was most tormented by who could have sent it to my room, what did they want to do to me, and what was the secret of it? It hid under the chest of drawers, under the wardrobe, crawled into the corners. I sat on a chair with my legs tucked under me. It quickly ran diagonally across the room and disappeared somewhere near my chair. I looked around in fear, but as I was sitting with my legs tucked under me, I hoped it would not crawl up the chair. Suddenly I heard a sort of crackling rustle behind me, almost by my head. I turned and saw that the reptile was crawling up the wall and was already level with my head and even touching my hair with its tail, which was turning and twisting with extreme rapidity. I jumped up, and the animal disappeared. I was afraid to lie down in bed, lest it crawl under the pillow. My mother and an acquaintance of hers came into the room. They tried to catch the reptile, but were calmer than I, and not even afraid. But they understood nothing. Suddenly the reptile crawled out again; this time it crawled very quietly, and as if with some particular intention, twisting slowly, which was still more repulsive, again diagonally across the room, towards the door. Here my mother opened the door and called Norma, our dog—an enormous Newfoundland, black and shaggy; she died some five years ago. She rushed into the room and stopped over the reptile as if rooted to the spot. The reptile also stopped, but was still twisting and flicking the tips of its legs and tail against the floor. Animals cannot feel mystical fear, if I am not mistaken; but at that moment it seemed to me that in Norma's fear there was something as if very extraordinary, as if almost mystical, which meant that she also sensed, as I did, that there was something fatal and some sort of mystery in the beast. She slowly backed away from the reptile, which was quietly and cautiously crawling towards her; it seemed that it wanted to rush at her suddenly and sting her. But, despite all her fear, Norma's gaze was terribly angry, though she was trembling all over. Suddenly she slowly bared her terrible teeth, opened her entire red maw, took aim, readied herself, resolved, and suddenly seized the reptile with her teeth. The reptile must have made a strong movement to escape, because Norma caught it once more, this time in the air, and twice got her whole mouth around it, still in the air, as if gulping it down. The shell cracked in her teeth; the animal's tail and legs stuck out of her mouth, moving with terrible rapidity. Suddenly Norma squealed pitifully: the reptile had managed after all to sting her on the tongue. Squealing and howling with pain, she opened her mouth,

and I saw that the bitten reptile was still stirring as it lay across her mouth, its half-crushed body oozing a large quantity of white juice onto her tongue, resembling the juice of a crushed black cockroach . . . Here I woke up, and the prince came in.

"Gentlemen," said Ippolit, suddenly tearing himself away from his reading and even almost shamefacedly, "I didn't reread it, but it seems I indeed wrote a lot that's superfluous. This dream . . ."

"Is that," Ganya hastened to put in.

"There's too much of the personal, I agree, that is, about me myself..."

As he said this, Ippolit looked weary and faint and wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.

"Yes, sir, you're much too interested in yourself," hissed Lebedev.

"Again, gentlemen, I'm not forcing anyone: whoever doesn't want to listen can leave."

"Throws us . .. out of somebody else's house," Rogozhin growled barely audibly.

"And what if we all suddenly get up and leave?" Ferdyshchenko, who until then, incidentally, had not dared to speak aloud, said unexpectedly.

Ippolit suddenly dropped his eyes and clutched his manuscript; but in that same second he raised his head again and, his eyes flashing, with two red spots on his cheeks, said, looking point-blank at Ferdyshchenko:

"You don't love me at all!"

There was laughter; however, the majority did not laugh. Ippolit blushed terribly.

"Ippolit," said the prince, "close your manuscript and give it to me, and go to bed here in my room. We can talk before we sleep and tomorrow; but on condition that you never open these pages again. Do you want that?"

"Is this possible?" Ippolit looked at him in decided astonishment. "Gentlemen!" he cried, again growing feverishly animated, "a stupid episode, in which I was unable to behave myself. There will be no further interruptions of the reading. Whoever wants to listen, can listen ..."

He hurriedly gulped some water from a glass, hurriedly leaned his elbow on the table, in order to shield himself from others' eyes, and stubbornly went on with his reading. The shame, however, soon left him . . .

The idea (he went on reading) that it was not worth living for a few weeks began to take possession of me in a real sense about a month ago, I think, when I still had four weeks left to live, but it overcame me completely only three days ago, when I returned from that evening in Pavlovsk. The first moment of my being fully, directly pervaded by this thought occurred on the prince's terrace, precisely at the moment when I had decided to make a last test of life, wanted to see people and trees (I said so myself), became excited, insisted on Burdovsky's—"my neighbor's"—rights, and dreamed that they would all suddenly splay their arms wide and take me into their embrace, and ask my forgiveness for something, and I theirs; in short, I ended up as a giftless fool. And it was during those hours that "the ultimate conviction" flared up in me. I am astonished now at how I could have lived for a whole six months without this "conviction"! I knew positively that I had consumption and it was incurable; I did not deceive myself and understood the matter clearly. But the more clearly I understood it, the more convulsively I wanted to live; I clung to life and wanted to live whatever the cost. I agree that I could have become angry then at the dark and blank fate which had decreed that I be squashed like a fly, and, of course, without knowing why; but why did I not end just with anger? Why did I actually begin to live, knowing that it was no longer possible for me to begin; why did I try, knowing that there was no longer anything to try? And meanwhile I could not even read through a book and gave up reading; why read, why learn for six months? This thought made me drop a book more than once.

Yes, that wall of Meyer's can tell a lot! I have written a lot on it! There is not a spot on that dirty wall that I have not learned by heart. That cursed wall! But all the same it is dearer to me than all of Pavlovsk's trees, that is, it should be dearer, if it were not all the same to me now.

I recall now with what greedy interest I began to follow their life; there was no such interest before. Sometimes, when I was so ill that I could not leave the room, I waited for Kolya with impatience and abuse. I went so much into all the little details, was so interested in every sort of rumor, that it seemed I turned into a gossip. I could not understand, for instance, how it was that these people, having so much life, were not able to become rich (however, I don't understand it now either). I knew one poor fellow of whom I was told later that he starved to death, and, I remember, that

made me furious: if it had been possible to revive the poor fellow, I think I would have executed him. Sometimes I felt better for whole weeks and was able to go out in the street; but the street finally began to produce such bitterness in me that I would spend whole days inside on purpose, though I could have gone out like everybody else. I could not bear those scurrying, bustling, eternally worried, gloomy, and anxious people who shuttled around me on the sidewalks. Why their eternal sorrow, their eternal anxiety and bustle; their eternal gloomy spite (for they are spiteful, spiteful, spiteful)? Whose fault is it that they are unhappy and do not know how to live, though they have sixty years of life ahead of them? Why did Zarnitsyn allow himself to die, having sixty years ahead of him? And each of them displays his tatters, his hardworking hands, gets angry and cries: "We work like oxen, we toil, we are hungry as dogs, and poor! The others do not work, do not toil, yet they are rich!" (The eternal refrain!) Alongside them some luckless runt "of the gentlefolk" runs and bustles about from morning till night—Ivan Fomich Surikov, he lives over us, in our house— eternally with holes in his elbows, with torn-off buttons, running errands for various people, delivering messages, and that from morning till night. Go and start a conversation with him: "Poor, destitute, and wretched, the wife died, there was no money for medicine, and in the winter the baby froze to death; the older daughter has become a kept woman . .." he's eternally whimpering, eternally complaining! Oh, never, never have I felt any pity for these fools, not now, not before—I say it with pride! Why isn't he a Rothschild himself? Whose fault is it that he has no millions, as Rothschild has, that he has no mountain of gold imperials and napoleondors,¹⁴ a mountain as high as the ice mountains for sliding during carnival week with all its booths! If he's alive, everything is in his power! Whose fault is it that he doesn't understand that?