The Adolescent

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.24 Know 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 Law25 appeared 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 a

In short, not to make money, not to learn how to make money, would be u

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 begi

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 ope

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.