Your Daily Dostoyevsky
From Crime and Punishment:
"Or look at Varents. She'd lived with her husband for seven years, but she abandoned her two children and severed her relations with her husband in one go, writing to him: 'I have come to the realization that I cannot be happy with you. I will never forgive you for having kept me from the truth and concealing from me that there exists another ordering of society, embodied in the commune. I have recently learned all this from a man of generous ideals, to whom I have given myself, and together with him I am settling down in a commune. I tell you this directly, as I consider it ignoble to deceive you. You may do as you think fit. Do not suppose you can make me come back, you are too late. I want to be happy.' That's how to write a letter of that kind!"
"Is this the Terebyeva you told me the other day was in the middle of her third citizens' marriage?"
"It's only her second, if one takes a correct view of the matter! But even if it were her fourth, or her fifteenth, what does it matter?..."
........
It would be hard to say what precisely the reasons were that had put the idea of this senseless funeral banquet into Katerina Ivanovna's muddled head. She really had squandered very nearly ten of the twenty or so roubles Raskolnikov had given her for the expenses of Marmeladov's funeral. it might have been that Katerina Ivanovna considered herself under an obligation to her dead husband to honour his memory "in proper fashion", so that all the residents, and Amalia Ivanovna in particular, should know that he had been "no worse than they were, and possibly even rather better", and that none of them was entitled to "behave in that stuck-up manner" in his presence. It was possible that the decisive factor was that singlular "pride of the poor", in consequence of which, where certain social rituals are concerned, rituals obligatory and unavoidable for each and every participant in our mode of life, many poor people strain themselves to their last resources and spend every last copeck they have saved in order to be "no worse than others" and in order that those others should not "look down their noses" at them. It was highly probable, too, that Katerina Ivanovna wished...to demonstrate to all those "nasty, worthless tenants" that not only did she "know how to do things properly and entertain in style," but that she had not been prepared by her upbringing for such a lot in life...and had certainly not been intended to sweep her own floor and wash the rags of her children at nights. These paroxysms of pride and vanity sometimes visit the very poorest and downtrodden people, among whom they occasionally acquire the character of an irritable, overwhelming need...
"Or look at Varents. She'd lived with her husband for seven years, but she abandoned her two children and severed her relations with her husband in one go, writing to him: 'I have come to the realization that I cannot be happy with you. I will never forgive you for having kept me from the truth and concealing from me that there exists another ordering of society, embodied in the commune. I have recently learned all this from a man of generous ideals, to whom I have given myself, and together with him I am settling down in a commune. I tell you this directly, as I consider it ignoble to deceive you. You may do as you think fit. Do not suppose you can make me come back, you are too late. I want to be happy.' That's how to write a letter of that kind!"
"Is this the Terebyeva you told me the other day was in the middle of her third citizens' marriage?"
"It's only her second, if one takes a correct view of the matter! But even if it were her fourth, or her fifteenth, what does it matter?..."
........
It would be hard to say what precisely the reasons were that had put the idea of this senseless funeral banquet into Katerina Ivanovna's muddled head. She really had squandered very nearly ten of the twenty or so roubles Raskolnikov had given her for the expenses of Marmeladov's funeral. it might have been that Katerina Ivanovna considered herself under an obligation to her dead husband to honour his memory "in proper fashion", so that all the residents, and Amalia Ivanovna in particular, should know that he had been "no worse than they were, and possibly even rather better", and that none of them was entitled to "behave in that stuck-up manner" in his presence. It was possible that the decisive factor was that singlular "pride of the poor", in consequence of which, where certain social rituals are concerned, rituals obligatory and unavoidable for each and every participant in our mode of life, many poor people strain themselves to their last resources and spend every last copeck they have saved in order to be "no worse than others" and in order that those others should not "look down their noses" at them. It was highly probable, too, that Katerina Ivanovna wished...to demonstrate to all those "nasty, worthless tenants" that not only did she "know how to do things properly and entertain in style," but that she had not been prepared by her upbringing for such a lot in life...and had certainly not been intended to sweep her own floor and wash the rags of her children at nights. These paroxysms of pride and vanity sometimes visit the very poorest and downtrodden people, among whom they occasionally acquire the character of an irritable, overwhelming need...
posted by Maurice Frontz | 10:32 PM
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