A Gentle Creature and Other Stories

So it is that when we are unhappy we sense more acutely the unhappiness of others; rather than dispersing, the emotion becomes focused...

I was ready to leave with every load, with every worthy individual of respectable appearance hiring a cab; but absolutely nobody invited me, not one; it was as if they had forgotten me, as if I was actually something alien to them!

I was laughed at by everyone upon every occasion. But no one knew or guessed that if there was a man on this earth who knew better than anyone how ridiculous I was, that man was myself, and that was the thing that I found most exasperating of all, that they did not know it.

But scales hung before me and obscured my mind. Fateful, terrible scales! How did it come about that all this fell from my eyes, that all of a sudden I saw the light and understood everything?

All of a sudden, I realized that it would not matter to me whether the world existed or whether there was nothing at all anywhere. I began to intuit and sense with all my being, that there was nothing around me.

Gentle and kindly creatures don’t put up much resistance and, though they may not reveal much of themselves, they have no idea of how to evade a conversation: they are sparing in their replies but they do reply, and the longer it goes on, the more you learn, but you have to keep at it, if that’s what you’re after.

Alas, I had always loved sorrow and grief, but only for myself, for myself; for them I wept in my pity. I stretched out my arms to them in my despair, accusing, cursing, and despising myself. I told them that I had done all this, I alone, that I had brought them corruption, contagion, and lies!

This life you cry up so much is what I wanted to extinguish by suicide, whereas my dream, my dream—oh, it has revealed to me a great, new, regenerated intensity of life!

Perhaps it was because a terrible anguish had developed within my soul, occasioned by a circumstance which loomed infinitely larger than my own self: to be precise, it was the dawning conviction that in the world at large, nothing mattered. I had had a presentiment of this for a good long time, but complete conviction came swiftly during this last year. All of a sudden, I realized that it would not matter to me whether the world existed or whether there was nothing at all anywhere. I began to intuit and sense with all my being, that there was nothing around me.

Dream? What's a dream? Isn't this life of ours a dream?

It begins to seem natural to him that the pleasures attainable through his capricious fantasy are fuller, richer and dearer than life itself. Finally, in his delusion he completely loses that moral sense through which man is capable of appreciating all the beauty of reality. He goes astray, loses himself, lets slip those moments of real happiness; and, in a state of apathy, he folds his arms and does not wish to know that man’s life consists in constant contemplation of oneself in nature and in day-to-day reality.

Towards the end of his article Dostoevsky comments on the true dangers of such dreaming: Little by little our curious fellow begins to withdraw from crowds, from common interests, and gradually and imperceptibly he begins to blunt his talent for real life.

They are fond of reading and they read all sorts of books, even serious scientific books, but they usually lay the book down after reading two or three pages, for they feel completely satisfied. Their imagination, mobile, volatile, light, is already excited, their senses are attuned, and a whole dream-like world, with its joys and sorrows, with its heaven and hell, its ravishing women, heroic deeds … suddenly possesses the entire being of the dreamer … Sometimes whole nights pass unnoticed in undescribed joys; sometimes a paradise of love or a whole lifetime … is experienced in a few hours … The moments of sobering up are terrible; the poor unfortunate cannot bear them and he immediately takes more of his poison in new increased doses.

but also by an article he published in the St Petersburg Gazette in June 1847. In this piece Dostoevsky ironically draws attention to the dreamer as a characteristic Petersburg type, entirely in tune with a city that seemed to the author to encourage withdrawal and alienation and which the hero of Notes from the Underground was later to describe as ‘the most abstract and premeditated city on earth’: Do you know, ladies and gentlemen, what a dreamer is? It is a Petersburg nightmare, it is sin incarnate, it is a tragedy … They [the dreamers] usually live in complete solitude, in some inaccessible quarters, as though they were hiding from people and the world, and, generally, there is something melodramatic about them at first sight. They are gloomy and taciturn with their own people, they are absorbed in themselves and are very fond of anything that does not require any effort, anything light and contemplative, everything that has a tender effect on their feelings or excites their sensations.

The tragedy of the dreamer lies in his inability to establish a balanced relationship between the external world of reality and the inner world of fantasy, as Dostoevsky explained to his brother in a letter of early 1847: ‘The exterior must keep in steady balance with the interior. Otherwise, in the absence of exterior phenomena, the interior will assume too dangerous an upper hand. Nerves and fantasy will occupy a very large place in one’s being.

Well, what if it was a dream, what if it was? This life you cry up so much is what I wanted to extinguish by suicide, whereas my dream, my dream—oh, it has revealed to me a great, new, regenerated intensity of life!    Listen.