been very familiar. He tried, by various
advances, to re-establish the familiarity, but I was determined to keep
him at a distance, and soon he gave it up. He displeased me extremely.
At the first glance I saw that he was a filthy debauche. I was jealous
of him, even before he had seen my wife. But, strange thing! some occ