Selected Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky — ‘The Insulted and Humiliated’ (Book Four in the Decalogy)

… But our flower festival did not come off next day. Nellie was worse and could not leave her room.

And she never left that room again.

She died a fortnight later. In that fortnight of her last agony she never quite came to herself, or escaped from her strange fantasies. Her mind seemed to have dimmed. She was firmly convinced up to the day of her death that her grandfather was calling her and was angry with her for not coming, was rapping with his stick at her, and was telling her to go begging to get bread and snuff for him. She often cried in her sleep, and when she waked, she said that she had seen her mother.

Only at times she seemed fully to regain her faculties. Once we were left alone together. She turned to me and clutched my hand with her thin, feverishly hot little hand.

“Vanya,” she said, “when I die, marry Natasha.”

I believe this idea had been constantly in her mind for a long time. I smiled at her without speaking. Seeing my smile she smiled too, and with a mischievous look she shook her finger at me and at once began kissing me.

Three days before her death on an exquisite summer evening, she asked us to draw the blinds and open the window in her bedroom. The window looked into the garden. She gazed a long while at the thick, green foliage, at the setting sun, and suddenly asked the others to leave us alone.

“Vanya,” she said in a voice, hardly audible, for she had grown very weak. “I shall die soon, very soon. I want you to remember me, I’ll leave you this as a keepsake.” (And she showed me a large amulet which hung with her baptismal cross on her breast.) “Mamma left it to me when she was dying. And so when I die you take it off me, and read what’s in it. I shall tell them all today to give it to you and no one else. And when you read what’s written in it, go to him and tell him that I had died, but that I had not forgiven him. Tell him, too, that I’ve been reading the Gospel lately. It says there we must forgive all our enemies. Well, I’ve read that, but I’ve not forgiven him all the same; for when Mamma was dying and could still talk, the last thing she said was: ‘I curse him.’ And so I curse him too, not on my account but on Mamma’s. Tell him how Mamma died, how I was left alone at Bubnova’s; tell him how you saw me there, tell him everything, everything, and tell him I preferred to be at Bubnova’s than to go to him…”

As she said this, Nellie turned pale, her eyes flashed, her heart began beating so violently that she sank back on the pillow, and for a minute or two she could not utter a word.

“Call them, Vanya,” she said at last in a faint voice. “I want to say good-bye to them all. Good-bye, Vanya!”

She embraced me warmly for the last time. All the others came in. The old man could not grasp the fact that she was dying; he could not admit the idea. Up to the last moment he argued with all of us, maintaining that she would certainly get well. He was quite emaciated with anxiety; he had been sitting by Nellie’s bedside for days and even nights on end. The last few nights he had not slept at all. He tried to anticipate Nellie’s slightest whims, her slightest wishes, and wept bitterly when he left her room and joined us, but a minute later began hoping again and assuring us that she would soon get well. He filled her room with flowers. Once he bought her a great bunch of exquisite white and red roses; he had to go to a shop very far away to get them and bring them to his little Nellie… She was extremely moved by all this. She could not help responding wih her whole heart to the love that surrounded her on all sides. That evening, the evening of her good-bye to us, the old man could not bring himself to say good-bye to her for ever. Nellie smiled at him, and all the evening tried to seem cheerful; she joked with him and even laughed… We left her room, feeling almost hopeful, but next day she could not speak. And two days later she died.

I remember how the old man decked her little coffin with flowers, and gazed in despair at her wasted face, smiling in death, and at her hands crossed on her breast. He wept over her as though she had been his own child. Natasha and all of us tried to comfort him, but he was inconsolable and fell seriously ill after her funeral.

Anna Andreyevna herself gave me the little bag off Nellie’s neck. In it was her mother’s letter to Prince Valkovsky. I read it on the day of Nellie’s death. She cursed the prince, said she could not forgive him, described all the latter part of her life, all the horrors to which she was leaving Nellie, and besought him to do something for the child.

“She is yours,” she wrote. “She is your daughter, and you know that she is really your legal daughter. I have told her to go to you when I am dead and to give you this letter. If you do not repulse Nellie, perhaps I shall forgive you and there, on the day of judgement, I myself will stand before the throne of the Almighty and beg Him to forgive you your sins. Nellie knows what is in this letter. I have read it to her. I have told her all; she knows everything, everything…”

But Nellie had not done her mother’s bidding. She had known everything, but she had not gone to the prince, and had died unforgiving.

When we returned from Nellie’s funeral, Natasha and I went out into the garden. The day was hot, sparklingly clear. A week later they were to leave. Natasha turned a long, strange look upon me.

“Vanya,” she said, “Vanya, it was a dream, wasn’t it?”

“What was a dream?” I asked.

“All, all,” she answered, “everything, all this past year. Vanya, why did I destroy your happiness?”

And in her eyes I read:

“We might have been happy together for ever.”