them to all who were literate, fully convinced that they would read them on the way, and that the literate ones would read to the illiterate. He rarely asked about their crimes, though he would listen when a prisoner began talking. He placed all the criminals on an equal footing, he made no distinctions. He talked with them as with brothers, but in the end they themselves came to regard him as a father. If he noticed some woman exile with a baby in her arms, he would go up to her, caress the child, snap his fingers to make the child laugh. He did this for many years, till his own death; it reached the point where he was known over the whole of Russia and the whole of Siberia, that is, to all the criminals. I was told by someone who had been in Siberia that he himself had witnessed how the most hardened criminals remembered the general, and yet, when he visited them, he would rarely give them more than twenty kopecks each. True, they did not remember him all that warmly or in any very serious way. Some one of those 'unfortunates,' who had killed some twelve souls, who had stabbed six children solely for his own pleasure (they say there were such men), suddenly, out of the blue, at some point, and maybe only once in all of twenty years, would suddenly sigh and say: 'And what's with the little old general now, can he still be alive?' He might even smile as he said it—and that was all. But how do you know what seed had been sown forever in his soul by this 'little old general' whom he had not forgotten in twenty years? How do you know, Bakhmutov, what meaning this communion of one person with another will have in the destiny of the person communed with? . . . Here the whole of life stands before us and a countless number of ramifications that are hidden from us. The best chess player, the sharpest of them, can calculate only a few moves ahead; one French player, who could calculate ten moves ahead, was written about as a wonder. And how many moves are there, and how much is unknown to us? In sowing your seed, in sowing your 'charity,' your good deed in whatever form it takes, you give away part of your person and receive into yourself part of another's; you mutually commune in each other; a little more attention, and you will be rewarded with knowledge, with the most unexpected discoveries. You will be bound, finally, to look at your work as a science; it will take in the whole of your life and maybe fill the whole of it. On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds you have sown, which you may already have forgotten, will take on flesh and grow; what was received from you will be passed on to
someone else. And how do you know what share you will have in the future outcome of human destiny? And if the knowledge and the whole life of this work finally raises you so high that you are able to plant a tremendous seed, to bequeath a tremendous thought to mankind, then . . ." And so on, I talked a lot then.
"And to think that it is you to whom life has been denied!" Bakhmutov cried with burning reproach against someone.
At that moment we were standing on the bridge, leaning on the handrail, and looking at the Neva.
"And do you know what's just come into my head?" I said, bending still further over the handrail.
"Not to throw yourself into the river?" cried Bakhmutov, almost in fright. Perhaps he had read my thought in my face.
"No, for the time being it's just the following reflection: here I'm left now with two or three months to live, maybe four; but, for instance, when I have only two months left, and I want terribly to do a good deed that would require work, running around and petitioning, something like our doctor's affair, I would in that case have to renounce the deed for lack of sufficient time and look for another 'good deed,' a smaller one, which would be within my means(if I should happen to have the urge to do good deeds). You must agree, it's an amusing thought."
Poor Bakhmutov was very alarmed about me; he went with me as far as my home and was so delicate that he never once tried to comfort me and was silent nearly all the way. Taking leave of me, he warmly pressed my hand and asked permission to visit me. I answered him that if he came to me as a "comforter" (because even if he was silent, he would still be coming as a comforter, I explained that to him), then it meant that each time he would be reminding me still more of death. He shrugged his shoulders, but he agreed with me; we parted rather politely, something I had not even expected.
But that evening and that night the first seed of my "ultimate conviction" was sown. I greedily seized upon this newthought, greedily analyzed it in all its windings, in all its aspects (I did not sleep all night), and the more I delved into it, the more I received it into myself, the more frightened I was. A dreadful fear came over me finally and did not leave me during the days that followed. Sometimes, thinking about this constant fear of mine, I would quickly freeze from a new terror: from this fear I was able to conclude that my "ultimate conviction" had lodged itself all too
seriously in me and was bound to reach its resolution. But I lacked resolve for that resolution. Three weeks later it was all over, and the resolve came, but owing to a very strange circumstance.
Here in my explanation I am noting down all these numbers and dates. For me, of course, it will make no difference, but
now(and maybe only at this moment) I want those who will judge my act to be able to see clearly from what logical chain of conclusions my "ultimate conviction" came. I just wrote above that the final resolution, which I lacked for the accomplishing of my "ultimate conviction," came about in me, it seems, not at all as a logical conclusion, but from some strange jolt, a certain strange circumstance, perhaps quite unconnected with the course of events. About ten days ago Rogozhin came to see me on business of his own, which I need not discuss here. I had never seen Rogozhin before, but I had heard a lot about him. I gave him all the information he needed, and he quickly left, and as he had come only for information, the business between us should have ended there. But he interested me greatly, and I spent that whole day under the influence of strange thoughts, so that I decided to call on him myself the next day, to return the visit. Rogozhin was obviously not glad to see me, and even hinted "delicately" that there was no point in our continuing the acquaintance; but all the same I spent a very curious hour, as he probably did, too. There was this contrast between us, which could not fail to tell in both of us, especially me: I was a man whose days were already numbered, while he was living the fullest immediate life, in the present moment, with no care for "ultimate" conclusions, numbers, or anything at all that was not concerned with what . . . with what . . . well, say, with what he's gone crazy over; may Mr. Rogozhin forgive me this expression of, shall we say, a bad writer, who is unable to express his thought. Despite all his ungraciousness, it seemed to me that he was a man of intelligence and could understand a great deal, though he had little interest in extraneous things. I gave him no hint of my "ultimate conviction," but for some reason it seemed to me that he guessed it as he listened to me. He said nothing, he is terribly taciturn. I hinted to him, as I was leaving, that in spite of all the differences between us and all the contrasts—
les extrémités se touchent*
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