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44 The Gospel in Dostoyevsky“I shan’t be altogether sorry, for then my object will be attained.If you kick me, you must believe in my reality, for people don’tkick ghosts. Joking aside, it doesn’t matter to me, abuse me if youlike, though it’s better to be a trifle more polite even to me. ‘Fool,flunkey!’ what words!”“Berating you, I berate myself,” Ivan laughed again. “You are inmyself, myself, only with a different face. You just say what I amthinking…and are incapable of saying anything new!”“If I am like you in my way of thinking, it’s all to my credit,” thegentleman declared with delicacy and dignity.“You choose out only my worst thoughts, and what’s more, thestupid ones. You are stupid and vulgar. You are awfully stupid.No, I can’t put up with you! What am I to do, what am I to do?”Ivan said through his clenched teeth.“My dear friend, above all things I want to behave like agentleman and to be recognized as such,” the visitor began inan increase of deprecating but good-natured pride, typical of asponging relation. “I am poor, but…I won’t say very honest, butit’s an axiom generally accepted in society that I am a fallen angel.I certainly can’t imagine how I can ever have been an angel. If Iever was, it must have been so long ago that there’s no harm inforgetting it. Now I only prize the reputation of being a gentlemanlyperson and live as I can, trying to make myself agreeable.I love men genuinely, I’ve been greatly slandered! Here when Istay with you from time to time, my life gains a kind of realityand that’s what I like most of all. You see, like you, I suffer fromthe fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with you,everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical,while we have nothing but indeterminate equations! HereI wander about dreaming. I like dreaming. Besides, on earth I