The Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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      PART I

       Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

       LAST YEAR, on the evening of March 22, I had a very strange adventure. All that day I had been walking about the town trying to find a lodging. My old one was very damp, and I had begun to have an ominous cough. Ever since the autumn I had been meaning to move, but I had hung on till the spring. I had not been able to find anything decent all day. In the first place I wanted a separate tenement, not a room in other people’s lodgings; secondly, though I could do with one room, it must be a large one, and, of course, it had at the same time to be as cheap as possible. I have observed that in a confined space even thought is cramped; When I was brooding over a future novel I liked to walk up and down the room. By the way, I always like better brooding over my works and dreaming how they should be written than actually writing them. And this really is not from laziness. Why is it?

      I had been feeling unwell all day, and towards sunset I felt really very ill. Something like a fever set in. Moreover, I had been all day long on my legs and was tired. Towards evening, just before it got dark, I was walking along the Voznesensky Prospect. I love the March sun in Petersburg, especially at sunset, in clear frosty weather, of course. The whole street suddenly glitters, bathed in brilliant light. All the houses seem suddenly, as it were, to sparkle. Their grey, yellow, and dirty-green hues for an instant lose all their gloominess, it is as though there were a sudden clearness in one’s soul, as though one were startled, or as though someone had nudged one with his elbow.

      There is a new outlook, a new train of thought…. It is wonderful what one ray of sunshine can do for the soul of man!

      But the ray of sunshine had died away; the frost grew sharper, and began to nip one’s nose: the twilight deepened; gas flared from the shops. As I reached Muller’s, the confectioner’s, I suddenly stood stockstill and began staring at that side of the street, as though I had a presentiment that something extraordinary was just going to happen to me; and at that very instant I saw, on the opposite side of the street, the old man with his dog. I remember quite well that I felt an unpleasant sensation clutch at my heart, and I could not myself have told what that sensation was.

      I am not a mystic. I scarcely believe in presentiments and divinings, yet I have, as probably most people have, had some rather inexplicable experiences in my life. For example, this old man: why was it that at that meeting with him I had at once a presentiment that that same evening something not quite ordinary would happen to me? I was ill, however, and sensations in illness are almost always deceptive.

      The old man, stooping and tapping the pavement with his stick, drew near the confectioner’s, with his slow, feeble step, moving his legs as though they were sticks, and seeming not to bend them. I had never in my life come across such a strange, grotesque figure, and, whenever I had met him at Muller’s before, he had always made a painful impression on me. His tall figure, his bent back, his deathlike face with the stamp of eighty years upon it, his old greatcoat torn at the seams, the battered round hat, at least twenty years old, which covered his head — bald but for one lock of hair not grey but yellowish-white — all his movements, which seemed performed, as it were, aimlessly, as though worked by springs — no one who met him for the first time could help being struck by all this. It really was strange to see an old man who had so outlived the natural spar, alone, with no one to look after him, especially as he looked like a madman who had escaped from his keepers. I was struck, too, by his extraordinary СКАЧАТЬ