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He saw clearly that all his impetuosity, impatience and feverish haste amounted to nothing more than an unconscious despair at the memory of his squandered talent and that it was more than likely that this talent had never been anything very special, not even in the beginning, that there had been a great deal of blindness, of vain complacency and premature self-satisfaction, and of dreaming and fantasizing about his genius. ‘But,’ B. used to say, ‘I couldn’t help marvelling at my friend’s strange temperament. I saw before my own eyes a desperate, feverish contest taking place between a
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You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.
He always became very envious. I believe it was at this time that his real, permanent madness set in; he had an unshakeable belief that he was the finest violinist in Petersburg but was persecuted by ill luck and that owing to various intrigues he had been misunderstood and left in obscurity. He flattered himself with this notion because he was one of those people who are very fond of seeing themselves among the insulted and injured, of complaining aloud about it and finding secret comfort in gloating over their unrecognized genius.
From that moment there arose in me a boundless love for my father, but it was a strange sort of love, not a childlike feeling. I would say that it was more like a compassionate motherly feeling, if one can use that expression of a child! My father always seemed to me so pitiful, so unbearably tormented, such a crushed creature and so full of suffering that it would have been horribly unnatural for me not to have loved him passionately, not to have comforted him and been tender towards him, not to have done everything possible for him.
I have noticed that many children are abnormally unfeeling and if they do love one person it tends to be to the exclusion of others.
little by little my love, or perhaps I should say my passion (for I do not know a word strong enough to express fully my overwhelming, anguished feelings for my father), reached a kind of morbid anxiety. I had only one true pleasure, which was dreaming and thinking about him. I had only one true desire, which was to do anything that might please him. How many times did I stand on the stairs waiting for him to come in, often shivering and blue with cold, simply in the hope of catching sight of him one second sooner? I used to become almost delirious with joy whenever he offered me the slightest
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But nowadays poverty is almost his happiness: it provides him with an excuse. He can now convince everyone that it’s only poverty that has hindered him, and that if he had been rich, free of troubles and had had plenty of free time, we would all have recognized him for the artist he is.
must be several years now since he has touched his violin – and do you know why? Because every time he does he’s forced to realize that he’s nothing, a nobody, not one bit of an artist. But at least when he’s put his violin aside, as now, he can sustain the remote hope that it isn’t true.
He thirsts for fame. But if such feeling becomes the main source of an artist’s activity then he ceases to be an artist, for he has lost the artist’s chief instinct, which must be to love art simply because it is art, and not for its rewards.
At first he put the money in my hand, then took it back and thrust it in the top of my dress. I remember shuddering when I felt the silver against my body, and I think it was then that I first understood the meaning of money.
He died because such a death was necessary to him, it was a natural sequel to his life. He was bound to die like that, once all the things that had supported him in his life had begun to crumble, fading like a ghost, like an incorporeal and empty dream. He died when his last hope had vanished, when in one instant everything with which he had deluded himself and which had sustained his entire existence disintegrated before his eyes. The unbearable glow of truth blinded him, and he recognized falsities for what they were.
From the moment I saw her, a feeling of happiness like a sweet premonition filled my soul. Try to imagine a face of idyllic charm and stunning, dazzling beauty; one of those before which you stop, transfixed in sweet confusion, trembling with delight; a face that makes you grateful for its existence, for allowing your eyes to fall upon it, for passing you by.
Sometimes, even in her brightest moments, I noticed tears in her eyes as though a sudden, painful memory of something which troubled her conscience had flared up in her soul; as if something was watching over her happiness and seeking to upset it. And it seemed as though the happier she was, the calmer and more tranquil her life, the closer she was to this depression, and the more likely was the appearance of sudden melancholy and the tears of a nervous collapse.
I sensed that she found it awkward to be with him, yet, to all appearances, she could not live without him for one minute.
It fascinated me, making me oblivious of the present, almost alienating me from reality; in every book I read, I found embodied the laws of the same fatality, the same spirit of adventure which commands the lives of each individual, yet is derived from some basic law of human life, which is the condition of salvation, preservation and happiness.
I was given too much; fortune erred and now she must correct the mistake and take everything back.
