The Adolescent

I ONLY WANT to say that I never could find out or make a satisfactory surmise as to precisely how it started between him and my mother. I’m fully prepared to believe, as he assured me himself last year, with a blush on his face, even though he told about it all with a most unconstrained and “witty” air, that there was not the least romance, and that it all happened just so. I believe it was just so, and that little phrase just so is charming, but still I always wanted to find out precisely how it came about with them. I myself have hated all this vileness all my life and hate it still. Of course, here it’s by no means only shameless curiosity on my part. I will note that until last year I hardly knew my mother; from my infancy I had been handed over to other people, for Versilov’s comfort, but of that later; and therefore I’m quite unable to imagine what her face could have been like at that time. If she was not really so good-looking, then what in her could have attracted such a man as Versilov was at that time? This question is important for me in that it highlights the man from an extremely curious side. That is why I ask it, and not out of depravity. He himself, this gloomy and closed man, with that sweet simpleheartedness he took from devil knows where (as if out of his pocket) when he saw it was necessary—he himself told me that he was quite a “silly young pup” then, not that he was sentimental, but just so, he had recently read Anton the Wretch and Polinka Sachs³—two literary works that had a boundless civilizing influence on our then rising generation. He added that it was perhaps because of Anton the Wretch that he had come to the estate then—and he added it extremely seriously. What form could the beginning between this “silly pup” and my mother have taken? It has just occurred to me that if I had at least one reader, he would probably burst out laughing at me, as at a most ridiculous adolescent who, having preserved his stupid innocence, barges with his reasonings and solutions into things he doesn’t understand. Yes, indeed, I still don’t understand, though I confess it not at all out of pride, because I know how stupid this inexperience at the age of twenty can be; only I will tell the gentleman that he himself does not understand, and I will prove it to him. True, I know nothing about women, and I don’t want to know, because I’ll spit on that all my life and I’ve given my word. But nevertheless I know for certain that one woman attracts you by her beauty, or whatever it is, from the first moment; another you have to chew over for half a year before you understand what’s in her; and to make her out and fall in love with her, it’s not enough to look and simply be ready for anything, on top of that you have to be somehow gifted. I’m convinced of that, even though I know nothing, and if it were otherwise, then all women would have to be reduced at once to the level of simple domestic animals and kept around only in that guise. Maybe a lot of people would like that.