The Dream of a Queer Fellow, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Contents
I
II
III
IV
V

The Dream of a Queer Fellow

I

I am a queer fellow. They call me mad now. That would be a promotion, if I were not still the same queer fellow for them as before. But I’m not cross with them any more; now I love them all — even when they laugh at me, somehow I love them more than ever. I would laugh with them myself — not at myself, but for love of them — if it did not make me so sad to look at them; sad, because they do not know the truth, and I do. How hard it is for one man who knows the truth! But they won’t understand this. They won’t understand it.

Before, I used to suffer deeply, because I seemed queer. Not seemed, but was. I always was queer; perhaps I ‘ve known it from the day of my birth. Perhaps when I was only seven I knew that I was queer. Afterwards I went to school, then to the university, and — well, the more I studied the more I discovered that I was queer. So that finally it seemed to me that all my university knowledge existed only to explain and prove to me, the deeper I plunged into it, that I was queer. Each day increased and strengthened my consciousness that I looked queer in every way. Everybody always laughed at me.

But no t one of them knew or guessed that if there was a man on earth who really knew how queer I was, that man was myself; their not knowing that was quite the most insulting thing of all, but there I was to blame. I was always so proud that nothing would induce me to confess that to any one. My pride increased with years, and I verily believe that if it had happened that I had allowed myself to confess that I was queer to any living soul, I would have blown out my brains with a revolver on the spot. Oh, how much I suffered as a youth for fear I might not be able to hold out, and might suddenly, somehow, confess to my comrades.

But since I became a young man, though each year I realised my awful nature more and more, for some reason I have been a little calmer. For some reason or other, I say, for even now I cannot define it. Perhaps because a terrible anguish had been born in my soul of one thing which was infinitely higher than the whole of me — it was the conviction that had descended upon me that it is all the same, everywhere on earth. I had suspected it long before, but the full eonviction came somehow suddenly last year.

I suddenly felt that it would be all the same to me if the world really existed, or if there was nothing anywhere. I began to feel with all my being that there had been nothing behind me. At first I thought that there really had been a great deal, but afterwards I guessed that even before there had been nothing, but it had only seemed so, somehow. Little by little I became convince’d that there never would be anything.

Then I suddenly stopped being angry with people, and began almost not to notice them. Indeed, that was shown in the most trivial things. It would happen, for instance, that I would walk in the street and knoek into people. Not beeause I was lost in thought — what had I to think about, I had utterly ceased to think by then? — it was all the same to me. And as for solving questions; oh, I didn’t solve one, yet what thousands there were! But it had become all the same to me, and all the questions disappeared.

Just after that, I learned the truth. I learned the truth last November, the 3rd of November last, and I remember every instant since that day. It was a gloomy night, the gloomiest night you can conceive. I was going home at about eleven o’cloek, and I remember I thought that it would be impossible to find a gloomier hour. Even physically. It had poured with rain all day, the coldest and gloomiest rain; some of it, I remember, was positively menacing, manifestly hostile to humankind.

Suddenly, at eleven o’clock it stopped, and a horrible dampness followed, damper even and colder than when the rain was pouring. A mist ascended from everything, from every stone in the street, and from every alley, when I looked away from the street into the depths. I suddenly thought that it would be comfortable if the gas went out, for the heart was sadder with the gas alight, because it lit up all those mists.

That day I had had praetieally no food; from the early evening I had been sitting with an engineer I knew, who had two other friends with him. I was silent all the while, and I believe I bored them. They talked of something provocative and suddenly they became quite exeited. But it was really all the same to them. I saw that. They were exeited all for nothing. Suddenly I broke out: ‘ I say, gentlemen, . . . but it’s all the same to you.’ They were not offended, but they all began to laugh at me. That was because I spoke without any reproach, just’ because it was all the same to me. They saw it was all the same to me, and cheered up.

While I was thinking about the gas in the street, I glanced at the sky. The sky was terribly black, but I could clearly distinguish the ragged clouds, and between them bottomless spaces of black. Suddenly I caught sight of a little star in one of these spaces and began to stare at it. For the little star had given me an idea: I proposed to kill myself that night. 1 had firmly decided to kill myself two months before, and though I was very poor, I bought myself an excellent revolver and loaded it that very same day.

Two months had passed since and it still lay in my drawer; it was so much the same to me that at last I longed to find a day when it would not be all the same, — why, I do not know. So, every night for these two months, as I returned home, I thought that I would shoot myself. But all the while I was waiting for the moment. Now the little star had given me the idea, and I decided that it would happen that night infallibly. But why the little star should have given me the idea — I do not know.

And just as I was looking at the sky, that girl suddenly caught me by the arm. The street was already empty; hardly a soul was in it. Far away, a cabman was asleep on his box. The girl was about eight years old, and wore a little shawl. She had no coat and was wet through.

But I particularly remember her wet, ragged boots; I remember them even now. They caught my eye particularly. She suddenly began to pull me by the arm and to cry out. She did not weep, but cried out some words abruptly somehow. She could not utter the words properly because she continually shivered all over from the cold. She was terrified by something and cried despairingly: ‘ Mother, Mother!’ I turned my face towards her, but did not speak. I walked on. But she ran and pulled at me.

In her voice was the sound which with very frightened people means despair. I know that sound. Though she had not uttered the words, I realised that her mother was dying somewhere, or something had happened to them, and she had run out to call some one or find something to help mother. But I did not follow her; on the contrary, the idea suddenly came to me to drive her away. First, I told her to find a policeman. But she suddenly clasped her hands together and kept running at my side, sobbing and breathless, and would not leave me.

Then I stamped my foot and shouted at her. She only cried out: ‘ Please, sir, sir . . .’; but suddenly she left me and rushed across the street. A passer-by appeared. Evidently she had rushed from me to him.

I climbed up to my fifth floor. I rent a room from the landlord: there are other rooms. My room is poverty-stricken and small. The window is an attic window, semi-circular. I have a sofa covered in American cloth, a table with some books, two chairs and an easy-chair, old, incredibly old, but still an easy-chair. I sat down, lit the candle, and began to think. Next door in the other room, behind the partition, pandemonium went on. It had been going on since the day before yesterday.

A retired captain lived there, and he had friends — about half a dozen beauties — who drank vodka, and played faro with old cards. Last night there was a scuffle, and I know that a couple of them pulled each other about by the hair for a long while. The landlady wanted to complain to the police, but she is terribly afraid of the captain. The only other lodger in our rooms is a small, thin, military lady, who is only passing through here, with three little children who have