The Adolescent

I don’t want to crush or torment anyone and I won’t; but I know that if I did want to ruin such-and-such a person, my enemy, no one would keep me from doing it, but everyone would be obliging; and again, enough. I wouldn’t even take revenge on anyone. I was always surprised at how James Rothschild could agree to become a baron! Why, what for, when he’s superior to everyone in the world without that? “Oh, let this insolent general offend me at the posting station, where we’re both waiting for horses; if he knew who I was, he’d run to hitch them up himself and jump out and hasten to seat me in my modest tarantass! They wrote that a certain foreign count or baron, at a certain Viennese railway station, before the public, helped a certain local banker into his shoes, and the man was so ordinary that he allowed it. Oh, let her, let this fearsome beauty (precisely fearsome, there are such!)—the daughter of this magnificent and high-born aristocratic lady, having met me by chance on a steamboat or wherever, look askance and, turning up her nose, wonder scornfully how this humble and puny little man with a newspaper or book in his hands could dare to show up beside her in first class! But if she only knew who was sitting next to her! And she will know—she will know, and will sit down next to me, obedient, timid, gentle, seeking my eyes, glad of my smile . . .” I have purposely introduced these early pictures in order to express my idea more vividly, but the pictures are pale and perhaps trivial. Reality alone justifies everything.

They’ll say it’s stupid to live like that. Why not have a mansion, an open house, gather society, exert influence, get married? But what would Rothschild be then? He’d become like everybody else. All the charm of the “idea” would vanish, all its moral force. As a child I had already learned by heart the monologue of Pushkin’s covetous knight; Pushkin never produced a higher idea than that! I’m also of the same mind now.

“But your ideal is too low,” they’ll say with scorn. “Money, riches! A far cry from social usefulness and humane endeavors!”

But who knows how I’ll use my riches? What is immoral, what is low, in having these millions flow out of a multitude of dirty and pernicious Jewish hands, into the hands of a sober and firm ascetic, who keenly studies the world? Generally, all these dreams of the future, all these conjectures—all this is still like a novel now, and maybe I shouldn’t be writing it down; it should have stayed inside my skull; I also know that maybe no one will read these lines; but if anyone does, would he believe that maybe I, too, was unable to endure the Rothschildian millions? Not because they would crush me, but in quite a different sense, the opposite. In my dreams, I had more than once seized on that moment in the future when my consciousness would be too well satisfied and power would seem all too little. Then—not from boredom, and not from aimless anguish, but because I will desire something boundlessly greater—I will give all my millions away to people; let society distribute all my riches, and I—I will once more mingle with nonentity! Maybe I’ll even turn into that beggar who died on the steamboat, with this difference, that they won’t find anything sewn into my rags. The awareness alone that I had had millions in my hands and had flung them into the mud, would feed me in my wilderness like a raven.²⁸ I’m prepared to think so even now. Yes, my “idea” is that fortress in which I can always and in any case hide from all people, be it even like the beggar who died on the steamboat. This is my poem! And know that I need precisely my whole depraved will—solely to prove to myself that I’m strong enough to renounce it.

They’ll undoubtedly object that this is poetry, and that I’ll never let go of millions, if I’ve got them, and will not turn into a Saratov beggar. Maybe I won’t let go; I’ve merely traced out the ideal of my thought. But I’ll add seriously now: if, in the accumulation of wealth, I should reach the same figure as Rothschild, then it might indeed end with my flinging it to society. (However, it would be hard to do that before the Rothschildian figure.) And I wouldn’t give away half, because then it would be nothing but a banality: I’d only become twice poorer and nothing more; but precisely all, all to the last kopeck, because, having become a beggar, I’d suddenly become twice as rich as Rothschild! If they don’t understand that, it’s not my fault; I won’t explain.