not had the pleasure….’

‘There, there,’ he interrupted me, ‘I knew that.’

He raised himself and folded his arms; the long shadow of his cap was bent from the wall to the ceiling.

‘And confess, now,’ he added, with a sudden sideway glance at me; ‘I must strike you as a queer fellow, an original, as they say, or possibly as something worse: perhaps you think I affect to be original!’

‘I must repeat again that I don’t know you….’

He looked down an instant.

‘Why have I begun talking so unexpectedly to you, a man utterly a stranger?—the Lord, the Lord only knows!’ (He sighed.) ‘Not through the natural affinity of our souls! Both you and I are respectable people, that’s to say, egoists: neither of us has the least concern with the other; isn’t it so? But we are neither of us sleepy… so why not chat? I’m in the mood, and that’s rare with me. I’m shy, do you see? and not shy because I’m a provincial, of no rank and poor, but because I’m a fearfully vain person. But at times, under favourable circumstances, occasions which I could not, however, particularise nor foresee, my shyness vanishes completely, as at this moment, for instance. At this moment you might set me face to face with the Grand Lama, and I’d ask him for a pinch of snuff. But perhaps you want to go to sleep?’

‘Quite the contrary,’ I hastened to respond; ‘it is a pleasure for me to talk to you.’

‘That is, I amuse you, you mean to say…. All the better…. And so, I tell you, they call me here an original; that’s what they call me when my name is casually mentioned, among other gossip. No one is much concerned about my fate…. They think it wounds me…. Oh, good Lord! if they only knew… it’s just what’s my ruin, that there is absolutely nothing original in me—nothing, except such freaks as, for instance, my conversation at this moment with you; but such freaks are not worth a brass farthing. That’s the cheapest and lowest sort of originality.’

He turned facing me, and waved his hands.

‘Honoured sir!’ he cried, ‘I am of the opinion that life on earth’s only worth living, as a rule, for original people; it’s only they who have a right to live. _Man verre n’est pas grand, maisje bois dans mon verre,_ said someone. Do you see,’ he added in an undertone, ‘how well I pronounce French? What is it to one if one’s a capacious brain, and understands everything, and knows a lot, and keeps pace with the age, if one’s nothing of one’s own, of oneself! One more storehouse for hackneyed commonplaces in the world; and what good does that do to anyone? No, better be stupid even, but in one’s own way! One should have a flavour of one’s own, one’s individual flavour; that’s the thing! And don’t suppose that I am very exacting as to that flavour…. God forbid! There are no end of original people of the sort I mean: look where you will—there’s an original: every live man is an original; but I am not to be reckoned among them!’

‘And yet,’ he went on, after a brief silence, ‘in my youth what expectations I aroused! What a high opinion I cherished of my own individuality before I went abroad, and even, at first, after my return! Well, abroad I kept my ears open, held aloof from everyone, as befits a man like me, who is always seeing through things by himself, and at the end has not understood the A B C!’

‘An original, an original!’ he hurried on, shaking his head reproachfully….’ They call me an original…. In reality, it turns out that there’s not a man in the world less original than your humble servant. I must have been born even in imitation of someone else…. Oh, dear! It seems I am living, too, in imitation of the various authors studied by me; in the sweat of my brow I live: and I’ve studied, and fallen in love, and married, in fact, as it were, not through my own will—as it were, fulfilling some sort of duty, or sort of fate—who’s to make it out?’

He tore the nightcap off his head and flung it on the bed.

‘Would you like me to tell you the story of my life?’ he asked me in an abrupt voice; ‘or, rather, a few incidents of my life?’

‘Please do me the favour.’

‘Or, no, I’d better tell you how I got married. You see marriage is an important thing, the touchstone that tests the whole man: in it, as in a glass, is reflected…. But that sounds too hackneyed…. If you’ll allow me, I’ll take a pinch of snuff.’

He pulled a snuff-box from under his pillow, opened it, and began again, waving the open snuff-box about.

‘Put yourself, honoured sir, in my place…. Judge for yourself, what, now what, tell me as a favour: what benefit could I derive from the encyclopaedia of Hegel? What is there in common, tell me, between that encyclopaedia and Russian life? and how would you advise me to apply it to our life, and not it, the encyclopaedia only, but German philosophy in general…. I will say more—science itself?’

He gave a bound on the bed and muttered to himself, gnashing his teeth angrily.

‘Ah, that’s it, that’s it!… Then why did you go trailing off abroad? Why didn’t you stay at home and study the life surrounding you on the spot? You might have found out its needs and its future, and have come to a clear comprehension of your vocation, so to say…. But, upon my word,’ he went on, changing his tone again as though timidly justifying himself, ‘where is one to study what no sage has yet inscribed in any book? I should have been glad indeed to take lessons of her—of Russian life, I mean—but she’s dumb, the poor dear. You must take her as she is; but that’s beyond my power: you must give me the inference; you must present me with a conclusion. Here you have a conclusion too: listen to our wise men of Moscow—they’re a set of nightingales worth listening to, aren’t they? Yes, that’s the pity of it, that they pipe away like Kursk nightingales, instead of talking as the people talk…. Well, I thought, and thought—«Science, to be sure,» I thought, «is everywhere the same, and truth is the same»—so I was up and off, in God’s name, to foreign parts, to the heathen…. What would you have? I was infatuated with youth and conceit; I didn’t want, you know, to get fat before my time, though they say it’s healthy. Though, indeed, if nature doesn’t put the flesh on your bones, you won’t see much fat on your body!’

‘But I fancy,’ he added, after a moment’s thought, ‘I promised to tell you how I got married—listen. First, I must tell you that my wife is no longer living; secondly… secondly, I see I must give you some account of my youth, or else you won’t be able to make anything out of it…. But don’t you want to go to sleep?’

‘No, I’m not sleepy.’

‘That’s good news. Hark!… how vulgarly Mr. Kantagryuhin is snoring in the next room! I was the son of parents of small property—I say parents, because, according to tradition, I had once had a father as well as a mother, I don’t remember him: he was a narrow-minded man, I’ve been told, with a big nose, freckles, and red hair; he used to take snuff on one side of his nose only; his portrait used to hang in my mother’s bedroom, and very hideous he was in a red uniform with a black collar up to his ears. They used to take me to be whipped before him, and my mother used always on such occasions to point to him, saying, «He would give it to you much more if he were here.» You can imagine what an encouraging effect that had on me. I had no brother nor sister—that’s to say, speaking accurately, I had once had a brother knocking about, with the English disease in his neck, but he soon died…. And why ever, one wonders, should the English disease make its way to the Shtchigri district of the province of Kursk? But that’s neither here nor there. My mother undertook my education with all the vigorous zeal of a country lady of the steppes: she undertook it from the solemn day of my birth till the time when my sixteenth year had come…. You are following my story?’

‘Yes, please go on.’

‘All right. Well, when I was sixteen, my mother promptly dismissed my teacher of French, a German, Filipóvitch, from the Greek settlement of Nyezhin. She conducted me to Moscow, put down my name for the university, and gave up her soul to the Almighty, leaving me in the hands of my uncle, the attorney Koltun-Babur, one of a sort well-known not only in the Shtchigri district. My uncle, the attorney Koltun-Babur, plundered me to the last half-penny, after the custom of guardians…. But again that’s neither here nor there. I entered the university—I must do so much justice to my mother—rather well grounded; but my lack of originality was even then apparent. My childhood was in no way distinguished from the childhood of other boys; I grew up just as languidly and dully—much as if I were under a feather-bed—just as early I began repeating poetry by heart and moping under the pretence of a dreamy