Fifty-Two Stories

He is a liberal and in the district is considered a red, but that, too, comes out boring in him. There is no originality or pathos in his freethinking; he is outraged, indignant, or joyful somehow all in the same tone, unimpressively and listlessly. Even in moments of great inspiration, he does not raise his head and remains stoop-shouldered. But most boring of all is that he even manages to express his good, honorable ideas in such a way that they come out banal and retrograde. It reminds you of something old, read long ago, when he begins, slowly and with an air of profundity, to talk about his honest, bright moments, his best years, or when he extols the young, who have always gone and still go in advance of society, or denounces Russian men for putting on their dressing-gowns at the age of thirty and forgetting the precepts of their alma mater. When you stay overnight, he puts Pisarev or Darwin on your night table. If you tell him you’ve read them, he goes and brings you Dobrolyubov.³

In the district this was known as freethinking, and many regarded this freethinking as an innocent and harmless eccentricity; for him, however, it was a cause of profound unhappiness. It was that larva he had just been talking about: it attached itself firmly to him and drank his heart’s blood. In the past a strange marriage in Dostoevsky’s taste,⁴ long letters and their copies, in poor, illegible handwriting, but with great feeling; endless misunderstandings, explanations, disappointments; then debts, a second mortgage, payments to his wife, monthly loans—and all that of no use to anyone, neither himself nor other people. And in the present, as before, he keeps bustling, seeks a heroic deed, meddles in other people’s affairs; as before, at every favorable opportunity there are long letters and copies, tiresome commonplace conversations about communes or the developing of arts and crafts, or establishing the cheese-making industry—conversations that resemble each other, as if he prepared them not in his living brain, but by machine. And, finally, this scandal with Zina, the outcome of which is as yet unknown!

And meanwhile his sister Zina is young—only twenty-two—good-looking, graceful, cheerful. She is a giggler, a chatterbox, an arguer, a passionate musician; she is a connoisseur of clothes, of books, and of good furniture, and she would not suffer having a room like this at home, smelling of boots and cheap vodka. She is also liberal-minded, but in her freethinking one senses an abundance of force, the ambition of a young, strong, brave girl, a passionate desire to be better and more original than others…How could it happen that she fell in love with Vlasich?

“He’s a Don Quixote, a stubborn fanatic, a maniac,” Pyotr Mikhailych thought, “and she’s as slack, weak-willed, and yielding as I am…We both surrender quickly and without resistance. She fell in love with him; but don’t I love him myself, in spite of it all…”

Pyotr Mikhailych considered Vlasich a good, honest, but narrow and one-sided man. In his worries and sufferings and in his whole life he did not see any lofty aims, either immediate or distant, but only boredom and an inability to live. His self-denial and all that Vlasich called heroic deeds or honest impulses seemed to him a useless waste of strength, unnecessary blank shots, which used up a great deal of powder. That Vlasich believed fanatically in the extraordinary honesty and infallibility of his thinking, seemed to him naïve and even morbid; and that all his life Vlasich had somehow managed to confuse the worthless with the lofty, that he had married stupidly and considered it a heroic deed, and then had taken up with women and saw in it the triumph of some idea—that was simply incomprehensible.

But Pyotr Mikhailych still loved Vlasich, sensed in him the presence of some force, and for some reason never had the heart to contradict him.

Vlasich sat down quite close to him, so as to talk under the noise of the rain, in the dark, and had already cleared his throat, prepared to tell something long, like the story of his marriage; but Pyotr Mikhailych found it unbearable to listen; he was tormented by the thought that he was about to see his sister.

“Yes, you weren’t lucky in life,” he said gently, “but, forgive me, we’ve strayed from the main thing. We’re talking about something else.”