A _religion of suffering_ ... let us eliminate at once the possibility of misinterpretation. It is not a question, or rather not solely a question, of vicarious suffering, the world-wide suffering before which Raskolnikov humbles himself to lie at Sonia the prostitute’s feet, or Father Zossima at Dmitri Karamazov the predestined parricide’s, but a theory of personal suffering. Throughout the whole book, Velchaninov keeps asking himself whether Trusotsky is jealous or not, whether he knows all or nothing. The question is absurd: of course Trusotsky knows! Of course he is jealous, but with the jealousy he fosters and cherishes within himself. It is the torment of jealousy that Trusotsky desires and enjoys, just as we saw the attachment of the hero of the _Underground_ to his toothache. Of the hideous torment of the jealous husband we learn practically nothing. Dostoevsky reveals it only indirectly, by virtue of the cruel suffering Trusotsky inflicts on the creatures round about him, especially on the little girl whom he adores in spite of all. The child’s anguish helps us to measure the intensity of the father’s own suffering. Pavel Pavelovitch tortures the child, whom he loves passionately; he can no more hate her than he can hate his wife’s lover: “‘Do you know what Liza has been to me?’--he suddenly recalled the drunkard’s exclamation and felt that that exclamation was sincere, not a pose, and that there was love in it. How could that monster be so cruel to a child whom he loved so much? Is it credible? But every time he made haste to dismiss that question, and, as it were, brush it aside; there was something awful in that question, something he could not bear and could not solve.”[88] We may rest assured that the keenest of his suffering is due to his inability to become jealous: of jealousy he has only the suffering, and he cannot hate the man who was preferred to himself. The very sufferings he inflicts on his rival, those he would fain inflict upon him, the torments he inflicts on his little daughter, are a kind of mystic counterpart that he sets to the horror and the anguish in whose depths he is struggling. None the less, he dreams of revenge: not that he has any precise desire to avenge himself, but he tells himself that he must seek revenge, as perhaps the sole means of freeing himself from such awful torments. “Habit is everything, even in love,” says Vauvenargues,[89] and you remember La Rochefoucauld’s maxim? “_How many men would never have known love if they had never heard of love?_” Are we not justified in asking: How many would never be jealous, if they did not hear jealousy spoken about, and had not persuaded themselves that it was imperative to be jealous?