But I did not go with her; on the contrary, it suddenly occurred to me to drive her away. I told her to go and look for a policeman. But she folded her hands in entreaty and, sobbing and panting, ran along at my side and would not leave me alone. It was then I stamped my feet at her and shouted. All she cried was: ‘Sir, oh sir!’ but, abandoning me abruptly, she darted across the street: another passer-by appeared there and it was to him she must have run from me.
I climbed my five flights of stairs. I live in a lodging house. My room is wretched and small, with just one attic window in it, a semicircular one. The furniture consists of an oilcloth-covered sofa, two chairs, a table with my books on it, and an armchair, a very, very old one but a Voltaire armchair for all that. I sat down, lighted my candle, and gave myself up to thought. The room next door was a real Bedlam. It has been going on since the day before yesterday. The man who lives there is a discharged captain and he was having guests, about six of them – castaways on the sea of life – drinking vodka and playing stoss with an old deck of cards. There had been a fight the night before, and I know that two of them had torn at one another’s hair for quite a long time.
The landlady wanted to put in a complaint against them, but she is terribly afraid of the captain. The only other lodger is a thin little lady, an officer’s wife, a newcomer to the town with three small children, who have all been ill since they came here. The lady and the children live in deadly fear of the captain, they spend their nights shaking with fear and praying, and as for the youngest baby, it was even frightened into a fit once. The captain, I know for a fact, sometimes accosts people on the Nevsky and begs alms. He won’t be given a post anywhere, but strangely (this is why I am telling all this), in all the months he has been staying with us, he never once roused any resentment in me.
I naturally shunned his company from the outset, but then he too thought me a bore the very first time we met, and no matter how loudly they shout in their room or how many they are – I never care. I sit up all night and, honestly, I never even hear them, so utterly do I forget them.
I cannot sleep, you know; it has been like that for a year now. I spend the night sitting in my armchair and doing nothing. I only read in the daytime. I just sit there, without even thinking. My thoughts are vague and stray, and I let them wander. My candle burns down every night. And so, I calmly settled down in my chair, took out my revolver and placed it on the table before me. I remember asking myself as I put it down: ‘Are you sure?’ and answering very firmly: ‘I am sure.’ That is, I would kill myself. I knew that I would definitely kill myself that night, but how much longer I would sit thus at the table before I did it I did not know. And I would have certainly killed myself if it had not been for that little girl.
II
You see how it was: though I did not care, I was still sensitive to pain, for instance. If someone struck me I would feel the pain. Mentally it was exactly the same: if something very pathetic happened I would feel pity, just as I would have felt pity in the days before I had ceased caring for anything in the world. And I did feel pity earlier that night: surely, I should have helped a child in distress? Why had I not helped her then? Because of a thought that had occurred to me; when she was tugging at my coat and crying out, a problem suddenly confronted me and I was unable to solve it. It was an idle problem but it had angered me.
I got angry because, having definitely decided to commit suicide that very night, I ought to have cared less than ever for anything in the world. Then why had I suddenly felt that I did care and was sorry for the little girl? I remember I was frightfully sorry for her, my pity was strangely poignant and incongruous in my position. I really cannot give a better description of that fleeting feeling of mine, but it remained with me even after I had reached my room and had seated myself in my chair, and it vexed me more than anything else had done for a long time.
One argument followed another. It was perfectly clear to me that if I was a man and not yet a nought, and had not yet become a nought, I was therefore alive and, consequently, able to suffer, resent, and feel shame for my actions. Very well. But if I was going to kill myself in a couple of hours from then, why should I be concerned with the girl and what did I care for shame or anything else in the world? I would become a nought, an absolute nought.
And could it be that my ability to feel pity for the girl and shame for my vile action was not in the least affected by the certainty that I would soon become completely non-existent, and therefore nothing would exist. Why, the reason I had stamped my feet and shouted so brutally at the poor child was to assert that: ‘Far from feeling pity, I could even afford to do something inhumanly vile now, because two hours hence all would fade away.’ Do you believe me when I say that this was the reason why I had shouted? I am almost positive now that it was that.
It had seemed clear to me that life and the world were from then on dependent on me, as it were. I should even say that the world seemed specially made for me alone: if I killed myself the world would be no more, at least as far as I was concerned. To say nothing of the possibility that there would really be nothing for anyone after I was gone, and the moment my consciousness dimmed the whole world, being a mere attribute of my consciousness, would instantly dim too, fade like a mirage and be no more, for it may be that all this world of ours and all these people are merely part of myself, are just myself. I remember that as I sat there and reasoned, I gave an entirely different twist to all these new problems that were thronging my mind, and conceived some perfectly new ideas.
For instance, a strange notion like this occurred to me: supposing I had once lived on the moon or Mars and had there committed the foulest and scurviest of deeds imaginable, for which I had been made to suffer all the scorn and dishonour conceivable in nothing less than in a dream, in a night-mare, and supposing I later found myself on the earth, with the crime committed on that other planet alive in my consciousness and, besides, knowing there was no return for me, ever, under any circumstances – would I have cared or not as I gazed at the moon from this earth? Would I have felt shame for that deed or not? All these questions were idle and superfluous since the revolver was already lying in front of me and I knew with all my being that it was bound to happen, and yet the questions excited me and roused me to a frenzy.
I no longer seemed able to die before I had solved something first. In short, that little girl saved my life because the unsolved questions put off the act. Meanwhile, the noise at the captain’s began to subside too: they had finished their game and were now settling down to sleep, grumbling, and sleepily rounding off their mutual abuse. It was then that I suddenly fell asleep in my chair in front of the table, a thing that never happened to me before.
I dropped off without knowing it at all. Dreams, we all know, are extremely queer things: one will be appallingly vivid, with the greatest imaginable precision in every minutely finished detail, while another will take you through time and space so swiftly that you hardly notice the flight. Dreams, I believe, are directed by desire, not reason, by the heart and not the mind, and yet what fantastic tricks my reason sometimes plays on me in dreams!
The things that happen to my reason in sleep are quite incredible. To give an instance: my brother has been dead these five years. I dream of him sometimes: he takes an active interest in my affairs, we are very fond of one another, yet all through my dream I know perfectly well that my brother
