734
VISSARION BHINSKY
that the Universal exists when the personality is suffering? What
care I if on earth the genius lives as in heaven when the mass is
wallowing in dirt? What care I that
I
grasp the "Idea," that the
world of ideas is open to me in art, religion and history, when I
cannot share it with all those who should
be
my brothers in hu–
manity, my brothers in Christ, but who in their ignorance are ac–
tually strangers and enemies? What is the felicity of the elect to
me when most men do not even suspect its possibility? Away with
felicity if it is granted to me as one out of a thousand! I will not
have it so long as I cannot have it in common with my lesser breth–
ren!
My heart bleeds as I watch the life of the masses. Grief, poig–
nant grief overpowers me at the sight of the barefooted little boys
playing knucklebones in the street, of the poor in their rags and
tatters, of the drunken cab driver, of the soldier returning from
duty, of the functionary hurrying along with his brief case under
his arm, of the self-complacent officer and the proud magnate. As
I give the soldier a penny I almost cry, and I run from the beg–
gar whom I have given a penny as though I had done
him
an in–
jury
and am ashamed to listen to the sound of my own footsteps.
And that is life: to sit in the street in rags, an idiotic expression
on one's face, collecting pennies all day long to
be
spent on booze
in the evenings-men see it and care not a whit! I don't know
what is happening to me, but there are times when I gaze with
unutterable anguish at a whore in the street; her senseless smile
acknowledging her depravity lacerates my soul, all the more so if
she is good-looking. Next door to me there lives a well-to-dp of–
ficial who has become so Europeanized that he sends his wife to
the baths in a carriage; recently I learned that he smashed in her
teeth and lips, that he kicked her, dragging her over the floor by
the hair because the cream she had prepared for his coffee was
not good enough; and she had borne this man six children, and
whenever I meet her I feel so bad at the sight of her pale worn
face on which tyranny has left its mark. On hearing this story I
gnashed my teeth-to burn this blackguard over a slow fire seemed
to me too easy a punishment, and I cursed my impotence at not
being able to go and kill
him
like a dog. And that is society, built
on rational principles, a manifestation of reality! And how many
