The
Dream Of a Ridiculous Man
Fyodor
Dostoevsky
(Translated by
Constance Garnett)
II
You see, though nothing
mattered to me, I could feel pain, for instance. If anyone had
stuck me it would have hurt me. It was the same morally: if
anything very pathetic happened, I should have felt pity just as
I used to do in old days when there were things in life that did
matter to me. I had felt pity that evening. I should have
certainly helped a child. Why, then, had I not helped the little
girl? Because of an idea that occurred to me at the time: when
she was calling and pulling at me, a question suddenly arose
before me and I could not settle it. The question was an idle
one, but I was vexed. I was vexed at the reflection that if I
were going to make an end of myself that night, nothing in life
ought to have mattered to me. Why was it that all at once I did
feel a strange pang, quite incongruous in my position. Really I
do not know better how to convey my fleeting sensation at the
moment, but the sensation persisted at home when I was sitting at
the table, and I was very much irritated as I had not been for a
long time past. One reflection followed another. I saw clearly
that so long as I was still a human being and not nothingness, I
was alive and so could suffer, be angry and feel shame at my
actions. So be it. But if I am going to kill myself, in two
hours, say, what is the little girl to me and what have I to do
with shame or with anything else in the world? I shall turn into
nothing, absolutely nothing. And can it really be true that the
consciousness that I shall completely cease to exist immediately
and so everything else will cease to exist, does not in the least
affect my feeling of pity for the child nor the feeling of shame
after a contemptible action? I stamped and shouted at the unhappy
child as though to say - not only I feel no pity, but even if I
behave inhumanly and contemptibly, I am free to, for in another
two hours everything will be extinguished. Do you believe that
that was why I shouted that? I am almost convinced of it now. I
seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended upon
me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for me
alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for
me. I say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist for
anyone when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is
extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like
a phantom, as a mere appurtenance of my consciousness, for
possibly all this world and all these people are only me myself.
I remember that as I sat and reflected, I turned all these new
questions that swarmed one after another quite the other way, and
thought of something quite new. For instance, a strange
reflection suddenly occurred to me, that if I had lived before on
the moon or on Mars and there had committed the most disgraceful
and dishonorable action and had there been put to such shame and
ignominy as one can only conceive and realize in dreams, in
nightmares, and if, finding myself afterwards on earth, I were
able to retain the memory of what I had done on the other planet
and at the same time knew that I should never, under any
circumstances, return there, then looking from the earth to the
moon - should I care or not? Should I feel shame for that action
or not? These were idle and superfluous questions for the
revolver was already lying before me, and I knew in every fibre
of my being that it would happen for certain, but they excited me
and I raged. I could not die now without having first settled
something. In short, the child had saved me, for I put off my
pistol shot for the sake of these questions. Meanwhile the
clamour had begun to subside in the captain's room: they had
finished their game, were settling down to sleep, and meanwhile
were grumbling and languidly winding up their quarrels. At that
point, I suddenly fell asleep in my chair at the table - a thing
which had never happened to me before. I dropped asleep quite
unawares.
Dreams, as we all know, are
very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling
vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of
jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without
noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time.
Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by
the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my
reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly
incomprehensible things happen to it! Mr brother died five years
ago, for instance. I sometimes dream of him; he takes part in my
affairs, we are very much interested, and yet all through my
dream I quite know and remember that my brother is dead and
buried. How is it that I am not surprised that, though he is
dead, he is here beside me and working with me? Why is it that my
reason fully accepts it? But enough. I will begin about my dream.
Yes, I dreamed a dream, my dream of the third of November. They
tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter
whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me
the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you
know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there
cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so
be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant
to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream - oh, it
revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of
power!
I
III