The Adolescent

Not long before the French Revolution, a man named Law²⁵ appeared in Paris and undertook a project that was brilliant in principle (afterwards, in fact, it crashed terribly). All Paris was astir; Law’s shares were snapped up, there was a stampede. Money came pouring from all over Paris, as if from a sack, into the house where the subscription was announced; but the house, finally, was not enough: the public crowded in the street—all estates, conditions, ages; bourgeois, nobility, their children, countesses, marquises, public women—everything churned up into a raging, half-crazed mass of people bitten by a rabid dog; ranks, prejudices of breeding and pride, even honor and good name—everything was trampled in the same mud; everyone sacrificed (even women) in order to obtain a few shares. The subscription finally passed into the street, but there was nowhere to write. Here one hunchback was asked to lend his hump for a time, as a table for subscribing to shares. The hunchback accepted—you can imagine for what price! Some time later (very little), it all went bankrupt, it all crashed, the idea went to the devil, and the shares lost all value. Who profited? Only the hunchback, precisely because he did not take shares, but cash in louis d’ors. Well, sirs, I am that very same hunchback! Didn’t I have strength enough not to eat and to save up seventy-two roubles out of kopecks? I’ll also have enough to restrain myself, right in the whirl of the fever that overcomes everybody, to prefer sure money to big money. I’m trifling only in trifles, but in great things I’m not. I often lacked the character for a small forbearance, even after the “idea” was born, but for a big one I’ll always have enough. When my mother served me cold coffee in the morning before I went to work, I got angry and was rude to her, and yet I was the same man who survived a whole month on nothing but bread and water.

In short, not to make money, not to learn how to make money, would be unnatural. It would also be unnatural, with continuous and regular accumulation, with continuous attention and sobermindedness, restraint, economy, with ever-increasing energy, it would be unnatural, I repeat, not to become a millionaire. How did the beggar make his money, if not by fanaticism of character and persistence? Am I worse than that beggar? “And, finally, suppose I don’t achieve anything, suppose my calculation is wrong, suppose I crash and fail—all the same, I’m going. I’m going because I want it that way.” That’s what I said still in Moscow.

They’ll tell me there’s no “idea” here, and precisely nothing new. But I say, and for the last time now, that there’s incalculably much idea and infinitely much that’s new.

Oh, I did anticipate how trivial all the objections would be, and how trivial I myself would be, explaining the “idea”: well, what have I said? I didn’t say even a hundredth part; I feel that it came out petty, crude, superficial, and even somehow younger than my years.

III

IT REMAINS TO answer the “what for” and “why,” the “moral or not,” and so on, and so forth. I’ve promised to answer that.

I feel sad to disappoint the reader at once, sad but glad as well. Be it known that the goals of my “idea” have absolutely no feeling of “revenge,” nothing “Byronic”—no curse, no orphaned complaints, no tears of illegitimacy, nothing, nothing. In short, a romantic lady, if she were to come across my “Notes,” would be crestfallen at once. The whole goal of my “idea” is—solitude.

“But one can achieve solitude without any bristling up about becoming Rothschild. What has Rothschild got to do with it?”

“Just this, that, besides solitude, I also need power.”

I’ll preface that. The reader will perhaps be horrified at the frankness of my confession and will ask himself simpleheartedly: how is it that the author doesn’t blush? I reply that I’m not writing for publication; I’ll probably have a reader only in some ten years, when everything is already so apparent, past and proven, that there will no longer be any point in blushing. And therefore, if I sometimes address the reader in my notes, it’s merely a device. My reader is a fantastic character.