The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky Read online

  “I’ll be here tomorrow,” I said. “Oh, I’m sorry, I seem to be already making demands.…”

  “Yes, you are rather impatient, aren’t you? You’re almost making demands.…”

  “Listen to me, please, listen to me!” I interrupted. “You won’t mind if I say something to you again, something of the same kind, will you? It’s this: I can’t help coming here tomorrow. I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I’ll most certainly come here tomorrow. Yes, here, at this place and at this hour. And I shall be happy to remember what happened to me today. Already this place is dear to me. I’ve two or three places like this in Petersburg. Once I even wept because I remembered something, just as you—I mean, I don’t know of course, but perhaps you too were crying ten minutes ago because of some memory. I’m awfully sorry, I seem to have forgotten myself again. Perhaps you were particularly happy here once.…”

  “Very well,” said the girl, “I think I will come here tomorrow, also at ten o’clock. And I can see that I can’t possibly forbid you to come, can I? You see, I have to be here. Please don’t imagine that I am making an appointment with you. I hope you’ll believe me when I say that I have got to be here on some business of my own. Oh, very well, I’ll be frank with you: I shan’t mind at all if you come here too. To begin with, something unpleasant may happen again as it did today, but never mind that … I mean, I’d really like to see you again to—to say two words to you. But, mind, don’t think ill of me now, will you? Don’t imagine I’m making appointments with men so easily. I wouldn’t have made it with you, if … But let that be my secret. Only first you must promise.…”

  “I promise anything you like!” I cried, delighted. “Only say it. Tell me anything beforehand. I agree to everything. I’ll do anything you like. I can answer for myself. I’ll be obedient, respectful.… You know me, don’t you?”

  “Well, it’s because I know you that I’m asking you to come tomorrow,” said the girl, laughing. “I know you awfully well. But, mind, if you come it’s on condition that, first (only you will do what I ask you, won’t you?—You see, I’m speaking frankly to you), don’t fall in love with me. That’s impossible, I assure you. I’m quite ready to be your friend. I am, indeed. But you mustn’t fall in love with me. So please, don’t.”

  “I swear to you …” I cried, seizing her hand.

  “No, no. I don’t want any solemn promises. I know you’re quite capable of flaring up like gunpowder. Don’t be angry with me for speaking to you like this. If you knew … You see, I haven’t got anyone, either, to whom to say a word, or whom to ask for advice. Of course, it’s silly to expect advice from people one meets in the street, but you are different. I feel I know you so well that I couldn’t have known you better if we’d been friends for twenty years. You won’t fail me, will you?”

  “You can depend on me! The only thing is I don’t know how I shall be able to survive for the next twenty-four hours.”

  “Have a good sleep. Good night, and remember I’ve already confided in you. But, as you expressed it so well a few minutes ago, one hasn’t really to account for every feeling, even for brotherly sympathy, has one? You put it so nicely that I felt at once that you’re the sort of person I could confide in.”

  “For goodness sake, tell me what it is. Please do.”

  “No, I think you’d better wait till tomorrow. Let it remain a secret for the time being. So much the better for you: at least from a distance it will seem more like a romance. Perhaps I’ll tell you tomorrow, perhaps I won’t. I’d like to have a good talk to you first, get to know you better.…”

  “All right, I’ll tell you all about myself tomorrow. But, good Lord, the whole thing is just like a miracle! Where am I? Tell me, aren’t you glad you weren’t angry with me, as some other women might well have been? Only two minutes, and you’ve made me happy for ever. Yes, happy. Who knows, perhaps you’ve reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts. Perhaps there are moments when I … But I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. You shall know everything, everything.…”

  “All right, I agree. I think you’d better start first.”

  “Very well.”

  “Goodbye!”

  “Goodbye!”

  And we parted. I walked about all night. I couldn’t bring myself to go home. I was so happy! Till tomorrow!

  SECOND NIGHT

  “Well, so you have survived, haven’t you?” she said to me, laughing and pressing both my hands.

  “I’ve been here for the last two hours. You don’t know what I’ve been through today!”

  “I know, I know—but to business. Do you know why I’ve come? Not to talk a lot of nonsense as we did yesterday. You see, we must be more sensible in future. I thought about it a lot yesterday.”

  “But how? How are we to be more sensible? Not that I have anything against it. But, really, I don’t believe anything more sensible has ever happened to me than what’s happening to me at this moment.”

  “Oh? Well, first of all, please don’t squeeze my hands like that. Secondly, let me tell you I’ve given a lot of thought to you today.”

  “Have you? Well, and what decision have you come to?”

  “What decision? Why, that we ought to start all over again. For today I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know you at all, that I’ve behaved like a child, like a silly girl, and of course in the end I blamed my own good heart for everything. I mean, I finished up, as everybody always does when they start examining their own motives, by passing a vote of thanks to myself. And so, to correct my mistake, I’ve made up my mind to find out all about you to the last detail. But as there’s no one I can ask about you, you’ll have to tell me everything yourself. Everything, absolutely everything! To begin with, what sort of man are you? Come on, start, please! Tell me the story of your life.”

  “The story of my life?” I cried, thoroughly alarmed. “But who told you there was such a story? I’m afraid there isn’t any.”

  “But how did you manage to live, if there is no story?” she interrupted me, laughing.

  “Without any stories whatsoever! I have lived, as they say, entirely independently. I mean by myself. Do you know what it means to live by oneself?”

  “How do you mean by yourself? Do you never see anyone at all?”

  “Why, no. I see all sorts of people, but I’m alone all the same.”

  “Don’t you ever talk to anyone?”

  “Strictly speaking, never.”

  “But who are you? Please explain. But wait: I think I can guess. You’ve probably got a grandmother like me. She’s blind, my granny is, and she never lets me go out anywhere, so that I’ve almost forgotten how to talk to people. And when I behaved badly about two years ago and she saw that there was no holding me, she called me in and pinned my dress to hers—and since then we’ve sat pinned to one another like that for days and days. She knits a stocking, blind though she is, and I have to sit beside her sewing or reading a book to her. It’s a funny sort of situation to be in—pinned to a person for two years or more.”

  “Good gracious, what bad luck! No, I haven’t got such a grandmother.”

  “If you haven’t, why do you sit at home all the time?”

  “Look here, do you want to know who I am?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  “In the strict meaning of the word?”

  “Yes, in the strictest meaning of the word!”

  “Very well, I’m a character.”

  “A character? What kind of a character?” the girl cried, laughing merrily, as though she had not laughed for a whole year. “I must say, you’re certainly great fun! Look, here’s a seat. Let’s sit down. No one ever comes this way, so no one will overhear us. Well, start your story, please! For you’ll never convince me that you haven’t got o
ne. You’re just trying to conceal it. Now, first of all, what is a character?”

  “A character? Well, it’s an original, a queer chap,” I said, and, infected by her childish laughter, I burst out laughing myself. “It’s a kind of freak. Listen, do you know what a dreamer is?”

  “A dreamer? Of course I know. I’m a dreamer myself! Sometimes when I’m sitting by Granny I get all sorts of queer ideas into my head. I mean, once you start dreaming, you let your imagination run away with you, so that in the end I even marry a prince of royal blood! I don’t know, it’s very nice sometimes—dreaming, I mean. But, on the whole, perhaps it isn’t. Especially if you have lots of other things to think of,” the girl added, this time rather seriously.

  “Fine! Once you’re married to an emperor, you will, I think, understand me perfectly. Well, listen—but don’t you think I ought to know your name before starting on the story of my life?”

  “At last! It took you a long time to think of it, didn’t it?”

  “Good lord! I never thought of it. You see, I was so happy anyway.”

  “My name’s Nastenka.”

  “Nastenka! Is that all?”

  “Yes, that’s all. Isn’t it enough for you, you insatiable person?”

  “Not enough? Why, not at all. It’s more than I expected, much more than I expected, Nastenka, my dear, dear girl, if I may call you by your pet name, if from the very first you—you become Nastenka to me!”

  “I’m glad you’re satisfied at last! Well?”

  “Well, Nastenka, just listen what an absurd story it all is.”

  I sat down beside her, assumed a pedantically serious pose, and began as though reading from a book:

  “There are, if you don’t happen to know it already, Nastenka, some very strange places in Petersburg. It is not the same sun which shines upon all the other people of the city that looks in there, but quite a different sun, a new sun, one specially ordered for those places, and the light it sheds on everything is also a different, peculiar sort of light. In those places, dear Nastenka, the people also seem to live quite a different life, unlike that which surges all round us, a life which could only be imagined to exist in some faraway foreign country beyond the seven seas, and not at all in our country and in these much too serious times. Well, it is that life which is a mixture of something purely fantastic, something fervently ideal, and, at the same time (alas, Nastenka!), something frightfully prosaic and ordinary, not to say incredibly vulgar.”

  “My goodness, what an awful introduction! What shall I be hearing next, I wonder?”

  “What will you be hearing next, Nastenka (I don’t think I shall ever get tired of calling you Nastenka), is that these places are inhabited by strange people—by dreamers. A dreamer—if you must know its exact definition—is not a man, but a sort of creature of the neuter gender. He settles mostly in some inaccessible place, as though anxious to hide in it even from the light of day; and once he gets inside his room, he’ll stick to it like a snail, or, at all events, he is in this respect very like that amusing animal which is an animal and a house both at one and the same time and bears the name of tortoise. Why, do you think, is he so fond of his four walls, invariably painted green, grimy, dismal and reeking unpardonably of tobacco smoke? Why does this funny fellow, when one of his new friends comes to visit him (he usually ends up by losing all his friends one by one), why does this absurd person meet him with such an embarrassed look? Why is he so put out of countenance? Why is he thrown into such confusion, as though he had just committed some terrible crime within his four walls? As though he had been forging paper money? Or writing some atrocious poetry to be sent to a journal with an anonymous letter, in which he will explain that, the poet having recently died, he, his friend, deems it his sacred duty to publish his verses? Can you tell me, Nastenka, why the conversation between the two friends never really gets going? Why doesn’t laughter or some witty remark escape the lips of the perplexed caller, who had so inopportunely dropped out of the blue, and who at other times is so fond of laughter and all sorts of quips and cranks? And conversations about the fair sex. And other cheerful subjects. And why does the visitor, who is most probably a recent acquaintance and on his first visit—for in this case there will never be a second, and his visitor will never call again—why, I say, does this visitor feel so embarrassed himself? Why, in spite of his wit (if, that is, he has any), is he so tongue-tied as he looks at the disconcerted face of his host, who is, in turn, utterly at a loss and bewildered after his herculean efforts to smooth things over, and fumbles desperately for a subject to enliven the conversation, to convince his host that he, too, is a man of the world, that he too can talk of the fair sex? The host does everything in fact to please the poor man, who seems to have come to the wrong place and called on him by mistake, by at least showing how anxious he is to entertain him. And why does the visitor, having most conveniently remembered a most urgent business appointment which never existed, all of a sudden grab his hat and take his leave, snatching away his hand from the clammy grasp of his host, who, in a vain attempt to recover what is irretrievably lost, is doing his best to show how sorry he is? Why does his friend burst out laughing the moment he finds himself on the other side of the door? Why does he vow never to call on this queer fellow again, excellent fellow though he undoubtedly is? Why at the same time can’t he resist the temptation of indulging in the amusing, if rather farfetched, fancy of comparing the face of his friend during his visit with the expression of an unhappy kitten, roughly handled, frightened, and subjected to all sorts of indignities, by children who had treacherously captured and humiliated it? A kitten that hides itself away from its tormentors under a chair, in the dark, where, left in peace at last, it cannot help bristling up, spitting, and washing its insulted face with both paws for a whole hour, and long afterwards looking coldly at life and nature and even the bits saved up for it from the master’s table by a sympathetic housekeeper?”

  “Now, look,” interrupted Nastenka, who had listened to me all the time in amazement, opening her eyes and pretty mouth, “look, I haven’t the faintest idea why it all happened and why you should ask me such absurd questions. All I know is that all these adventures have most certainly happened to you, and exactly as you told me.”

  “Indubitably,” I replied, keeping a very straight face.

  “Well,” said Nastenka, “if it’s indubitably, then please go on, for I’m dying to hear how it will all end.”

  “You want to know, Nastenka, what our hero did in his room, or rather what I did in my room, since the hero of this story is none other than my own humble self? You want to know why I was so alarmed and upset for a whole day by the unexpected visit of a friend? You want to know why I was in such a flurry of excitement, why I blushed to the roots of my hair, when the door of my room opened? Why I was not able to entertain my visitor, and why I perished so ignominiously, crushed by the weight of my own hospitality?”

  “Yes, yes, of course I do,” answered Nastenka. “That’s the whole point. And, please, I do appreciate the beautiful way in which you’re telling your story, but don’t you think perhaps you ought to tell it a little less beautifully? You see, you talk as if you were reading from a book.”

  “Nastenka,” I said in a very grave and solemn voice, scarcely able to keep myself from laughing, “dear Nastenka, I know I’m telling my story very beautifully, but I’m afraid I can’t tell it any other way. For at this moment, Nastenka, at this moment, I am like the spirit of King Solomon when, after being imprisoned for a thousand years in a jar under seven seals, all the seven seals have at last been removed. At this moment, dear Nastenka, when we’ve met again after so long a separation—for I’ve known you for ages, dear Nastenka, for I’ve been looking for someone for ages and that’s a sure sign that it was you I was looking for and, moreover, that it was ordained that we two should meet now—just at this very moment, Nastenka, a thousand floodgates have opened up in my head and I must overflow in a cataract of wo
rds, or I shall burst. So I beg you to listen to me like a good and obedient girl and not to interrupt me, Nastenka, or I shan’t say another word.”

  “No, no, no! Please, go on. You mustn’t stop. I shan’t say another word, I promise.”

  “Well, to continue. There is, Nastenka, my dear, dear friend, one hour in my day which I love exceedingly. It is the hour when practically all business, office hours and duties are at an end, and everyone is hurrying home to dinner, to lie down, to have a rest, and as they walk along they think of other pleasant ways of spending the evening, the night, and the rest of their leisure time. At that hour our hero—for I must ask your permission, Nastenka, to tell my story in the third person, for one feels awfully ashamed to tell it in the first—and so at that hour our hero, who has not been wasting his time, either, is walking along with the others. But a strange expression of pleasure plays on his pale and slightly crumpled-looking face. It is not with indifference that he looks at the sunset which is slowly fading on the cold Petersburg sky. When I say he looks, I’m telling a lie: he does not look at it, but is contemplating it without, as it were, being aware of it himself, as though he were tired or preoccupied at the same time with some other more interesting subject, being able to spare only a passing and almost unintentional glance at what is taking place around him. He is glad to have finished till next day with all tiresome business. He is happy as a schoolboy who has been let out of the classroom and is free to devote all his time to his favourite games and forbidden pastimes. Take a good look at him, Nastenka: you will at once perceive that his feeling of joy has had a pleasant effect on his weak nerves and his morbidly excited imagination. Look! he is thinking of something. Of dinner perhaps? Or how he’s going to spend the evening? What is he looking at like that? At the gentleman of the solidly prosperous exterior who is bowing so picturesquely to the lady who drives past in a splendid carriage drawn by a pair of mettlesome horses? No, Nastenka, what do all those trivial things matter to him now? He is rich beyond compare with his own individual life; he has become rich in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, and it was not for nothing that the farewell ray of the setting sun flashed so gaily across his vision and called forth a whole swarm of impressions from his glowing heart. Now he hardly notices the road on which at any other time every trivial detail would have attracted his attention. Now ‘the Goddess of Fancy’ (if you have read your Zhukovsky, dear Nastenka) has already spun the golden warp with her wanton hand and is at this very moment weaving patterns of a wondrous, fantastic life before his mind’s eye—and, who knows, maybe has transported him with her wanton hand to the seventh crystalline sphere from the excellent granite pavement on which he is now wending his way home. Try stopping him now, ask him suddenly where he is standing now, through what streets he has been walking, and it is certain he will not be able to remember anything, neither where he has been, nor where he is standing now, and, flushing with vexation, he will most certainly tell some lie to save appearances. That is why he starts violently, almost crying out, and looks round in horror when a dear old lady stops him in the middle of the pavement and politely asks him the way. Frowning with vexation, he walks on, scarcely aware of the passers-by who smile as they look at him and turn round to follow him with their eyes. He does not notice the little girl who, after timidly making way for him, bursts out laughing as she gazes at his broad, contemplative smile and wild gesticulations. And still the same fancy in her frolicsome flight catches up the old lady, the passers-by, the laughing little girl, and the bargees who have settled down to their evening meal on the barges which dam up the Fontanka (our hero, let us suppose, is walking along the Fontanka Embankment at that moment), and playfully weaves everybody and everything into her canvas, like a fly in a spider’s web. And so, with fresh food for his fancy to feed on, the queer fellow at last comes home to his comfortable little den and sits down to his dinner. It is long after he has finished his meal, however, when, after clearing the table, Matryona, the preoccupied and everlastingly melancholy old woman who waits on him, gives him his pipe, that he recovers from his reverie and is shocked to find that he has had his dinner, although he has no recollection whatever how it has all happened. It has grown dark in the little room; he feels empty and forlorn; his castle in the air comes crumbling noiselessly around him, without a sound, and it vanishes like a dream, without leaving a trace behind, and he cannot remember himself what he was dreaming of. But a vague sensation faintly stirs his blood and a perturbation such as he has known many times before agitates his breast. A new longing temptingly tickles and excites his fancy, and imperceptibly conjures up a whole swarm of fresh phantoms. Silence reigns in the little room; solitude and a feeling of indolence enfold his imagination in a sweet embrace; it catches fire, burning gently at first, simmering like the water in the coffee-pot of old Matryona, who is moving placidly about her kitchen, making her execrable coffee. Very soon it begins flaring up fitfully, and the book, picked up aimlessly and at random, drops out of the hand of my dreamer, before he has reached the third page. His imagination is once more ready for action, excited, and in a flash a new world, a new fascinating life, once more opens up enchanting vistas before him. A new dream—new happiness! A new dose of subtle, voluptuous poison! Oh, what is there in our humdrum existence to interest him? To his corrupted mind, our life, Nastenka, yours and mine, is so dull, so slow, so insipid! To his mind we are all so dissatisfied with our fate, so tired of our life! And, to be sure, Nastenka, how cold, gloomy, and, as it were, out of humour everything about us is at the first glance! ‘Poor things!’ my dreamer thinks. And it is not surprising that he should think so! Look at those magical phantoms which so enchantingly, so capriciously, so vastly, and so boundlessly, are conjured up before his mind’s eye in so magical and thrilling a picture, a picture in which, needless to say, he himself, our dreamer, in his own precious person, occupies the most prominent place! Look what an amazing sea of adventures, what a never-ending paradise of ecstatic dreams! You will perhaps ask me what is he dreaming of? But why ask? He is dreaming of everything—of the mission of the poet, first un-recognised, then crowned with laurels, of St. Bartholomew’s Night, of Diana Vernon, the heroine of ‘Rob Roy,’ of what a heroic role he would have played at the taking of Kazan by Ivan Vassilyevich, of Walter Scott’s other heroines—Clara Mowbray and Effie Deans, of the Council of the Prelates and Huss before them, of the rising of the dead in ‘Robert the Devil’ (remember the music? It smells of the churchyard!), of the Battle of Berezina, of the poetry reading at Countess Vorontsova-Dashkova’s, of Danton, of Cleopatra i suoi amanti, of Pushkin’s ‘Little House in Kolomna,’ of his own little home and a sweet creature beside him, who is listening to him, with her pretty mouth and eyes open, as you are listening to me now, my dear little angel.… No, Nastenka, what can he, voluptuous sluggard that he is, what can he find so attractive in the life which you and I desire so much? He thinks it a poor, miserable sort of life, and little does he know that some day perhaps the unhappy hour will strike for him too, when he will gladly give up all his fantastical years for one day of that miserable life, and give them up not in exchange for joy or happiness, but without caring what befalls him in that hour of affliction, remorse, and unconstrained grief. But so long as that perilous time is not yet—he desires nothing, for he is above all desire, for he is sated, for he is the artist of his own life, which he recreates in himself to suit whatever new fancy he pleases. And how easily, how naturally, is this imaginary, fantastic world created! As though it were not a dream at all! Indeed, he is sometimes ready to believe that all this life is not a vision conjured up by his overwrought mind, not a mirage, nor a figment of the imagination, but something real, something that actually exists! Why, Nastenka, why, tell me, does one feel so out of breath at such moments? Why—through what magic? through what strange whim?—is the pulse quickened, do tears gush out of the eyes of the dreamer? Why do his pale, moist cheeks burn? Why is all his being filled with such indescribable delight? Why is it
that long, sleepless nights pass, as though they were an infinitesimal fraction of time, in unending joy and happiness? And why, when the rising sun casts a rosy gleam through the window and fills the gloomy room with its uncertain, fantastic light, as it so often does in Petersburg, does our dreamer, worn out and exhausted, fling himself on the bed and fall asleep, faint with the raptures of his morbidly overwrought spirit, and with such a weary, languorously sweet ache in his heart? No, Nastenka, you can’t help deceiving yourself, you can’t help persuading yourself that his soul is stirred by some true, some genuine passion, you can’t help believing that there is something alive and palpable in his vain and empty dreams! And what a delusion it all is! Now, for instance, love pierces his heart with all its boundless rapture, with all its pains and agonies. Only look at him and you will be convinced. Can you, looking at him, Nastenka, believe that he really never knew her whom he loved so dearly in his frenzied dream? Can it be that he has only seen her in ravishing visions, and that his passion has been nothing but an illusion? Can it be that they have never really spent so many years of their lives together, hand in hand, alone, just the two of them, renouncing the rest of the world, and each of them entirely preoccupied with their own world, their own life? Surely it is she who at the hour of their parting, late at night, lies grieving and sobbing on his bosom, unmindful of the raging storm beneath the relentless sky, unmindful of the wind that snatches and carries away the tears from her dark eyelashes! Surely all this is not a dream—this garden, gloomy, deserted, run wild, with its paths overgrown with weeds, dark and secluded, where they used to walk so often together, where they used to hope, grieve, love, love each other so well, so tenderly and so well! And this queer ancestral mansion, where she has spent so many years in solitude and sadness with her morose old husband, always silent and ill-tempered, who frightened them, who were as timid as children, and who in their fear and anguish hid their love from each other. What misery they suffered, what pangs of terror! How innocent, how pure their love was, and (I need hardly tell you, Nastenka) how malicious people were! And why, of course, he meets her afterwards, far from his native shores, beneath the scorching southern sky of an alien land, in the wonderful Eternal City, amid the dazzling splendours of a ball, to the thunder of music, in a palazzo (yes, most certainly in a palazzo) flooded with light, on the balcony wreathed in myrtle and roses, where, recognising him, she hastily removes her mask, and whispering, ‘I’m free!’ breaks into sobs and flings herself trembling in his arms. And with a cry of rapture, clinging to each other, they at once forget their unhappiness, their parting, all their sufferings, the dismal house, the old man, the gloomy garden in their far-away country, and the seat on which, with a last passionate kiss, she tore herself away from his arms, numbed with anguish and despair.… Oh, you must agree, Nastenka, that anyone would start, feel embarrassed, and blush like a schoolboy who has just stuffed in his pocket an apple stolen from a neighbour’s garden, if some stalwart, lanky fellow, a fellow fond of a joke and merry company, opened your door and shouted, ‘Hullo, old chap, I’ve just come from Pavlovsk!’ Good Lord! The old count is dying, ineffable bliss is close at hand—and here people come from Pavlovsk!”