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VILLAGE OF X—-, March 22, 1840.

DEAR SIR,

ALEXEY PETROVITCH,

I have received your letter, and I really don’t know what to say to you. I should not even have answered you at all, if it had not been that I fancied that under your jesting remarks there really lies hid a feeling of some friendliness. Your letter made an unpleasant impression on me. In answer to your rigmarole, as you call it, let me too put to you one question: What for? What have I to do with you, or you with me? I do not ascribe to you any bad motives … on the contrary, I’m grateful for your sympathy … but we are strangers to each other, and I, just now at least, feel not the slightest inclination for greater intimacy with any one whatever.–With sincere esteem, I remain, etc.,

MARYA B.

III

FROM ALEXEY PETROVITCH TO MARYA ALEXANDROVNA

ST. PETERSBURG, March 30.

Thank you, Marya Alexandrovna, thank you for your note, brief as it was. All this time I have been in great suspense; twenty times a day I have thought of you and my letter. You can’t imagine how bitterly I laughed at myself; but now I am in an excellent frame of mind, and very much pleased with myself. Marya Alexandrovna, I am going to begin a correspondence with you! Confess, this was not at all what you expected after your answer; I’m surprised myself at my boldness…. Well, I don’t care, here goes! But don’t be uneasy; I want to talk to you, not of you, but of myself. It’s like this, do you see: it’s absolutely needful for me, in the old-fashioned phraseology, to open my heart to some one. I have not the slightest right to select you for my confidant–agreed.

But listen: I won’t demand of you an answer to my letters; I don’t even want to know whether you read my ‘rigmarole’; but, in the name of all that’s holy, don’t send my letters back to me!

Let me tell you, I am utterly alone on earth. In my youth I led a solitary life, though I never, I remember, posed as a Byronic hero; but first, circumstances, and secondly, a faculty of imaginative dreaming and a love for dreaming, rather cool blood, pride, indolence–a number of different causes, in fact, cut me off from the society of men. The transition from dream-life to real life took place in me late…perhaps too late, perhaps it has not fully taken place up to now. So long as I found entertainment in my own thoughts and feelings, so long as I was capable of abandoning myself to causeless and unuttered transports and so on, I did not complain of my solitude. I had no associates; I had what are called friends. Sometimes I needed their presence, as an electrical machine needs a discharger–and that was all. Love…of that subject we will not speak for the present. But now, I will own, now solitude weighs heavy on me; and at the same time, I see no escape from my position. I do not blame fate; I alone am to blame and am deservedly punished. In my youth I was absorbed by one thing–my precious self; I took my simple-hearted self-love for modesty; I avoided society–and here I am now, a fearful bore to myself. What am I to do with myself? There is no one I love; all my relations with other people are somehow strained and false.

And I’ve no memories either, for in all my past life I can find nothing but my own personality. Save me. To you I have made no passionate protestations of love. You I have never smothered in a flood of aimless babble. I passed by you rather coldly, and it is just for that reason I make up my mind to have recourse to you now. (I have had thoughts of doing so before this, but at that time you were not free….) Among all my self-created sensations, pleasures and sufferings, the one genuine feeling was the not great, but instinctive attraction to you, which withered up at the time, like a single ear of wheat in the midst of worthless weeds…. Let me just for once look into another face, into another soul–my own face has grown hateful to me. I am like a man who should have been condemned to live all his life in a room with walls of looking-glass…. I do not ask of you any sort of confessions–oh mercy, no! Bestow on me a sister’s unspoken sympathy, or at least the simple curiosity of a reader. I will entertain you, I will really.