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But, all the same, co
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 co
Of course, a father had suddenly appeared, whom I had never had before. This thought intoxicated me both while I was packing in Moscow and on the train. The fact of a father was nothing, and I disliked tender feelings, but this man did not want to know me and humiliated me, while all those years I had dreamed long and hard of him (if one can say that about dreaming). Each of my dreams since childhood had echoed with him, had hovered around him, had in the final result come down to him. I don’t know whether I hated or loved him, but he filled all my future, all my reckoning in life, with himself—and that happened on its own, it went together with my growing up.