Demons

I decided finally that I could leave, and went downstairs. I did not meet anyone. About three hours later we were all in our shirtsleeves, drinking tea in my rooms and playing a friendly game of cards. Lebyadkin was reciting poetry. Many stories were told and, as if by design, they were all successful and fu

But by around eleven o'clock the caretaker's girl came ru

I was hardly inconvenienced, though they did ask the appropriate questions. But apart from the fact that the girl had been sick and occasionally delirious over the past few days, so that for my part I had offered a doctor at my own expense, I had decidedly nothing to give as evidence. They also asked me about the penknife; I said that the landlady had given the girl a whipping, but that it was nothing. No one found out that I had come in the evening. I heard nothing about the results of the medical examination.

For a week or so I did not go back there. I went when they had long since buried her, in order to give up the apartment. The landlady was still crying, though she was already pottering with her rags and sewing as before. "It was on account of your knife that I offended her," she said to me, but without great reproach. I paid her off on the pretext that I really could no longer remain in such an apartment and receive Nina Savelyevna in it. She praised Nina Savelyevna once more on parting. As I left I gave her five roubles on top of what I owed for the apartment.

And generally I was bored with life then, to the point of stupefaction. Once the danger was past, I all but completely forgot the incident on Gorokhovy Street, like everything else then, except that for some time I remembered spitefully how I had turned coward. I vented my spite on whomever I could. At the same time, but not at all for any reason or other, I conceived the notion of somehow maiming my life, only in as repulsive a way as possible. For a year already I had been thinking of shooting myself; something better turned up. Once, looking at the lame Marya Timofeevna Lebyadkin, who was something of a servant in those corners, not yet crazy then, but simply an ecstatic idiot, and secretly madly in love with me (as our boys spied out), I decided suddenly to marry her. The thought of Stavrogin marrying such a last being tickled my nerves. Nothing uglier could be imagined. But I will not venture to decide whether my decisiveness included at least unconsciously (of course, unconsciously!) my spite at the base cowardice that had come over me after the thing with Matryosha. I do not think so, really; but in any case I went to the altar not just because of "a bet for wine after a drunken di

After the wedding, I left for the province to see my mother. I went for distraction, because it was unbearable. In our town I left the idea that I was crazy—an idea not eradicated even now, and undoubtedly harmful to me, as I will explain further on. I then went abroad and stayed for four years.

I was in the East, Istood through eight-hour vigils on Mount Athos,[221] was in Egypt, lived in Switzerland, even went to Iceland; sat out a whole yearlong course in Gottingen. During the last year I became very close with one noble Russian family in Paris and two Russian girls in Switzerland. About two years ago, in Frankfurt, passing by a stationer's shop, I noticed among the photographs on display a small picture of a girl, dressed in an elegant child's costume, but very much resembling Matryosha. I bought the picture at once and, coming to my hotel, placed it on the mantelpiece. There it stayed untouched for about a week, and I never once glanced at it; when I left Frankfurt, I forgot to take it with me.

I am setting this down precisely in order to prove the extent of my power over my memories, and how unfeeling for them I had become. I would reject them all in a mass, and the whole mass would obediently disappear each time the moment I wanted it to. I have always felt bored remembering the past, and was never able to talk about the past, as almost everyone does. As for Matryosha, I even forgot her picture on the mantelpiece.

About a year ago, in the spring, traveling through Germany, I absentmindedly missed the station where I should have changed for my direction, and got onto a different branch. They let me off at the next station; it was three o'clock in the afternoon, a bright day. It was a tiny German town. A hotel was pointed out to me. I had to wait: the next train came through at eleven o'clock at night. I was even pleased with the adventure, because I was not in any hurry. The hotel turned out to be trashy and small, but all sunk in greenery and completely surrounded with flower beds. They gave me a cramped little room. I had a nice meal, and since I had spent the whole night on the train, I fell asleep excellently after di

I had a dream which for me was totally unexpected, because I had never before had one like it. In Dresden, in the gallery, there exists a painting by Claude Lorrain—"Acis and Galatea,"[222]I think, according to the catalogue, but I always called it "The Golden Age," I do not know why myself. I had seen it before, but now, three days earlier, I had noticed it once again as I was passing through. It was this painting that I saw in my dream, though not as a painting, but as if it were some kind of verity.

A corner of the Greek archipelago; blue, caressing waves, islands and rocks, a luxuriant coastline, a magic panorama in the distance, an inviting sunset—words ca