do not act in real life in any other way than that in which I picture them as acting. Suppose that other upright people had been confronted with a slightly different situation: it is not a matter of absolute necessity or fatality that all husbands and all wives should separate; all upright wives do not strongly feel a passionate love for their husband's friend, all upright men do not have to struggle against their passion for a married woman during three whole years; nor is one always forced to blow his brains out on a bridge or (to use the words of the reader with the penetrating eye) to disappear from a hotel to go no one knows where. But no upright man in the place of the people pictured by me would have considered it heroic to do as they have done; he would do likewise under similar circumstances. Many times he has acted thus in many situations no less difficult, if not still more so, and yet he does not consider himself a man to be admired, but simply an ordinary, moderately upright man, nothing more. And the friends of such a man, resembling him (for these people form friendships only with those who act and think as they do), consider him an estimable man, but never dream for a moment of dropping on their knees before him; they say to themselves: We, too, are like him.
I hope, I say, that I have succeeded in making every upright man of the new generation recognize the type of his friends in my three characters. But those who from the beginning of the story have been able to think of Véra Pavlovna, Kirsanoff, and Lopoukhoff as "our friends, people like ourselves simply,"—these are yet but a minority of the public. The majority are still much below this type. A man who has never seen anything but dirty huts might take an engraving of a very ordinary house for the picture of a palace. How shall the house be made to seem to such a man a house and not a palace? Only by showing in the same picture even a little wing of a palace; he will then see from this wing that the palace must be quite a different thing from the building represented in the picture, and that the latter is really but a simple house no better than every one ought to have, perhaps not as good. If I had not shown the figure of Rakhmétoff, the majority of readers would have had a false idea of the principal characters of my story. I will wager that up to the concluding paragraphs of this chapter Véra Pavlovna, Kirsanoff, and Lopoukhoff have seemed to the majority of the public to be heroes, individuals of a superior nature, if not ideal persons, if not even persons impossible in real life by reason of their very noble conduct. No, my poor friends, you have been wrong in this thought: they are not too high, you are too low. You see now that they simply stand on the surface of the earth; and, if they have seemed to you to be soaring in the clouds, it is because you are in the infernal depths. The height where they stand all men should and can reach.
Elevated natures, such as neither you nor I, my poor friends, can equal,—elevated natures are not like these. I have shown you a faint outline of the profile of one of them; the features are different, as you clearly see. Now, it is possible for you to become entirely the equals of the men whom I represent provided you will work
