Читаем The Adolescent полностью

Was there anger in me? I don’t know, maybe there was. Strangely, there had always been this feature in me, maybe ever since earliest childhood: once evil had been done to me, fulfilled to the utmost, and I had been offended to the final limits, there always appeared in me at once an unquenchable desire to submit passively to the offense and even to outstrip the offender’s desires: “There, you’ve humiliated me, so I’ll humiliate myself still more, look here, admire!” Touchard used to beat me and wanted to show that I was a lackey and not a senator’s son, and so I myself at once entered into the role of lackey then. I not only helped him to dress, but would seize the brush myself and begin brushing the last specks of dust off him, without any request or order from him, sometimes ran after him, in the heat of my lackey zeal, to brush off some last speck of dust from his tailcoat, so that he himself sometimes stopped me: “Enough, enough, Arkady, enough.” He used to come and take off his street clothes—and I would clean them, fold them carefully, and cover them with a checked silk handkerchief. I knew that my comrades laughed and despised me for that, I knew it perfectly well, but that was what I liked: “You wanted me to be a lackey, well, so I’m a lackey, a boor—yes, a boor.” I could keep up this passive hatred and underground spite for years. And what then? At Zershchikov’s I had shouted to the whole hall, in complete frenzy: “I shall denounce you all, roulette is forbidden by law!” And I swear that here, too, there was something as if similar: I had been humiliated, searched, declared a thief, destroyed—“well, then know, all of you, that you’ve guessed right, I’m not only a thief, I’m an informer as well!” Recalling it now, I sum it up and explain it in precisely that way; but then I couldn’t be bothered with analyzing; then I shouted without any intention; even a moment before, I hadn’t known I’d shout that; it shouted itself—there was that streak in my soul.

While I ran, the delirium was undoubtedly already starting, but I remember very well that I was acting consciously. And yet I will say firmly that there was a whole cycle of ideas and conclusions that was impossible for me then; even in those minutes, I felt about myself that “certain thoughts I can have, but others I can’t possibly have.” So, too, certain of my decisions, though made with clear awareness, might not have the least logic in them. Not only that: I remember very well that at some moments I could be fully aware of the absurdity of some decision, and at the same time, with full awareness, set about realizing it. Yes, a crime was hatching that night, and it is only by chance that it wasn’t committed.

Tatyana Pavlovna’s phrase about Versilov suddenly flashed in me then: “He should go to the Nikolaevsky railroad and lay his head on the rails: he’d get it lopped off for him.” This thought momentarily took hold of all my feelings, but I instantly and painfully drove it away: “I’ll lay my head on the rails and die, and tomorrow they’ll say: he did it because he stole, he did it out of shame—no, not for anything!” And then, at that moment, I remember, I suddenly felt an instant of terrible anger. “What then?” raced through my mind. “There’s no way I can vindicate myself, to start a new life is also impossible, and so—submit, become a lackey, a dog, an insect, an informer, a real informer now, but at the same time quietly make preparations, and one day—blow it all sky high, destroy everything, everybody—the guilty and the not-guilty, and then suddenly they’ll all find out that it’s the same one they called a thief . . . and only then kill myself.”