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A BIOGRAPHY
257
for a completeness which life seldom gives. The
perfect union of two souls could not be realized either in
friendship or in love. Her friendship, as afterward
also her love, was tyrannical, in the sense that she
would not allow to any one she loved a feeling, an
affection, or a thought, of which she was not the
object. She wished to have such full possession of the
person of whom she was fond that it almost excluded
the possibility of individual life in that other person.
Even in love this is almost impossible, at least as
regards two highly developed personalities; and
naturally it is still more difficult in friendship. The very
foundation of friendship must be the individual liberty
of each friend.
To this peculiarity in Sönya is perhaps owing the
fact that maternal love did not satisfy her craving for
tenderness. A child does not love in the same way in
which it is loved. It does not enter into the interests
of its parent. It takes more than it gives. Sönya
desired and demanded self-sacrificing devotion.
I do not mean that she exacted more than she gave
in her relations with those of whom she was fond. On
the contrary, she gave full meed of sympathy, and was
prepared to sacrifice herself to any amount. But she
expected to get back as much as she gave. She wished
to be met half-way, and she considered herself to be of
the same importance to her friend as he or she was to her.
During the autumn before alluded to, besides
literary disappointment, Sönya was called upon to bear a
great and bitter sorrow. The sister to whose sick-bed
she had so often hurried over land and sea, often
sacrificing her own plans and wishes to the desire of
being with her at the last, had been taken to Paris for
an operation.
Sönya was at the time kept fast in the University
17
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