Having sinned, they immediately confessed. He wittily recounted to me how he had sobbed on Makar Ivanovich’s shoulder, summoning him to his study on purpose for the occasion, and she—at the time she was lying unconscious somewhere in her maid’s closet . . .
VI
BUT ENOUGH OF questions and scandalous details. Versilov, having bought out my mother from Makar Ivanovich, soon left, and since then, as I have already written above, began dragging her with him almost everywhere, except on those occasions when he was away for a long time; then he most often left her in the custody of the aunt, that is, Tatyana Pavlovna Prutkov, who always turned up from somewhere on such occasions. They lived in Moscow, lived in various other villages and cities, even abroad, and finally in Petersburg. Of all that later, if it’s worth it. I’ll say only that a year after Makar Ivanovich, I came into the world, then a year later my sister, and then, ten or eleven years later—a sickly boy, my younger brother, who died after a few months. The painful delivery of this child put an end to my mother’s beauty, or so at least I was told: she quickly began to age and weaken.
But, all the same, connections with Makar Ivanovich were never broken off. Wherever the Versilovs were, whether they lived in one place for several years or moved about, Makar Ivanovich never failed to inform “the family” of himself. Some sort of strange relations took shape, somewhat solemn and almost serious. Among the gentry, something comical would inevitably have mixed into such relations, I know that; but here it didn’t happen. Letters were sent twice a year, neither more nor less, and they were extremely like one another. I’ve seen them; there was little of anything personal in them; on the contrary, they contained, as far as possible, only solemn news about the most general events and the most general feelings, if one can say that about feelings: news of his own health first of all, then questions about health, then good wishes, solemn regards and blessings—that’s all. This generality and impersonality seem precisely to constitute all the propriety of tone and all the highest knowledge of behavior in that milieu. “To my dearly beloved and esteemed spouse Sofya Andreevna I send my humblest salutations . . .” “To our beloved children I send my eternally steadfast parental blessing.” The children would all be listed by name, as they accumulated, and I was there, too. I will note in this regard that Makar Ivanovich was clever enough never to refer to “his honor the most esteemed master Andrei Petrovich” as his “benefactor,” though he invariably sent his humblest salutations, asking for his good favor and for God’s blessing upon him. Replies were quickly sent to Makar Ivanovich by my mother, and were always written in exactly the same vein. Versilov, naturally, did not participate in this correspondence. Makar Ivanovich wrote from various ends of Russia, from towns and monasteries, in which he sometimes stayed for long stretches of time. He became what’s known as a wanderer. He never asked for anything; on the other hand, about once every three years he unfailingly came home for a while and stayed right at my mother’s, who, as always happened, had her own apartment separate from Versilov’s apartment. I’ll have to speak about that later, but here I’ll only note that Makar Ivanovich did not sprawl on a sofa in the drawing room, but modestly settled somewhere behind a partition. He never stayed long—five days, a week.
I forgot to say that he was terribly fond and respectful of his last name, “Dolgoruky.” Naturally, that was ridiculously stupid. The stupidest thing was that he liked his last name precisely because there were princes named Dolgoruky. An odd notion, completely upside down.
If I said the whole family was always together, that was without me, naturally. I was like an outcast and had been placed with other people almost from birth. But there was no special intention here, it simply turned out that way for some reason. When my mother gave birth to me, she was still young and beautiful, and that meant he needed her, and a howling baby would naturally have been a hindrance to everything, especially when traveling. That’s why it happened that until I was twenty I saw almost nothing of my mother, except for two or three fleeting occasions. It came about not from my mother’s feelings, but from Versilov’s contempt for people.
VII
NOW ABOUT SOMETHING quite different.
A month earlier, that is, a month before the nineteenth of September, in Moscow, I decided to renounce them all and go into my own idea for good. I set it down like that: “go into my own idea,” because this expression may signify almost my whole main thought—what I live for in the world. Of what this “my own idea” is, all too much will be said later. In the solitary dreaming of my many years of Moscow life, it took shape in me, from the sixth class of high school on, and since then has perhaps not left me for a moment. It swallowed up my whole life. I lived in dreams even before that, lived ever since childhood in a dreamlike realm of a certain hue; but with the appearance of this main idea that swallowed up everything in me, my dreams consolidated and all at once molded themselves into a certain form; from stupid they became reasonable. School did not interfere with dreams; nor did it interfere with the idea. I’ll add, however, that I did poorly in the last year, whereas up to the seventh grade I had always been one of the first, and it happened owing to the same idea, owing to a conclusion, maybe a false one, that I drew from it. So it was not school that interfered with the idea, but the idea that interfered with school. It also interfered with the university. Having finished high school, I immediately intended not only to break radically with everyone, but, if need be, even with the whole world, though I was then only nineteen. I wrote to those I had to, through those I had to, in Petersburg, saying they should leave me in peace for good, not send me any more money for my keep, and, if possible, forget me entirely (that is, naturally, in case they remembered me at all), and finally—that I wouldn’t go to the university, “not for anything.” I was faced with an irrefutable dilemma: either the university and further education, or postpone putting the “idea” to work for another four years; I stood intrepidly for the idea, for I was mathematically convinced. Versilov, my father, whom I had seen only once in my life, for a moment, when I was only ten years old (and who in that one moment had managed to impress me), Versilov, in answer to my letter, which, incidentally, was not sent to him, summoned me to Petersburg himself in a letter written with his own hand, promising me a private post. This summons from a dry and proud man, contemptuous and negligent in my regard, who until now, having produced me and thrown me among strangers, not only did not know me at all, but never even repented of it (who knows, maybe he had a vague and imprecise notion of my very existence, because it turned out later that it was not he who paid for my upkeep in Moscow but others), a summons from this man, I say, who so suddenly remembered me and deigned to write to me in his own hand—this summons enticed me and decided my fate. Strangely, one of the things I liked in his little letter (one small page of small format) was that he didn’t say a word about the university, did not ask me to alter my decision, did not reproach me for not wanting to study, in short, did not produce any parental folderol of that sort, as usually happens, and yet that was precisely bad on his part, in the sense that it testified still more to his negligence about me. I also decided to go because it didn’t interfere in the least with my main dream: “I’ll see what comes of it,” I reasoned, “in any case, I’ll be connected with him only for a time, maybe a very short time. But the moment I see that this step, even if it’s conditional and small, still moves me further away from the main thing, I’ll immediately break with them, drop everything, and withdraw into my shell.” Precisely into a shell! “I’ll hide in it like a turtle”—the comparison pleased me very much. “I won’t be alone,” I went on calculating, going around in a fuddle all those last days in Moscow, “I’ll never be alone now as I was for all those terrible years before: I’ll have my idea with me, which I’ll never betray, even in the event that I like them all there, and they give me happiness, and I live with them for ten years!” It was this impression, I’ll note beforehand, it was precisely this doubleness of my plans and aims, that was already determined in Moscow and that never left me for a moment in Petersburg (for I don’t know if there was a single day in Petersburg that I didn’t set up as my final date for breaking with them and going away)—this doubleness, I say, was also, it seems, one of the main reasons for my many imprudences committed that year, many abominations, even many low acts and, naturally, stupid ones.