It was a wonderful night, the kind of night, dear reader, which is only possible when we are young. The sky was so starry, it was such a bright sky that looking at it you could not help but ask yourself : is it really possible for bad - tempered and capricious people to live under such a sky ? That is also a young person’s question, dear reader, a very young person’s question, but may the Lord ask it of your heart more often !
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I was ready to leave with every cart, to drive off with every gentleman of venerable appearance who was hiring a cabbie, but no one, absolutely no one invited me; it was as if I indeed was a stranger to them !
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It was as if I had suddenly found myself in Italy – nature had so strongly affected me, a semi - invalid city dweller who had almost died of suffocation within the city’s walls.
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I was walking and singing, because when I am happy I am sure to hum something to myself, like every other happy man who has neither friends nor good acquaintances and who in a joyful moment has nobody with whom he can share his joy.
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‘ Conclusion ? I concluded that we must begin all over again, because today I came to the conclusion that I don’t know you at all, that yesterday I acted like a child, like a little girl, and it goes without saying that it turned out that my kind heart was to blame for it all; that is, I praised myself, which is how it always ends when we start examining our actions.
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A dreamer – if you require a precise definition – is not a man, but some sort of sexless being, you see. For the most part, he makes his home somewhere in an inaccessible corner, as if he were hiding there even from the light of day, and once he goes into hiding, he sticks to his corner, like a snail, or at any rate, he very much resembles in this regard that entertaining animal, both animal and house at the same time, which is called a tortoise.
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‘ Nastenka ! ’ I answered in a dignified and stern voice, scarcely holding back my laughter, ‘ dear Nastenka, I know that I am telling it splendidly; I plead guilty – but I don’t know how to tell it differently. Now, dear Nastenka, now I’m like King Solomon’s genie trapped in an earthenware urn for a thousand years, under seven seals, and from which these seven seals were at last removed.
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His own particular life has already made him rich; he somehow suddenly became rich, and not in vain did the farewell ray of the dying sun so gaily sparkle before him and call forth an entire swarm of impressions from his warmed heart.
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A new dream is new happiness ! A new dose of exquisite, voluptuous poison ! Oh, what does real life have to offer him ! In his misdirected view, you and I, Nastenka, live so idly, slowly, sluggishly; in his view, we are all so dissatisfied with our fate, so worn down by our life ! And really, as a matter of fact, look how everything at first glance among us is cold, gloomy, indeed wrathful …“ The poor things, ” my dreamer thinks. And it’s no wonder that he should think so ! Look at these magical phantoms that so enchantingly, so whimsically, so boundlessly and broadly take shape before him in such a magical, animated picture, in which the most important figure in the foreground, of course, is he himself, our dreamer, his own dear person.
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