The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
was allowed to burn, whether a curtain was hanging properly, whether a
dress was a success, whether a lesson was well learned, or whether a
medicine was swallowed.
“I saw clearly that to her all this was, more than anything else, a
means of forgetting, an intoxication, just as hunting, card-playing,
and my functions at the Zemstvo served the same purpose for me. It is
true that in addition I had an intoxication literally
speaking,—tobacco, which I smoked in large quantities, and wine, upon
which I did not get drunk, but of which I took too much. Vodka before
meals, and during meals two glasses of wine, so that a perpetual mist
concealed the turmoil of existence.
“These new theories of hypnotism, of mental maladies, of hysteria are
not simple stupidities, but dangerous or evil stupidities. Charcot, I
am sure, would have said that my wife was hysterical, and of me he
would have said that I was an abnormal being, and he would have wanted
to treat me. But in us there was nothing requiring treatment. All this
mental malady was the simple result of the fact that we were living
immorally. Thanks to this immoral life, we suffered, and, to stifle our
sufferings, we tried abnormal means, which the doctors call the
‘symptoms’ of a mental malady,—_hysteria_.
“There was no occasion in all this to apply for treatment to Charcot or
to anybody else. Neither suggestion nor bromide would have been
effective in working our cure. The needful thing was an examination of
the origin of the evil. It is as when one is sitting on a nail; if you
see the nail, you see that which is irregular in your life, and you
avoid it. Then the pain stops, without any necessity of stifling it.
Our pain arose from the irregularity of our life, and also my jealousy,
my irritability, and the necessity of keeping myself in a state of
perpetual semi-intoxication by hunting, card-playing, and, above all,
the use of wine and tobacco. It was because of this irregularity that
my wife so passionately pursued her occupations. The sudden changes of
her disposition, from extreme sadness to extreme gayety, and her
babble, arose from the need of forgetting herself, of forgetting her
life, in the continual intoxication of varied and very brief
occupations.
“Thus we lived in a perpetual fog, in which we did not distinguish our
condition. We were like two galley-slaves fastened to the same ball,
cursing each other, poisoning each other’s existence, and trying to
shake each other off. I was still unaware that ninety-nine families out
of every hundred live in the same hell, and that it cannot be
otherwise. I had not learned this fact from others or from myself. The
coincidences that are met in regular, and even in irregular life, are
surprising. At the very period when the life of parents becomes
impossible, it becomes indispensable that they go to the city to live,
in order to educate their children. That is what we did.”
Posdnicheff became silent, and twice there escaped him, in the
half-darkness, sighs, which at that moment seemed to me like suppressed
sobs. Then he continued.
CHAPTER XVIII.
“So we lived in the city. In the city the wretched feel less sad. One
can live there a hundred years without being noticed, and be dead a
long time before anybody will notice it. People have no time to inquire
into your life. All are absorbed. Business, social relations, art, the
health of children, their education. And there are visits that must be
received and made; it is necessary to see this one, it is necessary to
hear that one or the other one. In the city there are always one, two,
or three celebrities that it is indispensable that one should visit.
“Now one must care for himself, or care for such or such a little one,
now it is the professor, the private tutor, the governesses, . . . and
life is absolutely empty. In this activity we were less conscious of
the sufferings of our cohabitation. Moreover, in the first of it, we
had a superb occupation,—the arrangement of the new dwelling, and then,
too, the moving from the city to the country, and from the country to
the city.
“Thus we spent a winter. The following winter an incident happened to
us which passed unnoticed, but which was the fundamental cause of all
that happened later. My wife was suffering, and the rascals (the
doctors) would not permit her to conceive a child, and taught her how
to avoid it. I was profoundly disgusted. I struggled vainly against it,
but she insisted frivolously and obstinately, and I surrendered. The
last justification of our life as wretches was thereby suppressed, and
life became baser than ever.
“The peasant and the workingman need children, and hence their conjugal
relations have a justification. But we, when we have a few children,
have no need of any more. They make a superfluous confusion of expenses
and joint heirs, and are an embarrassment. Consequently we have no
excuses for our existence as wretches, but we are so deeply degraded
that we do not see the necessity of a justification. The majority of
people in contemporary society give themselves up to this debauchery
without the slightest remorse. We have no conscience left, except, so
to speak, the conscience of public opinion and of the criminal code.
But in this matter neither of these consciences is struck. There is not
a being in society who blushes at it. Each one practices it,—X, Y, Z,
etc. What is the use of multiplying beggars, and depriving ourselves of
the joys of social life? There is no necessity of having conscience
before the criminal code, or of fearing it: low girls, soldiers’ wives
who throw their children into ponds or wells, these certainly must be
put in prison. But with us the suppression is effected opportunely and
properly.
“Thus we passed two years more. The method prescribed by the rascals
had evidently succeeded. My wife had grown stouter and handsomer. It
was the beauty of the end of summer. She felt it, and paid much
attention to her person. She had acquired that provoking beauty that
stirs men. She was in all the brilliancy of the wife of thirty years,
who conceives no children, eats heartily, and is excited. The very
sight of her was enough to frighten one. She was like a spirited
carriage-horse that has long been idle, and suddenly finds itself
without a bridle. As for my wife, she had no bridle, as for that
matter, ninety-nine hundredths of our women have none.”
CHAPTER XIX.
Posdnicheff’s face had become transformed; his eyes were pitiable;
their expression seemed strange, like that of another being than
himself; his moustache and beard turned up toward the top of his face;
his nose was diminished, and his mouth enlarged, immense, frightful.
“Yes,” he resumed “she had grown stouter since ceasing to conceive, and
her anxieties about her children began to disappear. Not even to
disappear. One would have said that she was waking from a long
intoxication, that on coming to herself she had perceived the entire
universe with its joys, a whole world in which she had not learned to
live, and which she did not understand.
“‘If only this world shall not vanish! When time is past, when old age
comes, one cannot recover it.’ Thus, I believe, she thought, or rather
felt. Moreover, she could neither think nor feel otherwise. She had
been brought up in this idea that there is in the world but one thing
worthy of attention,—love. In marrying, she had known something of this
love, but very far from everything that she had understood as promised
her, everything that she expected. How many disillusions! How much
suffering! And an unexpected torture,—the children! This torture had
told upon her, and then, thanks to the obliging doctor, she had learned
that it is possible to avoid having children. That had made her glad.
She had tried, and she was now revived for the only thing that she
knew,—for love. But love with a husband polluted by jealousy and
ill-nature was no longer her ideal. She began to think of some other
tenderness; at least, that is what I thought. She looked about her as
if expecting some event or some being. I noticed it, and I could not
help being anxious.
“Always, now, it happened that, in talking with me through a third
party (that is, in talking with others, but with the intention that I
should hear), she boldly expressed,—not thinking that an hour before
she had said the opposite,—half joking, half seriously, this idea that
maternal anxieties are a delusion; that it is not worth while to
sacrifice one’s life to children. When one is young, it is necessary to
enjoy life. So she occupied herself less with the children, not with
the same intensity as formerly, and paid more and more attention to
herself, to her face,—although she concealed it,—to her pleasures, and
even to her perfection from the worldly point of view. She began to
devote herself passionately to the piano, which had formerly stood
forgotten in the corner. There, at the piano, began the adventure.
“The _man_ appeared.”
Posdnicheff seemed embarrassed, and twice again there escaped him that
nasal sound of which I spoke above. I thought that it gave him pain to
refer to the _man_, and to remember him. He made an effort, as if to
break down the obstacle that embarrassed him, and continued with
determination.
“He was a bad man in my eyes, and not because he has played such an
important _rôle_ in my life, but because he was really such. For the
rest, from the fact that he was bad, we must conclude that he was
irresponsible. He was a musician, a violinist. Not a professional
musician, but half man of the world, half artist. His father, a country
proprietor, was a neighbor of my father’s. The father had become
ruined, and the children, three boys, were all sent away. Our man, the
youngest, was sent to his godmother at Paris. There they placed him in
the Conservatory, for he showed a taste for music. He came out a
violinist, and played in concerts.”
On the point of speaking evil of the other, Posdnicheff checked
himself, stopped, and said suddenly:
“In truth, I know not how he lived. I only know that that year he came
to Russia, and came to see me. Moist eyes of almond shape, smiling red
lips, a little moustache well waxed, hair brushed in the latest
fashion, a vulgarly pretty face,—what the women call ‘not bad,’—feebly
built physically, but with no deformity; with hips as broad as a
woman’s; correct, and insinuating himself into the familiarity of
people as far as possible, but having that keen sense that quickly
detects a false step and retires in reason,—a man, in short, observant
of the external rules of dignity, with that special Parisianism that is
revealed in buttoned boots, a gaudy cravat, and that something which
foreigners pick up in Paris, and which, in its peculiarity and novelty,
always has an influence on our women. In his manners an external and
artificial gayety, a way, you know, of referring to everything by
hints, by unfinished fragments, as if everything that one says you knew
already, recalled it, and could supply the omissions. Well, he, with
his music, was the cause of all.
“At the trial the affair was so represented that everything seemed
attributable to jealousy. It is false,—that is, not quite false, but
there was something else. The verdict was rendered that I was a
deceived husband, that I had killed in defence of my sullied honor
(that is the way they put it in their language), and thus I was
acquitted. I tried to explain the affair from my own point of view, but
they concluded that I simply wanted to rehabilitate the memory of my
wife. Her relations with the musician, whatever they may have been, are
now of no importance to me or to her. The important part is what I have