Above all, take no risks, and that is precisely possible only with character. Just recently, when I was already in Petersburg, there was a subscription for railway shares; those who managed to subscribe made a lot. For some time the shares were going up. And then suppose, suddenly, somebody who didn’t manage to subscribe, or just turned greedy, seeing me with the shares in my hand, offered to buy them from me, with a premium of so much percent. Why, I’d certainly sell them to him at once. They’d start laughing at me, of course, saying: if you’d waited, you would have made ten times more. Right, sirs, but my premium is more certain, since it’s already in my pocket, while yours is still flying around. They’ll say you can’t make much that way; excuse me, but there’s your mistake, the mistake of all these Kokorevs, Polyakovs, Gubonins. 24Know the truth: constancy and persistence in making money and, above all, in accumulating it, are stronger than momentary profits, even of a hundred percent!
Not long before the French Revolution, a man named Law 25appeared in Paris and undertook a project that was brilliant in principle (afterwards, in fact, it crashed terribly). All Paris was astir; Law’s shares were snapped up, there was a stampede. Money came pouring from all over Paris, as if from a sack, into the house where the subscription was announced; but the house, finally, was not enough: the public crowded in the street—all estates, conditions, ages; bourgeois, nobility, their children, countesses, marquises, public women—everything churned up into a raging, half-crazed mass of people bitten by a rabid dog; ranks, prejudices of breeding and pride, even honor and good name—everything was trampled in the same mud; everyone sacrificed (even women) in order to obtain a few shares. The subscription finally passed into the street, but there was nowhere to write. Here one hunchback was asked to lend his hump for a time, as a table for subscribing to shares. The hunchback accepted—you can imagine for what price! Some time later (very little), it all went bankrupt, it all crashed, the idea went to the devil, and the shares lost all value. Who profited? Only the hunchback, precisely because he did not take shares, but cash in louis d’ors. Well, sirs, I am that very same hunchback! Didn’t I have strength enough not to eat and to save up seventy-two roubles out of kopecks? I’ll also have enough to restrain myself, right in the whirl of the fever that overcomes everybody, to prefer sure money to big money. I’m trifling only in trifles, but in great things I’m not. I often lacked the character for a small forbearance, even after the “idea” was born, but for a big one I’ll always have enough. When my mother served me cold coffee in the morning before I went to work, I got angry and was rude to her, and yet I was the same man who survived a whole month on nothing but bread and water.
In short, not to make money, not to learn how to make money, would be unnatural. It would also be unnatural, with continuous and regular accumulation, with continuous attention and sobermindedness, restraint, economy, with ever-increasing energy, it would be unnatural, I repeat, not to become a millionaire. How did the beggar make his money, if not by fanaticism of character and persistence? Am I worse than that beggar? “And, finally, suppose I don’t achieve anything, suppose my calculation is wrong, suppose I crash and fail—all the same, I’m going. I’m going because I want it that way.” That’s what I said still in Moscow.
They’ll tell me there’s no “idea” here, and precisely nothing new. But I say, and for the last time now, that there’s incalculably much idea and infinitely much that’s new.
Oh, I did anticipate how trivial all the objections would be, and how trivial I myself would be, explaining the “idea”: well, what have I said? I didn’t say even a hundredth part; I feel that it came out petty, crude, superficial, and even somehow younger than my years.
III
IT REMAINS TO answer the “what for” and “why,” the “moral or not,” and so on, and so forth. I’ve promised to answer that.
I feel sad to disappoint the reader at once, sad but glad as well. Be it known that the goals of my “idea” have absolutely no feeling of “revenge,” nothing “Byronic”—no curse, no orphaned complaints, no tears of illegitimacy, nothing, nothing. In short, a romantic lady, if she were to come across my “Notes,” would be crestfallen at once. The whole goal of my “idea” is—solitude.
“But one can achieve solitude without any bristling up about becoming Rothschild. What has Rothschild got to do with it?”
“Just this, that, besides solitude, I also need power.”
I’ll preface that. The reader will perhaps be horrified at the frankness of my confession and will ask himself simpleheartedly: how is it that the author doesn’t blush? I reply that I’m not writing for publication; I’ll probably have a reader only in some ten years, when everything is already so apparent, past and proven, that there will no longer be any point in blushing. And therefore, if I sometimes address the reader in my notes, it’s merely a device. My reader is a fantastic character.
No, it was not the illegitimacy for which they taunted me so much at Touchard’s, not my sad childhood years, not revenge or the right to protest that was the beginning of my “idea”; my character alone is to blame for it all. From the age of twelve, I think, that is, almost from the birth of proper consciousness, I began not to like people. Not so much not to like, but they somehow became oppressive to me. It was sometimes all too sad for me myself, in my pure moments, that I could in no way speak everything out even to those close to me, that is, I could, but I didn’t want to, I restrained myself for some reason; that I was mistrustful, sullen, and unsociable. Then, too, I had long noticed a feature in myself, almost from childhood, that I all too often accuse others, that I’m all too inclined to accuse them; but this inclination was quite often followed immediately by another thought, which was all too oppressive for me: “Is it not I myself who am to blame, instead of them?” And how often I accused myself in vain! To avoid resolving such questions, I naturally sought solitude. Besides, I never found anything in the company of people, however I tried, and I did try; at least all my peers, all my comrades to a man, proved to be inferior to me in thinking; I don’t remember a single exception.
Yes, I’m glum, I’m continually closed. I often want to leave society. I may also do good to people, but often I don’t see the slightest reason for doing good to them. And people are not at all so beautiful that they should be cared for so much. Why don’t they come forward directly and openly, and why is it so necessary that I should go and foist myself on them? That’s what I asked myself. I’m a grateful being, and I’ve already proved it by a hundred follies. I would instantly respond with openness to an open person and begin to love him at once. And so I did; but they all cheated me at once and closed themselves to me in mockery. The most open of them was Lambert, who used to beat me badly in childhood; but he, too, was merely an open scoundrel and robber; and here, too, his openness came merely from stupidity. These were my thoughts when I came to Petersburg.
Having left Dergachev’s then (God knows what pushed me to go there), I approached Vasin and, on a rapturous impulse, praised him to the skies. And what then? That same evening I already felt that I liked him much less. Why? Precisely because, by praising him, I had lowered myself before him. Yet it seems it should have been the opposite: a man so just and magnanimous as to give another his due, even to his own detriment, such a man is almost superior in his personal dignity to everyone else. And what, then—I knew this, and still I liked Vasin less, even much less, I purposely give an example already familiar to the reader. Even Kraft I remembered with a bitter and sour feeling, because he brought me out to the front hall himself, and so it remained right up to another day, when everything about Kraft became perfectly clear and it was impossible to be angry. From the very lowest grade in school, as soon as any of my comrades got ahead of me in studies, or in witty answers, or in physical strength, I at once stopped keeping company with him and speaking to him. Not that I hated him or wished him to fail; I simply turned away, because such was my character.