Dostoevsky - Humiliated and Insulted

Humiliated and Insulted

The real nineteenth-century prophet was

Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.

Albert Camus

Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss!

Albert Einstein

The only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Goethe once had to delay the completion of one of his novels till experience had furnished him with new situations, but almost before he had arrived at manhood Dostoevsky knew life in its most real forms; poverty and suffering, pain and misery, prison, exile and love were soon familiar to him, and by the lips of Vanya he had told his own story. This note of personal feeling, this harsh reality of actual experience, undoubtedly gives Humiliated and Insulted something of its strange fervour and terrible passion, yet it has not made it egotistic; we see things from every point of view, and we feel not that action has been trammelled by fact, but that fact itself has become ideal and imaginative.

Oscar Wilde

The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.

Virginia Woolf

Humiliated and Insulted

From the Notes of an Unsuccessful Author

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated and presented by Ignat Avsey

ALMA CLASSICS

alma classics
an imprint of

alma books ltd

3 Castle Yard

Richmond

Surrey TW10 6TF

United Kingdom

www.almaclassics.com

Humiliated and Insulted first published in Russian as in 1861

This edition first published by Alma Classics Limited (previously Oneworld Classics Limited) in 2008

Reprinted 2011

This new edition first published by Alma Classics Limited in 2012

English Translation Ignat Avsey, 2008

Extra material Ignat Avsey, 2008

Cover design by Will Dady

isbn : 978-1-84749-269-2

All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.

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Contents

Humiliated and Insulted

Principal Characters

Alexandra Semyonovna : Masloboyevs mistress

Alexander Petrovich : Vanyas publisher

Alyosha, Alexei, Alexei Petrovich : Prince Valkovskys son

Anna Andreyevna : Ikhmenevs wife

Arkhipov : a debauchee and paedophile

Bubnova, Anna Trifonovna : a brothel keeper and landlady

Count Nainsky : Prince Valkovskys relative, a St Petersburg grandee

Countess Zinaida Fyodorovna : Prince Valkovskys mistress

Ikhmenev, Nikolai Sergeich : a landowner, owner of Ikhmenevka

Katya, Katerina Fyodorovna Filimonova : the Countesss step-daughter

Masloboyev, Filip Filipych : Vanyas old school friend and sleuth

Matryona : Ikhmenevs maidservant

Mavra : Natashas maidservant

Natasha, Natalya Nikolayevna : Ikhmenevs daughter

Nelly, Yelena, Lenochka : Smiths granddaughter

Prince Valkovsky, Pyotr Alexandrovich : owner of Vasilevskoye

Sizobryukhov, Stepan Terentych : Arkhipovs companion

Jeremiah Smith : an impoverished industrialist

Vanya, Ivan Petrovich : the narrator, a young author

Part One

L ast year , on the evening of 22nd March, I had a most unusual experience. All day Id been tramping the city in search of lodgings. The place I was then living in was very damp, and I was already starting to develop a nasty cough. Id been meaning to move the previous autumn, but ended up putting it off till spring. I couldnt find anything suitable. First, I wanted self-contained accommodation, not a room in someone elses house and secondly, even if it were only a single room, it would definitely have to be a large one and, it goes without saying, as cheap as possible. I have noticed that in a cramped space ones thoughts too tend to be cramped. Also, while planning my novels, I like to pace up and down the room. Incidentally, Ive always found mulling over my compositions and imagining how they are likely to turn out more enjoyable than actually committing them to paper, and not just out of laziness. I wonder why that is!

I had been feeling unwell since morning, and by evening I was distinctly worse, with a fever coming on. Besides, I had been on my feet all day and was tired. Evening came, and just before dusk I happened to be walking along Voznesensky Prospect. I love the sun, especially the setting March sun in St Petersburg on a clear frosty evening. The whole street is suddenly bathed in brilliant light. All the houses glow. For a time, the grey, yellow and dull-green faades lose their drabness; theres a sense of euphoria, of awakening, as though someone had poked you in the ribs. A new vista, new ideas marvellous what a single ray of sunshine can do to a mans soul!

But the suns rays vanished. The frost was getting sharper and beginning to numb my nose. Dusk was falling. Up and down the street the gas lamps were being lit in the shop windows. As I drew level with Mllers coffee house I came to a dead halt and gazed across the street as though expecting something out of the ordinary to occur, and at that very instant I caught sight of the old man and his dog on the opposite side. I recall very well that my heart sank with some awful presentiment but of what, for the life of me I couldnt fathom.

Im not a mystic; Im no believer in premonitions or fortune-telling. However, possibly like everyone else, I have experienced incidents in my life that were somewhat inexplicable. Take this old man for instance. Why did I, seeing him on that occasion, immediately feel that something rather unusual would happen to me that night? Mind you, I was ill, and feverish impressions are nearly always deceptive.

The stooped old man, with his slow, faltering gait, moved his almost rigid legs like stilts, tapping the paving stones lightly with his stick as he approached the coffee house. In all my life, Ive never met such a strange and incongruous figure. Even before this particular occasion, when we happened to come across each other at Mllers, he had never failed to give me a feeling of unease. His tall frame, his crooked back, his cadaverous octogenarian face, his shabby old coat coming apart at the seams, his crumpled twenty-year-old stovepipe hat barely covering his bald head on the back of which a single tuft of, well, not even grey but yellowish-white hair still survived his movements which seemed to be performed mechanically, as if by clockwork all this could not fail to astonish anyone who met him for the first time. It was really strange to see such a decrepit figure on his own, without anyone to help him, especially since he had the look of a mental patient who had fled from his carers. I also couldnt get over how extraordinarily thin he was. There was hardly any flesh on him his skin appeared to be stretched tight over his bones. His large rheumy eyes circled by dark blue rings were always staring fixedly ahead, never deviating and totally unseeing of that Im certain even if he was looking at you, he went on walking straight at you as if you werent there. I had observed this several times. It was only quite recently that he had begun to frequent Mllers, appearing from goodness knows where, and always accompanied by his dog. Nobody in the coffee house dared to engage him in conversation, nor did he himself ever speak to anyone.