The Adolescent

And yet destitution was only the tenth or twentieth part of his misfortunes, and I knew it only too well. Besides destitution, there was something immeasurably more serious—not to mention that there was still hope of winning the litigation over an inheritance that Versilov had started a year before against the Princes Sokolsky, and Versilov might receive in the nearest future an estate worth seventy thousand and maybe a bit more. I’ve already said above that this Versilov had run through three inheritances in his life, and here he was going to be rescued again by an inheritance! The case was to be decided in court in the shortest time. That was why I came. True, no one gave out money on hope, there was nowhere to borrow, and meanwhile they bore with it.

But Versilov did not go to anyone, though he sometimes left for the whole day. Over a year ago, he had already been driven out of society. That story, despite all my efforts, remained unclear to me in its main points, despite my whole month of life in Petersburg. Was Versilov guilty or not—that was what mattered to me, that was what I had come for! Everybody turned away from him, including, by the way, all the influential nobility, with whom he had been especially able to maintain relations all his life, owing to rumors of a certain extremely low and—what’s worst of all in the eyes of the “world”—scandalous act he was supposed to have committed over a year before in Germany, and even of a slap in the face he had received then, much too publicly, precisely from one of the Sokolsky princes, and to which he had not responded with a challenge. Even his children (the legitimate ones), his son and daughter, turned away from him and lived separately. True, both the son and the daughter floated in the highest circle, through the Fanariotovs and old Prince Sokolsky (Versilov’s former friend). However, looking at him more closely during that whole month, what I saw was an arrogant man, whom society had not excluded from its circle, but rather who had himself driven society away from him—so independent an air he had. But did he have the right to that air—that’s what troubled me! I absolutely had to find out the whole truth in the very shortest time, for I had come to judge this man. My own power I still concealed from him, but I had either to acknowledge him, or to spurn him altogether. And the latter would be all too painful for me, and I suffered. I’ll finally make a full confession: this man was dear to me!

And meanwhile I lived in the same apartment with them, worked, and barely refrained from being rude. In fact, I did not refrain. Having lived with them for a month, I became more convinced every day that I simply couldn’t turn to him for final explanations. The proud man stood right in front of me as a riddle that insulted me deeply. He was even nice and jocular with me, but I sooner wanted a quarrel than such jokes. All my conversations with him always bore some sort of ambiguity in them, that is, quite simply some strange mockery on his part. At the very beginning, he did not meet me seriously when I came from Moscow. I could in no way understand why he did that. True, he achieved the result that he remained impenetrable to me; but I could not have lowered myself to beg for serious treatment from him. And besides, he had astonishing and irresistible ways about him, which I didn’t know how to deal with. In short, he treated me like the greenest adolescent—something I was almost unable to bear, though I knew it would be like that. Consequently, I myself stopped speaking seriously and waited; I even almost stopped speaking entirely. I was waiting for a certain person, on whose arrival in Petersburg I could definitively learn the truth; in that lay my last hope. In any case, I was prepared to break with him definitively and had already taken all the measures. I pitied my mother, but . . . “either him or me”—that was what I wanted to suggest to her and my sister. Even the day had been fixed; but meanwhile I went to work.

Chapter Two

I