PART ONE
“And what, in your opinion, keeps people from suicide?” I asked.
He looked at me distractedly, as if trying to recall what we were talking about.
“I … I still know little … two prejudices keep them, two things; just two; one very small, the other very big. But the small one is also very big.”
“What is the small one?”
“Pain.”
“Pain? Is it really so important … in this case?”
“The foremost thing. There are two sorts: those who kill themselves from great sorrow, or anger, or the crazy ones, or whatever … they do it suddenly. They think little about pain and do it suddenly. But the ones who do it judiciously—they think a lot.”
“Are there any who do it judiciously?”
“Very many. If it weren’t for prejudice, there’d be more; very many; everybody.”
“Really? Everybody?”
PART TWO
“My friend, the real truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it’s absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so. Perhaps there’s something here that we don’t understand. What do you think, is there something in this victorious squealing that we don’t understand? I wish there was. I do wish it.”
“Listen, now,” Pyotr Stepanovich began to fidget more than ever. “When I set out to come here, I mean, here generally, to this town, ten days ago, I decided, of course, to adopt a role. The best would be no role at all, just one’s own person, isn’t that so? Nothing is more cunning than one’s own person, because no one will believe you. To be frank, I wanted to adopt the silly fool, because the silly fool is easier than one’s own person; but since the silly fool is, after all, an extreme thing, and extreme things arouse curiosity, I finally chose my own person. Well, sir, and what is my own person? The golden mean—neither stupid nor smart, rather giftless, and dropped from the moon, as sensible people here say, isn’t that so?”
“So, you also love life?”
“Yes, I also love life, what of it?”
“Yet you’ve resolved to shoot yourself.”
“So what? Why together? Life’s separate, and that’s separate. Life is, and death is not at all.”
“You’ve started believing in the future eternal life?”
“No, not future eternal, but here eternal. There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stops, and will be eternal.”
“I reduce God to an attribute of nationality?” Shatov cried. “On the contrary, I raise the nation up to God. Has it ever been otherwise?
“I know I’m a worthless character, but I’m not trying to get in with the strong ones.”
“everything has become so boring that there’s no need to be punctilious about entertainment, as long as it’s diverting.”
“All right, all right, so I put it very stupidly. No doubt it would be very stupid to force such things. To go on: you were a member of the Society under the old organization, and it was then that you confided it to one member of the Society.”
“I did not confide it, I simply told it.”
“All right. It would be ridiculous to ‘confide’ such a thing—what sort of confession is it? You simply told it. Wonderful.”
“No, not wonderful, because you maunder so. I don’t owe you any accounting, and you’re not capable of understanding my thoughts. I want to take my own life because I have this thought, because I do not want the fear of death, because … because there’s nothing here for you to know … What is it? Want some tea? It’s cold. Let me get you another glass.”
Look here, sir, I used to carry her in my arms, danced the mazurka with her when she was ten years old, she came in today, naturally I flew to embrace her, and she announces to me from the second word that there is no God. If it had been from the third word, not from the second—but no, she’s in a hurry! Well, suppose intelligent people don’t believe, but that’s from intelligence, and you, I say, squirt that you are, what do you understand about God?
“Stavrogin, you are beautiful!” Pyotr Stepanovich cried out, almost in ecstasy. “Do you know that you are beautiful! The most precious thing in you is that you sometimes don’t know it. Oh, I’ve studied you! I’ve often looked at you from the side, from a corner! There’s even simpleheartedness and naivety in you, do you know that? There is, there still is! You must be suffering, and suffering in earnest, from this simpleheartedness. I love beauty. I am a nihilist, but I love beauty. Do nihilists not love beauty? They just don’t love idols, but I love an idol! You are my idol! You insult no one, yet everyone hates you; you have the air of being everyone’s equal, yet everyone is afraid of you—this is good. No one will come up and slap you on the shoulder. You’re a terrible aristocrat. An aristocrat, when he goes among democrats, is captivating! It’s nothing for you to sacrifice life, your own or someone else’s. You are precisely what’s needed. I, I need precisely such a man as you. I know no one but you. You are a leader, you are a sun, and I am your worm …”
PART THREE
Railroads have eaten up all the capital and covered Russia like spiderwebs, so that perhaps in another fifteen years or so one may even be able to take a ride somewhere.
“Every calendar doth lie,”1 he remarked with an obliging grin, but, ashamed, hastened to add: “It’s boring to live by the calendar, Liza.”
“Nikolai Vsevolodovich, tell me, as before God, are you guilty or not, and I swear I’ll believe your word as if it were God’s own, and follow you to the ends of the earth, oh, I will! I’ll go like a little dog …”
“You want very much that I shoot myself, and are afraid if suddenly not?”
“I mean, you see, you yourself joined your plan with our actions. Counting on your plan, we’ve already undertaken something, so you simply cannot refuse, because you would let us down.”
“No right at all.”
“I understand, I understand, it’s entirely as you will, and we are nothing, just as long as this entire will of yours gets carried out.”
“Knowing the human heart … we can be sure that he won’t denounce us now … because he’s in happiness … And so I called on everyone earlier and found no one home … and so maybe there’s no need for anything now …”
“ ‘I, Alexei Kirillov, declare …’ ”
“Wait! I don’t want to! Declare to whom?”
Kirillov was shaking as if in a fever. This declaration and some sudden, special thought about it seemed to have absorbed him entirely all at once, as if it were some outlet where, if only for a moment, his tormented spirit rushed precipitously:
“Declare to whom? I want to know whom!”
“To nobody, to everybody, to the first one who reads it. Why specify? To the whole world!”
“To the whole world? Bravo! And so there’s no need for repentance. I don’t want repentance; and not to any authorities!”
“Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him to let them enter these. So he gave them leave. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned. When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they fled, and told it in the city and in the country. Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. And those who had seen it told them how he who had been possessed with demons was healed.”
“My friend,” Stepan Trofimovich said in great excitement, “savez-vous, this wonderful and … extraordinary passage has been a stumbling block for me all my life … dans ce livre … so that I have remembered this passage ever since childhood. And now a thought has occurred to me; une comparaison. Terribly many thoughts occur to me now: you see, it’s exactly like our Russia. These demons who come out of a sick man and enter into swine—it’s all the sores, all the miasmas, all the uncleanness, all the big and little demons accumulated in our great and dear sick man, in our Russia, for centuries, for centuries! Oui, cette Russie que j’aimais toujours.as But a great will and a great thought will descend to her from on high, as upon that insane demoniac, and out will come all these demons, all the uncleanness, all the abomination that is festering on the surface … and they will beg of themselves to enter into swine. And perhaps they already have! It is us, us and them, and Petrusha … et les autres avec lui,at and I, perhaps, first, at the head, and we will rush, insane and raging, from the cliff down into the sea, and all be drowned, and good riddance to us, because that’s the most we’re fit for. But the sick man will be healed and ‘sit at the feet of Jesus’ … and everyone will look in amazement … Dear, vous comprendrez après, but it excites me very much now … Vous comprendrez après … Nous comprendrons ensemble.”
The one constant thought that there exists something immeasurably more just and happy than I, fills the whole of me with immeasurable tenderness and—glory—oh, whoever I am, whatever I do! Far more than his own happiness, it is necessary for a man to know and believe every moment that there is somewhere a perfect and peaceful happiness, for everyone and for everything … The whole law of human existence consists in nothing other than a man’s always being able to bow before the immeasurably great. If people are deprived of the immeasurably great, they will not live and will die in despair. The immeasurable and infinite is as necessary for man as the small planet he inhabits.
Better don’t come. The fact that I’m calling you to me is a terrible baseness. And why should you bury your life with me? You are dear to me, and when I was in anguish I felt good near you: only in your presence could I speak of myself aloud. Nothing follows from that. You yourself defined it as “nursing”—it’s your expression; why sacrifice so much? Realize, also, that I do not pity you, since I’m calling you, and do not respect you, since I’m waiting for you to come. And yet I call and wait. In any case, I need your answer, because I must leave very soon. In such case, I’ll go alone.
I have no hope from Uri; I’m simply going. I did not choose a gloomy place on purpose. Nothing binds me to Russia—everything in it is as foreign to me as everywhere else. True, I disliked living in it more than elsewhere; but even in it I was unable to come to hate anything!
I’ve tested my strength everywhere. You advised me to do that, “in order to know myself.” This testing for myself, and for show, proved it to be boundless, as before all my life. In front of your very eyes I endured a slap from your brother; I acknowledged my marriage publicly. But what to apply my strength to—that I have never seen, nor do I see it now, despite your encouragements in Switzerland, which I believed. I am as capable now as ever before of wishing to do a good deed, and I take pleasure in that; along with it, I wish for evil and also feel pleasure. But both the one and the other, as always, are too shallow, and are never very much. My desires are far too weak; they cannot guide. One can cross a river on a log, but not on a chip. All this so that you don’t think I’m going to Uri with any hopes.
One can argue endlessly about everything, but what poured out of me was only negation, with no magnanimity and no force. Or not even negation. Everything is always shallow and listless. Magnanimous Kirillov could not endure his idea and—shot himself; but I do see that he was magnanimous because he was not in his right mind. I can never lose my mind, nor can I ever believe an idea to the same degree as he did. I cannot even entertain an idea to the same degree. I could never, never shoot myself!
I know I ought to kill myself, to sweep myself off the earth like a vile insect; but I’m afraid of suicide, because I’m afraid of showing magnanimity. I know it will be one more deceit—the last deceit in an endless series of deceits. What’s the use of deceiving oneself just so as to play at magnanimity? There never can be indignation or shame in me; and so no despair either.
APPENDIX
“And it is possible to believe in a demon, without believing at all in God?” Stavrogin laughed.
“Oh, quite possible, it happens all the time,” Tikhon raised his eyes and also smiled.
I am convinced that I could live my whole life as a monk, despite the animal sensuality I am endowed with and which I have always provoked. Giving myself with extraordinary immoderation, until the age of sixteen, to the vice confessed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I stopped it the moment I decided I wanted to, in my seventeenth year. I am always master of myself when I want to be. And so, let it be known that I do not want to seek irresponsibility for my crimes either in the environment or in illness.