“May God forgive her sin in loving me. Everything around her was so coarse that she couldn’t help falling in love with me, young and handsome as I was and knowing so much poetry by heart. But when I first made her acquaintance, and how—this I cannot now call to mind. Separate pictures draw themselves out from the darkness. See, we are at the theatre. She, happy, gay (this was so rare with her), is drinking in every word of the play, and she is smiling at me.... I remember her smile. Afterwards, we were together at some place or other. She bent her head down to me, and said: ‘I know that you will not be my happiness for very long; never mind, I shall have lived.’ I remember these words. But what happened directly afterwards, and whether it is really true that all this happened when I was with Nina, I don’t know.
“Of course, it was I who first gave her up. This seems to me so natural. All my companions acted in this way: they flirted with some married woman, and then, after a while, cast her off. I only acted as everybody else did, and it didn’t even enter my mind that I was behaving badly. To steal money, not to pay one’s debts, to turn informer—this was bad, but to cast off a woman whom one has loved was only the way of the world. A brilliant future was before me, and I could not bind myself to a sort of romantic love. It was painful, very painful, but I gained the victory over myself, and I even saw a podvig in my resolution to overcome this pain.
“I heard that Nina went away afterwards with her husband to the south, and that soon after she died. But my memories of Nina were so tormenting that I avoided at that time all news of her. I tried to know nothing about her and not to think of her. I had not kept her portrait, I had returned her letters, we had no mutual acquaintances—and so, little by little, the image of Nina was erased from my soul. Do you understand? I gradually came to forget Nina, forget her entirely, her face, her name, and all her love. It came to be as if she had actually never existed at all in my life.... Ah, there’s something shameful for a man in this ability to forget!
“The years went by. I won’t tell you now how I ‘made a career.’ Without Nina, of course I dreamed only of external success, of money. At one time I had nearly obtained the complete success at which I aimed. I could spend thousands, could travel abroad. I married and had children. Afterwards, everything turned to loss; the works which I designed were unsuccessful; my wife died; finding myself left with children on my hands, I sent them away to relatives, and now, God forgive me, I don’t even know if my little boys are alive. As you may guess, I drank and played cards.... I started an agency—it did not succeed; it swallowed up my last money and energy. I tried to get straight by gambling, and only just escaped being sent to prison—yes, and not entirely without reason. My friends turned against me and my downfall began.
“Little by little I got to the point where you now see me. I, so to speak, ‘dropped out’ of intellectual society and fell into the abyss. What place could I presume to take, badly dressed, almost always drunken? Of late years I have worked for months, when not drinking, as a labourer in various factories. And when I had a drinking bout—I would turn up in the Thieves’ market and doss-houses. I passionately detested the people I met, and was always dreaming that suddenly my fate would change and I should be rich once more. I expected to receive some sort of non-existent inheritance or something of that kind. And I despised my companions because they had no such hope.
“Well, one day, all shivering with cold and hunger, I wander into someone’s yard without knowing why, and something happens. Suddenly the cook calls out to me, ‘Hallo, my boy, you don’t happen to be a locksmith, do you?’ ‘Yes, I’m a locksmith,’ says I. They wanted someone to mend the lock of a writing-table. I found myself in a luxurious study, gold all about, and pictures. I began to work and did what was wanted, and the lady gave me a rouble. I took the money, and, all of a sudden, I saw on a little white pedestal, a marble bust. At first I felt faint. I don’t know why. I stared at it and couldn’t believe: Nina!
“I tell you, dear sir, I had quite forgotten Nina, and at this moment specially, for the first time, I understood it, understood that I had forgotten her. Suddenly her image swam before my eyes, and a whole universe of feelings, dreams, thoughts, buried in my soul as in some sort of Atlantis—woke, rose again, lived again.... I look at the marble bust, all trembling, and I say: ‘Permit me to ask, lady, whose bust is that?’ ‘Oh, that,’ says she, ‘is a very valuable thing; it was made five hundred years ago, in the fifteenth century.’ She told me the name of the sculptor, but I didn’t catch it, and she said that her husband had brought this bust from Italy, and that because of it there had arisen a whole diplomatic correspondence between the Italian and Russian Cabinets. ‘But,’ says the lady to me, ‘you don’t mean to say it pleases you? What an up-to-date taste you have! Don’t you see that the ears,’ says she, ‘are not in the right place, and the nose is irregular ...?’—and she went away; she went away.
“I rushed out as if I were suffocating. This was not a likeness, but an actual portrait; nay more—it was a sort of re-creation of life in marble. Tell me, by what miracle could an artist in the fifteenth century make those same tiny ears, set on awry, which I knew so well, those same eyes, just a tiny bit aslant, that irregular nose, and the high sloping forehead, out of which unexpectedly you got the most beautiful, the most captivating woman’s face? By what miracle could there live two women so much alike—one in the fifteenth century, the other in our own day? And that she whom the sculptor had modelled was absolutely the same, and like to Nina not only in face but in character and in soul, I could not doubt.
“That day changed the whole of my life. I understood all the meanness of my behaviour in the past and all the depth of my fall. I understood Nina as an angel, sent to me by Destiny and not recognised by me. To bring back the past was impossible. But I began eagerly to gather together my remembrances of Nina as one might gather up the shattered bits of a precious vase. How few they were! Try as I would I could get nothing whole. All were fragments, splinters. But how I rejoiced when I succeeded in making out in my soul something new. Thinking over these things and remembering, I would spend whole hours; people laughed at me, but I was happy. I was old; it was late for me to begin life anew, but I could still cleanse my soul from base thoughts, from malice towards my fellows and from murmuring against my Creator. And in my remembrances of Nina I found this cleansing.
“I wanted desperately to look once more at the statue. I wandered whole evenings near the house where it was and I tried to see the marble bust, but it stood a long way from the windows. I spent whole nights in front of the house. I knew all the people who lived there, how the rooms were arranged, and I made friends with a servant. In the summer the lady went away into the country. And then I could no longer fight against my desire. I thought that if I could see the marble Nina once again, I should at once remember everything, to the end. And that would be for me ultimate bliss. So I made up my mind to do that for which I’ve been sentenced. You know that I didn’t succeed. They caught me in the hall. And at the trial it came out that I’d been in the rooms on pretence of being a locksmith, and that I’d often been seen near the house.... I was a beggar, I had forced the locks.... However, the story’s ended now, dear sir!”